Posts by 3Davideo

Name: Grass Path with Electric Hoe alt-fire

Description: Minecraft 1.9 added "grass path" blocks that can be created by right-clicking Grass Blocks with a shovel. Although they have little value beyond decoration, they can be nice to have. However, none of IC2's electric tools are really shovels, so if you want these blocks you have to make a regular, boring shovel.

Since Mining Drills already have other features, I propose that the existing Electric Hoe tool be given an alt-fire option (similar to how Chainsaws can have shearing turned on or off) to switch between plowing (as they currently do) and creating these grass path blocks.

Perhaps a better word than "precisely" is "concisely" - those angles require only a single term to have their trig functions expressed exactly. And if I remember correctly there are 2*pi radians in a rotation, not one.

Degrees, radians, and rotations are all measures of angle; I just feel the degree is the least graceful. Radians are extremely useful in mathematics and physics, as certain trig identities and other formulae only work when expressed in radians; in this manner radians are a sort of "natural" unit for angle. Rotations are also useful, but in different contexts, primarily engineering, where the important thing is not where on a circle one is located but how many times one has gone around it.

Degrees, however, are not as convenient or systematic, and the archour is intended to replace them with something easier to use for the times when we want part of a circle expressed as a rational number. One objective with this unit is to make the bridge between basic angle units (degree or archour) and radians easier for students. This shift is easier for archours because one archour (15 degrees) is pi/12 radians, two archours (30 degrees) is pi/6 radians, three archours (45 degrees) is pi/4 radians, four archours (60 degrees) is pi/3 radians, and six archours (90 degrees) is pi/2 radians - simple fractions of pi in radians, small integers in archours, and concise trig functions all around. The archour is the greatest common divisor of these common angles.

It's still a feature!

If your chainsaw is not fully charged and you're wearing an energy backpack that has charge left, right clicking will transfer charge into the chainsaw. Works for most tools.

Quote from Epic Lulz

Oh okay lol.

I kind of agree with this suggestion though. Makes sense. Then again, the chainsaw can be used to destroy grass etc and shear sheep and also a weapon. Maybe switch modes for the right-click ability? (E.g. mode 0 = charge on right-click, mode 1 = sickle on right-click, mode 2 = blocking on right-click.)

Well, a sapling can only be placed on the top of a dirt block. So if you right click grass, it wouldn't even try to place a sapling, it would act like a right-click on grass anyway (isn't shearing of grass done through left click?). And if you right click out into the air, it can have the charge ability it already has. And you have to hold it to block. We don't need multiple modes to implement all this behavior, just a context-sensitive right-click.

Quote from Sinnaj63

Ohh, okay. Maybe you should make it more specific that the Chainsaw Sapling thingy is not there yet, because I actually thought it would. Might interfere with the Sheeps though.

Good point. I edited the post to make it more clear. Also, it shouldn't interfere with sheep. The right-click action is, I believe, smart enough to know what it is interacting with. So if a right click hits a sheep, it gets sheared. If it hits the top of a dirt or grass block, it plants a sapling. If it hits something else or nothing at all, it doesn't really do anything (unless there's other right click actions I don't know of). It can't do both. It's the same kind of behavior that allows you to push a button while holding a block.

It's in the suggestions section because I'm suggesting that this behavior be added to the chainsaw, which it currently does not have. I mentioned the behavior of the mining drill so the idea would sound more reasonable; I do that because people keep complaining about off-base ideas - I want to demonstrate that my ideas are grounded in reality.

I noticed something today. If you right click with the mining drill (only checked for the diamond version) on a block and you have torches in your inventory, it places a torch. It's a little odd, but it makes sense, as you can mine away without switching tools.

Then I was cutting some trees with the chainsaw and thought it should be able to do the same thing with saplings! I propose that if you hold a chainsaw and right click (NOT M-right-click) on a valid block while having saplings in your inventory, it will place one. Of course, since there are multiple types of saplings there'd be an issue of priority. I suggest going through inventory slots in order, with preference to the tool bar first, until saplings are encountered.

In this manner, cutting down and replanting trees will become a quicker and easier task, as one will no longer have to switch between your chainsaw and a stack of saplings.

I understand. Thanks for the enlightenment!

Well doesn't this defeat the purpose of storing heat when idle? If the heat capacity goes down, all that heat just goes away. Anyway, why do different materials have different maximum capacities anyway? I can understand a difference in minimum heat before processing can begin, but from what I know about metallurgy it doesn't really hurt to have more heat. The centrifuge is clearly capable of these temperatures, after all.

I was running some tests with the thermal centrifuge and I noticed a curious thing. When empty, the centrifuge can store up to 5000 units of heat, but when processing something it holds different amounts, depending on what it is processing. For example, purified crushed gold ore only allows the centrifuge to hold 2000 heat. If the centrifuge has more heat than it can hold, it cools off.

I was just wondering why this was, and why the centrifuge didn't hold the same amount of heat for everything.

It was approximate.

Anyway, units fascinate me. I might go for a job at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology).

So going through high school geometry and trigonometry one learns about certain triangles with angles with particular properties. The angles of the 30-60-90 triangle and the 45-45-90 triangle all can have their trig functions expressed precisely and concisely using square roots. This makes these angles particularly useful, as one doesn't need a table or a calculator to work problems with these angles.Now, the greatest common divisor of these angles is fifteen degrees. Interestingly, fifteen degrees divides a full circle twenty four times, the same number as there are hours in a day (and in all probability is where the idea of dividing a day into twenty four hours comes from).


So I propose an alternate unit for angle measure, the "archour" by extension of the "arcminute" and "arcsecond", equal to fifteen degrees. This makes the friendly angles of 30, 45, 60, 90, 180, and 360 degrees relatively low integers when expressed in archours. Finer divisions will be standard decimal metric prefixes. This will be easier to learn for new mathematics students than the degree, with far too many useless angles, and the radian, with an irreducible irrational factor in all practical angles. For technical purposes the radian will be retained, but the degree will be phased out in favor of the easier to learn archour.


Naturally I expect uptake to be slow; Europe took a century to adopt metric, Britain took two, and the US still hasn't. This modest proposal is in the same vein, and I would like to hear feedback.

The debug item is rather useful in creative mode. Fortunately, I had NEI, or I wouldn't have found it, as it isn't in the normal list.

Anyway, the infinite energy feature is very useful when designing machine setups. However, it would also be useful if it could also power furnaces/generators/anything else that burns things indefinitely as well, so I can design with a power limit but not a fuel limit.

For example, I often setup a bunch of stone engines from Buildcraft. It would be useful if I could just plonk down some debug items to fuel them, instead of sending them stacks of Coal Blocks.

Naturally, the debug item would remain available only through commands and NEI (and hopefully creative as well).

Good lord! I took a look at the wiki, and now I feel it is unbalanced in the other direction. Diamonds for a macerator??? Advanced circuit for a diamond drill? Eyurghh!

I use a bunch of hoppers with my machines. Being a vanilla MC item, they only can use iron, and that can easily hurt one's iron supplies.

So I propose that an additional recipe for hoppers be added. It is identical to the vanilla recipe, except the iron is replaced with bronze ingots.

This is largely intended for non-GT users of IC. However I'm dimly aware that GregTech can turn hoppers back into metal somehow. So for those who do use GT, this alternate recipe should not create normal hoppers, but a special bronze hopper that is a separate item from the regular hopper but works more or less the same. This way, GT can turn the bronze hopper back into bronze, instead of iron.

This impression was made some time ago. It may not be current. I saw solar panels outputting many times what they usually do and thought that overpowered. I didn't look at the recipe.

Hmm, a lot of people here have been mentioning GregTech. I'll consider looking into it, but my first impressions was that it was unbalanced. Perhaps a deeper look will change my opinion.

Oh I see, dungeon loot, like apples and cocoa beans of times gone by.

Thanks for the information!

What is this transfer node? I don't use GT, some people just use Industrial Craft by itself.