5003

If you are playing Omnifactory I keep reading on Discord that you should use the latest version rather then the outdated one on Curseforge.

You can retrieve the latest client zip from here, then import on MultiMC:

5004

Yes, absolutely use the latest dev version. Another nice feature of MultiMC, as it makes importing a .zip just as easy as getting things from Curseforge.

5005

So… as much as I like the idea of these mods, I’m not yet entirely convinced I want to play these mods. I can absolutely see why games like FortressCraft Evolved/Factorio/Satisfactory/Dyson Sphere Project have come about. Right now there is a LOT of busywork, and any actual ‘automation’ is a good way off. Whereas the other games focus on getting right to the automation so there is a lot less up-front repetition. Right now I’m spending all my time shuffling things about in chests/crates and into furnaces/crafting stations and it is silly tedious.

(insert gif of little girls ‘thinking about minecrafts mods vs playing minecraft mods’)

5006

Yeah, I only play modded minecraft now, love the machines and automation, as well as some of the magic packs.

5007

Are you saying I should keep going and it’ll get better?

Also - Minecraft is the first game in a loooong while that gives me a motion sick feeling (even with head bob off). WTF, this isn’t Warframe.

5008

The reward mechanic in Minecraft (modded) is that you work very hard to get to some point, then you get there and unlock a number of new things and gameplay. That’s typical of the fun of tech trees, you expand your possibilities, see more things, get more toys to figure out and experiment with. With a large modpack you have so many different toys and a whole lot of freedom.

The other half of the exquisite reward feeling is that it’s not just unlocking new toys, but also access to certain tiers that immediately make everything you’ve done up to that point much easier. So it keeps changing. You get to work hard, but then you look back and have means to compress that path. So the hard work is compensated by something that escalates the scope.

But it depends what you want. For me the early game is the most fun across the whole genre. I enjoy learning how stuff works, especially if it’s well directed.

It depends a lot on the modpack, but Minecraft is not Factorio, so you have many different types of gameplay that make the experience less focused but richer. I don’t even know how it’s possible to get bored since it’s almost overwhelming all that it throws at you.

Even stuff I always considered shallow, like creating a nice place well decorated, it acquires a whole new dimension in Minecraft modded. Because if you have to spend a long time in this type of game then it makes sense to make it nicer. If decorating a house is the whole end goal, then I’m bored before even starting. But if it’s just incidental and working alongside other activities, then it acquires its purpose and contributes to the richer experience. I keep getting distracted by countless of sidetracks, and time flies.

Suggestion: before giving up try the Lost Era pack I linked above. After an introduction it opens up a number of alternate paths, giving you quests for everything. You get to experience the variety more directly (and it keeps the standard recipes, working with the classic version of GregTech).

P.S.
I played Omnifactory for a few hours to try it, but of course I picked the “self-torture” edition because it doesn’t give you the diamond hammers at the start, and I picked the standard overworld. I actually enjoy to start from nothing and work hard to get some crap tools. I enjoy to have that kind of long progression and rags to riches path. In fact I think that being able to get iron just a few minutes into the game is kind of shallow. I think GTNH has a much more complex and longer early game (I don’t think there’s any way to get iron, and you have to work with copper for a while).

In GT6 it’s very well designed (even better with Punch Me Not). If you punch a tree, you get hurt. Same if you punch the ground. So what you do is starting to walk around to explore a bit, and in the meantime you collect sticks and stones that you find everywhere. Different types of stone indicate the type of metals you’d find if you dig, so you don’t need any advanced scanner like Omnifactory. Then you get some gravel, take flint, and you can make some basic flint tools. It’s all layered meaningfully and makes the experience fun. It’s going fast that actually kills the feeling.

5009

I understand the appeal, but since I skipped over the whole vanilla minecraft phase back in the day, Omnifactory is quite enough to jump into even if it isn’t quite the insanity of GTNH and the others :)

5010

Yeah, but you are missing the whole deal. The first thing in Minecraft is trying to survive, not build a factory. Building the factory becomes meaningful when it’s stacked on top of what makes it useful and needed. Or after you know what’s it is all about.

Omnifactory is a good introduction to GregTech, not a good introduction to Minecraft modding. You need to get there to understand why it’s fun. Like all things, it’s the journey. And Omnifactory skips it.

5011

I’ll throw in a recommendation for the Create Above and Beyond pack from a ways upthread.

Create is the mod that does the Opus Magnum-esque rotational stuff. And a lot of kitchen sink modpacks include it because it is pretty neat and you can make some pretty neat automations with it. The problem, though, is that there are always other mods that do the same stuff more efficiently. So while Create has you building a washer out of fans and water and a chute placed in the world, another mod might accomplish the same thing in a single block, so Create tends to get overlooked.

So Above and Beyond focuses solely on the Create mod, and it’s really something special. The spatial challenge of building factories out of belts, arms, rotators, saw blades, fans, and mixers, and providing power to them directly via rotational force from windmills and water wheels really tickles the building part of the brain in a way that jives with vanilla Minecraft.

And while I do like GregTech and enjoy the way it builds on itself gradually and folds in this crazy complexity, I feel like it loses the frictionless “fun factor” (hate that term) that has made Minecraft the global brand it is. Mods like Create are complex, but they don’t get in your way if you just want to build an iron sword and armor and go out exploring.

5012

I call these the chicken with its head cut off phases. I love these points where a new toy or massive tier unlocks and there is so much you need to work on to either rebuilt or optimise that you end up bouncing around between them fruitlessly.

Rebuilding your infrastructure with newer and better tools is a definite trope in these mod packs. You end up loving and hating this.

Omnifactory is probably one of my favorite mod packs, but it was left in a semi broken state when I played it by the original developer. Its apparently in much better shape now thanks to the community. It eschews the early game grind that GTNH revels in, wanting to get you the tools you need to start automating right away. Omnifactory is all about that automation, if you don’t automate everything you are going to quickly find the game impossible. Because you will need everything, and at scale, to make it through the massive end game projects.

I don’t know if this still applies, but one of the reasons I quit my omnifactory game is because at the scale we are talking about the game degenerates down to a lag fest with AE2. You could still finish the game if you employed some pretty severe redesigns of your infrastructure to accommodate AE2 issues.

So not a beginner pack. I would probably recommend something like Age of Engineering if you wanted to try an expert’s expert pack. It’s still a major accomplishment to finish it, but it’s not insane like Omnifactory.

5013

My point isn’t about the quality of Omnifactory, but the nature of the experience.

I just spent an hour watching on Twitch Greg’s test guy, trying to fight a big monster. It’s all the little things of the sandbox that make the game. He was dodging explosions while picking pears from the trees to eat and outrun the poison. Kept dying to retrieve loot. Even stuff like roads to move faster or steps to avoid jumping and so the increased hunger. Spice of Life that makes you change food types. It’s when it all comes together that is great.

I was playing the beginning of Lost Era, yesterday, and working to make paper and a compass, because there’s no standard Journeymap in the mod and it uses Ancient Atlas instead. But you need to craft it first… But I don’t have any canes for the paper. So I started exploring but I ended up in a huge forest where tons of monsters were spawning even during the day. And because I need redstone to craft the compass, and I already had one done, I kept trying to retrieve the body, and failing spectacularly every time. I could go on filling a page to explain everything that happen.

After two hours I WASN’T able to retrieve the compass. The map is still not done. I essentially wasted those two hours, making zero progress. But I had ton of fun. This happened because a very simple task triggered a much more complex chain of events. You need a certain thing X, but to get that you need some other stuff, and to get that you’re off to an adventure that may lead you completely offtrack. It’s not getting to the end that is fun, that’s only the excuse.

Minecraft will never even come close to the periphery of Factorio when it comes to complexity. But Factorio doesn’t have the complex sandbox (and doesn’t try to). It’s not that Factorio is better, it’s that Minecraft works when it does its thing.

I was also thinking it works like early Dark Souls, when it comes to progress. You work hard to get to the bonfire, but after you unlock it, it’s done. You have a permanent step up.

5014

The joy of modded gameplay is allowing it to be the game you want. I’m glad there are options like Omnifactory out there, because I’m personally more interested in the automation than the survival. Yes, I play without biters usually in Factorio too. I don’t feel like I’m missing the whole deal, rather I’m able to enjoy the parts I want without burning out due to fighting the parts I don’t.

Doesn’t mean I won’t try the other packs at some point, but my gameplay style is much more casual.

@Gendal - I think a lot of the performance issues have been mitigated if you use the latest dev versions. One of the first things I did was import someone’s mostly-complete world to see what performance was like on my machine, and it was still playable. There are some tricks I think you still have to do (which I don’t fully grok yet at my newbie level - using drawers appropriately, using chunks appropriately, etc), but not terribly onerous from what I’ve read.

5015

What I’m saying is that the experience is transformative in ways you don’t expect.

It’s the same even for the vanilla game. You’ll have some players telling you to play in hardcore, and you think that, nope, you absolutely don’t want to play with that kind of risk and keep losing everything. It’s just masochist and not a thing you’d enjoy.

And yet if you try it you find a completely new game. All the parts that would be completely worthless become meaningful. Pieces of the game that have zero function become important. It’s the same game, and yet it’s a completely different experience, that is almost impossible to understand intuitively until you really try it.

You could ideally play Omnifactory even in creative. And it would still be fun. Pick all the resources you need from JEI and just enjoy making machines and set ups. That’s also not a “wrong” way to play the game.

Or, elaborating… You could make a great modpack that focuses on automation, then another that focuses on survival, and one on exploration. So you get the very best in each and let players pick what they like better. But that’s not the point, because what makes it meaningful in a game like Minecraft is the intersection of the parts, that makes it greater than the sum. It’s when you survive THROUGH automation, or automate THROUGH exploration, because maybe you need a rare material. Or mods like Botania and Thaumcraft that are considered “magic”, but are just disguised tech mods.

5016

No, I fully understand what you are saying. If it wasn’t true, GTNH wouldn’t exist. And in a multiplayer world, I’m more willing to play 2 hours without making progress (ie., Sea of Thieves). But in single player games - which for me this is - I want to be able to have some meaningful progress in each session. Spending 2 hours trying to retrieve my body? Yeah, no. My Everquest days are behind me. Rebuilding part of my base because new tech unlocked? That’s better - sure, the original design is now ‘waste’, but it was incremental progress to get to the new design.

5017

But I didn’t have to. That was my choice, but certainly I didn’t decide to spend two hours doing that. It happened. I thought I’d do it in 5 minutes max, but all sort of absurd things kept happening. Including me building brand new equipment to accomplish that task. Gameplay opened up there.

I could also have just abandoned the thing and simply keep digging to get a new piece of redstone to craft another compass. Retrieving the compass was just the excuse that triggered the adventure. The adventure was fun. And still, I had countless options. I could have forgotten the whole thing and go doing something else entirely. At the beginning it was all triggered because I needed a bed, and I didn’t have any sheep nearby. But to explore I needed some kind of minimap to not get lost… And so on.

(the lack of progress is also not entirely true because I think I incidentally completed another couple of quests, and did things like crafting torches to light the way through the dark forest… I kept doing stuff. Lots of stuff.)

5018

Average age of modded Minecraft players on Twitch:

Image4

5019

So that is where all the retired truck drivers ended up.

5020

Good! I like to see middle aged and old gamers, since I will be/am one.

5021

Apparently I look like a (only slightly younger) retired truck driver. Must mean I need to keep playing!

5022

Its not the years, its the miles!