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[Sirus]

Or you could play vanilla. Hardly any crashes at all!

But it's so hard...

Fixed it for you 

Nothing about Vanilla is hard

Apparently the actual mining part of Minecraft is. Isn't that the whole point behind infinite energy generators, or whatever the heck those mods do?

[forsaken1111]

Leaving this gem of a tutorial over here.

Yay, a tutorial for something I don't use!

Or you could play vanilla. Hardly any crashes at all!

But it's so hard...

Fixed it for you 

Nothing about Vanilla is hard

Apparently the actual mining part of Minecraft is. Isn't that the whole point behind infinite energy generators, or whatever the heck those mods do?

The point is to give a payoff for your effort, and a higher endgame.

Vanilla Minecraft: Work hard, build a house, explore a mineshaft. In the end you have diamond armor and diamond tools and... now what? Build a bigger house I guess.

Modded Minecraft: Work hard, build a house, construct machines to do certain tedious tasks for you. Use those machines to tackle objectives in hours which would take you days without the machines, such as building advanced machines or constructing condensers. Use those advanced machines and condensers. Eventually you still top out with endgame items but those endgame items are things like powered armor, jetpacks, laser blasters, rings that let you fly and fire heat-seeking arrows, etc. Making any one of those top tier items takes more effort than anything in vanilla minecraft.

[Seriyu]

Yeah, what he said. As of now vanilla minecraft just doesn't have a good end game goal. If you're a creative person that likes building stuff it's fine, but for those of us that need a reason to build something mods make things much more enjoyable.

[forsaken1111]

I should really post a picture of my house sometime... when its finished.

Ugh... now that EE has been revamped I'll have to tear up the entire 3.1 cube and rework it.

[Sirus]

Leaving this gem of a tutorial over here.

Yay, a tutorial for something I don't use!

Or you could play vanilla. Hardly any crashes at all!

But it's so hard...

Fixed it for you 

Nothing about Vanilla is hard

Apparently the actual mining part of Minecraft is. Isn't that the whole point behind infinite energy generators, or whatever the heck those mods do?

The point is to give a payoff for your effort, and a higher endgame.

Vanilla Minecraft: Work hard, build a house, explore a mineshaft. In the end you have diamond armor and diamond tools and... now what? Build a bigger house I guess.

Modded Minecraft: Work hard, build a house, construct machines to do certain tedious tasks for you. Use those machines to tackle objectives in hours which would take you days without the machines, such as building advanced machines or constructing condensers. Use those advanced machines and condensers. Eventually you still top out with endgame items but those endgame items are things like powered armor, jetpacks, laser blasters, rings that let you fly and fire heat-seeking arrows, etc. Making any one of those top tier items takes more effort than anything in vanilla minecraft.

...and?
What's the point of any of that stuff? Take no damage from creepers? Kill zombies with one hit instead of two? The only good thing I see in that list is the jetpack; everything else makes an easy game effortless.

The point of Vanilla is exploration: seeing just how huge a random cave goes, discovering an underwater mineshaft, scoring big with your dungeon loot, carefully digging for diamonds on the edge of a lava pit. I know I feel satisfaction when I uncover a mother lode of gold deep in a cave. How much do you feel when you stick dirt into a diamond generator and flip the switch?

[PsyberianHusky]

Leaving this gem of a tutorial over here.

Yay, a tutorial for something I don't use!

Or you could play vanilla. Hardly any crashes at all!

But it's so hard...

Fixed it for you 

Nothing about Vanilla is hard

Apparently the actual mining part of Minecraft is. Isn't that the whole point behind infinite energy generators, or whatever the heck those mods do?

The point is to give a payoff for your effort, and a higher endgame.

Vanilla Minecraft: Work hard, build a house, explore a mineshaft. In the end you have diamond armor and diamond tools and... now what? Build a bigger house I guess.

Modded Minecraft: Work hard, build a house, construct machines to do certain tedious tasks for you. Use those machines to tackle objectives in hours which would take you days without the machines, such as building advanced machines or constructing condensers. Use those advanced machines and condensers. Eventually you still top out with endgame items but those endgame items are things like powered armor, jetpacks, laser blasters, rings that let you fly and fire heat-seeking arrows, etc. Making any one of those top tier items takes more effort than anything in vanilla minecraft.

...and?
What's the point of any of that stuff? Take no damage from creepers? Kill zombies with one hit instead of two? The only good thing I see in that list is the jetpack; everything else makes an easy game effortless.

The point of Vanilla is exploration: seeing just how huge a random cave goes, discovering an underwater mineshaft, scoring big with your dungeon loot, carefully digging for diamonds on the edge of a lava pit. I know I feel satisfaction when I uncover a mother lode of gold deep in a cave. How much do you feel when you stick dirt into a diamond generator and flip the switch?

It is all about being able to say...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I built dat!

[Eagle_eye]

Quite a lot, seeing as I gathered the resources to build, it, I cleared the area, I planned the layout, I coordinated it with the power source, and I built the bunker keeping the creepers away.

[forsaken1111]

...and?
What's the point of any of that stuff? Take no damage from creepers? Kill zombies with one hit instead of two? The only good thing I see in that list is the jetpack; everything else makes an easy game effortless.

The point of Vanilla is exploration: seeing just how huge a random cave goes, discovering an underwater mineshaft, scoring big with your dungeon loot, carefully digging for diamonds on the edge of a lava pit. I know I feel satisfaction when I uncover a mother lode of gold deep in a cave. How much do you feel when you stick dirt into a diamond generator and flip the switch?

I feel pretty awesome when I dump all of my spoils from my last mining run into a single chest and watch it get pulled through my sorting machinery and processed through a system that took me hours to build and troubleshoot.

I'm not sure you understand just how difficult it is to build the 'diamond generator'. By the time you have stuff like that running at and reasonable speed you would already be DONE with everything vanilla minecraft has to offer. Mods like this let you do anything you want in vanilla minecraft, and then when you get bored of YET ANOTHER CAVE/MINESHAFT/RAVINE then you can move on and do something else instead of going "Welp that's the whole game gonna go play TF2 now."

[Osmosis Jones]

I'm not sure you understand just how difficult it is to build the 'diamond generator'. By the time you have stuff like that running at and reasonable speed you would already be DONE with everything vanilla minecraft has to offer. Mods like this let you do anything you want in vanilla minecraft, and then when you get bored of YET ANOTHER CAVE/MINESHAFT/RAVINE then you can move on and do something else instead of going "Welp that's the whole game gonna go play TF2 now."

Can't be harder than building any decent bit of RS logic.
Hell, I've spent hours perfecting minecart rail sorting systems, and loving every minute of it.

That said, guys, chill. The beautiful thing about minecraft is it isn't real. Changing the game you play to fit your playstyle doesn't affect anyone else.

[Tres_Huevos]

Exploring is great and all, there's some real nice stuff to find in vanilla Minecraft; however, if one is more of a building mindset, then stumbling on a motherload of gold is great and all... right up until you have jack all to do with it. At that point it's just finding a rare stack of blocks that are more useless than cobblestone. These mods aren't really aimed, from what I can tell, at significantly improving the exploring side of Minecraft so much as the building side of it.

For me, in vanilla, the part that really shines is digging about, exploring underground, right up until you have more iron that you know what to do with, unless you want to build a huge rail system, and you get a handful of diamonds. It's a classic, lovely Skinner box. You hammer on the lever (mine/explore), and occasionally, if you do that, you get treats (iron/redstone/gold/diamonds), and if you're not on the ball, you'll occasionally get punished (creepers). Once you've got a decent stockpile of those treats, they start becoming devalued, and the system starts to fall apart.

That's not to say there aren't rewarding things to do. For example, you can build a grand structure; this is something that will require many resources, and be quite the accomplishment. Unfortunately, most of what it requires is the bog standard resources, such as stone, sand, dirt, wood, or even such things as netherrack. They're abundant and not at all hard to find. Relative to searching for that other stuff, it's an insignificantly rewarding experience. Granted, in the end, you do get to construct a grand... construction, which is quite rewarding, but the more grand your construction is, the more hours upon hours of fairly minuscule rewards you have to slog through to get there. Sometimes it's just not worth it.

These mods, on the other hand, or at least what I've used of them, keep the worthwhileness of the rarer resources up as they have many uses, and make the tedious to gather things much less tedious to gather, and as the cherry on top, they give you all kinds of gubbins to build and play with that result in a much nicer reward schedule while playing the game. That's how I see it, anyway.

[forsaken1111]

Yeah, I'm curious what exactly you people USE gold for in vanilla...

Because it's like the most useless metal.

[Sirus]

...and?
What's the point of any of that stuff? Take no damage from creepers? Kill zombies with one hit instead of two? The only good thing I see in that list is the jetpack; everything else makes an easy game effortless.

The point of Vanilla is exploration: seeing just how huge a random cave goes, discovering an underwater mineshaft, scoring big with your dungeon loot, carefully digging for diamonds on the edge of a lava pit. I know I feel satisfaction when I uncover a mother lode of gold deep in a cave. How much do you feel when you stick dirt into a diamond generator and flip the switch?

I'm not sure you understand just how difficult it is to build the 'diamond generator'. By the time you have stuff like that running at and reasonable speed you would already be DONE with everything vanilla minecraft has to offer. Mods like this let you do anything you want in vanilla minecraft, and then when you get bored of YET ANOTHER CAVE/MINESHAFT/RAVINE then you can move on and do something else instead of going "Welp that's the whole game gonna go play TF2 now."

Huh. From the way people discuss Buildcraft or whatever, I had a different image in mind: You throw together your alchemy bench and solar collector (out of wood, of course), turn cobblestone into iron, iron into gold, and coal into uranium, before putting it all together into an infinite food generator and an automatic mining robot, and maybe a self-repairing house made of solid obsidian.

FAKE EDIT: Gold is used in watches (telling time underground) and powered minecart rails. You could also make blocks of solid gold if you wanted to be ostentatious.
(wow, I spelled ostentatious right on my first try  )

[dragnar]

See. So many people hate mods for making the game "easier" or being "overpowered". But... it's a sandbox game. An easy one at that. Mods that give you "overpowered" things don't break the game. After all, you aren't competing with anyone. What they do, is change the dynamic away from exploring and toward... something else. It varies per mod. Maybe it's building. Maybe it's a tech tree. Maybe it's just about over-the-top weapons. Point is, they exist to change teh experience into something different, not to remove the challenge from the game.

For example: The newest version of Equivalent Exchange takes 18 diamonds, some obsidian, and a couple other things, just to get started making diamonds from random junk. If you were playing Vanilla? Those 18 (plus the 3 for the pick you had to make) would last you pretty much forever. The challenge is over already, and now you get to go exploring/building. In EE? You are just getting started, and have hours of work ahead of you just to reach the end game.

[Sirus]

Those 18 (plus the 3 for the pick you had to make) would last you pretty much forever. The challenge is over already, and now you get to go exploring/building.

Eh? Just the set of armor would take 24 diamonds. Throw in a sword and pickaxe, and you're looking at 29. And it's always possible to lose said diamonds to either stupidity or bad luck.

[ECrownofFire]

Those 18 (plus the 3 for the pick you had to make) would last you pretty much forever. The challenge is over already, and now you get to go exploring/building.

Eh? Just the set of armor would take 24 diamonds. Throw in a sword and pickaxe, and you're looking at 29. And it's always possible to lose said diamonds to either stupidity or bad luck.

Not to mention the usual wear and tear.