In Defense of Equivalent Exchange

[J0P5]

I don't care about the duping, it's a bug that will eventually be fixed.

EE is a great mod, it's a lot of fun, and it's great for Technic.

For tekkit however, it ruins it. It makes it way too easy to go up super fast, there is barely any need for IC2 machines. Not even starting on the tools it has, which make griefing unstoppable.

[jakj]

I will begin distributing my plugin to certain servers which I think deserve it.

I 100% believe you have the right to distribute your mod any way you see fit. I also 100% believe you're a complete and total asshole for having the arrogance to believe you are qualified to decide who "deserves" it.

[rEvolutionTU]

Actually I think the problem with EE isn't even the "free stuff". You can achieve just the same with farms etc.

The problem I have with EE is that it completely ruins the purpose of farms and therefore all other mods in the game.

One item of food/wood/cactii/glass/stone/WHATEVER = unlimited supply of them. That is what is broken with EE.

If I could make changes to EE, I'd allow Admins to decide which items can be created via transmutation and which can't. Also I'd add in a certain "EMC tax" - each transmutation should cost you EMC in the long run.

[Sp0nge]

EE bypasses protections because no one has written a plugin which stops it from that. I, in fact am testing a safe EE plugin, which I wrote myself, and it works fine. After some more testing, I will begin distributing my plugin to certain servers which I think deserve it.

Ill gladly test the plugin for you. We have around 80ish players online on primetime, 50ish at average. But, will only do it as long as u make it public for everyone.

Beside, u can block/nerf/dissable almost anything within EE using allready existing, and known plugins, it just needs some imagination.

[dc11man]

i personalty love ee im playing on a server that has it disabled only due because the map kept breaking

were hoping it will be in the next update of tekkit and the big will be fixed and we can turn it on again

[gorgenzola]

I don't like the idea of making items so easily just out of thin air. Converting stuff you have dug out of the ground is one thing, but just using condensers to pull BS items out of thin air is dumb. My roommate has a condenser setup that pulls forty stacks of diamonds out of the air overnight. He never needs to mine or find anything. At least with Buildcraft Quarries, all that stuff still comes from the ground and there is a satisfaction in building the machine.

One thing that is nice about EE is that is basically creative mode, so big builds are a lot easier to make, and things that are normally a PITA to find like Gravel (for back alleys, small roads, other touches) and Bricks (drowning issues) are a lot easier to synthesize. I would prefer some kind of more involved process, maybe something that takes time, than just instantly turning one thing into another. But when you're building an entire town by yourself on a small server, the limited creative mode EE gives you helps out.

[Lennalf]

Our server has been playing with full EE2 for a few weeks now, and the unanimous consensus is that many things in EE2 are overpowered and ruin the fun for people who want a "balanced" experience. The original poster focused heavily on differences in combat, but that's not what's imbalanced in EE2.

The problem is that this mod makes entire aspects of the game entirely pointless.

Flight, lava immunity, fire immunity, and automatic health regeneration make the player virtually invincible. Power flowers obviate all resource collection, with the exception of a few select resource that don't have EMC values (apatite, uranium, rubber). Red matter tools are outrageously powerful and dangerously destructive. EE2 was a lot of fun for a few days when we were enjoying the outrageous power creep. But as with any mod or cheat that makes the game too simple and easy, we've grown bored with it.

EE2 is like Creative Mode on crack. Once you have a few power flowers, you can make anything you want essentially for free. If that's what you want, great, but many Minecrafters can attest to the addiction and fun of hunting for resources. EE2 eliminates the excitement of exploring caverns for diamonds. It eliminates the dangers and strategies of pillaring for glowstone in the Nether. It makes Buildcraft and IC2 mining machines completely pointless. It enables anybody to reach the point of effectively unlimited resources in a matter of a few days. And what's worse, it requires absolutely no creativity to reach that point.

We are disabling a very large number of EE2 items for our next world (especially Energy Collectors!), but we are keeping a few select items. Alchemy bags are awesome inventory management, and they allow you to keep your hard-earned valuables safe. Condensers and transmutation tables give players more freedom to "trade" their unwanted resources for what they need for their projects. Black hole bands are just plain convenient. Zero rings provide an easy method of creating snow and ice. Harvest bands make farming far less tedious (although they are still under review). We are also considering including the repair talisman, because diamonds are forever (diamond tools and armor, that is).

[gorgenzola]

I completely agree with you Lennalf. I leave EE on, I just told people who use it that as long as they're enjoying it then that's fine. You're absolutely right, it completely negates any searching or exploring for materials and makes all machines worthless. Why macerate anything when you can just make anything you want out of thin air?

[Sp0nge]

Ill make a small post about EE, that it seems like no other server are having issues with?

Place down a t.table, place an item at the left side, wait till the same item appears on the right side, pull that out and fast, pull out the item at the left side again. Dont that dupe items on your server? It does on ours, and no, we dont have lagissues etc that could be making it.

(it seems like almost none server know about this, prob about time?)

[Lennalf]

Ill make a small post about EE, that it seems like no other server are having issues with?

Place down a t.table, place an item at the left side, wait till the same item appears on the right side, pull that out and fast, pull out the item at the left side again. Dont that dupe items on your server? It does on ours, and no, we dont have lagissues etc that could be making it.

(it seems like almost none server know about this, prob about time?)

Are you entirely sure that the table has 0 EMC when you start? What you describe would be the normal behavior if you have some extra EMC stored in the table.

I haven't encountered any duping bugs with the tablet. (I did encounter a completely different duping bug. Putting random stuff in a pedestal brought down my client, and when I reconnected my inventory had been reset to about 5 minutes earlier... which meant I had duplicates of everything I'd already placed in the world since that point in time.)

[Truculent]

I thought I could provide some numbers, as I'm in the process of building the IC2 equivalent to EE2 matter generation: a UUM factory. It is planned to have 4 HV solars powering a mass fabricator with full scrap generation for max efficiency. 4 HV panels costs: 2048 solar panels, 256 LV transformers, 32 MV transformers, 4 HV transformers. And the scrap generator to feed the Mass Fabricator consists of 57 Recyclers, 57 Filters and 44 Block Breaker-powered cobblegen. Total cost for just these items is around:

22500 Iron

8000 Tin

14000 Copper

27000 Rubber

13000 Redstone

6200 Coal

It's about 48000 UUM of material or 5300 diamonds.

This is NOT even including the piping, sorting machines, wiring, energy storage, 1000's of glass/cobble, etc. Nor does it take into consideration all the EUs that go in to preparing these resources. Nor does it include the machine I built to automatically fabricate solar panels, which is a large and complex albeit not very costly construction.

When complete this machine will produce on average 1 diamond (9 UUM) in 8 seconds, considering solar panel downtime.

With EE2 I could build a machine that spits out 1 diamond every 8 seconds with probably 1/1000th of this resource expenditure.

[Yuriy]

I thought I could provide some numbers, as I'm in the process of building the IC2 equivalent to EE2 matter generation: a UUM factory. It is planned to have 4 HV solars powering a mass fabricator with full scrap generation for max efficiency. 4 HV panels costs: 2048 solar panels, 256 LV transformers, 32 MV transformers, 4 HV transformers. And the scrap generator to feed the Mass Fabricator consists of 57 Recyclers, 57 Filters and 44 Block Breaker-powered cobblegen. Total cost for just these items is around:

22500 Iron

8000 Tin

14000 Copper

27000 Rubber

13000 Redstone

6200 Coal

It's about 48000 UUM of material or 5300 diamonds.

This is NOT even including the piping, sorting machines, wiring, energy storage, 1000's of glass/cobble, etc. Nor does it take into consideration all the EUs that go in to preparing these resources. Nor does it include the machine I built to automatically fabricate solar panels, which is a large and complex albeit not very costly construction.

When complete this machine will produce on average 1 diamond (9 UUM) in 8 seconds, considering solar panel downtime.

With EE2 I could build a machine that spits out 1 diamond every 8 seconds with probably 1/1000th of this resource expenditure.

2 17/5 flower producing 558 EMC/s each will both produce, on average, 1 diamond every 7.34 seconds (close to your machine). The cost of making the 2 flowers would be ~1,953,334 EMC or ~2,384 diamonds. This is one of the most efficient way of producing diamonds with minimal resource expenditure. If you were to make cobble gens to feed this thing, you'd probably spend more than you would just building a flower. The material cost is a little less than half of yours. Balanced differently? Sure.

IC2 just requires a greater upfront cost for certain projects whereas EE2 allows for EMC generation in the meantime usually cutting down project length and shortening the curve the more its played.

Either way, why are people still arguing this. EE2 is fun but some people don't like playing with it because they want more of a challenge by spending more time in the mines. I prefer it because then I can not be bother with mining so much and take on legitimate build projects. It's up to each server owner to decide what type of community they want and that can either include EE2 or not.

[Lennalf]

Either way, why are people still arguing this.

This is just a friendly discussion, not an argument. The "why" is because it's the topic of this thread. A thread to which you just contributed, by the way ;)

[Jusupov]

I thought I could provide some numbers, as I'm in the process of building the IC2 equivalent to EE2 matter generation: a UUM factory. It is planned to have 4 HV solars powering a mass fabricator with full scrap generation for max efficiency. 4 HV panels costs: 2048 solar panels, 256 LV transformers, 32 MV transformers, 4 HV transformers. And the scrap generator to feed the Mass Fabricator consists of 57 Recyclers, 57 Filters and 44 Block Breaker-powered cobblegen. Total cost for just these items is around:

22500 Iron

8000 Tin

14000 Copper

27000 Rubber

13000 Redstone

6200 Coal

It's about 48000 UUM of material or 5300 diamonds.

This is NOT even including the piping, sorting machines, wiring, energy storage, 1000's of glass/cobble, etc. Nor does it take into consideration all the EUs that go in to preparing these resources. Nor does it include the machine I built to automatically fabricate solar panels, which is a large and complex albeit not very costly construction.

When complete this machine will produce on average 1 diamond (9 UUM) in 8 seconds, considering solar panel downtime.

With EE2 I could build a machine that spits out 1 diamond every 8 seconds with probably 1/1000th of this resource expenditure.

Uh you need like 2 or 3 recyclers with 10 overclocker upgrades to power a single massfab at that power level. Not 57

[Lennalf]

Uh you need like 2 or 3 recyclers with 10 overclocker upgrades to power a single massfab at that power level. Not 57

He makes no mention of overclocking the recyclers. It is far more energy efficient to run a bunch of individual machines with no upgrades than to run a smaller number of machines with equivalent total output. The reason is that overclocking increases the energy consumption by a greater factor than it increases production speed. The effect is multiplicative, too, which means the amount of energy "wasted" to overclock grows exponentially with each overclock upgrade per machine.

You would have to compare the cost of generating a lot of extra energy to the cost of making the recyclers to determine the ideal amount of overclocking.

In overly simple terms, you don't want to overclock one recycler to double its production if it is going to require you to make three times as many generators, unless the cost of making the extra generators is cheaper than the cost of one extra recycler.

[Jusupov]

He makes no mention of overclocking the recyclers. It is far more energy efficient to run a bunch of individual machines with no upgrades than to run a smaller number of machines with equivalent total output. The reason is that overclocking increases the energy consumption by a greater factor than it increases production speed. The effect is multiplicative, too, which means the amount of energy "wasted" to overclock grows exponentially with each overclock upgrade per machine.

You would have to compare the cost of generating a lot of extra energy to the cost of making the recyclers to determine the ideal amount of overclocking.

In overly simple terms, you don't want to overclock one recycler to double its production if it is going to require you to make three times as many generators, unless the cost of making the extra generators is cheaper than the cost of one extra recycler.

Tubing that is way easier though and wont take a few chunks to do it. After you build a factory to make the HV solar panels for you why bother making stuff use as little power as possible? Or after you get your first reactor. There's so much EU/t to generate and not much to use it on since teleporters are so terrible.

[Lennalf]

Tubing that is way easier though and wont take a few chunks to do it. After you build a factory to make the HV solar panels for you why bother making stuff use as little power as possible? Or after you get your first reactor. There's so much EU/t to generate and not much to use it on since teleporters are so terrible.

I have to admit my ignorance here, what are HV solar panels? Do you mean an array of solar panels so large that it outputs HV, or is there actually a solar panel that outputs more than the standard 1 EU/t? If the former, that's a lot of resource investment. If the latter, do these exist in Tekkit or is it an add-on? Please tell me more.

[Truculent]

Tubing that is way easier though and wont take a few chunks to do it. After you build a factory to make the HV solar panels for you why bother making stuff use as little power as possible? Or after you get your first reactor. There's so much EU/t to generate and not much to use it on since teleporters are so terrible.

Yes, 2 recycler with 10 overclocker upgrade should keep my massfab fed, at a cost of 163 EU/t more drain or around 16% loss in UUM generation. As the entire point of the UUM factory is to make materials out of nothing, just like EE2, I choose to minimize the EU cost and build more recyclers.

[Jusupov]

I have to admit my ignorance here, what are HV solar panels? Do you mean an array of solar panels so large that it outputs HV, or is there actually a solar panel that outputs more than the standard 1 EU/t? If the former, that's a lot of resource investment. If the latter, do these exist in Tekkit or is it an add-on? Please tell me more.

HV solar panels are in tekkit and you need 8x8x8 regular solar panels each and they output 512 eu/t. It's not that big of a deal to make them if you automate the resource condensing and make them with automatic crafting tables.

Yes, 2 recycler with 10 overclocker upgrade should keep my massfab fed, at a cost of 163 EU/t more drain or around 16% loss in UUM generation. As the entire point of the UUM factory is to make materials out of nothing, just like EE2, I choose to minimize the EU cost and build more recyclers.

Actually I just tested this and the powerdrain per recycler is 80-120 eu/t. My massfab is only eating 5110 eu/t and the three recyclers I put in make it produce UU every two seconds.

[Truculent]

2 17/5 flower producing 558 EMC/s each will both produce, on average, 1 diamond every 7.34 seconds (close to your machine). The cost of making the 2 flowers would be ~1,953,334 EMC or ~2,384 diamonds. This is one of the most efficient way of producing diamonds with minimal resource expenditure. If you were to make cobble gens to feed this thing, you'd probably spend more than you would just building a flower. The material cost is a little less than half of yours. Balanced differently? Sure.

IC2 just requires a greater upfront cost for certain projects whereas EE2 allows for EMC generation in the meantime usually cutting down project length and shortening the curve the more its played.

Either way, why are people still arguing this. EE2 is fun but some people don't like playing with it because they want more of a challenge by spending more time in the mines. I prefer it because then I can not be bother with mining so much and take on legitimate build projects. It's up to each server owner to decide what type of community they want and that can either include EE2 or not.

Sure, I was being a silly with the 1/1000. The EMC value of my UUM factory is around 10.6M, so by the numbers it's ~5x the cost. However, you have to consider how much faster the divining rod + destruction catalyst allow you get rolling, compared to using an IC2 miner or quarry. It's not even comparable, dive down to diamond level with a destruction catalyst and it takes hardly no time at all to pull enough EMC to get going with EE2.

Also consider a 17/5 flower would replace itself in ~30 minutes, my UUM factory would replace itself in ~12 hours.

My opinion is that both are OP'd, but EE2 has a much more aggressive power curve.

Actually I just tested this and the powerdrain per recycler is 80-120 eu/t. My massfab is only eating 5110 eu/t and the three recyclers I put in make it produce UU every two seconds.

Yes, 1 recycler draws 1 EU/t, each overclocker is a 1.6x multiplier on power draw so with 10 it will draw 1.6^10=110x more EU. It will produce 1/(.7^10) = 35.4x as much scrap. To replace the 57 recyclers I have now it will then take two 10x overclocked recyclers (this produces excess scrap) drawing 220 EU/t whereas 57 not-overclocked recyclers draw 57 EU/t, for a difference of 163 EU/t.

A better match would be a 10x and 9x overclocked recyler, producing ~60x the scrap of a single recycler, at a power draw of 178 EU/t or a difference of 121 EU/t.

The extra cost of producing multiple recyclers is offset in less than 24 hours.

[Jusupov]

Sure, I was being a silly with the 1/1000. The EMC value of my UUM factory is around 10.6M, so by the numbers it's ~5x the cost. However, you have to consider how much faster the divining rod + destruction catalyst allow you get rolling, compared to using an IC2 miner or quarry. It's not even comparable, dive down to diamond level with a destruction catalyst and it takes hardly no time at all to pull enough EMC to get going with EE2.

Also consider a 17/5 flower would replace itself in ~30 minutes, my UUM factory would replace itself in ~12 hours.

My opinion is that both are OP'd, but EE2 has a much more aggressive power curve.

Yes, 1 recycler draws 1 EU/t, each overclocker is a 1.6x multiplier on power draw so with 10 it will draw 1.6^10=110x more EU. It will produce 1/(.7^10) = 35.4x as much scrap. To replace the 57 recyclers I have now it will then take two 10x overclocked recyclers (this produces excess scrap) drawing 220 EU/t whereas 57 not-overclocked recyclers draw 57 EU/t, for a difference of 163 EU/t.

A better match would be a 10x and 9x overclocked recyler, producing ~60x the scrap of a single recycler, at a power draw of 178 EU/t or a difference of 121 EU/t.

The extra cost of producing multiple recyclers is offset in less than 24 hours.

How does the EU/UU change? Is it a linear progression. I'm just thinking that is there any difference now that I'm powering 4 recyclers with two hv panels (so they run through the night) and the massfab with 10 that changing it to 12 hv for massfab with 57 EU/t to recyclers would lower my time from 1½ seconds per UU-matter significantly?

I'm getting no UU during the night since I don't have a reactor near the massfab and don't want to move it again but I make roughly 1 1/3 alchemy chests of scrap during the night and run out just before dusk.

[Yuriy]

Sure, I was being a silly with the 1/1000. The EMC value of my UUM factory is around 10.6M, so by the numbers it's ~5x the cost. However, you have to consider how much faster the divining rod + destruction catalyst allow you get rolling, compared to using an IC2 miner or quarry. It's not even comparable, dive down to diamond level with a destruction catalyst and it takes hardly no time at all to pull enough EMC to get going with EE2.

Also consider a 17/5 flower would replace itself in ~30 minutes, my UUM factory would replace itself in ~12 hours.

My opinion is that both are OP'd, but EE2 has a much more aggressive power curve.

Yes, 1 recycler draws 1 EU/t, each overclocker is a 1.6x multiplier on power draw so with 10 it will draw 1.6^10=110x more EU. It will produce 1/(.7^10) = 35.4x as much scrap. To replace the 57 recyclers I have now it will then take two 10x overclocked recyclers (this produces excess scrap) drawing 220 EU/t whereas 57 not-overclocked recyclers draw 57 EU/t, for a difference of 163 EU/t.

A better match would be a 10x and 9x overclocked recyler, producing ~60x the scrap of a single recycler, at a power draw of 178 EU/t or a difference of 121 EU/t.

The extra cost of producing multiple recyclers is offset in less than 24 hours.

I don't use the destruction catalyst but sure, some of the power item will allow you to clear cut a forest and level half the world very quickly once you've got the power, won't disagree with you there. However, a 17/5 flower costs 9,766,667 EMC each (my apologies about my previous number, I forgot a 3) whereas they produce 558 EMC/s. The flower would require 17503s or 291.71m or 4.86 hours to reproduce itself (assuming one was waiting and not building the other flower as each part was available). So still less then half of the time it would take your setup to self replicate.

As for both being OP, matter of opinion; but I will say that the reason (as far as I can gather) for EE's power curve is because the higher end items take a significant amount more resources and EMC to reach. I had a much harder time and much longer wait getting my RM Armor then it took me to make IC2's Quantum armor.

[Yuriy]

This is just a friendly discussion, not an argument. The "why" is because it's the topic of this thread. A thread to which you just contributed, by the way

By argument I meant more debate or discussion with opposing views not a petty squabble.

Furthermore, I only ask because many threads have covered the same topic and, because I love EE2, I often participate. Frankly I do so to make sure that people don't make claims that anyone can start in EE2 and within a day rebuild the moon 1:1 scale out of RM furnaces because it's simply not possible without spawning many, many items. I'll admit by end game I can basically burn diamonds by the stack (and something I've done for entertainment on occasion) but I drop by to (attempt to) prevent either side from exaggerating for the benefit of their argument.

;p

[ejmejm]

I completely agree with the original post.

True EE makes it easy to get things like diamond blocks but thats where matter comes in. dm and rm give you a new goal to work for.

With EE when even when i can get tons of red matter making an HV solar array or a nuclear reactor in ic22 is still a hard task.

Just beacuse you can get diamond so easily doesn't mean you can get everything else so easily.

[SimpleGuy]

I simply don't like EE because, through collectors, its growth curve replaces pretty much anything else's curve that has an EMC value. EE's growth curve is exponential, while pretty much every other mechanic inherent to MC or modded to be added to MC has linear growth, which may jump at certain milestones. Thus, it cuts down on a lot of the "search for resources" time, which requires less exploration by a player (which I imagine some people are OK with).

Furthermore, inherent in MC there really is no such thing as an "Equivalent" exchange, because of the immeasurable utility of each item. This brings me to my next personal distaste: EMC itself. How many Ender Pearls is a diamond really worth? Is unlocking an End Gate worth 1 diamond, ten diamonds, one hundred? Who is to judge what I value unlocking end-game content through this portal? How many torches do I need to pay to shoot an arrow? How many cow-milking sessions are worth a pickaxe? How much netherrack is a boat worth? EMC becomes a price-fixing mechanism for those things that have EMC value (problems for servers with open economies). Suddenly, things that don't have an EMC value become incredibly more valuable to a player because they're not exchangeable. No matter what goals the player had beforehand, it feels (to me) like a cheap reason to go out searching for that particular resource, and it makes me feel like an asshole for hoarding it since I can't make it at will.

I'm not going to pretend EE isn't unfixable. It's just one of few mods with no negative feedback mechanisms that hinder growth. Mods like IC2, Thaumcraft 2, Buildcraft utilize MC's basic negative feedback mechanism in that they will deplete your resources as you progress (whether iron, vis, copper, tin, diamonds, etc) while EE instead produces as you progress. Granted, IC2 has solar panels which generate electricity (and thus UU Matter) from nothing. However, UU Matter is an end-game item attained and is extremely limited in what it can produce. EMC is used right from the start and is very broad in what it can produce.