Mod Spotlight - Redstone Paste Mod
Do you like to build contraptions with redstone? Most players at least experiment with this highly versatile mechanic of Minecraft, but it does come with some frustrating downsides. "Wouldn't it be easier if you could just stick redstone lines to walls and ceilings?" is a question I often hear (both from others, and myself). Lucky for us, that question has been answered!
Redstone Paste Mod, by FyberOptic, adds a new form of redstone dust into the game, allowing you to transmit redstone signals across a variety of surfaces, including ceilings and walls. Also included are sticky repeaters and sticky comparators, to keep your redstone current strong, or do complex logic no matter where you decide to run your paste.
The placement of the paste is uniquely different than normal redstone, however. It can be applied to any of the four directions of a block face (top, bottom, left, right), allowing you to create compact redstone paths, and only direct current in the directions you desire. Individual segments can be removed as well, so you don't have to tear down the entire wiring system just to fix, update, or improve one small section! There is much, much more, but I'll let you discover that for yourself.
One of the biggest complaints about redstone wiring has been limited space - you can only place one wire per block, and even then, only on top of blocks. With Redstone Paste, you can place it anywhere, and create much more complex devices without taking up quite so much space. Neat!
WHERE CAN I GET THIS MOD
You can check out Redstone Paste Mod right here, in this thread!
Oh, clever. Why reason with people when you can just rephrase their words in the most absurd way possible?
Suppose that I decided to reinvent the wheel by redoing Mystcraft from scratch (as an example). Mystcraft is already done while my features overlap considerably and aren't even as well-developed. It doesn't really make much sense for me to be promoted when it's already been done. It's not about ignoring mods because they're lesser known or not - it's about promoting mods that do something different, something that hasn't been refined twice already. That's what got those "well known people" to where they are.
It's just a mod spotlight... no reason to rage about it, even if it happens to have some of the same features as another mod, and even if, in your opinion, the other mod is better. It doesn't really matter if one mod is "better", "more refined", or whatever than the other. It's something somebody made, and made pretty well, for a game. Yeah, a GAME. You know, those things you do for fun, that aren't really important?
Sacheverell happened to like the mod and decided to promote it - that's his job, and his decision to make, no matter how much you or I may disagree with it. I don't care much for those remakes of random old arcade games inside of Minecraft, but I don't freak out if someone puts one on the front page. Anyway, enough said. I've got fun things to do
Of course, I agree on that. =) I just didn't get the impression that this mod does anything novel relative to the others.
I do want to address something though, mostly because it's not the first time I've heard it. About six months ago I was surprised to find that Captain Sparklez did a review of one of the earlier versions of Redstone Paste. As with here, the response was positive overall, and it really made my day. But unfortunately the comments that stood out to me were people saying it was a RedPower clone, or a Project: Red clone. I felt like those people were overlooking my entire driving force behind Redstone Paste, which is to have total control over placement and direction. Nobody has ever actually named or accused me of copying the one thing which was the biggest inspiration: Space Station 13 wiring. In that game you can place wire in any direction on a tile. Ever since then I wanted redstone to behave the same way, despite SS13 only being a 2D game and the mechanics being much simpler. No other mod that I know of gives you that degree of control over redstone, and it wasn't until I started developing it that I started to see why! It was a challenge, to say the least.
It's also worth saying that a lot of the motivation behind mods of mine like Hopper Ducts and Redstone Paste comes from the time we have to wait for the bigger mods to be updated to new versions of Minecraft. For example, once we got to Minecraft 1.5, and RedPower stopped being updated, I was in the same boat as a lot of other people. I'd gotten a lot of use out of RP2, and now I was back to redstone staircases, back redstone torch towers, and back to laying down tons of repeaters to force redstone connect to a row of pistons or whatever (another driving force behind implementing SS13-style mechanics). But then MineFactory Reloaded came out with rednet cables and controllers, and that changed everything in my opinion. I felt like this was a great replacement, different and innovative enough to not just be a copy of what we'd seen before, and that I'd probably stick with that from then on. Well then it wasn't long until we got to Minecraft 1.6, and we're in the familiar situation again of waiting for mods to update. So, Hopper Ducts came about so that I didn't have to wait for mods like BuildCraft in the future, and Redstone Paste came about so that I didn't have to wait on mods like MFR, while also giving me the chance to finally implement my SS13-inspired mechanics. Keeping the mods simple and very vanilla-oriented is a big part of it, and is why I've decided against integrating things like Forge Multipart support. That would delay the time it takes for me to update significantly (FMP updated to 1.7 only recently, where as Redstone Paste as been updated for over two months), and requires people to include a mod they don't necessarily need, all of which kind of defeats my initial purpose.
So when I hear people say that any of my mods should be in the base game, then I feel like they "get" it. I'm pleased when people can appreciate the mods for being simple and meshing with the regular mechanics of the game. And I certainly have no problem with people telling me that they need the more advanced functionality of a mod like MFR, Red Logic, Project: Red, etc, because I enjoy logic circuits as much as the next geek. But cloning RedPower was never the motivation behind Redstone Paste, and I feel the exact opposite for the people who say that; that they don't "get" it, that they don't see the primary mechanic of the mod, and that's disappointing to me. At least on the super rare occasion that I was accused of copying Vertical Redstone then I could appreciate that the person has been around for a long time to even remember that one, because I honestly don't! But that mod behaved differently as well.
Anyway, I shouldn't focus on the negative when there's so much positive, but I just wanted folks to see the inspiration behind the mod. Go play Space Station 13 if you want to see where it all started!
We've already had someone mention the trouble with a giant mod updating versus a small one.
There are other issues on servers -- maybe a server doesn't want a particular style of play/build. Maybe there's a desire to see what people do when there are limits on their building.
For "re-inventing mystcraft": Is Steve's Carts a re-invention of Railcraft? Would a forge version of Multiworld (bukkit only last time I checked) count? Is ReactorCraft a re-invention of whichever old-school mod had nuclear reactors? (Sorry, I actually don't know which one that is).
The same theme can be done multiple ways, by multiple people. The drama of minecraft mods -- the whole "you can't do something that someone else has already done" -- makes no sense at all to me. Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, and I'm certain that Notch did not get permission from the guy who made Infiniminer.
Also, I like reinventions of some of the ideas. Sometimes I like the original implementation, but sometimes I like the alternatives. As I can't think of many mods which have absolutely 0 alternatives (especially in the tech tree), I don't see what the big issue is.