Universal Electricity?
While our FTB world was in limbo this week, I toyed with the Universal Electricity modpack. Kinda fun learning new things, but boy, without Buildcraft the game is just a never-ending heap of recipes that have to be done by hand EVERY time. I study mods by typing up their recipes in a text file, organized by groups and processes.
Some odd things. I built some Blastcraft things first, even grabbed the graphics and wrote FTB wiki pages for this handy little mod. And then the next day all the graphics came up blank white nothing, even the barbed wire fence ... couldn't remember what that white thing was supposed to be until I bumped into it and took damage. I guess there was an update and the graphics were not included? BTW, I'll be glad to help anyone document their mods. Since I can't get the MC jar to decompile I'm dead in the water as a coder, but I've been an author for 20+ years and can put together explanations and screen grabs and mod spotlight videos.
As for the core UE mod, it's just a different batch of copper wires, motors, machines. I really don't like their base copper wire recipe, that takes 6 LEATHER and 3 copper to get 7 wiggly copper wire. I shouldn't have to go hack and slash dozens of cows to get started on some simple machines. Leather is a horrible choice for this. Yeah, IC2 wins by introducing rubber (rubber trees are fun to find and figure out) for insulating wires. One of the UE add-ons adds its own copper wire (insulated) using 6 wool and 3 copper. Leather is not the same kind of renewable resource, you have to wrangle, breed and kill to get it. Yuck.
The ores seem way too common, almost every tunnel is sparkling with stuff right up near the surface. Platinum is more common than tin? It's just out of whack if your most basic machines start out full of platinum. That should be 3rd tier rare material. I know, other mods got iron, copper and tin covered. But platinum every 50 blocks is just loopy. Though their code to half sulfur ore lining all the lava pools was really well done.
In trying to update the wiki and get screen grabs, I cheated myself a few machines. Didn't really like them. They have fixed inputs for power, so I can never set them up the way I want them. I wired a test lab in a logical way and then every machine was like "neener neener, I have to face left, no I have to go the other way". The mod that handles this best is Thermal Expansion -- super configurable, with color-coded inputs and outputs. It would be hard to match that! No way to pump items from one machine to another (that I could find), sketchy documentation at best. And after all that, the operations are pretty much the same ore-doubling (etc) as other mods. Although the platinum compressor was a neat item: use platinum plus dusts to make ingots out of glowstone, redstone, obsidian ... to be made into tools & armor. That was a fun discovery.
OTOH, I've really gotten to like the multiblock machines in Railcraft -- going back to "blue box #1" and "blue box #2" or even the machines with custom models, it's just all blocky again. The ICBMs look nice but are not anything I would ever want on my server.
BIG issue: none of the recipes for these machines come up in the NEI interface. So I can't search all the recipes for machine X ... which is key to learning what they do (given the mostly blank wiki and lack of supporting videos). I have no idea what that interface is or how to code it, but I'd say that's a requirement for living in a modpack these days. On any other FTB modpack I've tried, when you right-click an item, you see all recipes using that item, wonderfuly sorted one machine at a time. None of the UE machine recipes come up in that interface. So there wasn't much I could do with it other than the two three things I saw other people do in their videos.
I like what UE is trying to do, create a standard for powering gadgets. But Buildcraft and IC2 are so solid, and do it so well, it's going to be rough developing anything parallel. And BC and IC2 are extensively documented, and work as advertised ... nobody's going to win this battle of standards with a wiki full of holes and forums full of guesswork, and recipes that don't come up in NEI to help players learn the secrets on their own. I saw some hints that some UE components can take BC or IC2 power, but neither of those is in the modpack, so the UE modpack remains an insulated curiosity, cutoff from most of what we know of the Minecraft modverse. Lots of potential, but mostly undefined stuff with neat names I could only shrug at and move on.
Some odd things. I built some Blastcraft things first, even grabbed the graphics and wrote FTB wiki pages for this handy little mod. And then the next day all the graphics came up blank white nothing, even the barbed wire fence ... couldn't remember what that white thing was supposed to be until I bumped into it and took damage. I guess there was an update and the graphics were not included? BTW, I'll be glad to help anyone document their mods. Since I can't get the MC jar to decompile I'm dead in the water as a coder, but I've been an author for 20+ years and can put together explanations and screen grabs and mod spotlight videos.
As for the core UE mod, it's just a different batch of copper wires, motors, machines. I really don't like their base copper wire recipe, that takes 6 LEATHER and 3 copper to get 7 wiggly copper wire. I shouldn't have to go hack and slash dozens of cows to get started on some simple machines. Leather is a horrible choice for this. Yeah, IC2 wins by introducing rubber (rubber trees are fun to find and figure out) for insulating wires. One of the UE add-ons adds its own copper wire (insulated) using 6 wool and 3 copper. Leather is not the same kind of renewable resource, you have to wrangle, breed and kill to get it. Yuck.
The ores seem way too common, almost every tunnel is sparkling with stuff right up near the surface. Platinum is more common than tin? It's just out of whack if your most basic machines start out full of platinum. That should be 3rd tier rare material. I know, other mods got iron, copper and tin covered. But platinum every 50 blocks is just loopy. Though their code to half sulfur ore lining all the lava pools was really well done.
In trying to update the wiki and get screen grabs, I cheated myself a few machines. Didn't really like them. They have fixed inputs for power, so I can never set them up the way I want them. I wired a test lab in a logical way and then every machine was like "neener neener, I have to face left, no I have to go the other way". The mod that handles this best is Thermal Expansion -- super configurable, with color-coded inputs and outputs. It would be hard to match that! No way to pump items from one machine to another (that I could find), sketchy documentation at best. And after all that, the operations are pretty much the same ore-doubling (etc) as other mods. Although the platinum compressor was a neat item: use platinum plus dusts to make ingots out of glowstone, redstone, obsidian ... to be made into tools & armor. That was a fun discovery.
OTOH, I've really gotten to like the multiblock machines in Railcraft -- going back to "blue box #1" and "blue box #2" or even the machines with custom models, it's just all blocky again. The ICBMs look nice but are not anything I would ever want on my server.
BIG issue: none of the recipes for these machines come up in the NEI interface. So I can't search all the recipes for machine X ... which is key to learning what they do (given the mostly blank wiki and lack of supporting videos). I have no idea what that interface is or how to code it, but I'd say that's a requirement for living in a modpack these days. On any other FTB modpack I've tried, when you right-click an item, you see all recipes using that item, wonderfuly sorted one machine at a time. None of the UE machine recipes come up in that interface. So there wasn't much I could do with it other than the two three things I saw other people do in their videos.
I like what UE is trying to do, create a standard for powering gadgets. But Buildcraft and IC2 are so solid, and do it so well, it's going to be rough developing anything parallel. And BC and IC2 are extensively documented, and work as advertised ... nobody's going to win this battle of standards with a wiki full of holes and forums full of guesswork, and recipes that don't come up in NEI to help players learn the secrets on their own. I saw some hints that some UE components can take BC or IC2 power, but neither of those is in the modpack, so the UE modpack remains an insulated curiosity, cutoff from most of what we know of the Minecraft modverse. Lots of potential, but mostly undefined stuff with neat names I could only shrug at and move on.
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