Posts by Omicron

Not even that. It's mostly the silly story bit that scrolls through after you take the portal back - that's the one thing that doesn't fit. And you can cancel out of that with ESC, if I recall correctly, and return right to your regularly scheduled block games.

And if you have no wish to read that, then there is absolutely no reason to go kill the Ender Dragon. None. Nada. It's completely optional. Even the Wither has a better reason for killing it than the Ender Dragon, because at least the Wither drops something that's an ingredient in a recipe!

Ultimately, the dragon ends up working more like a secret exploration feature than an actual game goal (considering nothing ingame even tells you to go kill it in the first place). A player stumbles upon a stronghold, activates the portal, comes up in another dimension that's completely empty? Boring! But if that dimension has a giant freaking dragon that's trying to eat you, and you don't expect it, that's an awesome feeling of discovery. And you can then do whatever ou want with it. Preserve the cool dragon? No disadvantage to the player. Kill him because you can? No disadvantage to the player. Kill him and then set up a new base in The End because you like the look of the starfield? No disadvantage to the player. You can make your own rules. It's just another part ofthe sandbox. Heck, I've seen people PortalGun the little healing crystal thingies to the overworld and use them as decorative elements in building, because they could. There's nothing about The End that makes it, or the game as a whole, not a sandbox.

Quote from MagusUnion

Since Jeb took over Mojang... *snip*

I think I physically cringed when reading this post. How exactly has Minecraft become less of a sandbox? How exactly does the game not support something anymore that it used to?

You seem to have a severe disconnect between your personal definition of "sandbox" and the actual meaning of the word.

Quote from Chocohead

Ironic how just before that add a ModAPI in, they break every mod ever made

It basically works like this

1.) Mojang creates Minecraft without modding in mind
2.) The community invents creative ways to cobble together mods anyway
3.) Mojang changes the Minecraft code so that it can be easily modded
4.) All existing mods break because the cobbled together workarounds are no longer valid
5.) People moan that Mojang actively works against modders

It's true that the pressure to match every new vanilla version update puts a major strain on modders, and consumes most of the development time that could otherwise be used for content. In 1.2.x modding flourished because that version ran so long without any serious vanilla updates that everyone was content developing all the time. By contrast, in the 1.4 - 1.5 - 1.6 cadence we saw much less content created than before because everyone was busy updating all the time.

So there's a tough choice to make: do we want vanilla Minecraft, and thus work on modding support, to stagnate so that modders can develop content on a difficult to mod platform? Or do we want Mojang to run full speed ahead with its complete internal rebuilding of Minecraft into an easily moddable platform, while current mod developers throw their hands in the air in frustration? Both are far from an ideal situation.

Even bronze blocks crafted* after installation won't craft back into ingots. It's not a bug, it's a feature (of GregTech). Smelt or macerate them. If you have NEI, that should show you everything.

* you probably need a machine to make them now, as well.

Quote from Vic3Dexe

RP2 didn't have real A/V. Because Eloraam never provided values for consumption of the machines, and no real rules of electricity were working. Ok, I crafting AV-meter, I measuring X amps and Y volts. And so what?

Just because a feature is undocumented doesn't mean it isn't working.

Go here if you're curious. Includes a numbers reference for every single part. I made it all with nothing but the voltmeter you decry as useless

I think it's quite silly to make arguments for whether or not the old or the new system is "realistic". Anyone who knows even basic concepts of how real electricity works understands that IC2's e-net has absolutely nothing to do with it, and uses terms like "voltage" only as a proxy. It never made any claims of being a simulation of reality, either. This hasn't changed between the old and the new system.

What changed was that you no longer have this silly disconnect between packet size limits and actual power transfer, which coupled together with packet-based (not power-based) loss over distance confused the heck out of every newcomer. It was an artificial, unnecessary complexity, a corner that development had painted itself into. The new system gets rid of that by setting packet size equal to power. It's a massive simplification for the player. Less different terms to lern, less different numbers to keep in mind, no idiosyncratic behavior where you can route an amount of power in one way and have everything explode, but route a hundred times that amount of power in a different way over the exact same cable to the exact same machines without causing a squeak.

There's now just power. One key attribute. Everything else is irrelevant.

Of course, now it's no longer the newbies that are confused, it's the old established players who are so used to exploiting the idiosyncratic behavior of the e-net to transmit any amount of power over any kind of connection (another reason to better not bring up the realism argument, by the way). The new system shuts off that loophole. You now need to build differently.

Also, in case nobody noticed, not only storage got bumped up in tiers. Cables did, too - copper does 128 EU/t natively, not 32 EU/t. And machines as well. You macerator can handle 128 EU/t just fine with zero transformer upgrades, and 512 with just one. I've set it up like that in my world, there's no issue at all. In fact, I only know two things in the entire mod that will blow up on more than 32 EU/t, and that's the batbox and the luminator. Everything else I have tried is at least MV. The thermal centrifuge even does HV by default.

Quote from SirusKing

No, EU/p was voltage, EU/t was current.

And despite that analogy, Blutricity and IC2's e-net were still two vastly different worlds. For example, what IC2 calls "voltage" has little to no relation to how voltage works IRL. The word is used there simply to explain to the player the concept that it is possible to overload cables and machines by sending too much energy at once. It makes no attempt to actually simulate reality, like Blutricity does (to an extent); that's just not what IC2's e-net was designed to do.

The advantage of IC2's system is its simplicity - sometimes deceptive simplicity, as the whole concept of EU/p and EU/t being different was kind of an unintuitive mindbender introduced as a result of the very attempt at making it simple. That's now going the way of the dodo with the redesign, thankfully. You can generally get away with playing IC2 without doing any math, just eyeballing some numbers. It won't be the best system, but it'll do what you want it to do.

The advantage of Blutricity was its complete lack of hardcoded idiosyncrasies like the aforementioned confusion regarding EU/p that plagued IC2 for the longest time, because nearly everything it does and almost all the reasons for why something happens can be derived directly from Ohm's Law. Instead of being coded to work a certain way, Blutricity follows math, and math never lies or confuses itself. Unfortunately, the downside of that approach is the fact that math tends to confuse humans. Even the simple grade school multiplication and division necessary to handle Ohm's Law, coupled with some introductory algebra to know that an equation can be shifted about to solve for your desired result, meant that a lot of players didn't even try to work with it. They saw math and proceeded to flee. Which is a crying shame and a lost chance, because Redpower made learning about electricity more fun than my old physics teacher ever could

Which is more or less the reason why IC2 is probably best served to keep its simple model. It has a well-established place in the modding community with that model. Besides, it's also easily possible to screw up your development with half-boiled attempts to simulate realworld electricity for the heck of it (hello UE).

Quote from SirusKing

We should have both Voltage and Amperage. As Voltage Rises, amperage decreases and thus so does the Resistivity, giving a reason to step up voltages.

That power system exist(ed) already... it's called Blutricity.

And what a beautiful system it was. Nipped in its infancy by a lack of mod updates and APIs/usage permissions. Oh Eloraam, what could have been if you had found a maintainer...

I don't think it's the right route for IC2 though. EUs are absolutely iconic in Minecraft, and such a massive redesign would probably not go over well.

In my humble opinion*, I think it's a bit silly to tout increased storage capabilities as a buff, when it's simply a part of the re-aligning of the entire mod's power creation and consumption. Storage may have increased, but energy transfer and energy draw has been increased by similar (or even greater) amounts as well. With the new MOX reactors, even energy creation was increased; and the semifluid generator, while quite inefficient fuel consumption wise, actually posts quite good EU/t numbers as well. And then there's RTGs.

To use a made-up analogy: Buildcraft could go and make their quarry consume 500 MJ/t instead of 50 MJ/t, and then go and make the combustion engine output 60 MJ/t instead of 6 MJ/t, and up transfer capacities on all kinesis pipes by 10x as well. There is no buff or nerf anywhere, there's just a paradigm shift - a restructuring of the numbers, maybe to allow for specific new features or more fine-grained differentiation or whatever you can come up with. It's just an example.

As such, would Buildcraft be justified in making the combustion engine require diamond gears instead of iron, for 8 diamonds a piece, "because its energy output got buffed by 10x"? Hardly. It is still a combustion engine and it still fulfils the exact same purpose within the mod, at the same spot in the progression tree. If the cost was fine before, the cost is fine now. If the cost gets adjusted, that means it wasn't fine before.

The lapotron crystal, for example - since those were cited above - is also still a lapotron crystal. It still fulfils the same purpose in the mod, sitting at the same position in the progression tree (the top tier portable energy storage and ingredient for endgame recipes). What we're seeing here is simply the dev team deciding that IC2's engame was too cheap and needed a bumping up. People may agree or disagree with this, and I am intentionally not picking a side in this specific post here, but trying to sell it as anything else is just plain eyewash. Seriously: just tell people that it's an intentional nerf. They'll argue all the same, but at least you stay honest.

* Just drawing attention to these words again in case people forgot after four paragraphs.

Why do you miss that? Today's situation is a major improvement!

That's because on 1.6 you don't install Forge into the jarfile anymore. You need to run the new Forge Installer instead.

Here's a video explaining how to do it. Though it shows a slightly older version, the process hasn't really changed.

Here's a general guide that I wrote on how to use mods with the new vanilla launcher.

The interface has slots that must be filled.

The center slot takes nuclear material. Pretty much any kind will work, except for crafted reactor fuel; explosion power is different for different materials, though (plutonum makes the biggest boom IIRC). You can also put more than one item in, up to an entire stack, to increase explosion power.

The outer slots take industrial TNT. One piece will fill all outer slots with one each, and again, you can insert up to a stack to improve explosion power.

After you have both the compression TNT and the nuclear material inserted, you have a fully functional nuclear warhead that can be set off by a redstone signal, like normal TNT. It's advised that you run

Not sure if this is a good idea. IC2 by itself still doesn't handle liquid transfer elegantly. Also, it requires a rework of the recycler and another rework of the mass fab, which already got one; whereas changing the amplifier value of scrap but keeping the current system is much less work.

Mathematically... let's see. Average 1.85 pieces of scrap per recycled block. Average 1,110 amplifier per recycled block if scrap is used directly; as liquid with water, 2,775; with lava, 11,100. The numbers don't look pretty or intuitive, but it would be a significant buff from the current value of average 625 amplifier per recycled block. Maybe too much of a buff, even. Water is 4.44 times as powerful, lava 17.76 times as powerful as the current recycling system.

Maybe 1,200 amplifier per 50mb liquid scrap, and 150 mB per lava conversion would be better values.

Indeed, the energy requirement isn't an issue. It's the fact that You don't have enough blocks to process to make recycling even worth doing. Unless you intentionally go out of your way to conjure recyclable materials from this air, it's completely irrelevant whether you recycle or not. It's not going to make a difference in your iridium production. I tore up the landscape all around my base with quarries, and the third piece of iridium I completed just yesterday was still made without any scrap at all because you need entire biomes worth of stuff for it.

Of course, there's another possible solution: if conjuring recyclable materials out of this air is the intended approach, then the whole system can be simplified a great deal. Simply skip the block part entirely and let the recycler conjure scrap out of thin air. Allow it to run continuously on power alone, without block input, and still let it spit out a piece of scrap in 1/8th of the cases. It's a solution independent from the presence of other mods, it's much more friendly to your tickrate and/or surrounding landscape, and it completely preserves the status quo without locking people who don't play with specific modpacks out of the endgame. (If they can find any iridium to scan in the first place, that is.)

Quote from Kuudere

IC is supposed to be about enriching the minecraft world with technology, not seeing how hard you can exploit game mechanics.

Pretty much this. Block generators, next to mob grinders, are among the most uninspired and immersion-breaking things a player can build. In my humble opinion.

Not to mention that the very reason you can even do this is the reason we're having this discussion in the first place. If a thing like a cobble generator never existed in Minecraft, the entire concept of recyclers might have developed very differently. At bare minimum, we'd be talking about massively different numbers here. It's bad enough that mod devs have to account for exploits involving block generators in their creations; we don't need mods starting to make them a requirement.

Enchanting Plus... tried that, found it unbelievably exploitative.

With vanilla, you pay levels above the minimum price to raise the probability to get specific enchants; Enchanting Plus however does away with probability, so you just need to pay the absolute minimum price at which that enchant can appear. As a result, you get prices like 15 levels for Fortune III, and another 4 levels for Unbreaking III - all on an iron pick, which doesn't even have very good enchantability. Gold, Diamond or Thaumium are even cheaper.

Add to that the fact that you can keep adding enchants to already enchanted items, and recover the invested levels by removing all enchants from a tool that is one hit away from breaking, and you honestly might just as well cheat yourself a perfect gear set in. You're going to run out of items to enchant just from the levels you get from manually mining enough to set up your first quarry.

Quote from SpwnX

scrap and energy are still very easy to generate in massive amounts, even for those who doesnt play 24 h per day.
Use your mind and reactors for quick power, then overclocked recyclers for quick scrap.

Oh, i can build plenty of reactors and overclocked recyclers no problem. After all, IC2 has very generous worldgen. I have tons of resources.

What I do not have are blocks I can recycle. At this point, cobblestone is more valuable than iron ore. I have considered breaking my metal bars into nuggets and throwing those into the recycler. But after doing the math, I figured that my entire diamond chest full or ingots would make next to zero difference in the grand scheme of things. You just need so. many. blocks.

And before you say "go use machine X from mod Y to do Z":
- What if you do not have mod Y installed?
- What if you do have it, but no enderchests for long-distance mass transport that some solutions (like quarries) will require?
- What if you don't want to lag your server out with a 1000+ entity vanilla chicken farm... one for every single player, in fact?

The point is that IC2 demands a resource amount that IC2 itself cannot supply. There is no method in this mod, natively, to generate that much scrap. That's a major design flaw. I'll be the first to call out classic IC2 for making uu-matter too cheap to obtain, but a 360-fold increase (which is what it is if you do not use scrap) seems a tiny bit harsh, no? Even GregTech seems "quick and dirt-cheap" compared to that... especially since it offers methods besides the matter fab to obtain iridium.

Quote from Chocohead

Make scrap better

I was thinking along those lines too, actually. How about the following?

- Since this is the time for big revamps, get rid of the sixfold bonus on amplifier. Nobody wants to divide 10 by 6 all the time. Make it a fivefold bonus (yes, I know this makes scrap worse, but bear with me).
- Multiply the amount of amplifier gained per piece of scrap or scrapbox by 4. That means 20k/180k instead of 5k/45k.
- Reduce the uu-matter cost of iridium from 42 buckets to 32 buckets. Diamonds could probably also use a reduction from 20 to 16. Overall, tighten up the spread of prices by bringing the larger numbers down. This compensates the reduced amplifier bonus.

Here's a comparison of the effects these changes will have:

Classic:
166,667 EU + 34 scrap per uu-matter (~272 recycled blocks, +12,240 EU)
1,166,667 EU + 234 scrap per iridium ore (~1,872 recycled blocks, +84,240 EU)
46,666,667 EU + 9,334 scrap per quantum suit (~74,672 recycled blocks, +420,030 EU)
OR
1,000,000 EU per UU-matter
7,000,000 EU per iridium ore
280,000,000 EU per quantum suit

Current:
1,666,667 EU + 334 scrap per uu-matter (~2,672 recycled blocks, +120,240 EU)
71,000,000 EU + 14,000 scrap per iridium ore (~112,000 recycled blocks, +5,040,000 EU)
2,839,999,999 EU + 560,000 scrap per quantum suit (~4,480,000 recycled blocks, +201,600,000 EU)
OR
10,000,000 EU per UU-matter
420,000,000 EU per iridium ore
16,800,000,000 EU per quantum suit

Proposed:
2,000,000 EU + 100 scrap per uu-matter (~800 recycled blocks, +36,000 EU)
65,000,000 EU + 3,200 scrap per iridium ore (25,600 recycled blocks, +1,152,000 EU)
2,600,000,000 EU + 128,000 scrap per quantum suit (1,024,000 recycled blocks, +46,080,000 EU)
OR
10,000,000 EU per UU-matter
321,000,000 EU per iridium ore
12,840,000,000 EU per quantum suit

Mind you, this still does not solve the issue that IC2 alone will hardly ever be able to provide that kind of recycleable block count within the ca. 3 month lifespan of the average Minecraft world (maybe unless you plant a square kilometer full of cropstick wheat, melons or pumpkins that you will have to manually harvest around the clock for days on end, or if you take a diamond drill to an entire desert biome, again manually). However, it's now more realistic to do without scrap - or, more importantly, with partial scrap supply. Scrap use is down by about 77%; energy use with scrap is almost the same, but without scrap it is down by about 24%.

Pssst... wrong thread. Try looking at the stickies first. This one ceased being relevant half a year ago; here's the new one:

New [Official] Reactors design thread.

Rule of the thumb when submitting a reactor design in that thread: look at the designs in the first post and see how your design stacks up against them. If you find something that's better than a listed design for the same cost, you can even get yours listed for all to see. But: the design you have here won't be able to do it. Existing designs offer more output for a fraction fo the uranium in a reactor that costs less resources to build and maintain.

I have bad news for you.

FTB Ultimate shipped with a GregTech beta version not meant for longterm use, and then stopped updating. Thorium cells are extremely buggy in that build and do not scale in output when grouped up. Heat however does scale. So basically grouping up thorium gives you all the heat with none of the output.

The best you can do is cram as many quad thorium cells into a reactor as you can without them touching. Something like this should technically work. (Try it out carefully ingame, because heat values ingame are different from those in the reactor planner).

And if you say "man that reactor sucks", then you would be correct. But it's still the best you can build with Thorium in FTB Ultimate. If you want better, downgrade GregTech to 2.8x and enjoy yourself a beautifully overscaling plutonium-thorium hybrid.

I've been thinking for a few days on with how best to make a post about the UU-matter situation. Done some math - you need to recycle about 4.5 million blocks to make a full quantum suit, which is roughly equal to 20 max sized quarries... provided you even have Buildcraft installed. Classic IC2 required 75,000 blocks recycled. And hey, be happy that you have made 2 iridium in 2 days, and that someone was able to find iridium in dungeons... I've been playing with IC2 experimental in singleplayer/LAN mode, not on a 24/7 server, so it took me 1.5 months RL time for 3 pieces of iridium ore (out of 4 to make a plate, or out of 40 to make a quantum suit). And during all that time, I've been unable to find even one piece in dungeon loot (I gave up trying after looting ca. 60 chests). I can only produce it because I cheated some in to scan.

Balancing the mod for 24/7 servers = bad idea
Balancing the mod so it requires specific other mods = bad idea
Content gating by random number generator = bad idea

Now I just need a constructive suggestion of how to do it better...