#paradise-lost Friday 19 November 2021

Fun-fact: I also drafted up the 1.5 notes (Not my job this time though, mainly as writing all the changes in such a big update in an understandable way was a bit time consuming when this time I need to work on the 1.18 patch)

I ponder a lot over design things, ways to make our mods better, ways that other mods have made themselves worse, the typical. And one thing that I have been thinking of for a bit now is time

When one asks you what is the most valuable resource a player has, some would say it is things like diamonds or golds, others energy, but none of them are right, are they? The most valuable thing a player possesses is time.

One can mine for more gold

One can generate more power

One cannot make more time, it is a fickle, transient thing, and a precious one at that. For in our pursues of the charms of life it stands as a harsh marker , of the end for the enchants we so obsess over.(edited)

As such, a player's time is a thing that must be respected, for it bears value beyond any one thing... and yet, it is so common amidst not just mods, but also games as a whole to carelessly waste it. Now, do note that I am not talking about such basic things as asking the player to play in the first place, but rather certain design decisions, a large set of mechanics that all funnel into one concept: waiting.

Now, not all time gates are made equal, but most bad, and they are equal in how wasteful they are, not only in regards to the aforementioned time but also simple potential for demanding and encouraging smarter play. In too many cases time gates are used, intentionally or not, to pad out playtime, making it so a short experience seems much longer, they ask the player to stop, step back, and wait a little (or a lot) to progress, and that is it.

There are no tricks, no cheats, while you may be able to speed it up somehow, the game is simply asking you to stop progressing until it wants you to continue doing so, and this is rather clearly a bad thing. Any experience that chooses to use time gates like this stands to not just steal from the player, but also actively deceive them, tricking them into seeing substance where there is none.

A better use for them would be as a combination between an encouragement and a punishment, it is what they should be used for as I see it. A time gate should not be the game telling you to wait because you are progressing too quickly, it should be the game telling you to do something else. Realizing this demands one to look at the larger picture, instead of thinking about just the time gate, one has to look at all that surrounds it as to make sure that, no matter the player's goal, there is never nothing else of relevance and or importance to be done.

All that come together a tool previously used solely for padding grows into something greater, it can be used as a discouragement for sporadic, short-sighted play, paired with other things such as the product of it maybe decaying after it is complete or the time gate itself demanding periodic, time sensitive intervention you can go on to test the player's ability to think ahead and carefully plan out their moves.(edited)

Something that also lingers within my mind and is somewhat related to this is EnderIo. You have likely heard about the mod, it is a rather important tech mod amidst modding communities and history, and it is one that is notably... not well balanced.

Now there are many things I could criticize and analyse about the mod, but the most relevant to this entire thing is its rather bad case of It Does Everything and how it tries to fix it. EnderIo's case of IDE is a simple, yet pungent one, it most modpacks it finds itself its machines are cheaper, faster, more efficient, and capable of simply making more stuff than others, an alloy smelter can get you pretty much any ingot in the game before you can blink and for only a fair trickle of power.

This is a long brewing problem, I have memories of friends and I always rushing the aforementioned furnace back in the 1.7.10 days, and it is one that the developers tried to fix when they updated to 1.12. How did they do this? Simple, they added another tier of slower, worse machines that you need to get the typically good ones (and also added a tier of even better ones above the preexisting tier but that is a discussion for another time), now this is not a bad idea in of itself, if something is too strong just push it back until it fits, but its implementation in EnderIo has one fatal flaw: it is padding.

As it stands, EIO's simple tier of machines does not serve to do anything other than waste time. The simple machines require a fairly substantial amount of resources to get in spite of being intended to be an earlygame intermediate, the standard machines right after them are not much more expensive, so little is the difference in the resources they demand and how hard they are to get that, by the time you are able to make the simple machines you have most if not everything required to make the standard tier.

This makes for an interesting divot in gameplay where the only real purpose for the simple tier of machines is to be used to make the standard tier, and not all simple machines, but rather the simple alloy smelter specifically as, in your standard modpack, the rest can be generally be ignored and skipped, one of them is entirely useless even on its own right. There is no reason to linger around the simple machines, they are slow, leak power, are susceptible to gravity, and cannot be upgraded, they are completely inferior to their successors and there is nothing stopping you from just making said successors.

All of this compounds into the simple machines being nothing for time gates, the only thing you are likely to need to do to get the standard machines is to process resources that you already had as you needed them for the simple machines through said machines, a process which is tortuously slow, and then assemble things together and never think twice about that mechanic again. I cannot guess what EIO's developers intended to do with these when they were implemented them, perhaps they truly wanted to make the mod more balanced and perhaps make entry a bit smoother, maybe they just wanted to be able to say that the mod is not unbalanced nor overpowered, but past any such ponderance it is certainly the case that the only thing that was achieved is causing tedium.

structures in general are fucked up in 1.18

good thing we didnt fucking finish the dungeon then LOL that would be a mess

I had a preemptive look moths ago when the logic got shipped Doable but difficult(edited)

normally I would say that having some work on early snapshot porting would be useful but in this case I don't think that's true

lemme fix that

It's definitly doable, but will be the most difficult part of 1.18