I don't think I'm in favor of IDSU. I find some of the more entertaining work I would start doing at really high tech levels was creating stable and long range power transport. If it comes down to teleporting lapotron crystals or some similar approach of moderate complexity... well, I like that better than an (albiet expensive) single-block piece of ubermagic. I feel like I must have missed some critical part of the conversation so far to be asking this, but... Are we really talking about removing every single kind of automatic mining? I'll grant quarry spam gets a little ugly, but I'd rather see them get some kind of nerf than pure obliviation. I thought IC2 miners were reasonable enough; they don't do massive terrain damage, they require what I figure as at least a few days of play (for, you know, someone with a job and stuff) to reach, and they don't scale to neigh-infinity very easily (i.e., consuming a field of 3x3 chunks requires a lot of manual set up, or else a system of frames and tubes that would really impress me). I think it was the new chunk loading ability of quarries that brought the entire discussion of automatic mining up? I'm sort of annoyed at whoever made that change to buildcraft if they didn't also include a config option for it, but I'd rather look at damage control options for the chunk loading issue and/or discuss balance of recipe and energy cost than blow them out of the game. And if *all* automatic mining short of building wads of RP frames and block breakers is removed? Well, speaking purely personally, I'd be done playing here, and that would make me sad. Fusion reactors seriously make 100kEU/t? That's... what. What do you even do with all that energy. Especially if you can't make much out of UUM anymore. (And whoa. About that. We're going to have an utterly ridiculous shortage of glowstone. Remember how bad it was on the last generation of Alice already? The nether was mined out in a radius of ermahgerd^2. Every time someone new joined the server, they would weep. I would allow that the default UUM->glowstone recipie probably made too much, but disablingly it entirely scares me a bit.) Metacommentary: this whole thread seems to be teetering around the realization that at some point, these industrial mods essentially create a post-scarity economy. Ladies and gents, this is inevitable: you're talking about systems that on the whole have: a single, flat, up-front cost to assemble; minimal energy costs to run; and provide yield that's just really quite large compared to that initial investment. So, build 1 bank of factory for herpderp, and it gives you the material for, say, 2 more. Shit son, you just went exponential. Raising the up-front cost to build these things most emphatically Does Not Help -- all that can do is make the first one more annoying to get, and after that you're on the curve of exponential post-scarity already. So, what can we really do to combat this in the name of "fun"? I dunno. One option that would really rock socks would be having an exponential cost system for the high tech stuff. For example, if your second IDSU cost 1.5x the first, and the third IDSU 1.5x the second, then... then I'd actually consider being in favor of the IDSU, because there's no scale of personal productivity where you can suddenly carelessly spam that end tech. Sadly, I can't think of any particuarly simple way to implement this; it's way out of line with any precident in minecraft crafting. Maybe we could modify machines to have a sub-linear return rate when you start making banks of them; that wouldn't be effortless either, but perhaps doable. The other, more mundane, option that comes to mind is just to prefer systems where the complexity really shines, and where one-block near-magical functionality doesn't really exist in any category. That's a lot of what we get with pipes and tubes already, and that's why I'm generally somewhere between disinterested and downright opposed to things like, say, the IDSU. EDIT: feel free to take different conclusions than mine from this metacommentary bit. My main point with it was mostly that any mention of balance so far conflated running cost and construction cost, so let's make the discussion better by noticing the distinction, and also let's be aware that the post-scarity production curve can be shifted by changing the construction cost, but its shape (which is what the complaints are about) remains unphased.
I disagree that eliminating all the One-Block-Magic-Wonder-Machines™ makes the game more fun. Maybe for some people.... but I would suggest not most people. The complexity and in my opinion the "fun" comes not from the function of the machine, but in the connections, the network you build around these machines to give them even greater purpose and function, function that is NOT innate to the machine. And honest to God, if you want mining-by-hand to be the primary mode of resource collection... :S I shake my fist at thee!
^ Networks indeed. I suppose when I poo-poo one-block-magic-wonder-machines, I should say that in particular I mean those that have boundless teleportation or similar features that makes connectivity work overtly trivial. Ages with glowstone might fix that particular issue. If we... get them...? I wasn't going to comment much on Mystcraft, because I assume SK has more plans about the scalability issue there than I do, but. Hrm. Even aside from glowstone, I'm kinda itchy about removing nearly all of the UUM recipies just because I like building a crapload of fusion reactors more than I like making holes in the ground. As long as we have something figured out about glowstone sources though, I won't wet myself.
We have Mystcraft installed but you likely won't be able to create your own worlds. Unfortunately, chunk generation is quite expensive, and unless it runs on a separate thread so it doesn't stop the entire server, it's not really reasonable. Before Mystcraft existed, SKCraft had its own Mystcraft-like only thing but the project was shelved early on because it turned out to be very demanding. What code was left over became the mining world. I actually enjoy mining by hand sometimes.
Can you delete an age? If so, we could have an age set out to intentionally be stripped and deleted, so that people can use quarries and all kinds of nasty stuff there and not pollute the overworld.
First of all, it is only Buildcraft Quarries that are disabled as far as I know. IC2 Miners, Buildcraft Fillers, Frame Quarries/Tunnel Bores, etc. are all still enabled. IC2 Miners are actually pretty easy (easier than quarries, actually albeit on a smaller scale). Tunnel Bores are now easier than ever with Tube Frames. You don't even need a massive starting resource pool. I've managed to construct in SSP a TBM with a 2x2 profile (without wireless redstone) requiring only 4 block breakers to begin with (easily expandable). The decision to disabled Buildcraft quarries has been made almost entirely because of the inability to easily disable the forced chunkloading, as sk has said previously. I have more glowstone than I know what to do with on Alice 1.2.5 - not from UU, or manual mining. Demonic Bees from forestry make glowstone production a cinch. Not good with bees? I'm sure there'll be many people selling glowstone for dirt-cheap prices (I filled two diamond chests with glowstone blocks and ended up recycling the stuff I had so much. Ages can be deleted, yes (not sure if just manually or you can actually do it in-game). I would assume that large quarries would be banned in the overworld.
And when I say "If anyone has a linkbook to it, it will re-create it" I mean if they use it. So if someone warps to the age that was deleted, it will be regenerated.
Not necessarily. Number of mods doesn't mean much, I'd say. Type of mods and their demands on your PC matters more. You could have 100's of mods that do very little, and be fine, and then have one or two mods that are demanding as hell and slow you to a crawl.
Absolutely right. That's just the mod count reported by Forge Mod Loader. Quite a few are actually just modules of a larger mod.
Wow... I fixed the problem by deleting my (.)minecraft folder, but it took like 5 minutes to initialise! And will take 5 minutes to initialise EVERY TIME I want to play Alicecraft...
