Well, the problem is that you are playing GTNH. That modpack forces you to grind for no reward. (Source: I played it.) GT5u is pretty much dead at this point, as too many unfinished features have been implemented. If you'd like to stay on 1.7.10 please try GT6, Greg did a great job with it. (Muh realism! :D) There is currently a rewrite happening for 1.12+ that should be out in 6 months or so.
is there any modpacks that use GT6 that aren't hella unbalanced or have cheap strategies?
i see, i didn't know that. i don't dive too deep into researching things like that, so most of what you said is new to me. i guess i'll check it out then.
edit: i guess i was onto something when i said "this current version of gregtech does not look like it's made by the same person who made the previous version at all." lol.
hi, i'm a game designer and a long time player and terrorizer of minecraft. i've been around since alpha, i've seen the best and the worst this game has to offer.
to give you a bit of context, i first found out about gregtech back when equivalent exchange was the big mod(lol), and at the time i thought gregtech was genius(the version i first found was 4). combined with IC's wiring system and machinery, gregtech took it to the next level and created more complex machinery that provided a lot of endgame content which was geared towards having creative mode amounts of resources in survival. without dragging it on too long, i'll quickly list the reasons i thought it was good here:
1. it expanded on the idea of maceration in an intuitive way which was relevant to its own machinery. it also directly rewarded the player for doing so, in a way that was time efficient.
2. each new piece of technology felt accomplishing and like the natural progression to the next step. every new piece of machinery you were working towards was built differently, had a very different appearance, fulfilled a unique purpose, and was progressively more complicated to craft. despite each next piece of machinery being used for completely different purposes, it was weaved in a way which still made each machine more useful than the last.
3. building the machinery was never a maze of crafting, and there were always options to cut time on repetitive tasks. this can be attributed to AE2 and other mods compensating for this in certain older modpacks, but we'll get into why gregtech has lost the ability to be user-friendly not by gaming standards, but by limitation of the GUI.
4. it respected the direction IC was heading in trying to reward players for building its machinery, and only then it would offer its additional difficulty to further provide rewards.
5. it provided intuitive targets and goals for players to look forward to right off the bat. the fusion reactor was the ultimate goal: a shiny dream that looked shiny, was ridiculously difficult to accomplish but very easy to assimilate what it was: a massive energy producer. combined with a UU matter machine and other machinery, anybody's imagination could wonder what the possibilities of what they could do were if you had one.
nowadays, i play gregtech on GT New Horizons, which undoubtedly has done the best job integrating the modpack out of anything, and i have to say i am extremely disappointed and left unsatisfied with the direction the mod has taken. all of the machines are mundane and look the same. most are just boring forgettable 1 block structures that are clones of one another but just built with different materials and are completely streamlined. the further you get the more you get punished instead of rewarded, and as you create higher tier machinery you're just paying more for higher efficiency of the same thing that i already have, and there's nothing interesting or attractive about that. the crutch is of course you can't actually process certain things with weaker machines, but that is a very weak and badly designed crutch to compel you to dive further into the machinery tree. this current version of gregtech does not look like it's made by the same person who made the previous version at all. all of the actual interesting and unique structures are completely outshined by these fraudulent tiers, and the balance that was previously created and established was completely thrown out of the window in exchange for excessively complex crafting recipes which can't be designed for any other reason but to waste your time. incorporating all of these tools into recipes was a terrible idea: you have to constantly waste time to remake the tool, you have to constantly waste time putting the tool into the grid, you have to figure out what the hell is going on just to be able to even know how to make the piece that you need... you're expected to have enough inventory space to hold like 6 different tools and all the thousands of different variations of the same materials which the mod now forces you to create(spoilers: you don't), just to go through a maze of pointless crafting when you could have just dumped all of the raw materials in a pot and reached the same outcome without going through all that trouble. unlike the old IC/gregtech where every crafting component had a purpose, now it seems to just be made to be annoying, boring and completely unnecessary. you know there's a problem when you have more than enough materials to do what you're being asked to do but still don't feel like doing it because it feels pointless. that's bad game design no matter how you look at it, and gregtech has gone from being the thing i turned to to run away from the bad game design of minecraft to being the bad game design i was running away from(and for arguably worse reasons!).
if you've gone this far with the mod already, i doubt you're going to change your ways at this point, and if i know anything about minecraft communities it's full of social rejects who are tryhards but with very low intelligence that love to try to bully people like me around. i come here fully expecting you to disagree with me, but i still felt inclined to make this post for 2 reasons. 1, you won't be able to say i didn't try when your mod burns in hell; 2, there's always a very small chance it does make a difference.
in conclusion, it's your mod so do what you want; but just because you want your mod to be a certain thing, doesn't make it right for it to be said thing. that is an extremely selfish way of living, and you definitely have downgraded gregtech from what it was 5 years ago. that being said, do what you want with your life. 
QuoteThere are better ways to express your opinion than what you said here. Because you just insulted hundreds of people. And judging by all of your other posts on this forum alone, you do not seem to know how to convey constructive criticism without insulting people. Throughout your entire post on this thread, you did not once suggest any alternative way to setup quests. Ultimately you complained about having to craft something multiple times and that you can't use primitive vanilla tools and expanded it somehow to be three paragraphs long.
you're right about there being a way to say things and i can very easily criticize without shit talking, but life is just extremely boring if you don't heat up the discussion. you are living proof there is nothing wrong with that, since you addressed my points without falling into the trap. however, i did provide a solution to setting up quests better at the very end of my post:
Quoteif you want players to enjoy collecting things for a quest, you should slap the coke oven blocks right on the front of the quest with a good reason to get them and it should be completely open to the player what order they decide to do things in(and be able to work towards multiple things at once). the quests follow the player's progression, not the other way around. you are not making it difficult by making me walk past sheep to find pigs and then going back to find and kill the sheep afterwards.
i'll address what you said in order now, so let's start from the top.
QuoteI am not sure how far you actually got in the modpack, but the questing system is NOT required for player progression. If the player wants to figure out everything for themselves, they can choose to do that. The player does not have to depend on any of the rewards given by the quest book. In fact on the EU server alone there are a number of long time players who have never used the quest book.
prove it, by providing an example of how you get an iron pickaxe head without creeper bombing or exploring dungeons.
QuoteWhy would you want to use vanilla tools when you have Tinker's Construct tools available to you? Also if you looked in NEI, you can clearly see in the tooltip for all the vanilla tools that "This tool cannot mine anything! It can only be used for crafting". So the answer for you is never. You can never use the stone pickaxe and hope to actually be able to mine with it.
using basic tools is my speedrun strat to save a substantial amount of time on getting the mazebreaker in the twilight, which saves me hours in mining at the beginning of the game. because i saw i can craft it i assumed i could use it, and even after reading the red i assumed i would eventually be granted access to using it since the second layer of quests is labelled "THE STONE AGE". the option to make it should be removed if you can never use it at all. it's extremely misleading.
QuoteNow in terms of the order of the quests and the requirements for each: The quest book, especially for the first couple tiers, tells you to collect/craft whatever because those are the things you need to progress. Whether you follow the quest book or not, for example you are going to need to make torches, but to make torches you need a coke oven and there's a quest for that. But to make a coke oven you need clay and sand, so there is a quest for that too. Not only this but if you actually READ the quests' descriptions, they explain why you are collecting this stuff. Why do you need a coke oven? to make torches, so here's the required materials to make a coke oven.
to requote what i said at the end of my previous post, since it looks like you replied to it before i edited it:
Quoteif you want players to enjoy collecting things for a quest, you should slap the coke oven blocks right on the front of the quest with a good reason to get them and it should be completely open to the player what order they decide to do things in(and be able to work towards multiple things at once). the quests follow the player's progression, not the other way around. you are not making it difficult by making me walk past sheep to find pigs and then going back to find and kill the sheep afterwards.
nowhere in here does it give me a real reason to care about doing this quest. it just says i had this "vision" i never actually had and that it invented for me. do you think i even need torches after being able to live without them for 2 whole irl days because of how long the other quests made me run back and forth like a yoyo? you already had to find another workaround just to reach this point to begin with. and why the random vagueness if you're going to tell me literally right after in the next quest that it's for a coke oven? god, this is poorly designed. just slap the coke oven quest first and make other quests branch out of it or have them inside of it directly.
why can't i hunt sheep and pig at the same time? there's no reason for this, they're literally just put in a line instead of a branch for no reason. if you put them as branches, it would be less of a problem even if you had to hunt sheep pig AND cow. why does the game trade me 256 cobblestone for an iron pickaxe head? doesn't that completely defeat the purpose of the adventure since you should find the iron yourself? this quest does this multiple times and with broken english. the list goes on and on.
why the super darkness? you expect people to go out questing for all these different things but you have to dig a hole and wait for the night to pass for no reason at the beginning of the game. it's just waiting, nothing else. isn't buffed monsters and ridiculous hunger nerfs enough to discourage a player from travelling in the dark with the risk of losing what little they have? you can't even plot out a strategy to approach a dungeon or a cave because you can't see anything inside the cave. imagine if you're playing chess, but while you're playing chess you can't see how the field is shaped or where the enemy's pieces are. "ultra extreme hardcore chess, way more challenging than the original". does that sound like a good game to you? no, you're going to install xray and play the game without straining your eyes in real life to see what's going on. that's how you know a mod is good, because it actually manages to somehow damage you in real life and not just in the game.
graves mod and "ultra hard" in the same sentence? please. spider that explodes and kills you in one hit from FULL HP when you slay it(that was my first death in this modpack after 3 days of not dying)? must be good game design, the game kills you for doing what you were supposed to do. i'm scared to know what you think is not shit talking if this is just pointless ranting.
i can go on forever as i get through this, but i'll stop for now.
QuoteFinally, I should address the belief that this modpack is just grind grind grind..
no, i never said that. gathering resources is actually my specialty. i have never used quarries or other cheap methods of mining to get to fusion.
QuoteI implore everyone to at least try out this modpack.
i'm not shooting the modpack down, just identifying the problems not many people are capable of identifying. to those random players reading this, don't take it as "this modpack is shit". take it for what it is. i actually have more to say, but i'm not going to waste my time talking for people with closed ears so i'll see how this post does first.
this pack is a pretty nice cleanup of the fundamental flaws i've seen other packs have if you take out the quest mod being mandatory. however, the questing mod stands in front and therefore is a huge problem, so i am now going to harshly criticize it and provide a simple solution which i think follows suit with the original intentions of the author of this modpack.
the questing mod on this pack completely ruins the game and is some of the WORST game design i have ever seen. only play with it in if you're a retarded monkey who finds thrill in completing 10 million asinine repetitive tasks that the game forces you to do for no other reason than "xd"(all of which revolve around waiting and standing completely still, w0w what fun), not to mention making the actual game completely pointless because the quest book does shit like "here let's trade 10 woods for carrots bcuz i'm k000ll xDDD". i don't want you to give me the fucking carrots and tell me when i can use a stone pickaxe, i want to go out and get things myself and not have you make it impossible without your shitty book. it literally gives you the iron pickaxe head and there is no other way to make an iron tool.
it was bad enough how much time i had to waste crafting 40 of the same recipe with a bucket i had to put water back in EVERY TIME just to make grout. there is no rhyme or reason to this, but i did it. then when i realized that the quest didn't update my seared brick count when i had already made the sear bricks blocks and it literally wanted me to wait for all of my unfired bricks to smelt BEFORE starting to craft another 20 shitty bucket recipes one at a time so the mod can optimize how much time i waste in my life? ROFL. not even handicaps. couple this with the constant loss of hunger so you can't even go out and get materials without feeling punished for it through random debuffs(unless you farm, and be prepared to stand around for DAYS to get enough food to be able to go around, only to be crammed in your inventory at all times with books, "quest" materials and other garbage you're bound to pick up in a normal run of minecraft. did i mention they also force you to hold multiple food types as well? they justify this with an item called lunch bag, but the time wasted pulling things in and out is not worth the extra 2 inventory slots, there's so many random spawned food sources that you can spend less time by throwing your shit on the ground and eating them as you pick them up and picking your stuff back up after) and nonsensical monster spawn algorithms which expect you to fight back despite being stripped of all means to do so, AND the quests all revolve around standing still or getting blatantly lucky finding a specific stupid fucking animal or some shit(or else you can't do anything else). combine this all together and i guarantee you will be hospitalized for cancer within the week.
if you care that much about stone making progression too quick since you can get iron with it, remove vanilla stone tools(and i guess iron too) from the game completely, nerf a crafted flint pickaxe's durability, and make it so only tinker's flint pick can mine whatever pickaxe material will be able to mine iron(by the way, crafted flint pickaxe can mine coal which i assume is a major exploit at this point). also, NO MORE HAVING TO OPEN CLOSE OPEN CLOSE OPEN CLOSE THE CRAFTING TABLE TO CRAFT THE SAME EXACT SAME THING. nobody is going to hunt double the clay just to make more buckets so this mechanic is bearable(and nobody should have to either). there are ways to make things be the best way to do them without forcing the player to follow your stupid little idea of what the progression should be, and it's called doing it through the GAMEPLAY. when you put a quest in front saying "collect 128 clay" "collect 128 sand", nobody wants to do that because it's not their idea and they have no clue why they're doing it. this means not only forcing quests upon people is bad, but the quests themselves are designed bad. if you want players to enjoy collecting things for a quest, you should slap the coke oven blocks right on the front of the quest with a good reason to get them and it should be completely open to the player what order they decide to do things in(and be able to work towards multiple things at once). the quests follow the player's progression, not the other way around. you are not making it difficult by making me walk past sheep to find pigs and then going back to find and kill the sheep afterwards, you are making it: .
overall, don't take this in a bad light. i do think you guys have done a lot of positive work to create a real progression, you just need to patch up these holes to reach the peak of your pack.
is there a way to change the max input eu for the molecular transformer? 2048 is way too slow(do it for 1.6.4 pls)
