#terrafirmagreg

[smiegrin]

TFG thoughts:

Goddness GRACIOUS ok I get why GregTech is like One of the Big Mods now.

So the first tech mod I really ever touched was Mekanism, right? It's still in beta and all, but I enjoyed making upgrades for machines and trying to find ways to make automatic processing lines. One of the things I discovered playing it, though, was that almost everything felt very linear; often getting higher ore yields was just a matter of adding one or two steps/machines at the start of the existing process. Sometimes you had to make something to enable that step, but even then it just made the machine for that step Bigger(tm).

GregTech, on the other hand? I'm enthralled by the... interconnectedness of all the recipes? I'm always doing something with nitrogen or oxygen or hydrogen, and a lot of processes have different "atoms" of the process you can recycle perfectly as long as you put in the logistics for it. For example, there are a few recipes trees that start with Chlorine as an input that, later down the line, end up producing a byproduct of hydrochloric acid. You can just save it for other recipies (gotta make circuits after all) OR you can electrolize it back into the original chlorine BUT you have to deal with whatever hydrogen came out with it! Other recipes also have the acid diluted so you have to separate it from the water first if you want to recycle the chlorine this way.

So already the crafting logistics are much more interesting (in a way that makes EMI's recipe tree effectively mandatory, admittedly) (great work on that mod, by the way, holy cow it's so useful). This all EXPLODES (fun) when you get the Large Chemical Reactor!!!

The Large Chemical Reactor (LCR) is a multiblock, so you put it together using lots of smaller pieces. There's blocks for power, blocks for checking the status, blocks for fixing the internals with duct tape maintenance, so on so on. The most important part is the ingredient input and output blocks, though! The LCR lets you attach up to FOURTEEN (I think...?) different input/output blocks! This gives LCR's REALLY awesome but VERY tricky one-stop crafting possibilities! Where a line of regular reactor machines (the one-block sized ones) requires a lot of filters and pipes and space to manage looping or shared inputs and outputs, the LCR's output blocks (but not inputs!!!) have filters built right in!

The effect is getting to arrange the individual parts of this sizeable machine so that all the chemicals dip in and out in such a way that smaller machines that orbit it can recycle, pre-proccess, or buffer all kinds of stuff!

The whole thing turns a machine that could have been "one-block machine but more expensive bigger and faster" (looking at you, Mekanism evaporation tower) into a rewarding puzzle of finding the best way to route chemicals WITHIN a machine!

[transcatgirlhazel]

another meme from me and @kyatmiya's wacky adventure. this time featuring my attempt to find cassiterite and hitting a fuckhuge vein of asbestos

[large-fucking-bird]

I really need to stop expecting games to be real-world accurate, I'm playing terrafirmagreg a lot recently, and I'm currently taking a natural environments course in college. I keep expecting the wind to act like it does IRL (because tbh, wind isn't all that complex to model), and to blow certain ways based on landforms, but it's still minecraft and minecraft is mostly random.

[infinite-planes]

Found a cool oversight in the Minecraft mod pack I’m playing, TerrafirmaGreg

See the GregTech recipe for Red Alloy is 1 Copper plus 4 Redstone to make 1 Red Alloy, and you can use a centrifuge to undo that

But the TerrafirmaGreg devs added an alloying recipe to make Red Alloy, where you melt 4 parts Copper with 1 part Redstone to make 5 parts Red Alloy

So you can go 4 Copper + 1 Redstone -> 5 Red Alloy -> 5 Copper + 20 Redstone. That’s free copper and redstone!

Best of all, there are other alloying mismatches that let you convert Copper into Zinc or Tin or other metals!

[magnetictapedatastorage]

terrafirmagreg is SO GOOD. it manages to slow down progression MASSIVELY without making it a grind. instead, you're slowed down by having more complex/faster-depleting needs that encourage you to prioritize food above all other things. this is such a genius way of doing it, because you spend that extended time on engaging tasks (spear fishing, searching for wild plants, finding water) rather than mindless microcrafting!

[jothwip]

I've entered the steam age in terrafirmagreg

[smiegrin]

Just gonna write this down in a blog post because it's itching my brain quite thoroughly and it's the kind of thing that might be fun for a fellow modded minecraft gamer to see:

So I've been playing the modpack TerraFirmaGreg for a few weeks now (after updating and starting a new save, again. You know how it goes). Thanks to letting myself cheat just a tiny bit (peeking at the world map), I have made it all the way into LV -- circuit assembler and blast furnace and all! This transition out of the base TerraFirmaCraft mechanics (forging tools by hand with charcoal I made in a charcoal pit and shiny rocks I walked miles to find) into the GregTech things (mixing my own biodiesel out of fish oil and whisky after an hour reading EMI) has highlighted an interesting gameplay texture.

Early on when you're making things out of metal (eg: armor) there's a series of steps you have to take that ultimately take two "ingots" of material and turn them into a single plate. This makes the cost of things very steep (eg: about 24 ingots of wrought iron for plate armor) As you get to the point where your making your first "automatic" machines (ie: steam age) this cost starts to drop pretty significantly. Instead of 2 ingots for each plate, you can make 3 ingots into 2 plates at once (a 33% increase overall, or only 18 ingots for the same armor). All of the steps involve more complex materials to make the stronger alloys for everything, but you still end up getting more bang for your buck at every turn.

Now that I've completed lots of the machines for LV, however, I'm starting to notice a different kind of resource pressure. Even when I have all the parts that I need, I'm still limited primarily by how LONG everything takes. I have an Electric Blast Furnace that will turn cast iron ingots and oxygen gas directly into steel, and I have another machine that can flatten those into plates at a 1:1 ratio. I can even run things in batches so that I'll have plenty of plates for making mining machines on demand. Material costs are just such a small factor now. What's changed is that I'm still constantly waiting on something to finish processing.

I can load up all the oxygen and iron I can into the blast furnace, but when it's done I still have to clear it out myself, and it'll only be a batch of 48 ingots max. It burns enough fuel that I still have to check the diesel buffer hasn't run low. I can have the most efficient chemical line for turning latex into rubber, but that doesn't matter if my tree taps aren't producing because it's the dead of winter. I can just chop them down and use the extractor, but that takes up a whole machine and almost 2/3rds of a dedicated engine's energy output. A machine I'm waiting on so I can extract the fish oil to make more fuel for the EBF making steel so I can make more machines-- Wait how long will it take for my next batch of rubber fig logs to grow???

It's time! It's taking time for everything and for me to run back and forth between machines juggling drums and fluid cells while also trying to schedule things so I don't overdraw my engines' power output.

I don't know if I can articulate it well, but this game has somehow gotten me to reach with my mind for a solution in the same way it did when I was counting out how many iron blooms were going to be dedicated just to making one shield, but for my time. Where once I was scouring EMI to find out how to squeeze more plates out of my ingots step-by-step, now I'm sorting through all the recipes I already know in my head to try and find which of them I can try and make a dedicated line for so I can forget them. Something that packs all the time of scooping and dumping and sorting and walking into a line where I pour in whisky and fish at one end and know it will keep all my engines topped off with fuel for the next year.

It's a shape of problem that I never really encountered in a game before. Even in Factorio (including Space Age), most of the complexity is in parsing what outputs need to connect to what inputs. Solving this I/O problem naturally leads to implementing a system that you can leave alone for a while. When you get a new powerful item, most of the time it just changes what ratio of machines you need on the input or output side.

Where Factorio has you make 4 or so chemicals and 20ish items 10,000 times to make the next tool (which only adds maybe 2 or so new chemicals/fluids/items), TFG has me making at least 12 different chemicals and hundreds of items just 20 or 30 times, but unless I can figure out how to turn that into just 20 items with 8 intermediate steps I don't have to remember, all 30 of those iterations will be death by 10,000's of seconds of down time waiting for rubber trees to grow back in.

[transcatgirlhazel]

A four-panel retelling of me and @kyatmiya's beautiful foray into modded minecraft. We decided in a classical example of girlbossing too close to the sun to boot up Terrafirmagreg, one of the most technically challenging and time/grind intensive modpacks we know of. Our first year is on the books, and we're barely surviving by the skins of our teeth. This shit's peak, I haven't had this much fun playing minecraft in a loooong time.