I know I have no intention of making an add-on for this feature, mostly because i think the base idea in the main mod needs expanding to become as good as their crop system is.
I'd like to generate thought and discussion on how best the system could be improved upon while keeping it in proportion with how ic2 works generally. Not so much to suggest specific features but to give food for thought.
Nobody else has any other thoughts about how the booze system could be made more interesting?
i can only hope this will lead to an industrial brewing revolution since that is the theme of this mod and in a seperate post I made some time ago on the subject. Perhaps a boozalyzer or beeralyzer of some description.
I'd like to start off by saying that i already find the Brewing system interesting which would normally make this post pointless but i'll expand on what i mean and hope to hear what you think about it.
The idea of breeding crops to ferment alchoholic drinks is a really good one and I enjoy the idea quite a bit but its lacking in diversity despite the 200 some odd varieties of the beer/ale/dragonsblood. For me, I find rum and black stuff to be the most fun ones to have because they each have a unique personality with their effects. It may well be that the intention of this feature is to offer players a minor effect from the drink itself and more of a roleplayish style of feature to "have a beer with friends" rather than a practical purpose. In both cases it is lacking in diversity from my point of view since even within the current crops you can breed there are many hidden gems that can be fermented into well known drinks like vodka for example, from potatoes.
Practical value to this feature may come from things like specialty brews of drinks which produce unique results. You'd need to discover these combinations of ratio and ingredient types to find "Chef's delight beer" which may give some buff that allows "blank' to happen better or worse in some cases depending on if its a posative unique type or not. The general point I'm trying to make is this feature can be expanded into a much more robust and practical means to enjoy your crops while tripping over cropsticks or walking into trees.
A minor note, this is ic2 so to not have brewing machines or some kind of storage ability for our brews and/or cooled storage powered by our energy grid seems like a fun oppurtunity to play around with i think.
Also, for those who typically just post "I like the idea" in threads like this please change your reply to "i'll drink to that.' for a bit of fun.
This change would be op certainly, portable modes of EU would become useless or infinitely refillable even if you didn't stack the mfsu carrying 2 of them would sort out your EU needs for a very long time.
I've been growing and breeding your crops for quite some time and maxed them all out but still the cropalyzer takes 4 swipes to fully analyze a seed bag. Why is this? Its just tedium, I have never once needed to only swipe it once twice or three times alone. Always, I want the full stats of the bag. Some may say I could have checked what kind of crop it was and discard it before stats use up a lot of power. Well, anybody who doesn't know what the crop is by the time its fully grown needs glasses is my reply to that. Can we just do away with swipes 1 - 3 and have a full analyisis saving us all carpal tunnel in the end?
beeralyzer - much as I don't like this name it suits the theme. Check the contents, ratios, liters, space left in barrels and maybe scan beers for the effects they give and qualities.
beer the liquid - storing alchohol in the logs is fine but I hope i'm not alone in wanting a railcraft tank full of rum or some more advanced brewing that allows this to become more possible / interesting. booze is a fun feature but it needs refining~
Mainly the origin of this post is the 31/31/31 on all crops, so that would be cool to check out. But also I would like to see where you set up the places to get the plants up to the highest stats.
I realized something but doesn't this mean you need my config files since the IDs aren't default? As well as any mod I'm currently using in the world.
Better Yet contact me on AIM since this would just be a silly place to have this conversation.
AIM = Xizzzy
YIM = Pirate_pengui@yahoo.com (can also be used for msn)
IRC = Xizzzy the IC² channel
Actually, Xizzzy, you could go into MC-Edit, if you have it and select the chunks or select the area you wish to put up for download and export it as schematics. these would be quite small and make it so we don't snoop your world, if you cared about that of course. In other words I would also like if this was downloadable, thanks in advance for a reply and if a download is not possible I would completely understand.
I'm not particularly bothered about people looking around my world. If I had a better comp I'd host a server for whoever wanted to see whichever parts they were interested in. That said, assuming I can select a particular part of my world you're interested in, which part would that be?
I'm not really sure if you'd consider this a bug but I thought I'd mention it since it wasn't in the list of changes and we seemed to agree that the current setup wasn't what you wanted it to be.
My world is nearly 800mb atm due to me playing it since before nether was released so it'd be kinda hard to upload it. I had started agriculture a little bit before 1.2.3 came out so I've been at it for a bit ;3
Tyvm ;3 and SSP.
Display MoreFirst of all thanks for your guides, have been helpful but there is one thing that I am having trouble with which is light levels. In a different thread someone(I think you) said that a light level of 10 was good for most things to grow at but I've been having problems getting new plants with that. And looking through your pictures I see red power lamps over some plants and for others there are light sources that I cannot see. for your 9x9 set up what would you recommend doing about light levels to raise/breed certain plants.
What I can tell so far is flowers need light of 13-14 minimum, red wheat needs 5-10 but I have no clue if those are right or anything about other plants.
Thanks In advance
I haven't really written any guides that I know of but you're welcome. I'll try to get an image to show what the light setup for my fields are and see if that helps you out. I used to have a mod installed which could tell me a current light level for a block but I didn't re-install it hoping IC² would include some light level tool *looks at alblaka* to help us measure it.
Note: For the redwheat setup the lights need to form a ceiling enclosed completely with walls on all sides to block the light. Also, the 9x9 needs an extra block border for the ones on the edge of this setup so they have the air they need the wall should begin after that border.
Whether he means one solar panel for both or two it doesn't matter. The cropmatron does indeed act like an EU sink and just keeps taking EU regardless of what its doing. It doesn't reach a state of "I'm done for now" ever.
Weed-ex if overused will reduce stats on harvest of the plant its sprayed onto. I don't know the amount you need to put on to overuse it so I generally avoid the stuff as much as possible letting things grow as they may. If you're fine with the parent plants losing stats and only want to rely on the child then spray only the parents (I'd only go with once but I'm not familiar with how weed-ex works or how long it lasts) As long as you kill the weeds when they appear you should be fine unless you get unlucky and have a parent or child of a 24 get taken over which doesn't happen too often if your resistance is on par with the other stats so if you're doing 24 growth 24 gain 24 resistance you'll likely have your plants stay fine but if you use your 24-1-1 it has a very high chance of just dying any moment if next to a 24 growth child.
Amazing configuration. So basically crops bred with the 24++ Growth plants will have a chance to yield weed instead of normal crops even when you Weed-EX it?
Can the weed that sprout from the crossbreeding stick kill the 24++ Growth plant?
Please teach me how to improve Gain on plants. Everytime I breed plants, they tend to just increase Growth and nothing else.
24 - x - 24
The x will yield weeds many times before sprouting a proper plant and if the weeds remain it can kill the two 24 growth plants too higher resistance makes this take longer but it will occur if left unattended.
Even when you have a sprouted 24 growth (depends on its stats) between 2 other known 24's it may still kill the other originals which is where weed-ex may come in handy occasionally again depending on res levels. you'd put it on the two which were crossing to make a new one and the new one if you want but I try not to use the stuff.
I want to call stat gains random but they may turn out not to be and I have no proof one way or the other aside from they seemed random when I was gaining them. Brute force and waiting for the change you want is really all you need to get growth and resistance + stats. Not taking loss to stats is important too since you'll go in circles if you let that happen. Although the stats do depend on the current stats of both plants so if you're using 24-1-1 x 24-1-1 you're going to probably get growth gains as its the strongest stat which is why I said make them more even to start with.
By the way good sir, I saw your amazing thread about how you made all plants 31/31/31. Congratulations. Please teach me how to crossbreed them for higher stats without the crossbreed sticks yielding weeds.
Thank you 
The short answer is you can't crossbreed without getting weeds its just how the system works. Even weed-ex won't save your crossed section from weeds showing up but you can save newly sprouted plants with one click of weed-ex I just don't recommend it unless you're having a lot of issues with the plant getting overgrown.
Some things that helped me.
- Build a farm at the highest elevation you can
- the farm should be in swampland (if you use rei's minimap build it in the area of solid swampland as devoid of rivers as possible they don't count as swampland)
- use the cropmatron in 9x9 area patches the water being the center one with the cropmatron one above the ground.
- secure a power source for it and a means to make hydration cells + fertilizer
- set it up with the pattern I show below (if you want it just worked well for me particularly)
- babysit your crops weed-ex is bad (for my purposes)
- try to balance out the stats early on so you can get an even flow of gains (gain > growth > resistance in order of importance to me)
- have 3 blocks of dirt under each crop minimum if ferru use the iron ore block then 3 dirt under the crop not counting the farmland block. (I generally just use 4 in all situations so I can swap out things if I want)
I want to say its intentional because its been around since before 1.2.5 version if IC². I had to build my farms that house high level plants specifically with this in mind so they don't spawn grass randomly around each other.
Can you show the like first growth of Hops <3
Sure, once I'm done scanning my comp but its the same as wheat until a certain point near full growth. So the sprout will be wheat looking for hops and wheat like with how coffee aurelia and ferru all have the same sprout.
Large container for liquids - beer barrels hold 32 liters but could we have something like a massive vat 6h 4 x 4w that is somewhat metalish with a small window to show how full it is and a means to check the contents. (this would be an ideal thing to slap a label on)
Labels - something like a portrait you can place on barrels or wherever that will show the label of what is stored there (you could also include normal item images for much the same effect)
Electronic Beer Barrel - allows you to see what stage your fermentation is in without removing the fermenting beer from it.
Fun recipe for boozeption - rum is a good start but what about other things like maybe apple cider perhaps or something original with its own unique effects.
Beer Barrels - alternative textures, label of what is in it as a tooltip
Canning Machine - Put Beer, Ale, Dragonblood barrel into the top slot and empty cells into the bottom to create beer cans.
Some method of chilling the beverage to buff or reduce negative effects of the canned drink.
Terraforming - a way to actually alter the biome you're in to become a new biome instead of merely simulating the effects of one (it would show up as X biome in Rei's minimap for instance) You could mark out a perimeter line of effect and set it up similar to how the buildcraft landmark torches do. It doesn't need to be quick to achieve its overall intended effect and could need massive energy to pull it off I don't mind if its hard to do just that it can be done would be nice especially for the agriculture being able to make zones of swampland would be useful or areas with snowfall or even just some fun places that have a lot of weird biome combinations.
There is a stage after ale which is DragonBlood not sure of the time but by your chart its longer than 12 hours which is a bit strange to me since I made the stuff but ah well I'm sure you'll test it and find out ;3
