I personally hate mining for 2 hours to get barely enough materials for what I want to build. The friend who usually joins me here also hates mining. Sure you can say "lol bot da naem iz MiNEcr3ft l900l" but tech mods are meant to help you automate the TEDIOUS tasks so you can focus on the fun ones, such as building an entire room of automation to support and allow for the autominer. I wasn't even aware this was a problem, from what I've seen the main reason was "AUTOMINING RUINS THE POINT OF THE GAME, KILLS 100% OF THE FUN, DIVIDES BY ZERO, AND CAUSES CHILDREN IN DJIBOUTI AND RWANDA TO STARVE!" Wouldn't be too bad of an idea imo That happens with anything really, lol With the current load of mods, is a steady supply of 200 diamonds per hour and 1k iron per minute required as was with GT? Or is it actually something that someone who hates mining can grind out in a few minutes per machine instead of a few hours? I actually might consider trying this out.
A quick look at NEI would confirm that other mod's machines are far less resource intensive than those of GregTech. While automated mining is disabled, we added Tinkers Construct which adds 3x3 mining. Two new mods, Mekanism and RotaryCraft, provide ways to quintuple the yields from ore processing. I typically spend about 10% or less of my time mining since an inventory full or ores result in half a diamond chest worth of processed materials.
I honestly like the Automated mining, but here are my thoughts on it. I feel only the Arcane Bore or Tunnel Bore should be enabled, but should be more expensive to use, more expensive to create, and more damaging on the tools used. So in the end, my thoughts are: Limited Options, More Expensive to create, more power used, more damaging on the tools, and maybe a chance for them to destroy themselves in the process.
So I remember when i first joined in 1.4 and I blew up three macerators because i had too much power going in. This was the first modded server I had joined and it's the only one I really care for. Mostly it is because of the community. That aside the issue being automation. I've seen a lot of you bring in automation's merits. It does help de-congest to laborious and tedious things that you have to do normally such as manual mining. Other than that really everything else is still automate-able. I have an MFR tree farm running right now. I also have an ore processing station with Thermal which is fantastic. The real problem it seems like is people don't want to mine. The problem with this attitude is it causes people to run 4 quarries at a time if not more in order to acquire the mass amounts of materials you need to hit the next branch of tech. This does indeed lag the server alot. I did it myself so I am also to blame. Without the automation of quarries though I have been able to really play and feel accomplished again. Being more casual than some of those who are fighting for the automation it becomes very discouraging when i am doing more homework for a game im playing than for my college courses just to keep up and beable to trade anyone anything valuable when i need hard to get resources. Also, I don't know about the next person but what's the point in playing an open sandbox game like minecraft if not for exploration and discovery. We're overlooking the shear amount of undiscovered places there are on this map as opposed to last map that would go unnoticed if automation was there. I notice tons more people in chat as well. Now being a part of the server means something. There were nights on legacy where an hour would go by and maybe three people would say something in chat. Now i log in and i probably spend about an hour of playing in conversation before i even get started mining. That's the point in being part of a server. The community and when the automation was here it was anything but alive. As much as I miss being able to run to my chest and find 50 gold, 30 diamonds, and 100+ iron copper and tin ore that came in over the last twenty minutes, I wouldn't trade it. Lastly, I notice a lot of people complaining that the server is ded all the time. If we bring back automation prepare for it to happen a lot more. P.S. These are all my opinions and facts i know to be true from my own knowledge and experience. I am never 100% right. If you really feel the need to correct me on anything I only ask you do not be rude about it.
Minecraft scales infinitely there is no "tiny" when it comes to automining. Even if the price is extreme once players start using it it just becomes that much easier to make more. Eventually the lag will consume the server again.
Thats the exponentialism I was talking about. Having automation that gives you free stuff you can then use to make more automation is bound to end in endless ressources. To put this into perspective (atm): 1 Golden Bag of Holding full of ores will result in you getting 2 1/2 diamond chests full of processed stuff with rotarycraft. It isn't that hard.
Personally I'm new to the server and also new to mod (playied vanilla way too long) I think the moderators are right, auto-mining should not be enabled. The only problem I experienced yesterday was, I was finally able to make a mining-laser and I did, without knowing that usage was disabled. So suddenly the tool disappeared from my inventory. Maybe it would be useful to remove the recipe, or block it, because for new players (like me) this can be a little bit confusing. (R.I.P. Mining laser & R.I.P. diamonds, 12-03-2014) By the way, I'm now playing Five days and it is a very nice server! Keep this great work up!
Before when we had auto-mining enabled, Gregtech was required to stop you from completing the game in a day with tedious recipes, now with auto-mining disabled, the game is limited by how much effort you put into the game, rather than how long you're able to AFK.
I think Greg has actually gone out and said that he expects users to have fulltime chunkloaded bases and multiple automining operations.
I believe if you really want to afk and automine, just play singleplayer, you'll get the experience you really want with the free reign to not have to care about other people.