[Mod] Elepower - Machines/Power/Fluids/Nuclear [elepower]

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by LegoLogger » Post

Ah, yes, servers can be tricky.... Got it now. Looks great and fun! +1

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EDIT: Also, 5 pages on this thread. :D
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by TechNolaByte » Post

This looks pretty nice. I sense inspiration (or just similarities) to the mc mod mekanism
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by TechNolaByte » Post

Also, im having an issue with the mod in the latest version of 5.0 and am not able to fix it myself. Do you have a discord?
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

RSLRedstonier wrote:This looks pretty nice. I sense inspiration (or just similarities) to the mc mod mekanism
Yes, this mod is inspired by Thermal Expansion, Mekanism and MineFactory Reloaded.
Last edited by IcyDiamond on Wed Dec 12, 2018 19:49, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

RSLRedstonier wrote:Also, im having an issue with the mod in the latest version of 5.0 and am not able to fix it myself. Do you have a discord?
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

Alpha 9 has now been released. Fluid transfer code was moved to fluid_lib, which means that you can have fluid transfer systems without elepower itself. There might be a followup release shortly, as this one went mostly untested.

This release also includes experimental crafting type machine upgrading, although it's currently only possible in creative mode.
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by cy » Post

This mod is as awesome as technic, possibly even better, and... as terrible as technic, possibly even worse. Okay yes, primitive living is not likely to result in refined steel. But steel ingots are used for everything not just elepower, but tons of other mods. So elepower overrides iron lumps producing iron ingots, then adds extra stuff you have to do to make them steel ingots. You have to:
  1. Go mining for iron
  2. Cook the iron in a furnace.
  3. Go searching for clay.
  4. Cook the clay in a furnace.
  5. Construct an alloy furnace.
  6. Go mining to search for gravel
  7. Mine a few stacks of gravel to get 3 rare flint drops
  8. Construct a grindstone
  9. Put a crank on top of the grindstone.
  10. Go mining for coal.
  11. Hold down the right button over the crank for 16 seconds for every single iron ingot
  12. Construct an anvil.
This, compared to the normal method:
  1. Go mining for iron.
  2. Cook the iron in a furnace.
  3. Construct an anvil.
Now of course this "hand cranked" grinder is brilliant, but it shouldn't be required to get steel. It's almost impossible to play the game at all without steel. Even technic only introduced these infuriating mechanics only for their most powerful energy producers: nuclear power plants. So that's my biggest issue with elepower. It needs to save grinding for some super useful custom metal, that doesn't override default:steel_ingot.

But moving on, why complain about a hand grinder, when you have the pulverizer an automated machine that can use elepower to do all the grinding for you? Well, let's just construct a pulverizer...
  1. You need a machine block to construct a pulverizer.
  2. You need mese to construct a machine block.
  3. You need four electrum ingots to construct a machine block.
  4. You need two gold ingots and one invar ingot to make 3 electrum ingots
  5. You need 3 iron ingots, and one nickel ingot to make 4 invar ingots.
So just to make the machine block, first you have to go down to -1024 with a stone pick to have any chance of finding mese, then you have to find it! Oh sure you can use bronze, but without steel you can't construct an anvil, or any sort of repair device, so you use it up faster than you can replace it, especially since you're digging straight down instead of following random veins. Plus bronze is a pain to construct, requiring an alloy furnace. Until you get past -255, you only find like 2 gold ores in a 15 block radius, and even at -1024 you still only find 3 in a 13 block radius. Gold is almost as hard to find as silver, and you need three gold ingots for every single machine? It's not as bad as technic's humanly impossible solar panel construction, but jeez.

Sorry, I just tried out elepower, and I wanted to say what I thought of it. Some super neat ideas, but the crafting is too complicated and expensive. I know it's alluring to have that sort of ramping up in efficiency, from hand crank to machine, but it's way too high a barrier to entry. And don't say just use creative mode, because survival mode is supposed to be actually fun, so anything that turns it into a maddeningly frustrating grind fest and sucks all the fun right out is something that needs improvement. Less obstacles to construct steel, less dependence on gold for the machines (the mese is okay as long as we can actually get down there). Do like technic, where they have "refined" steel for constructing special stuff within their own mod, so it doesn't lock other mods behind a wall of grinding.

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by BrunoMine » Post

I'm very interested in this project. If you wish, I can help with encodings.

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by Mantar » Post

cy wrote:It's not as bad as technic's humanly impossible solar panel construction, but jeez.
I wouldn't say humanly impossible, I built 4 MV arrays and 1 HV array in survival mode over on Linuxworks NG. Though, yeah, it's kind of a long process and definitely a pain in the butt.
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

cy wrote:This mod is as awesome as technic, possibly even better, and... as terrible as technic, possibly even worse. Okay yes, primitive living is not likely to result in refined steel. But steel ingots are used for everything not just elepower, but tons of other mods. So elepower overrides iron lumps producing iron ingots, then adds extra stuff you have to do to make them steel ingots.
Thanks for the constructive feedback. I have been pondering this as well because it is indeed pretty tedious. I will fix this.
cy wrote:less dependence on gold for the machines (the mese is okay as long as we can actually get down there).
I personally didn't feel as if the gold was too rare, but I might be able to do something about it if it really is that bad.
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

Alpha 10 has been released on the ContentDB, this release contains more work towards the Nuclear side of the pack and simplified the recipe for Steel (Iron Ingots are smelted into Steel now, instead of requiring alloying).
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by cy » Post

IcyDiamond wrote:I personally didn't feel as if the gold was too rare, but I might be able to do something about it if it really is that bad.
Experimenting more with gameplay, I think my feedback had a few wee errors in it.
  • I forgot about diamonds.
  • -1024 is for mese blocks, you can find plenty of stone with mese at -255
  • Cave divers can skip a lot of the digging, especially on the completely insane pits in v7 caves
  • Once you have made an anvil and shears, and... a compass I guess, there's not a huge need for more steel.
  • Yeah, gold is more findable than I thought. At around -255, I got 17 in one lengthy cave dive, compared to 16 mese crystals. Silver is the huge obstacle in these recipes. I only found one single silver lump in a run that got 6 diamonds, 17 gold, 16 mese, and 10 uranium. Silver never appears in veins, and only can be found 1 at a time, very rarely, no matter how deep you go.
So really the only issue is that other mods relying on steel ingots get locked behind the pulverizer, and you could fix that with having your mod depend on "refined" steel ingots or "carbon steel" or something. Even as infuriating as the grinder is, I can see something where you upgrade the hand crank to a motor or something, and just plug that in the crank's place, then find some way to power it. That would be pretty awesome, long as it was possible to figure out i.e. by making it baldly obvious that the hand crank is in the same category as other motors.
IcyDiamond wrote:Thanks for the constructive feedback. I have been pondering this as well because it is indeed pretty tedious. I will fix this.
Thanks for taking it so well! I had thought I went and got all insulting and offensive or something again, but I'm glad you got something positive out of whatever rant I managed to write.

Well, good luck fixing it. On the subject of tedious, I wanted to suggest that some of the chains of crafting recipes were complex, confusing and very tedious. It's tempting to include a bunch of intermediary crafting steps because it's easy to convince yourself that they're "clever" "challenging" and "realistic" but in the end I had 6 chips, a printed circuit board, no more copper or silver, and 3 hours spent collecting all the materials and figuring out how to craft them.

I just gave up at that point. And that's just creating the integrated circuit, never mind the machine frame, the motor, the copper coils, the lead gear, and all to create a machine that's totally useless unless you craft even more complex machinery. You might be making "clever" references to the PCB industry left and right, but for most of us it's just a lot of frustration when the recipes are so complicated that you can't tell how many metals you need to collect, and you end up having to go back down the ladder again and again, with no reward or accomplishment since it's all useless intermediary busywork crafting.

So my suggestion is have a motor that runs on science, built with science doohickeys that are constructed out of copper, iron and nothing special. Have it so it can be substituted for the hand crank, to crank faster, stronger, and automatically. Generators to power it would be made from readily available ingredients like wood and stone and iron and stuff. And it'd just plug into basic machines. Then once we've got basic, crude automated machines, we can start talking about figuring out the secrets of etching acid and integrated circuits. Honestly, the further away from a computer metaphor you stay, the more awesome your mod is. We don't want to be reminded that we are playing a game on a computer, and only pretending to be rugged survivalists.

Or, you know, keep it like it is and do what you want. I'm just throwing out suggestions for how I think it might be made more fun, and will take no offense if you laugh at my misery and tell me to git gud scrub.

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

cy wrote:Or, you know, keep it like it is and do what you want. I'm just throwing out suggestions for how I think it might be made more fun, and will take no offense if you laugh at my misery and tell me to git gud scrub.
Well, I'm not going to insult you. It's a fact that you cannot please everyone, and frankly I like the way it is right now. I'm mainly doing this stuff for fun and not to please everyone so I'm just going to continue doing things my way. Thanks for taking the time to write your opinions though, I appreciate the feedback.
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by texmex » Post

Very nice!

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by texmex » Post

I’m wondering, do you plan on replacing pipeworks with your own item transfer system? This would make this mod/modpack a most comprehensive contribution and hopefully more coherent than the mod combos needed for the same features today (pipeworks, technic and so on)

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

texmex wrote:I’m wondering, do you plan on replacing pipeworks with your own item transfer system? This would make this mod/modpack a most comprehensive contribution and hopefully more coherent than the mod combos needed for the same features today (pipeworks, technic and so on)
Item transfer is being merged together with other forms of transfer in node_io. I am a supporter of the node_io API project and elepower fully supports it.
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by mywaynotthehighway » Post

Hi,
I have been looking for a mod that can pump water from a hole into a tank via a pipe. Is this something this mod caan do?

If so would you mind showing how as i tried fluid_lib but couldnt transfer the water from the pump to the tank via a fluid conduit.

I was probably doing it wrong though :)

Thanks for your time

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

mywaynotthehighway wrote:mod that can pump water from a hole into a tank via a pipe. Is this something this mod caan do?
Yes.
mywaynotthehighway wrote:i tried fluid_lib but couldnt transfer the water from the pump to the tank via a fluid conduit.
The pump in fluid_lib pumps fluids out of fluid containers. It does not pump fluid nodes themselves.
Elepower has a "Pump" machine that uses power to actively pump fluid nodes (by removing them from the world) into it's internal tank.
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by mywaynotthehighway » Post

IcyDiamond wrote:
mywaynotthehighway wrote:mod that can pump water from a hole into a tank via a pipe. Is this something this mod caan do?
Yes.
mywaynotthehighway wrote:i tried fluid_lib but couldnt transfer the water from the pump to the tank via a fluid conduit.
The pump in fluid_lib pumps fluids out of fluid containers. It does not pump fluid nodes themselves.
Elepower has a "Pump" machine that uses power to actively pump fluid nodes (by removing them from the world) into it's internal tank.
Could you possibly give a pic showing how to set this up. Also once the pump in Elepower has filled its internal tank how do you then transfer the fluid from its internal tank to a seperate tank using the conduits.

Sorry if iI seem really thick but this is something I have been waiting a long time for in Minetest

Thanks for your time.

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

mywaynotthehighway wrote:Could you possibly give a pic showing how to set this up.
Image

The "pipe" below the pump is placed automatically, don't place anything there yourself. There's also a solar panel on top of it for my convenience, also not required.
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by mywaynotthehighway » Post

Hi ,
Many thanks for your reply. After doing a clean git pull of minetest, minetest_game, fluid_lib and elepower i managed to get it working although at times the pump is a bit quirky.

There seems to be a difference in the graphics as seen in this pic
Image

The portable tank is solid (it is full like in your pic) wheras the one in your pic shows the water and also the solar panel is just a black square

Many thanks for your continued awesome work

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

mywaynotthehighway wrote: i managed to get it working although at times the pump is a bit quirky.

There seems to be a difference in the graphics
Yeah the pump is indeed a bit quirky, I'm going to iron out the bugs later, currently I'm working on other things.

That's caused by the "Connected Glass" render setting.
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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by mywaynotthehighway » Post

Thanks that solved the solid tank issue however I have noticed a few other bugs/quirks

Solar Panel only seems to become active upon server restart and shows a black square
Some items like the Tanks don't retain their values when dug
If you would rather I posted these anywhere else then let me know

Edit: The issue with the solar panel showing a black square is that I didn't have Smooth Lighting turned on as on this laptop I tend to turn everything of including the shaders due to the complete lack of grunt this system has

Many Thanks again

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Re: [Mod] Elepower - A new powerful modpack [elepower]

by IcyDiamond » Post

mywaynotthehighway wrote:Some items like the Tanks don't retain their values when dug
That shouldn't happen, unless you're using a version prior to 5.0.0-dev
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