Hey everyone, there are many Tekkit servers that try to foster a player economy as well as a survival theme with limited resources. These servers usually disable items that quickly produce enormous amounts of material at unreasonably low cost, or create "infinite money loops", for example the Condenser and several other items in equivalent exchange.
Despite also being a fan of EE, I like to enjoy the technic pack in many ways and I get a kick out of these economy servers. Now... the reason EE is banned on economy servers is that some players will exploit them to quickly produce, well, basically everything, and can achieve nearly creative mode within a dozen hours or so given sufficient EE macgyvering skills. The most damaging part of this is the fact that abusing resource-producing modules based on EE have an exponential growth effect as you can make more and more of them from the resources they produce.
My goal with this thread is to show how UU matter actually does the same thing, though not as quickly or obviously, it WILL result in creative mode and an economy warped around UU value given enough time and a crafty group of players.
So, UU matter, what is it? There's a device called the Mass Fabricator that turns IC2 power (as well as Scrap) into a material called UU matter that can be used to produce almost anything. I've noticed after playing for hundreds of hours that eventually an infinite UU-Matter-HV Solar producing loop can accomplish pretty much the same degeneration as EE, once a player is sufficiently rich. Furthermore, there are other overpowered setups for producing UU, that most players don't actually know about.
It actually gets more degenerate than that though. Here's an example of a UU loop that is extremely overpowered and can be accomplished in just 40 hours playtime after a few rounds of quarries/mining: snowmen->block breakers(if not banned from breaking snow then use pumps)->compressors->Ice for both an array of overclocked recyclers and a couple I-O-SUC nukes which generate about 4000 EU/T total, wired to a UU generator which is both fed 4000 EU/T and scrap from your recyclers. You will have almost a chest full of UU in no time and be ready to start breaking down the economy piece by piece by massing HVs if that is what you would like to do.
But Zed, it takes 70 stacks of iron alone to make an HV Solar Array! How can that be overpowered? Exponential growth, it's the most powerful force in the universe my friends!
Warning: math. All calculations round down or rely on some underestimation. Furthermore, they underestimate by ignoring economic step, that is, the fact that you don't make your HVs all at once but can also hook up your MVs and LVs as you go to produce power even faster.* So without going into excessive detail, and I will elaborate this math if asked, given a willingness to lag the server and other factors, you can turn 1 HV into 2 using double overclocked recyclers and mass fabricators in approximately 100 hours w/ chunk loaded, assuming 20 ticks per second on the server and only day/night. Approximately 400 hours of the chunk being loaded if you use no recyclers but also save EU not having to power all the machines. This sounds like a long time. However, the player doesn't have to be online, the chunk just has to be loaded for HVs to produce UU. Assuming a clan of players create plots next to each other, and they each play for 4 hours at random times, a serious offender could easily have his chunk loaded for 16 hours a day, so let's round that down to 100 hours per week. **Then HVs and solar energy sources can be doubled in a week with recyclers, and doubled in a month without recyclers.** So assuming a player needs, say, 2 real world weeks of playing on and off to build his HV, enough recyclers to support 2 HVs hooked to a mass fab, then in 2 more real world weeks he can turn his 1 HV into 4 HVs (first HV doubles in a week, both HVs double in second week, total HVs:4). In the next week, he can produce 2 more HVs from his 2 HVs using recycler scrap setup + 4 MVs from his 2 HVs not using scrap. So in 1 month of real world time, it's possible for a player to achieve 6 HVs + 4 MVs. At this point, in just a month, irreperable damage has been done.
Anyway, let's say our player is more enterprising. He's gotten 6.5 HVs at this point, game broken, but why stop? He can double them every month now. Month 2: 13 HVs. Month 3: 26 HVs. Month 4: 52 HVs. Month 5: 104 HVs, can probably give every new player an HV if he wants to. At this point chunk loading has become a serious problem so we'll stop at 104 HVs.
tl;dr: Mass Fabs and HVs can produce enough UU that a player can estimably have 6-7 HVs in the first month of server uptime, producing UU 16 hours a day due to the fact that other players, guildies, etc. build in nearby plots, keeping his chunk loaded while he is offline. The UU production of this many HVs is creative mode, and can already cause severe damage to the player economy. The number of HVs can double every month if a chunk is loaded by player activity for 16 hours a day. At the current rate of growth, catastrophic damage can be done to the economy after only a month, and signs of damage should materialize. Nerfing the mass fab or making UUs more expensive will not solve the problem, it will only make it take longer to materialize. Also note that since UUM produces most other blocks, it eliminates most desire for economic specialization, from mining to cactus farming.
Conclusion: Unless producing infinite stuff is fine, economic servers need to prevent crafting and placement of MVs and HVs, AND block ice as a recycler target and probably other blocks I haven't been clever enough to think of as a recycler target; OR they need to disable the crafting of most materials with UU matter except for irridium ore.