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[forsaken1111]

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.

Ok... so are you missing the point or just being obnoxious on purpose? 29 diamonds takes a while to find no matter how you slice it. The point here is that after finding ~30 diamonds you've made the end-game top tier vanilla equipment.

In EE 30 diamonds is... well its nothing. That is a small amount of currency. You can make a single condenser which will eat 40 coal to make ONE additional diamond iirc. By itself that is a very very slow means to an end. You don't just slap down a condenser and 'yay infinite diamonds lulz'. You take the meagre output of that condenser and you keep finding more stuff, mining, transmuting, etc to make extremely expensive and extremely powerful items and equipment.

Its just additional challenges and goals. If you really dislike it so much or (obviously) don't understand it, then don't use them. It just extends the base game by giving you more options, that's all there is to it.

[Duke 2.0]

 My issue isn't so much access to 'free' resources so much as how it makes resources work on a much more fluid level. Tiers and material requirements don't matter as much, which feels off for me.

 (And people pairing it with IC and BC make some boring industrial machines)

[nichaey]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.

I feel like you two have condense and filtered all arguments and come to an eloquent conclusion.

If you want to argue mroe about overhaul mods just see these two posts, but preferably show off some crazy piston/redstone/factory builds

[forsaken1111]

My issue isn't so much access to 'free' resources so much as how it makes resources work on a much more fluid level. Tiers and material requirements don't matter as much, which feels off for me.

 (And people pairing it with IC and BC make some boring industrial machines)

I still don't get this argument. EE gives you the ability to transmute material up the tier system but that transmutation is extremely expensive, almost prohibitively so to do for any large scale use. It is quite handy for small scale uses though, like when I need some more dirt but all I have is a few pieces of cobblestone... transmute down to dirt and use it.

And why is an industrial machine boring? I guess it's boring because you don't like machines? or something?

[Sirus]

40 coal from dirt to diamond.

And you can turn coal into mobius fuel for free in an energy collector, 1 mobius fuel will do 2 diamonds or so.

So how much for an energy collector? Now those 40 pieces of coal become 80 diamonds. Are you still gonna tell me that it's incredibly wasteful to make diamonds?

[Duke 2.0]

 Nononono, I love me some overly complex industrial machines going through several different steps and refinement processes. Even Industrialcraft doesn't really understand this, and it offers some of the best stuff to chain together with BC. I also like the idea of running resource collectors like miners and processing the resulting tons of junk that come from it. When you have tons of cobble and dirt as a byproduct of such an operation EE offers a lot of benefit. And if your minders don't stumble across enough Lapis for your current project? No need to hunt for it, transmute some of your iron around. Or even cobble after not too long of a while.

 It's a mod that works well within the context of vanilla Minecraft, offer some balance issues when it comes to interacting with other mods(Balance as in making availability of some resources different and changing the intended dynamics of the mod to remove previous limitations), and has a personal style that does not fit with my own personal style. I don't see the problem here.

[forsaken1111]

40 coal from dirt to diamond.

And you can turn coal into mobius fuel for free in an energy collector, 1 mobius fuel will do 2 diamonds or so.

So how much for an energy collector? Now those 40 pieces of coal become 80 diamonds. Are you still gonna tell me that it's incredibly wasteful to make diamonds?

Who said it was wasteful? Who are you talking to?

In any case, I checked the wiki.

To make a condenser, it takes 18 diamonds, 2 obsidian, 4 smooth stone and 1 glass.
To make a collector, it takes 6 glowstone blocks, 9 diamonds, a furnace and 1 glass.

Turning 40 coal into 40 mobius fuel using an energy collector would take 128 minutes or a little over 2 hours. The wiki doesn't have numbers on conversion times for condensers but does say that making cobblestone into diamond takes 'a long time'. So yes, eventually your 40 coal could become 80 diamonds if you've already collected 27 diamonds and you're willing to wait several real-time hours.

[Sirus]

EE gives you the ability to transmute material up the tier system but that transmutation is extremely expensive, almost prohibitively so to do for any large scale use.

^^^^^
Referring to that.

In any case, I've decided to stop this silly argument and work on my LP instead. If you want to mod in a bunch of stuff, fine. I will play and enjoy vanilla.

[forsaken1111]

EE gives you the ability to transmute material up the tier system but that transmutation is extremely expensive, almost prohibitively so to do for any large scale use.

^^^^^
Referring to that.

I didn't say it was wasteful, just expensive. And I was talking about manual transmutations. I personally haven't played with the new stuff in EE.

Why are we having this conversation again? Are you just venting about a mod you dislike? Are you angry that people like me use it?

[Duke 2.0]

Why are we having this conversation again? Are you just venting about a mod you dislike? Are you angry that people like me use it?

Seems the conversation included me because somebody doesn't like the idea that I don't personally like a mod.

[forsaken1111]

I meant the conversation as a whole. I understand your statement Duke.

I'm trying to figure out why I've had 2 pages of discussion about a mod with someone who doesn't use mods.

[Sirus]

I meant the conversation as a whole. I understand your statement Duke.

I'm trying to figure out why I've had 2 pages of discussion about a mod with someone who doesn't use mods.

The conversation started because I (erroneously) assumed that the mod was more of a hack than anything else. Now I know better. Still not gonna use it 

[forsaken1111]

Well I'm glad I could at least convince you that it isn't just a cheat. They have done their best to balance it so it's not too easy or too hard to do stuff.

[Biag]

I like the idea behind Equivalent Exchange, but I don't like the way it interacts with IC and BC. I like the idea of all your spare crap cobble converting into useful things, and I love the idea of big complicated machines sweeping and industrializing the world to turn it all into more productive capacity, but when all that output just flows into a chest and converts into a stack of diamonds it just kind of takes away from the bigness that attracts me to the industrial mods. I guess that, as they stand, they don't really produce anything but ever-larger stacks of crap, and there is no chance I have a demand big enough to consume everything I produce. The economics don't work out. And since I am the only citizen of my single-player worlds, there's no real point to accumulating anything beyond what I need.

To emphasize: yeah, I know that's the fundamental question that EE answers, but before that two-page conversation is renewed I would reiterate that EE doesn't mesh with what appeals to me about industrialization, and thus I'm not going to use it in conjunction with an industrialization-focused modpack.

[Rex_Nex]

This thread is a bore for anyone who doesn't use IC and/or BC. 80% of the thread for the last 50-100 pages has been nothing but about those mods. I realize its on topic and there is nothing really wrong with it, but...