Posts by zorn

CELL_Technology_ wrote:

What game is fun when you can't lose? Not atleast dwarf fortress where the end goal is to have "Fun" (INSERT HORRIBLE DEATH).

I don't get it either. People can't handle losing I guess. Lots of new games are like this, i think WoW started it. My son's Lego games... you die and respawn on the spot, you just lose a bit of money. His skylanders game is the same way. Its made so that anyone can win, even the worst games players.

Like Thermal Expansion, or extra utilities. They will say that ic2's power system is 'keeping them from moving on to new projects' but no one can ever say what that is. In reality they just failed, blew up a bunch of stuff, and their fragile egos couldnt take it, so they gravitate towards mods designed to guarantee that you succeed.

CELL_Technology_ wrote:

It is Minecraft Where trees float, so let's call it Gregs law that any electric machine can explode.

This reminds me of how a lot of people on reddit say that ic2 should make fuses, so if you wire a machine wrong, it blows the fuse, not the machine. no way! we ride horses and fight zombies, the tech doesnt have to be modern and smart. If you screw up, stuff blows up, you die.

fuses... sheesh.

retep998 wrote:

That is actually what Better than Wolves did. It costs 1 coal/log per stone or ore, but cooking food is considerably cheaper. In addition it moved wood -> charcoal to the kiln, and made burning logs about on par with coal/charcoal and also different logs had slightly different burn values. Honestly, I just want to see all the applicable changes from BTW transitioned over to GT. I know Overmind was working on something, but he hasn't bestowed us with any progress updates lately.

What is this about BTW transitioning to GT?

GregoriusT wrote:

Furnace is OP yes.

I got thinking, if one coal smelted say... 1 item in a vanilla furnace, instead of 8, how much harder it would make mods. An electric furnace could smelt 2 items per piece of coal, and the power requirements would be MUCH higher to process an ore, dust, etc. It would leave much more room for mods to make progressively more efficient items.

Is there any way to easily nerf vanilla furnaces but still allow players to smelt food early in the game? probably not.

Actually a mod could remove vanilla furnaces and introduce its own furnace, right? Make it be some recipe that is also made from stone somehow, but then have it's cycle time reduced to really promote electric or steam smelting, etc.

This would be awesome to put in GT, if for no other reason than to view the FTB forums and reddit explode in frustration when they realized vanilla furnaces were not as efficient.

So here's a question: anyone know how much more efficient an electric furnace is than a vanilla stone furnace?

There have been a few times that i get electric machines set up only to think 'am i even more efficient after all this work than if I just had used vanilla furnaces to smelt the stuff?' Most of my knowledge is still stuck at 1.6 GT, but in that, it seemed that running an electric furnace and a generator wasnt really any better than just smelting in stone furnaces.

My gut tells me that a stone furnace should be reaaaaaally slow and inefficient.

So what I am saying is... are vanilla furnaces OP?

axlegear wrote:

I, too, am running a Gregtech server.

Anyone here able to do simple mods? I am looking to have a few Gregtech-themed, purely aesthetic blocks made. (They use GT items to make, but don't actually do anything, just there for decoration). I would be willing to recompensate for the work done if reasonable.

There is a mod called Custom Stuff 2 that will let you do that.

Lohakar wrote:

I met some server admins refusing to add GregTech to their modpack because of "unstabillity and frequent changes" recently.
Is there any idea to split GregTech to stable & unchanging and, uhm, "developing" parts?
Or, divide it by technology? Bronze Age, Liquids, Magnetic Processing?

Before people attack this guy, notice he said server admins refusing to add GT, not his own opinion. Not everyone is super tech savvy, he is apparently trusting the opinion of the admins.

This line of thought comes from FTB and imo jadedcat. They push the 'GT isn't safe, thats why we wont add it to ftb packs' so server admins pick up on this. But the reality is that they dont want to remind players how easy and simple their other packs are. 0_o

GT also adds more headaches for server admins. "Hey admin, my (insert gt machine here) wont work and im sure its a bug.' Then the admin warps there and finds out they just did things wrong.

Being an admin for RF based packs makes for less headaches.

No its an ad for my server, i was just detailing the pack that is on it.

Ill pm you the IP address.

Drawfox wrote:

I didn't found it grindy, but I spent a lot of time looking for what I need until I gave up.
One of the ore that I was looking for was Rock Salt, even tried on creative, tunneled for about an hour on the right altitude, with prospecting hammer, and nothing.
So, what do you guys do, to actually find what you're looking for? For example, the first diamonds?
Can someone teach me a smart way of finding ores, please (Gregtech only, no IC2 or other mods devices)?

It appears the common method is to dig vertical tunnels down to bedrock. When you find a vein, try to determine where the center of it is, then go 48 blocks north, south, east, or west, and dig another tunnel straight down. You should find a different vein. When I tried it, I found 5 veins in a row.

Dr.Terr wrote:

have reached high end machinery of GregTech, with nothing but hand minning. (And recently fixed IC2 Miner, but it's covers tiny area compare to what I can mine manually. It helps mostly with all tiny ores.) And it wasn't tedious, it was a challenge.

Actually I didn't mean to say that it was a total grind, I was just pointing out that swinging a pickaxe is no more creative or awesome than placing a quarry. I do get the idea of doing things by hand making you more starved for resources, I am definitely a fan of making the game more of a struggle.

My point was to say that quarries can introduce their own challenges, especially without teleportation.

How do people run a mass fab without any automation though? No tree farms I assume, if you don't like quarries? I know greg said one time, something about only chopping trees by hand... my point is THAT also introduces Grind or tedium. I might be having more fun and be more creative making a railcraft line to haul all of the stuff from a quarry back home, than you do chopping trees by hand and mining veins by hand. NOT saying quarries are better, just saying both methods can be fun and interesting, if done right.

Personally i like a pack/world where you do both. I thought this was the point of the recipe change in GT for the bc quarry, to make it mid to late game only, so you would hand mine early then quarry later on.

GregoriusT wrote:

I will explain it again:
Grinding = doing the same thing over and over again. Making Gravel into Flint by shoveling it is grinding.
Time Consuming = thinking before doing. Making Gravel to Flint using the previously crafted Macerator is time consuming.
Adventure = finding things by searching intelligently (and luck), this can be shortened to an x*log(n) Effort if done a smart way, and an in worst case an n³ Effort if done stupidly (Quarries are n³ btw.)

So every minute of swinging a pickaxe is Grinding. Its repetitive, doing the same thing over and over.

But a quarry, if done right, creates less grinding than hand mining. (I agree something like a redpower frame quarry is much more interesting than a BC quarry).

IMO the challenge of a quarry is that it sends lots of blocks to your base. If you NEED all of those blocks (like sending cobble to the recyclers) then you need to set up a pipe system to sort it all, get the right ores to the right machines, etc. If you are quarrying a lot and using GT machines to process (at least in older versions) then your cycle time is slow, and your energy use is high, so you need lots of infrastructure to process all of the stuff coming in. Quarries also require infrastructure. If you get rid of tesseracts and ender chests, you have to send the stuff to your base with mine carts.

IMO this is what frustrates me with the 'hard core' crowd. To get away from being swamped in resources from quarries, they play the game with hand mining only. But then it requires no real infrastructure to process it all. Some chests, hoppers, done. Put your backpack of ores into a chest to process, etc.

When you are running 4 quarries at once, stuff is coming in fast. It creates bottlenecks, requires lots of power. I remember running 25 turtles round the clock in 1.4, processing it all with GT machines, etc. It required MUCH more thought and preparation than 'dump backpack of ores into chest connected to a hopper'. It also meant I had to get much more power than i would with just hand mining.

This is why in the pack blockmaster and I made, you only get about 30% of the ores from a quarry than you do in a typical ftb pack. Now yu have the challenge of infrastructure, plus the logistics of moving the stuff home, but hopefully not the overabundant resources.

This was why I jumped into GT so hard in 1.4, needing so much redstone for chrome meant I had a need to keep running auto miners of some sort.

I do agree though that the main community is dead wrong about GT. Mods like Thermal Expansion are the truly 'tedious' mods. Setting up a TE system is no harder than making gravel into flint by shoveling it. Gt requires much mroe thought. Although the ic2 e-net is really what has always drawn me to ic2. I have yet to make any of the mid to high end 1.7 gt machines though, im eager to see what has changed, based off of what people here have said.

UNG_God wrote:

I have the same feeling ever now, prob is just because i already passed it at least once, and dont forget what it does, it just became grind to me diferent from time consuming or logic required.

Every one has its own conceit of grind, time consuming and logic, and that is the world. Lately what is giving me the feel of grind, is the amount of things i need to use/spend/gather for little to no real gain, just need to make that, because it is design to be that, no think, no choice, one path.

I fear this is kind of inevitable without new mods or new ideas. At some point you refine how you do things and then it becomes repetition. IMO mod blocks have to have more 'issues' or things that cxan go wrong with them, based on some random event. Like how BC combustion engines are affected by the heat of the biome. Its a small thing, but it adds depth to the game.

Redstone mechanics are the real creativity in the game IMO. Any mod that has items/machines/blocks that emit redstone based off of certain events (MFEs can emit redstone if full, partially full, or empty, etc.) and have things that react TO the redstone signal imo is the only way to have long term enjoyment with these tech mods.

Thats why i will always have bc installed, for the Gates.

retep998 wrote:

At some point in the history of your configs, GregTech changed the default for whether that generates in the overworld. The easiest way that happens is when you add/remove PFAA.

So you mean when we upgrade gt versions? We dont use PFAA. Well at least its a mistake, we can just fix it.

Also @Greg - if you change Orestacksize in your config to less than 16, you can still carry 16 ores. not sure if this was intentional, just letting you know.

Quote

I:Density_5=5
I:MaxHeight_20=20
I:MinHeight_5=5
B:Nether_true=true
I:OrePrimaryLayer_22=22
I:OreSecondaryLayer_22=22
I:OreSporadiclyInbetween_834=834
I:OreSporaticlyAround_839=839
B:Overworld_false=false
B:Overworld_true=true
I:RandomWeight_100=100
I:Size_24=24
B:TheEnd_false=false

Display More

This is the config entry for sulfur, blockmaster and i are positive we didn't add the second Overworld Entry. Is this just a mistake or is there some super secret reason one ore would say overworld true AND overworld false? 0_o

Anyone who has been playing 1.7 for awhile... any guess how often you find a dead area when scouting for veins? It seems a vein like cassiterite would try to spawn at y90 and be in a flat swamp that doesnt rise above y70, and you would get no vein. I only played default gt ore gen for a week or two.

If you checked for say, 10 or 20 veins, how often do you find a 'dead' one?

UNG_God wrote:

I did read that again, i still dont agree with greg conceit of "grind", where the rarity/nv of the materials are what make it grind, to me the over need of the same material is what make gregtech grind.
Also he could had mention glass with rubber and plastic.

IMO grinding is when you look at something you have to do in minecraft and know exactly what you have to do. no problem to solve. The road ahead is clearly marked, you just have to get moving and get it done.

Good game design should make me say 'huh, how am I going to do this?' For me the few times this happens is with pipe systems (buildcraft) and the ic2 e-net. Applied energistics (1) and RF power are the epitome of 'grind'.

I remember in 1.4 setting up 12 generators and hooking them up via power converters to some basic ic2 machines and some TE machines. one machine would use a trickle of power though, and it meant that each time it used 10 eu, all 12 of my generators would burn 1 piece of charcoal, and i was using much more power than I needed to.

So I had to figure out how to get the generators to not waste that excess energy. Took me a couple days.

In my opinion the ic2 e-net is what keeps modded mc from being mostly Grind.

PaladinOne wrote:

This assumes that no custom veins have been defined for generation, and that you haven't significantly changed the weights of any other veins in the config. As has probably been brought up in the past, in order to get the actual chance for a given vein to generate, you need to take the total weight of all veins added together, and use that as the divisor for any given vein you want to find.

Yes this would be with default settings, no custom ores, and default weights. I made a spreadsheet that would automatically calculate the % chance for each vein, so it would recalculate each one when we tried using a new weight on one vein. Increasing the weight of Platinum decreases the other veins a tiny bit, etc.

The real issue is that many of the most common veins spawn above y64, so even with default GT settings, you will get veins that attempt to spawn in the air (if i understand how vein generation works correctly).

Marti_2203 wrote:

For Faster mining i suggest: Extra Utillites Quarry with Speed Upgrades, Quarry Plus with Efficiency 5 and both of them are boosted with an inventory full of The Clocks from Project E, which increase the tickrate. And the time can be narrowed to a week IRL

I use the BC quarry because most people know how fast it is.

In the pack I'm playing getting the ender quarry with upgrades is going to take a long time :). Now I'm really glad we set it up that way.

My math is rusty, but jsut a random piece of info that might be helpful to people trying to customize GT ore gen:

The randomweight number in the config file works out to about how many of those veins will spawn in a 2000 x 2000 block area.

So the random weight of platinum is 5, you can expect an average of 5 platinum veins in a 2000 x 2000 block area. To mine this area would take 976 quarries.

So on average, running 1 BC quarry per day, it would take 976 days to get 5 platinum veins. Or about 32 months (almost 3 years).

It would take 1736 vertical shafts placed every 48x48 section to find every vein in that 2000x2000 area. So if you do 8 a day, its going to take ~7 months of real time playing to find those 5 platinum veins.

Changing this to just finding one platinum vein

It will take, at 1 bc quarry per day, 6 months of real time play to find one.

At 8 vertical prospecting shafts per day, it will take about 42 days. This means making 336 shafts and prospecting a 900 x 900 block area to get, on average, 1 platinum vein.

I have to recheck my math though, much of that is rounded off too.

Increasing the weight of platinum to 10 and reducing some other ore by 10 would cut all this in half. Then its only 168 shafts over 21 days to find one! Or only 3.5 months of quarrying.

SpwnX thanks for the help with the ore gen I appreciate it.

edit: side question if anyone knows... how often do you get 'dead' veins where, say, tetrahedrite tries to generate at y100, but the area is a swamp and is only y64 or so. This creates a dead area with no vein, right?

It appears the veins with the highest chance to spawn are also the most likely to spawn. is it common to have every 4th or 5th vein just be a dead area?