Minecraft Forums

Quote from AllenWL

Thaumcraft golems.
But they are really really slow

I think we should be able to compost seeds

They're as fast as activators.

Quote from ILoveGadgets

~Holy Snip, Batman!~

First of all, can you link that oasis map?

Second of all, I don't quite like that cobblegen. It requires a lot of waiting for lava to fall and cover the water and waiting for it to dissipate afterwards. It also needs blocks. Quite a bit of them. If one does make this contraption out of wood in a skyblock before they have access to stone, in a situation where the only building material is wood, a wrong move could potentially burn down the entire island. A standard cobblegen is easier to build, far more compact, and can be operated while watching random youtube videos on the side. Because let's be honest about this. Cobblegenning is boring work.

Ex Nihilo is not meant to be an all in one mod. It's sole purpose is to give you access to the things you need a normally generated world in a skyblock map. If you want automation, you should be adding additional mods to your play. Playing with just Ex Nihilo and no other mods in a skyblock world should "feel" like playing a vanilla land generation world with no mods, but in the sky. Adding automation would ruin this.

Quote from Marsupilami

Ex Nihilo is not meant to be an all in one mod. It's sole purpose is to give you access to the things you need a normally generated world in a skyblock map. If you want automation, you should be adding additional mods to your play. Playing with just Ex Nihilo and no other mods in a skyblock world should "feel" like playing a vanilla land generation world with no mods, but in the sky. Adding automation would ruin this.

An ex nihilo addon adding automation stuff balanced around ex nihilo would be great.

Quote from ariosos

Getting an error with 1.29d - http://pastebin.com/vNEWN75c Looks like it doesn't like the Factorization mod?

This line: "[STDERR] at powercrystals.powerconverters.mods.Factorization.postInit(Factorization.java:45)" tells me that this is caused by a conflict between Power Converters and Factorization. It has nothing to do with me.

Quote from Marsupilami

Ex Nihilo is not meant to be an all in one mod. It's sole purpose is to give you access to the things you need a normally generated world in a skyblock map. If you want automation, you should be adding additional mods to your play. Playing with just Ex Nihilo and no other mods in a skyblock world should "feel" like playing a vanilla land generation world with no mods, but in the sky. Adding automation would ruin this.

This.

There are two ways that this mod can be used. Firstly, it can be added to a survival map and played by itself. In this instance, it just unlocks the rest of vanilla. Everything in a vanilla survival map is tedious, and this mod should have the same feel. People should still be motivated to build vanilla things, like pigman droppers for gold and iron golem farms for iron.

Secondly, it can also be played in a mod pack with other mods. There is no late game in super-modded Ex Nihilo because that is the way it was designed. It's purely an early-game and utility mod. You know how AE adds a a quartz grindstone to allow for an early game pulverizer? You know how that grindstone can only be used manually and it breaks if you try and automate it? The sieve is supposed to be the "quartz grindstone" of resource creation. If you want a late-game resource generation technique, use a MFR laser drill or some IC2 UU-matter. Hell, I went through a LOT of work building my "Artificial Hives" system and hijacking world gen so that people can get all their bees. You can use bees to generate pretty much anything you want.

The sieve's job was never to generate resources. It's purpose was to allow the possibility of building other machines that DO give you resources.

People are already afraid to add my mod to modpacks because automating the sieve is "stupidly overpowered". They are right to be concerned. It doesn't matter how slow I make the automatic version. People just make up for the low speed by building a billion of them running in parallel. Then I get to deal with people telling me that my blocks cause lag when you build 100+ of them.

Quote from ILoveGadgets

Wow you make long posts.

I don't see how those blocks can automate hammering in any way. The breaker acts as a standard block breaker and doesn't use tools.

Quote from Goreae

An ex nihilo addon adding automation stuff balanced around ex nihilo would be great.

It would be neat to see someone try this. It would be interesting to see how people react to it from all different points of view. Players, server ops, modpack creators, youtubers, etc.

What would be great is a thaumcraft alternative to the laser drill. Lore-wise, you use the arcane bore to dig out another universe by using a 'void mirror'. This mirror will not teleport items, but rather will delete them. Lore-wise, it teleports the items to another universe, but with no way to interact with them in this universe, they are lost. You could use golems to drop certain items (I.E. cobblestone) through the mirror to void them.

EDIT: The miner would require a source of alienis aspect to run. This allows the mirror to open wide enough to fit the bore's beam through. The entropy aspect will make it run faster, but is not necessary.

I think I see the issue here.

One group says "I want full access to vanilla gameplay in skyblock".
Another group says "I want to automate the boring part of getting access to vanilla gameplay in skyblock".

Does that summarize the different correctly?

If so, then there is a desire/want for two different mods: manual Ex Nihilo (what we have now), and simple automation for Ex Nihilo (what we are discussing the last three pages).

Now, can simple automation be balanced without being over powered? At the very least, it sounds like the drop rate for automated sieves needs to be turned down, but the "just build more" factor just makes this a matter of scale. And we've seen how big minecrafters will make something. Heck, whether it's an ender ender, a massive mob farm, an automatic gold collector from nether mob drops, etc -- vanilla automation does exist, and the truth is it has been made even more so since hoppers/etc.

Which brings back the question: What is the purpose of sieves? Answer: To generate materials needed to play the rest of the game.

What is the intended operation of sieves? Answer: With hammers. Plop down stone, hammer it. Sieve some. Plop down cobble, hammer. Sieve some. Plop down sand, hammer. Sieve some. Plop dirt into barrels; get dirt.

Automatic cobble collection? Sure. Set up water and lava so that the cobble is carried by water flow into hoppers and chests; stand above it, and AFK right-click hold-down. Collect cobble into chests.

Automatic gravel into a sifter? If I have chests full of gravel, I can have a dispenser/dropper put gravel into my inventory, and I can hold down right click. If I have the timing right, my behavior is AFK. Drops can either go into my inventory or a hopper. Ditto for the sand and dust.

Automatic breaking of cobble to gravel? That's hard. Hard only because vanilla does not have a block placer. Droppers do not place anything; dispensers place some blocks and not others (water/lava, I think, is it). If vanilla had a block placer, then something as simple as block placed, hammered break, hopper pickup. Again, AFK -- except that vanilla lacks one crucial block for any sort of automation, a block placer. There are mods that do that.

So going from no automation, to vanilla full automation, the only thing missing is being able to put a block down in front of you to smash. And we've seen automatic bonemealers for growing wheat -- remember that? Hold down right click to place a wheat seed, then a bonemeal is put into your hand, then when the wheat grows the ground is moved to harvest, and another seed is put into your hand. Given things like that, it would not surprise me at all to see something that would put out a bunch of cobble, a smaller amount of gravel, still smaller amounts of dirt, and then still smaller amounts of dust -- tossing the leftover dust into an automatic dirt producer. You've got a hammer in hand, just AFK'ing away hitting the block placed in front of you, and after putting enough things in front of you to break the hammer, gives you another hammer.

Eventually, you stop holding down left click at one AFK machine, and go to the other AFK machine. Now, you hold down right-click as tons of stuff to be sifted are tossed at you.

So what's the difference? One system (vanilla with a block-placer machine) only lets you run one system at a time. You spend about half your time sifting, and half your time hammering. The other -- fully automated by mods -- lets you generate stuff as fast as you want.

Well, mod automation is fundamentally about generating stuff as fast as you want.

EDIT: And even better: While I was writing this up, someone posts half of this apparently tested and functioning already. Perfect.

Quote from CA2020

I have one question, about the version for Minecraft 1.7.2. I'm in a pack where I also have Tinkers Constructs. I know that in some 1.6.2 Packs with this 2 Mods, you can smelt the Ores dust in the smeltery, but I can't in 1.7.2

Is that something to be fixed, it's not Ex-Nihilo responsibility and I should ask Tinkers, or it's a third mod that allows this?

Once again, thanks for your time, and for the awesome mod

Ex Aliquo is the one that adds the smelting recipes for the TCon smeltery. It's not on 1.7 yet