...tweaks such as disabling rituals and making the armour only protect against so much damage, and possibly the damage from the Bound Blade should all be configurable without having too many issues.
Well, the same could be said for IC2. You must remember how hard and expensive it is to get this stuff, and the work it takes to automate filling the soul network. Plus it is easy it tamper with, steal one blood orb and they're set back a long ways until they get a new one, if they realize it was ever stolen. And you must remember, if they ever run out of LE.... Well, they will bleed themselves dry.
That being said, I wouldn't mind more Config options. For enabling/disabling rites, along with countless other things like an option for the rite of magnetism to add ID's for other mod ores.
Sure, but I wouldn't use IC2 in an adventure-focused pack. Time and expense are fine balancing factors for tools and infrastructure, but when it comes to combat... well, it makes every battle into a matter of "who spent more time doing their blood magic?". Against mobs it's even worse: if you're going to, say, fight a boss, you just work out how much blood you need to gather to render yourself invulnerable against that one enemy, gather it, then walk in and hit them until they die.
Most of the mitigating factors you mentioned are strategic, not tactical. Sure, there are ways to sabotage an enemy who's using blood magic, but that's akin to saying "Okay, combat is boring now so instead we're going to have battles of espionage." I mean, that sort of thing is fun too, but I wouldn't want to ditch combat completely just to get a bit of espionage in there.
Although hmm, that does suggest an interesting idea. What if the efficiency of your soul network dropped off with distance? You'd be near-invincible in your own sanctum, but potentially vulnerable if you ventured afield. Defeating someone would require either stealing their blood orb or ambushing them in the wilderness. I dunno if that would actually be ideal or not, but it's interesting to think about.
More config options, at least ones such as disabling recipes, would be a good call. I'm not too sure on things such as manipulating how well the Bound Armour and Weapons are. For instance, the Bound Sword, unenchanted, is 50% stronger than a diamond sword. That isn't that much stronger, considering that there is a gating cost of having to get a tier 3 altar and make a Ritual of Binding, which requires even MORE blood. Also, as someone has already stated, if you run out of LP while using something such as the Bound Armour, you will be very sorry... It also costs at least twice as much as diamond armour, is unenchantable, and its strengths really are dependent on how well you socket the armour with various upgrades. Boots can only socket four things at max, which means only two upgrades when you factor in the blood orb and the blood shard needed to make it worth it.
Well, let me put it like this. In this modpack I'm putting together, there are a wide variety of "strong" items, some of which are just as hard to acquire as a bound sword. Most of them basically come down to "diamond gear with some perks" or "one bump better than diamond with no extra abilities". It's a design that works really well for encouraging a variety of playstyles: the guys who like to fight hit-and-run get the speed-boosting gear, the cave delvers get the stuff that lets you see in the dark, the wizards get the armour that improves their casting. Then suddenly, we add blood magic to the mix. Now everybody's wearing the same gear and playing the same way, because whatever enchants and special abilities they had just weren't as good as +4 damage and invulnerability. (They don't do it right away, of course, but they will once they can afford it.) Now there's less reason to go adventuring any more, since nothing you find can possibly compare to what you already have.
And okay, sure, maybe that's not how you play your games. But everybody plays a different way, and there's no harm in giving users a bit more freedom in how they use your mod. I'm not saying that your numbers are wrong in general, just that they're not right for me personally. And anyway, it'd be no more than half a dozen lines of code.
Although I suppose the bound blade would be more or less balanced if it were unenchantable, like the other bound combat gear is supposed to be. That wouldn't be enough to balance the armour for me, though; running out of LP isn't really something that happens to a well-prepared player, in practice. You might make that mistake once or twice, but after that all danger is reduced to the yes/no question of "Do I have plenty of LP to spare?" And costs aren't really a disadvantage so much as a delaying tactic; "nigh-infinite power later" is still better than "moderate power now", especially if you can get both.
I just started playing with this and I'm enjoying it immensely. The mechanics are so elegant, and the flavour is near-perfect.
There's one thing I was wondering, though. The bound weapons and armour are, like, really powerful. Most of the stuff in the mod is balanced despite its power, but a sword that deals +12 damage and a theoretically unlimited hit point pool just seem straight-up too good when most other mods' "ultimate" gear is basically diamond with some extra perks. Is there something I'm overlooking? I really want to be able to use this with other mods, but the massive difference in power makes that not really feasible.
If it wouldn't be too much bother, would you consider adding some config options to let people tweak the power levels to suit their own tastes? If I could set the sword's damage and the armour's defense value (i.e. have it block only, say, 90% of incoming damage), I would feel a lot better about making it a permanent fixture on my server.
This looks pretty neat! Are the mobs' recruitment costs configurable? Like, if I wanted knights to cost 24 iron, archers to cost 6 gold, and soldiers to cost a few rift flux (from Invasion Mod, which would pair well with this), could I do that?
I gotta say, this mod has been such a boon for me and my server. Possibly too much of a boon, actually. Our modpack includes a bunch of new enchantments, which are all fine individually but start to become a little bit ridiculous when you have all of them on the same sword.
The level cap you added in 1.14.4 did help a lot, but I'm wondering how complicated it would be to add some other ways to customize the mod for one's needs. I'd be interested in seeing:
An option to limit the total number of unique enchantments on any given item. If the limit is 3, and I have three enchantments on my sword, I can't enchant it further without an anvil.
The ability to keep certain enchantments from showing up on the enchanting list at all. (You'd need to find a book or something.)
A way to make certain enchantments available on nonstandard items, like Power on an arrow or Knockback on a stick.
A way to make certain enchantments not/only available on specific items. e.g. only leather boots can have Feather Falling; diamond chestplates can't have Thorns.
A way to give some items a higher/lower maximum effect level for certain enchantments. e.g. I could decide that gold swords can go up to Smite VI, but only Bane of Arthropods III. (This one is probably difficult)
Just suggestions, but I think they'd work well with the custom config options you already have.
I was playing around with spell creation recently, looking for something I could use against an invasion I had scheduled, and found myself unexpectedly disappointed. There doesn't seem to be any way to make a straightforward custom area attack spell, like a Fireball that deals extra damage to everything it hits.
It seems that Fireball, as a projectile spell, only actively targets the creature hit by the projectile; the other creatures in the radius only suffer the effects of a regular Fireball. Other area attacks, like Fire Bolt and Shockwave, don't appear to target any creatures in their area at all. Beams and some channelled spells do work as expected, but they both apply some awkward limitations to any custom spells that make use of them. (Also their ranges tend to be very short.) Chain Lightning hits a specific (small) number of targets, instead of everything in a radius.
Basically, there's no good way to make a multitarget version of a single-target spell. And that's a shame, because a lot of the less-appreciated spells, like Pull of the Watery Grave or Draining Poison, would become much more interesting if you could use them on a whole bunch of enemies at once.
In the end, I did find a combination I liked—Fireball, Breath of the Open Sky, and Meteor Jump—but it only works because of a quirk of the latter two spells' timing, and the fact that they were all already area attacks.
This is easily one of my favourite mods of all time. One tiny request, though: would you be able to add the "Twilight" prefix to the names of the biomes that don't have it already? Highlands becomes TwilightHighlands, Lake becomes TwilightLake, and so on. I keep running into name conflicts with other biome-adding mods, which makes it difficult to tune my mob spawning properly. At the moment there's no real way to have, say, penguins and no monsters in Twilight glaciers and monsters but no penguins in overworld glaciers at the same time.
Just started playing with this mod, and I'm loving it. One problem, though: I've been trying to make a custom liquid, and I'm having some serious trouble getting the textures right. It appears that liquids can't take custom textures (my other blocks and items are getting their custom textures just fine, though), and because the "color" attribute is just a multiplier on top of the blue water texture, the only colours available are a range between greenish and purplish.
Is there any way I can get a nice honey-brown ale, or will I be stuck drinking water?
Edit: I should mention that I'm using 0.9.9 bugfix. Does the version-independent–ness include backward compatibility?
Is there anywhere I could acquire v0.4.1 of this mod?
My SMP world was started on v0.4.0, but now I'd like to install BOP Integration, which only works with v0.4.1 and newer. I'd rather not use v0.4.6 if I can help it: the changes to the biome list cause those annoying glitch-cliffs to appear where the old lands end and the new begin.
Do you mean Amnet's BoP integration? If you are using it for Thaum you should contact her. I THINK she is keeping apace but I may be wrong.
If you are using for Mo Creatures you don't need to anymore. Dr Zhark added compatibility.
Not to Amnet out of biz... but maybe we should start making noise over at Thaum to see if we can get compatibility there too.
Amnet's BoP Integration, that's the one. I'm not sure why I'd contact her about this, though... everything's fine on her end. I only mentioned her mod to provide some context for my situation.
My problem is the inevitable changes in terrain that come with each version. No matter how I tweak which biomes are permitted to spawn, the new version can't generate terrain that fits seamlessly into an older map.
I'm looking for v0.4.1 because I expect that it has the fewest changes from 0.4.0. Hopefully the changes would be few enough that I could replicate 0.4.0 terrain generation.
And I can't just update Mo' Creatures; the version that's compatible with Mo' Creatures is also only compatible with Minecraft 1.5.1. We're still on 1.4.7, since some of our mods haven't updated yet.
Is there anywhere I could acquire v0.4.1 of this mod?
My SMP world was started on v0.4.0, but now I'd like to install BOP Integration, which only works with v0.4.1 and newer. I'd rather not use v0.4.6 if I can help it: the changes to the biome list cause those annoying glitch-cliffs to appear where the old lands end and the new begin.
Just out of curiosity, I had a peek at your code. I noticed something odd in the MoCreaturesIntegration file: when you register the entities, you give all of them the wraith's spawn rate.
Is that intentional? I noticed some people mentioning that they're getting fewer animals spawning in BOP biomes... if they had the wraith's spawn rate turned down low, that could be why.
Aspects
I agree with everyone else that a large list of aspects is ideal. Figuring out the logic of which aspects do what, working out where one might find them, then setting out to collect them is really fun.
You're right that there's some redundancy, but I think that's actually a strength of the system. There are a dozen or so common, robust aspects like Motus and Imperito that show up again and again, with well-defined properties: transmutations always involve Permutatio, for instance. Then you've got a bunch of more obscure or specialized aspects that provide the flavour of this specific enchantment. The former are conceptual, relational, sort of like verbs; the latter, concrete, elemental, nounish. It's a good setup, and the mod would suffer if you reduced the vocabulary available to enchantments.
If you really do want to reduce the number of aspects, though, you should probably restrict your cuts to the nouns, leaving the verbs intact. I'd expect that aspect nodes would cleave more to the noun side of things than the verbs (where would you look for an Instrumentum node, anyway?), so if you want a slimmer range of nodes you only really need to trim the nouns.
Also, vague idea: maybe instead of removing similar aspects entirely, you could make certain aspects subtypes of others? Like, instead of cutting Aer and Volito in favour of Aura (for example), you might rename them to Aer Aurae and Volito Aurae. They'd work just like Aura for ordinary purposes (and might be indistinguishable without a specific mid-level research), but certain advanced research and enchantments might require the Aer (or Volito) flavour of Aura. This would again allow you to have fewer types of node while retaining the full array of aspects.
Vis
Both vis and essentia, please. But by all means, rework how vis comes into the world until it's more stable. (I do like being able to create nexuses and dead zones, though.)
Spellcasting
I'm okay with spellcasting in theory, but it'd have to stick to the "A mage is defined by his tools" tone that Thaumcraft already has going on. I could see it working like, you know a set of spells, but on your own you can't channel energy fast enough to use anything more than the weakest form of each (e.g. a spark eqivalent to a flint and steel). You'd bind spells into wands, and those wands would channel larger amounts of vis much faster (or alternatively, use vis more efficiently), producing greater effects (e.g. a fireball). More advanced items—call them staffs—would increase your personal storage capacity (or rather, act as an auxiliary storage that you can tap into automatically while you're wielding them), as well as improving your channeling rate. (Perhaps only while you have the appropriate essentia stored in it?)
Or in other words—
Personal spellcasting: flexible, but very low power
Wand: contains single bound spell with a set (potentially high) power and storage
Staff: stores vis and essentia for personal spellcasting, increases power of personal spellcasting
That may have been a bit unclear... it's a bit late, and the idea isn't fully formed yet anyway. I may come back and rewrite this last bit later.
0
Great, thanks so much!
0
Sure, but I wouldn't use IC2 in an adventure-focused pack. Time and expense are fine balancing factors for tools and infrastructure, but when it comes to combat... well, it makes every battle into a matter of "who spent more time doing their blood magic?". Against mobs it's even worse: if you're going to, say, fight a boss, you just work out how much blood you need to gather to render yourself invulnerable against that one enemy, gather it, then walk in and hit them until they die.
Most of the mitigating factors you mentioned are strategic, not tactical. Sure, there are ways to sabotage an enemy who's using blood magic, but that's akin to saying "Okay, combat is boring now so instead we're going to have battles of espionage." I mean, that sort of thing is fun too, but I wouldn't want to ditch combat completely just to get a bit of espionage in there.
Although hmm, that does suggest an interesting idea. What if the efficiency of your soul network dropped off with distance? You'd be near-invincible in your own sanctum, but potentially vulnerable if you ventured afield. Defeating someone would require either stealing their blood orb or ambushing them in the wilderness. I dunno if that would actually be ideal or not, but it's interesting to think about.
Well, let me put it like this. In this modpack I'm putting together, there are a wide variety of "strong" items, some of which are just as hard to acquire as a bound sword. Most of them basically come down to "diamond gear with some perks" or "one bump better than diamond with no extra abilities". It's a design that works really well for encouraging a variety of playstyles: the guys who like to fight hit-and-run get the speed-boosting gear, the cave delvers get the stuff that lets you see in the dark, the wizards get the armour that improves their casting. Then suddenly, we add blood magic to the mix. Now everybody's wearing the same gear and playing the same way, because whatever enchants and special abilities they had just weren't as good as +4 damage and invulnerability. (They don't do it right away, of course, but they will once they can afford it.) Now there's less reason to go adventuring any more, since nothing you find can possibly compare to what you already have.
And okay, sure, maybe that's not how you play your games. But everybody plays a different way, and there's no harm in giving users a bit more freedom in how they use your mod. I'm not saying that your numbers are wrong in general, just that they're not right for me personally. And anyway, it'd be no more than half a dozen lines of code.
Although I suppose the bound blade would be more or less balanced if it were unenchantable, like the other bound combat gear is supposed to be. That wouldn't be enough to balance the armour for me, though; running out of LP isn't really something that happens to a well-prepared player, in practice. You might make that mistake once or twice, but after that all danger is reduced to the yes/no question of "Do I have plenty of LP to spare?" And costs aren't really a disadvantage so much as a delaying tactic; "nigh-infinite power later" is still better than "moderate power now", especially if you can get both.
0
There's one thing I was wondering, though. The bound weapons and armour are, like, really powerful. Most of the stuff in the mod is balanced despite its power, but a sword that deals +12 damage and a theoretically unlimited hit point pool just seem straight-up too good when most other mods' "ultimate" gear is basically diamond with some extra perks. Is there something I'm overlooking? I really want to be able to use this with other mods, but the massive difference in power makes that not really feasible.
If it wouldn't be too much bother, would you consider adding some config options to let people tweak the power levels to suit their own tastes? If I could set the sword's damage and the armour's defense value (i.e. have it block only, say, 90% of incoming damage), I would feel a lot better about making it a permanent fixture on my server.
Thanks!
0
0
The level cap you added in 1.14.4 did help a lot, but I'm wondering how complicated it would be to add some other ways to customize the mod for one's needs. I'd be interested in seeing:
- An option to limit the total number of unique enchantments on any given item. If the limit is 3, and I have three enchantments on my sword, I can't enchant it further without an anvil.
- The ability to keep certain enchantments from showing up on the enchanting list at all. (You'd need to find a book or something.)
- A way to make certain enchantments available on nonstandard items, like Power on an arrow or Knockback on a stick.
- A way to make certain enchantments not/only available on specific items. e.g. only leather boots can have Feather Falling; diamond chestplates can't have Thorns.
- A way to give some items a higher/lower maximum effect level for certain enchantments. e.g. I could decide that gold swords can go up to Smite VI, but only Bane of Arthropods III. (This one is probably difficult)
Just suggestions, but I think they'd work well with the custom config options you already have.0
It seems that Fireball, as a projectile spell, only actively targets the creature hit by the projectile; the other creatures in the radius only suffer the effects of a regular Fireball. Other area attacks, like Fire Bolt and Shockwave, don't appear to target any creatures in their area at all. Beams and some channelled spells do work as expected, but they both apply some awkward limitations to any custom spells that make use of them. (Also their ranges tend to be very short.) Chain Lightning hits a specific (small) number of targets, instead of everything in a radius.
Basically, there's no good way to make a multitarget version of a single-target spell. And that's a shame, because a lot of the less-appreciated spells, like Pull of the Watery Grave or Draining Poison, would become much more interesting if you could use them on a whole bunch of enemies at once.
In the end, I did find a combination I liked—Fireball, Breath of the Open Sky, and Meteor Jump—but it only works because of a quirk of the latter two spells' timing, and the fact that they were all already area attacks.
Or is there something I'm overlooking?
0
Thanks!
0
Is there any way I can get a nice honey-brown ale, or will I be stuck drinking water?
Edit: I should mention that I'm using 0.9.9 bugfix. Does the version-independent–ness include backward compatibility?
0
Amnet's BoP Integration, that's the one. I'm not sure why I'd contact her about this, though... everything's fine on her end. I only mentioned her mod to provide some context for my situation.
My problem is the inevitable changes in terrain that come with each version. No matter how I tweak which biomes are permitted to spawn, the new version can't generate terrain that fits seamlessly into an older map.
I'm looking for v0.4.1 because I expect that it has the fewest changes from 0.4.0. Hopefully the changes would be few enough that I could replicate 0.4.0 terrain generation.
And I can't just update Mo' Creatures; the version that's compatible with Mo' Creatures is also only compatible with Minecraft 1.5.1. We're still on 1.4.7, since some of our mods haven't updated yet.
0
My SMP world was started on v0.4.0, but now I'd like to install BOP Integration, which only works with v0.4.1 and newer. I'd rather not use v0.4.6 if I can help it: the changes to the biome list cause those annoying glitch-cliffs to appear where the old lands end and the new begin.
So: old versions, anyone?
0
if (proxy.getHorseFreq() > 0) { EntityRegistry.addSpawn("Horse", proxy.getWraithFreq(), min, max, me.b, plains); } if (proxy.getBoarFreq() > 0) { EntityRegistry.addSpawn("Boar", proxy.getWraithFreq(), min, max, me.b, forest); ...Is that intentional? I noticed some people mentioning that they're getting fewer animals spawning in BOP biomes... if they had the wraith's spawn rate turned down low, that could be why.
1
Aspects
I agree with everyone else that a large list of aspects is ideal. Figuring out the logic of which aspects do what, working out where one might find them, then setting out to collect them is really fun.
You're right that there's some redundancy, but I think that's actually a strength of the system. There are a dozen or so common, robust aspects like Motus and Imperito that show up again and again, with well-defined properties: transmutations always involve Permutatio, for instance. Then you've got a bunch of more obscure or specialized aspects that provide the flavour of this specific enchantment. The former are conceptual, relational, sort of like verbs; the latter, concrete, elemental, nounish. It's a good setup, and the mod would suffer if you reduced the vocabulary available to enchantments.
If you really do want to reduce the number of aspects, though, you should probably restrict your cuts to the nouns, leaving the verbs intact. I'd expect that aspect nodes would cleave more to the noun side of things than the verbs (where would you look for an Instrumentum node, anyway?), so if you want a slimmer range of nodes you only really need to trim the nouns.
Also, vague idea: maybe instead of removing similar aspects entirely, you could make certain aspects subtypes of others? Like, instead of cutting Aer and Volito in favour of Aura (for example), you might rename them to Aer Aurae and Volito Aurae. They'd work just like Aura for ordinary purposes (and might be indistinguishable without a specific mid-level research), but certain advanced research and enchantments might require the Aer (or Volito) flavour of Aura. This would again allow you to have fewer types of node while retaining the full array of aspects.
Vis
Both vis and essentia, please. But by all means, rework how vis comes into the world until it's more stable. (I do like being able to create nexuses and dead zones, though.)
Spellcasting
I'm okay with spellcasting in theory, but it'd have to stick to the "A mage is defined by his tools" tone that Thaumcraft already has going on. I could see it working like, you know a set of spells, but on your own you can't channel energy fast enough to use anything more than the weakest form of each (e.g. a spark eqivalent to a flint and steel). You'd bind spells into wands, and those wands would channel larger amounts of vis much faster (or alternatively, use vis more efficiently), producing greater effects (e.g. a fireball). More advanced items—call them staffs—would increase your personal storage capacity (or rather, act as an auxiliary storage that you can tap into automatically while you're wielding them), as well as improving your channeling rate. (Perhaps only while you have the appropriate essentia stored in it?)
Or in other words—
Personal spellcasting: flexible, but very low power
Wand: contains single bound spell with a set (potentially high) power and storage
Staff: stores vis and essentia for personal spellcasting, increases power of personal spellcasting
That may have been a bit unclear... it's a bit late, and the idea isn't fully formed yet anyway. I may come back and rewrite this last bit later.