UU matter on Economy Servers: It's enough to break the game, really!

[zedkiller]

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.

[warpspeed10]

There is one fundamental problem in your argument. A game like Minecraft does not posses the characteristics that give rise to market economies. Therefore, any economy forced onto the players is more akin to a communist style of government rather the economy you claim to seek.

First off Minecraft lacks scarcity. The map size is infinite unless you are using a map limiter plugin, and if you are, your map will eventually run out of resources completely and the economy will collapse.

The second, and almost as important aspect is the lack of specialization. A market thrives off people of different skills trading goods and services. If everyone in the game can mine, fish, cut wood, use redstone, build, craft, travel, brew, farm, or fight off monsters, there is no incentive for the players to trade goods or services. If you try to limit this by telling players they cannot break wood, or place down redstone, or only some can use weapons, well good luck with that. You would be changing the whole feel of Minecraft.

If you instead go the lame route and give players 1 up every couple hundred blocks they mine. Then you're not really creating specialization, you're just forcing the players to grind levels.

A long the line as lack of scarcity, there is also lack of diversity. Every item in the game can usually be found within the 5 to 6 biomes around you, not counting the other dimensions. Thus there is no incentive for players to travel and trade with each other for anything other than more diamonds.

In summary, Minecraft just isn't the type of game that market economies can arise in. Sure there are plugins that try to half-ass it, but not one of them really embodies a true market economy. Your view on disabling the creation of resources from energy, is akin to being against the generation of gunpowder, arrows, string, wool, as well as leather, stone, and iron items in infinite amounts due to the mechanics of mob drops. You would even have to disable the entire branch of IC2 farming if you don't want plants making free iron, gold, and redstone dust. Minecraft economies simply do not work.

[gavjenks]

Your view on disabling the creation of resources from energy, is akin to being against the generation of gunpowder, arrows, string, wool, as well as leather, stone, and iron items in infinite amounts due to the mechanics of mob drops.

Well that's not really true. He is worried about exponential, not linear growth.

However, there are various exponential growth options in vanilla and other tekkit mods.

Like... chicken eggs -> chickens -> eggs (if you have even a tablet allowed or anything EE, this allows you to make almost anything, and exponentially grow the enterprise) Or almost anything you can imagine with turtles.

[warpspeed10]

You don't even have to walk over to the chicken farm to load the eggs back into the dispenser like you do in vanilla. You just need a filter, transposer, retriever, or sorting machine to pick the drops up. In fact, if the transmutation table is enabled, you can abuse all drops of any kind to get infinite diamonds. You can even turn every stack of coal into a diamond really easily with IC2. And when you get a fortune 3 pick, well then there goes your diamond shortage. Just more reasons that a market economy cannot arise naturally in Minecraft unless it is forced.

[GreenWolf13]

While I think that this article is well written, warpspeed presents a valid point in saying that Minecraft economies do not work. But as for your presentation of the exponential growth possible from HV solars and UU-matter, I can only find one flaw. HV solars don't take that long to make as you get more and more solars. Let's call the length of time needed to craft an HV solar using an automatic UU- matter factory is X. The number of solar arrays is Y. Now let's say that if Y=1, X =1. Time elapsed is 1. Now you have Y=2, but X=1/2 now, as you are producing the same amount of UU-matter in half the time. Time elapsed is 1.5, and Y=3. You can see how this continues, with each solar array being produced faster than the previous one.

Other than that, you're article is great. May I cite it as an information source in The GreenWolf Report on Industrial Craft 2?

[zedkiller]

Hey Greenwolf, I agree with this flaw, which makes my math an underestimate and like you said HV production even faster. One way to solve this is to just correctly calculate the true doubling period up front, then you can use a simple exponential growth function without e. Or you can bake e and k into an exponential function to calculate the doubling period in your math, either way is OK. For a fairest estimate, I would use an exponential growth function in units of MVs instead of HVs; that is to say, I think its fair to assume players add MVs to their solar farm once an MV is built but not before; and account for recyclers by making it the sum of 2 exponential growth functions.

By all means, I also posted this on the tekkit subreddit, copypasta what I wrote, I'm glad to share it. :-)

Warpspeed, "Economies can't exist in minecraft" is not a belief held by enough players that the syllogism I'm making isn't pertinent to a large amount of the community. For those players, there is a reason they may sometimes play on EE banned servers, for some of those reasons you yourself mentioned, and the things I'm saying are relevant to their point of view.

That said, your claims that SMP lacks scarcity and specialization are wrong. Scarcity exists through the requirement of player time to acquire blocks and specialization exists in the form of unique capital and knowledge; you yourself named a very good example of economy, a fortune 3 pick is a great example of specialization, making diamonds more abundant, and also making it possible for the guy who runs a brewery to mutually benefit from the miner and vice versa.

That's all I have to say about the claim that economy cannot exist in this thread, but I'll only continue to beat that dead horse in a separate thread.

[jojomoep]

The thing about the specialization is zedkiller, that you dont even need to specialize if everyone is just rushing UU Matter. As soon you got some UU, you dont even need to mine anymore, you dont need to go farm wood, redstone, rubber or whatever since you can produce pretty much everything out of uu. Just an example: 1 UU Matter produces 8 wood. 4 UU Matter produce 21 Redstone or a STACK of Rubber.

So UU Matter is a problem, it should be much more expensive to produce like 10.000.000 EU each instead of 1.000.000 or the recipes needs to be adjusted.

Even with disabled Equalivent Exchange you reach the tekkit "endgame" way to fast and stuff is getting boring in my opinion. What do you do if you got a UU Matter production on a desent speed? Build a Castle? Another one? Build huge redstone machinery or mess around with repower frames? Again? Or just nuke your place, get your player file deleted and start over.

In the end UU matter kills all sense of economy and specialization the same way as energycondersers and collectors do, just not as fast but still too fast.

[Omicron]

I have disabled CompactSolars for this reason on my server.

Players can still generate enormous amounts of UU-Matter using nuclear reactors or combustion engine arrays (with one bucket of fuel being worth >600k EU, this works surprisingly well), but neither way is a "set and forget" method. Both variants are highly explosive if done wrong, and both variants run out of resources unless you actively procure more oil or uranium (neither of which can be made out of UU-Matter). Or I suppose they could drain the nether with Geothermals. But that, too, consumes effort and/or resources because you have to move the lava or the energy between dimensions, and occasionally move the pump to new lava fields.

And then of course there are normal solar panels. But the 512 panels that go into a lone HV Array they take up a LOT of space, much less dozens of that...

The point being, so long as there's a tradeoff in effort and resources and a lack of closed-loop systems, I don't mind UU-Matter so much.

[zedkiller]

Good point jojo, you bring up another reason UU matter is bad, once achieved its huge variety of recipes kill specialization too. I will add this to the op.

Omicron, that's an interesting solution, are you blocking ice from recyclers as well and banning covalence dust? I think maybe nukes and combustion engines are still gonna be OP, but taking away "easy" recyclers also nerfs UU some. Your setup should mitigate the damage some but don't underestimate how fool-proof and lag inducing some nuclear reactor setups (once they fix thermal monitors being glitched) are and the same for combustion arrays (and remember BC2 pumps cause lag). Although I find player ingenuity to be completely remarkable, even with your setup UU matter may still be the most efficient way to get most things without piling on another flat nerf to UU production. Here's a reasonable litmus test, is the most efficient way for players to get cactus to generate more UUM, or to make a cactus farm?

The more I think about this I'm pretty sure the only current safe fix using that uses bukkit plugins for the current build is to block most UU matter recipes, or else you can try to play whack-a-mole with a number of clever uses of recyclers that you and I may or may not be aware of and nearly every powerful low cost form of EU generation and probably many other things like furnaces that smelt buckets.

[zedkiller]

Oh about the buckets, if you want my math for solar to apply you'd best ban the recipe for Tin Buckets. Otherwise there's a kind of furnace that can smelt buckets back into iron, and players will use that to get cheaper iron. If I'm not mistaken this "exploit" makes the time taken to produce solar nukes and a lot of stuff from UUM considerably shorter.

[jojomoep]

Well if the admins do care about their server Tin Buckets are one of the first recipes blocked.

[Omicron]

Omicron, that's an interesting solution, are you blocking ice from recyclers as well and banning covalence dust? I think maybe nukes and combustion engines are still gonna be OP, but taking away "easy" recyclers also nerfs UU some. Your setup should mitigate the damage some but don't underestimate how fool-proof and lag inducing some nuclear reactor setups (once they fix thermal monitors being glitched) are and the same for combustion arrays (and remember BC2 pumps cause lag). Although I find player ingenuity to be completely remarkable, even with your setup UU matter may still be the most efficient way to get most things without piling on another flat nerf to UU production. Here's a reasonable litmus test, is the most efficient way for players to get cactus to generate more UUM, or to make a cactus farm?

Well, EE is disabled completely too, as well as the various alloy furnace exploits. I have not disabled using ice in recyclers yet, that's a nice catch. Anything else that people tend to abuse in recyclers?

I honestly pondered disabling cobblestone and dirt as well, but more because it makes no sense for these things to generate scrap at all and less because of game balance issues. But then I thought: "what the hell am I going to do with all the useless cobble I tend to amass?" and left it in just so it has at least that minor use. Though it might be an interesting experiment to make a game with the recycler limited to actually recycling products only (tools, machines, batteries and so on, and no resources). That would probably end up with people setting up automated crafting tables to produce and funnel Furnaces into recyclers, though...

It should also be noted that I'm running a private, friends-only server, so I have an additional layer of protection from exploiting. Namely the fact that I know where they live, so I can come over and slap them silly :p

[Sacrieur]

I'm playing on a server that doesn't suffer this problem, kinda. There are a few flaws with it, really.

EE and Nether is banned. PvP except in towns which cost money to run.

There are more biomes, but each biome won't have all of the ores, only certain kinds of resources. Glowstone, for instance, can only be found in elusive mushroom biomes. And ocean/beach/mushroom biomes don't have copper, which is found in forests and extreme hills (plains too?)

Diamonds are far more rare, manufacturing them is easier than digging for them. Uranium is extremely, extremely rare.

Solar panels and arrays are nerfed by a factor of eight. They're pretty pitiful now and no one seriously uses them since it's ludicrously expensive for an extremely small amount of energy.

Trading still occurs all of the time, people like settling in and just dealing with what they have, and are willing to trade for things they need. Often it's easier to trade for things than to go dig them up yourself. No one really has a quarry yet to my knowledge, but not because they don't have the resources, but rather because powering them is so difficult. I've been making a profit off of these trades, by selling ores in exchange for 1.5 ores of any kind. I negotiate this down if I have to, but most are eager to accept and trade ores they can easily find for ores they can't. Diamonds still sell for a high price, but I've been dealing with them a little higher than a baseline 64 coal. They're sold for 12.5% more than cost, a profit of 8 coal.

---

There are a number of things I would change. Solar panels should be 1.5-2x as effective as they are now, and should work 2x better in deserts. Quantum armor and nano sabers have been banned, but honestly nano hasn't been nerfed, and I think nano and quantum should be nerfed and then added back in, so the higher tier players have something to really work towards, also because nano isn't terribly hard to get.

[Omicron]

Interesting concept. Do you know what plugins/mods are used to alter the ore distribution and biome types?

[gavjenks]

Warpspeed, "Economies can't exist in minecraft" is not a belief held by enough players

Economics is not a democratic field. It doesn't make a lick of difference how many people believe something, in and of itself.

That said, your claims that SMP lacks scarcity and specialization are wrong. Scarcity exists through the requirement of player time to acquire blocks

Yes, there is scarcity, you're right.

and specialization exists in the form of unique capital and knowledge;

Not really so much. Yes there are IC2 crops and there are enchanted tools. There are a few things that provide SMALL barriers to entry in a market. But literally I can count the examples I know of on one hand, versus there being HUNDREDS of commodities in tekkit.

So yes the two professions you named: diamond hunter and brewer, are viable trades, maybe, but they are just about the only ones. Along with maybe nuclear engineering (although only truly all that relevant on a server where solars are nerfed, even then. And still likely to fail in competition to the NON-specialized nether geothermal plants), and... ??? *crickets*

For instance, bricks: not in any way specialized. All you need is like... a stone shovel... and 5 planks for a boat, and suddenly you are fully competitive with everybody else on the server for clay gathering. Add in a cheap jetpack for "elite" clay gathering, I guess. But that's about it (and most people have jetpacks anyway).

Or wood gathering: Sure you CAN build a tree farm, which takes time. But there's no real reason to do so other than it being kinda cool. A simple iron axe and wandering around for 3 minutes until you find a forest will lead you to full inventories of logs in no time at all.

Food is stupidly simple and cheap to gather or automate, in quantities vastly beyond anything you'd ever need. Flint and steel, a deployer, a transposer, and a few eggs = infinite cooked chicken, for example.

And so on and so forth for pretty much everything except very rare minerals, or IC2 crops.

Also add in non-localized resources

Add in no way to efficiently distribute resources (retail)

Add in difficulty of enforcing contracts

Add in lack of ability to invest capital

Diamonds still sell for a high price, but I've been dealing with them a little higher than a baseline 64 coal. They're sold for 12.5% more than cost, a profit of 8 coal.

Manufacturing diamonds, which you say is common, requires 64 coal, 8 flint, and 9 iron (or some alternate thing for the iron I forget). Selling diamonds for 72 coal is thus not a very good example of an economy. It's more of an example of somebody trading because they realize they can rip you off...

But yes, some sort of trading obviously occurs on servers. But usually it's like maybe 10% of people who log on will trade something before they log off, and it's not a very fun or interesting economy. More like a very primitive barter system which does not entertain much (due to only having one or two of the ingredients of a full fledged economy)

[warpspeed10]

Thanks gav. Reading through this thread, I was starting to worry that no one here actually understood what specialization was and how it, as well as barriers to entry, are nearly nonexistent in Minecraft.

As to your other question about manufacturing diamonds, you can use either an iron, obsidian, or brick block.

[Nomadman]

Concerning scarcity and specialization, You forget there is one resource that is very scarce. Time. On the server I play on, I could go gather my own wood and Iron and such, but I'm only on for a few hours at a time if that, and I have better things to be doing. Therefore, I and many other midlevel players trade for raw resources. It is the same reason that even though the real world is industrialized, we still have laborers. Sure, the CEO of GE could go work in his own factory, or could cook his own meals or drive his own car, but his time and energy is limited therefore he does not. Same reason the CEO of Ford doesn't work in a steel mill.

[gavjenks]

Concerning scarcity and specialization, You forget there is one resource that is very scarce. Time. On the server I play on, I could go gather my own wood and Iron and such, but I'm only on for a few hours at a time if that, and I have better things to be doing. Therefore, I and many other midlevel players trade for raw resources. It is the same reason that even though the real world is industrialized, we still have laborers. Sure, the CEO of GE could go work in his own factory, or could cook his own meals or drive his own car, but his time and energy is limited therefore he does not. Same reason the CEO of Ford doesn't work in a steel mill.

No this doesn't really explain anything either.

Let's say it takes 5 minutes to gather a stack of logs. And 20 minutes to gather a stack of iron.

Since both thing have virtually no specialization and anybody can gather them instantly, the exchange rate would be about 1 iron to 4 logs in this case.

If so, then there is actually ZERO time savings from trading. If I require 1 stack of iron and 4 stacks of logs for a project, I could:

1) Gather only wood, and trade for the iron: I would have to gather 8 stacks of logs, and trade half of them for iron: 8 * 5 = 40 minutes + time spent trading.

2) Gather only iron, and trade for the wood: I would have to gather 2 stacks of iron, and trade half for wood: 20 * 2 = 40 minutes + time spent trading.

3) Gather it all myself, and don't trade: 4 * 5 + 20 = 40 minutes.

Thus, in fact, without high barrier to enter an industry (which mining and logging do not have), you are actually BETTER OFF NOT TRADING, due to the time you save by not having to negotiate and go meet somebody, etc.

[Sacrieur]

Perhaps if you're new to trading.

I always trade any ore for any other ore for 1.5x as much, allowing for mixing and matching of ores. This gives me a profit of 50%, which I can then use to turn around and sell to someone else. Most people are glad to throw excess ore at me for what they need.

Usually if you throw in free services such as macerating and making ingots yourself they're even more willing to trade. The goal of trading it make profit of any kind, not get what you want. That is, if you're looking at it from a trader's perspective.

[gavjenks]

Perhaps if you're new to trading.

I always trade any ore for any other ore for 1.5x as much, allowing for mixing and matching of ores. This gives me a profit of 50%, which I can then use to turn around and sell to someone else. Most people are glad to throw excess ore at me for what they need.

Usually if you throw in free services such as macerating and making ingots yourself they're even more willing to trade. The goal of trading it make profit of any kind, not get what you want. That is, if you're looking at it from a trader's perspective.

What's this have to do with the conversation? I'm confused.

You're discussing specific strategies about how to trade when people are interested in trading. The last several posts, however, were about how the Minecraft world does not encourage people to want to trade in the first place nearly as often as in real life.

I always trade any ore for any other ore for 1.5x as much

As long as you brought it up though, this is a pretty bizarre strategy for trading, if you apply it without adjusting for ore rarity. Ore rarity in tekkit (assuming you are only talking about actual blocks that drop as "ores"):

Gold: 387

Tin: 3944

Iron: 4373

Copper: 5114

First of all, I assume you aren't including gold in your deal, otherwise it would be pretty easy to rip you off.

Second of all (if we remove gold from the list), trading for 1.5x the amount of ore will always net you a profit, but:

A) This will only really work if you consistently trade with dumb (and lazy) people. You can get all three types of ore (copper, tin, and iron) yourself easily in like 10 minutes of mining. To spend 5 minutes trading with you (and losing ores in the process) instead of spending those 5 minutes mining is almost always going to be a bad deal for that person.

Even if we assume that you are always trading with dumb, lazy people, this is not the best way for you to make profit anyway. You would still benefit according to classic economic principles by adjusting to people's willingness to pay. And since people are generally aware that copper is more abundant than tin, they would be willing to pay a higher exchange rate when trading in copper for tin. You are not taking advantage of that higher willingness to pay. For example, if people on your server are willing to consistently pay 1.5 tins to get one copper, then you should be able to charge them approximately 2.5 coppers to get one tin, and the same people would be willing to pay, if they are roughly aware of the distributions of copper and tin in the earth.

Usually if you throw in free services such as macerating and making ingots yourself they're even more willing to trade. The goal of trading it make profit of any kind, not get what you want. That is, if you're looking at it from a trader's perspective.

Also, if they "are more willing to pay" when you provide services, then the services are not, by definition, "Free." ...

All you're doing is selling them ores and then separately selling them smelting services, essentially. It's another side business, and if you're treat it as "free" right now, then that means you're probably not doing a very good job of optimizing it, either.

[zedkiller]

Gavejenks, you made a very lengthy argument but it assumes there is no economic specialization. But it seems to ignore my earlier post about the topic, almost all of what I said, and it really doesn't at all address the fact that specialization exists in the form of unique capital and knowledge.

Your assumption that logging and mining take the same amount of time for all players falls apart when you consider the fact that players have unequal capital and knowledge e.g. one player may have 6 quarries and the other none, causing mutual benefit for the poorer player to work as the logger and trade with the quarry operator, or having fortune 3 tools; there are myriad ways specialization can exist by creating both manual and automated production pipelines (e.g. a non UU non EE slow, but legitimate cactus farm).

UU matter (and EE) aren't just specialization and economy killers, however, they also disincentivize the creative acquisition of resources through a wide variety of different builds and activities in favor of only one activity, manufacturing UU (or EMC).

[Watchful11]

Yes, that's it exactly. The entire point of modded minecraft is to build machines that produce specific items automatically.

If you can produce one item and turn it into anything you need, that breaks this principle.

However, the realities of servers often make it difficult is not impossible to fully automate the production of some critical items. Namely, ores and other base resources, like diamonds, redstone, lapis, etc.

It is possible in theory to build an automated quarry using either redpower frames or computercraft turtles that can keep mining forever. But, most servers wouldn't allow massive chunks of land to be stripped to bedrock for resources.

I have yet to implement it on the server I run, but I believe that all the otherwise renewable recipes should be removed.

It should also be possible to increase the EU cost of UU matter. Thus making it more difficult and expensive to produce those non-renewable recipes that are left.

[gavjenks]

there are myriad ways specialization can exist by creating both manual and automated production pipelines (e.g. a non UU non EE slow, but legitimate cactus farm).

1) So far you've named one actual example as far as I can tell: Fortune enchanted tools. Which are actually a pretty lame example, since like an hour killing random zombies can get you one of your own (i.e. still not a very high barrier at all to entering into competition).

Factories are not a good example, because they're only really worth it if you're using EE or UU to supply materials. if not, it's silly to make a solar panel factory, since it will just sit dormant 95% of the time.

Quarries are not that great of an example, either. Slightly better, but to say "one player has a lot of quarries and the other doesn't" implies that one player started with vastly more resources, or started earlier. If so, they probably ALSO have automated tree cutting, etc. If so, then this would have virtually zero effect on trading.

2) I think it has to be assumed that before you start talking about economies, that EE is not in any way involved whatsoever, for obvious reasons. Probably not UU either. having either of those things makes an economy pretty much hopelessly impossible, no matter what.

[warpspeed10]

It seems we all agree that EE and the creation of UU matter make an economy impossible. What seems to be the topic of debate is whether economies in Minecraft are possible at all.

Personally, I do not define a high barrier to entry as being following a video on YouTube block for block to create an Iron Golem Grinder. All it takes is the ability to follow instructions, not special knowledge, or innovation to generate almost any resource in the game infinitely.

[Sacrieur]

Oh, I forgot to mention you have to make ores biome specific or economics won't really work. The servers I play on have this feature, so going out and mining tin if you set up in a forest just isn't an option, you'd have to go find a river or mountain or something.