I've been pondering Equivalent Exchange for a long time, but I didn't want to jump on the "waah, broken" bandwagon until I had something constructive to contribute. Apologies for length; I wanted to be thorough for you fine folk, as I would greatly appreciate your insight before I consider whether to present this to pahimar more directly (on the EE forums, I assume?). Those of you unaccustomed to reading are free to depart at your leisure.
When I heard that pahimar would be rebalancing Equivalent Exchange 3, my biggest hope was, quite simply, that we would no longer have the ability to transmute common items into rare mob drops.
I'll start with the reasons why I consider this a problem, then suggest my solution. (If you already agree that this is a problem, you can skip ahead!)
THREE PARTS TO THE PROBLEM
I'll use everyone's favourite mob drop as an example: the Ender Pearl. This item is rare, because it's so difficult to acquire. (Aside: The same is not true of Diamonds, I would argue. Diamonds are easy to acquire, it's merely tedious and time consuming. Mob drops, particularly rare/difficult ones, are not.)
There are three reasons why I think Ender Pearls (and other mob drops) shouldn't be so easy to acquire with EE3:
1) It goes against the spirit of Tekkit. Tekkit is about building bigger and better, about always having a project to work on. I don't know how many people realize the sheer number of awe-inspiring projects that are rendered unnecessary and/or redundant by Equivalent Exchange. So many projects in Tekkit could involve acquiring reliable supplies of the various hard-to-get Minecraft items... but why bother, when you can just make them by the stack with EE? ("Because it's fun!" is an answer that misses my point.) Continuing with Ender Pearls: Without EE, you'd need to be bold and/or clever to amass them, and there are so many fun, totally-Tekkit-themed ways to go about it (e.g. End-bases; Flat, Eternal-Rain MystCraft Ages with a shelter+Tesla Coil trap; other Enderman Mob-Grinders; braving the night with a Jetpack, Night Vision Goggles and an enchanted one-hit-one-kill weapon...). Of course you can still do all of these things, but it's impossible to escape the knowledge that Equivalent Exchange renders them redundant and unnecessary: EE obliterates so many opportunities for real motivation to build bigger and better, by reducing so many of these huge projects to a recipe on a crafting grid.
2) It goes against the spirit of Equivalent Exchange. The mod is called Equivalent Exchange... but in no way is an Ender Pearl the "equivalent" of a mere four Iron Ingots---not in theme, not in use, not in rarity, not in ease-of-acquisition, not in value-to-player. EE's transmutation recipes must account for these factors in some way, or the exchanges it offers are not "equivalent". (This isn't limited to mob drops; it also applies to something like Obsidian's equivalence to Wood, though to a much lesser extent.)
3) It removes rare items as balancing tools for other mods/the Vanilla game. Other designers presume, with good reason, that Ender Pearls are scarce. When a designer creates a recipe that includes an Ender Pearl, it's because he or she wants that recipe to be difficult: more difficult than 4 Iron Ingots, certainly. But, by making the Ender Pearl cheaper than a Compass, EE3 undermines the fair assumptions and reasonable intentions of these other mod designers. EE floods the market with rare items, creating a rippling effect through other mods that neither pahimar nor those designers would have considered. (Yes, I know EE isn't the only mod that allows easier creation of rare items, but its scope---almost everything---and its simplicity---no infrastructure needs or start-up costs---makes it the worst offender by a significant margin.)
SUGGESTED SOLUTION: KEYWORDS & KEYWORD COST
(While I know EE3 doesn't explicitly use EMC yet, I'll speak in those terms as I'm sure EE3 will contain something similar, at least "behind-the-scenes". Also, any terms I've used and decided to use again are bolded and underlined when they're first defined.)
The base EMC value of an Ender Pearl is 1024 EMC (= 4x Iron Ingot (256 EMC) = 1024). But, by considering only the base EMC value of the Ender Pearl, the transmutation recipe doesn't account for the difficulty/rarity of the Ender Pearl itself: It is not an "equivalent" exchange. Compare the typical Tekkit player's inventory of Diamonds vs. Ender Pearls, and you'll see this disparity rather clearly.
However, we can't just raise the base EMC value of an Ender Pearl. This would cause one of two problems: either (A) unbalance exchanges where the Ender Pearl is an ingredient ("I found an Ender Pearl!" --> transmute to stacks of Iron) OR ( ignore the "equivalence" theme of the mod, by requiring a different base EMC value when you're creating an Ender Pearl, vs. when you're using it as an ingredient.
My suggested solution takes a page from (, but instead of changing base EMC values, it works a bit like a tax: an added cost to account for the difficulty of transmuting common, mundane things into the rare and wonderful. It is in the spirit of "equivalent" exchange, because the base EMC values on either side of the crafting grid remain equal. However, like pouring water uphill, it can sometimes cost more to move in one direction than the other.
It begins with tagging certain items with one or more keywords. A keyword represents some aspect of the item that makes it more costly to create than the item's base EMC value alone. Perhaps the item is from another dimension, or maybe it's mechanically complex, or it's magical, or it requires energy to make (e.g. smelting, for Glass), or it's simply rare (and thus less familiar to the alchemist).
Ender Pearls could have three keywords: "TheEnd" (items associated with The End dimension; items from the Nether would have a "Nether" keyword); "Eldrich" (items with a mystical component); and "HostileMobDrop" (items that only drop from hostile mobs, including mobs that become hostile when you attack them).
Each keyword has an associated EMC cost, and an item's keyword cost is the total cost of its keywords:
For the three keywords on our Ender Pearl example (these are arbitrarily-chosen values; don't go apoplectic on the numbers):
TheEnd = 10,000 EMC
Eldrich = 7,500 EMC
HostileMobDrop = 2,500 EMC
Keyword Cost (Ender Pearl): 10,000 + 7,500 + 2,500 = 20,000 EMC
The keyword cost and base EMC value are added together to determine how much EMC you need to create the item. Importantly, the keyword cost is one-way (it is a "cost", after all): It only applies when you are creating the item. (When the item is used as an ingredient to create something else, it only contributes its base EMC value.)
Ender Pearl's Cost to Create: Keyword Cost (20k) + Base EMC Value (1,024) = 21,024 EMC
Ender Pearl's Value as Ingredient: Base EMC Value (1,024) = 1,024 EMC
So: an Ender Pearl would cost nearly four Diamonds worth of EMC to create, but would provide only 1,024 EMC when it is transmuted into something else... with one fun exception.
ONE FUN EXCEPTION
Though the keyword cost of ingredients is ignored, the keywords need not be: If ingredients have keywords in common with the item being created (e.g. you're transmuting End Stone into Ender Pearls), they can dramatically reduce or even eliminate the keyword cost. This creates a nifty (and fun!) thematic incentive to, say, create "Nether" items from other "Nether" items.
THE ICING: EASILY CONFIGURABLE
Perhaps some of you did go apoplectic at the idea of an Ender Pearl costing over 20k EMC to create. Fortunately, this system lends itself to easy configuration: A simple list of all keywords and their values could show up in the config file, for easy editing by players/server admins. Something like the XML files associated with InventoryTweaks would allow even more fine-tuning: changing which items have which keywords; adding entirely new keywords; assigning specific keyword costs to items regardless of their keywords; etc.
So... yeah. I've always been terrible at writing conclusions, so I'll just stop here. Thanks for reading this far; I would sincerely appreciate your feedback, whatever your opinion may be!
