If you've read the art of game design or a similar book, you'll find that in FTB, most of the fun is had through the problem solving.

You have to give problems to solve to the player, hard ones if you must, but you must not hinder the player in his attempts to solve it. The player should be as free as possible to solve your problems any way he likes

When the player finds a shortcut, he receives some instant gratification. As a developper, you may hate shortcuts as they cut content from the player's experience. But the short-term gratification can be worth it. Letting the player skip some of the game's content isn't dramatic. And this is what makes Minecraft's replayability.

# Feels good:

Problem solving

• Using a combination of redpower tubes, buildcraft pipes and all the mothers of all the different pipes to do something very specific.
  
• Easily popping up a computer and taking 15-30min to code something simple and portable to solve an easy problem
  
• I remember fondly the days of power converters. They made sense, were easy to craft, easy to use, and switching between the different energies was pretty fun. They were the source of lots of game breaking exploits, though. :|
  
• Convenience vs efficiency trades. I once played on a server where tesseracts were costly but lossless and transceivers were early game but very lossy, I can't go back. It's SO much better that way. You could always rely on transceivers to help you solve problems quickly and you could optimize down the road if you wanted to by switching to cables or to tesseracts (not always easy btw).
  
• Multiple alternate manners to obtain items and solve problems.
  
  • Gregtech was great at this with electrolyzers and centrifuging
    
  • Ex Nihilo is also great at this
    
• Cross-mod """"exploits"""". Uncrafting something that wasn't meant to be uncrafted, weird ways to generate energy... when they aren't game breaking, I love cross mod interactions.
  
  

  Feels bad:
  

  
  Tediousness
  
  

• Unnecessary steps in crafting. Go flatten your iron with a hammer, then cut it into stripes, then apply some rubber (<= which you had to harvest, extract, cook) and you get a cable.
  
• Spending 15 minutes to setup a computer and its power supply. Stop coding at least five times to craft all the modules you need.
  
• Unnecessary cable management because tesseracts/dimensional transceivers/etc are pretty costly early game
  
• Very mandatory yet almost useless machines (blast furnaces, coke ovens, vats, canning machines, QED...)
  
• Shitty power conversion problems. "Use copper wires, they're magical"
  
• Costly kind of cables that you can't get early game
  
  Stopping me, breaking my inertia, by asking me to do some weird task
  
  When you place a wall down my road and the only way to get past it is to jump, be careful, maybe I don't like to jump; add a window, a door, explosives, portals, anything.
  
  
• Screw you, you need to activate that division sigil (AGAIN) to do the thing.
  
• Being too lazy to start using a mod that's disconnected with everything else. Botania, for instance. Or blood magic. Or Psi.
  
• Screw you, you need to make an X farm again. The same as the last one.
  
  • In sky factory, there are lots of good ways to get wither skulls... I almost cried. It was amazing.
    
  • There's also lots of good ways to get draconium
    
    Mixed feelings:
    
    
• Big numbers. Draconic evolution stuff, pointless power generation, pointless ressource gathering. Perfecting your craft, even if there's no point, and seeing the numbers glorifying your accomplishment is the backbone of the game
  
  Alternately, when a mod relies too heavily on grinding and isn't automateable easily, it gets annoying. The grind isn't what's fun, the wait isn't what's fun, refining your machinery and scaling up your contraptions is where the fun is at.

Actually (I was the OP of this thread that you were talking to) I like more expensive recipes, but not becuase i feel it is more of an accomplishment when i make something. I just feel that the way modded usually works, you start playing and within a few days are extremely flush with resources, and then you can just sit around and craft craft craft all of the machines you need. Plus, with resources being so easy to get vs the cost of building things, there really is no need to worry about efficiency, other than for giggles.

So for example, forestry ethanol. People usually make oak trees, crush the apples for fruit juice for some of the saplings, then use water for whatever saplings they can't use. There is no push to find ways to get more fruit juice, or even make honey, to get more ethanol production. You make another tree farm, or just move on to a big reactor (not many people even make tree farms anymore, its nether lava right ot big reactor now).

If the cost of a tree farm was very high, then people would try to find ways to squeeze every bit of power out of the resources they got from it. Instead its far easier to just make another or another cheap power source, than it is to breed trees to get more Sappiness from a sapling, get more saplings to drop, etc.

If they cannot pay for the cost of another power source (due to cost being high) then they might say... hmm... i have a lot of redstone doing nothing, I could use it in an EIO vat for some rocket fuel. But people only do that now for fun (which is fine too). It could also be fun though to have to make that decision. Do you put some redstone into making some fuel for engines to power your stuff, or do you use it to build something new?

Compare it to a game like call of duty. Modded mc would be like playing COD where you can just carry every single weapon. Sure its fun! Snipe over here, LMG over here, toss 20 grenades over here.

But its also fun to only have enough 'resources' to carry a few items, and to have to pick what you want. Do you invest in Fast Hands to switch weapons faster, or Engineer to spot opponents Equipment and blow it up before it gets you? If you could just carry ALL of those things and have all of those abilities, it would get very bland. Of course cod is a competetive game, and people will argue that MC is not... but then again, MC is a sandbox game, right? Its not a competition against other people, but a competition against the 'world'. Can i thrive and survive in this world? Isnt that why they call it survival mode? TO me, the higher costs push the game more in that direction. But i dont like how IE:E has done it IMO. It doesnt seem more challenging, it just made the numbers more impressive. Which could be the narcissism thing you are talking about. People can post screenshots of the crazy expensive item they created.

My pack would go the other way, and no one would like it. :) I would reduce the amount of resources you get, make it harder ot make power, so then crafting normal items becomes more challenging. The pack i am working on for example cuts the amount of resources a quarry gets by 75%. So, quarries are a bit more balanced vs hand mining. They cost a lot of energy (configured to cost moer than default...) and dont give you the tons of ores that you normally get.

Your post got off on a tangant about society in general, I agree with you on most of it. It gets tiring sometimes how so many people are 'look at me look at me! see how great i am!' you might be interested in this book, it claims to explain why our sociey is becoming more and more narcissistic.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies/dp/1608193411

Im arguing that by mod devs not caring or not seeing apoint in redistribution, they are hurting the community as a whole. Which is fine if they feel that way.

The point is im not going to find 100 mod devs and post to ask for permission, or even go read their EULA. I dont have time. All it has done is to stifle innovation and creativity. Instead of releasing my pack that people might enjoy (which isnt true but someone else might make a pack that others would enjoy) ill just keep it private. The community might be missing out on 100s of fun packs just because people dont ahve time to go asking each mod dev for permission. I understand its copyright law, but copyrights protect IP, but it comes with a cost.

The best example I can come up with is S Korea. That country was poor, and it became an economic powerhouse by pirating software and information. If youre interested, thsi is a cool book if you enjoy economics.

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986

The author grew up there, and he said that colleges there were using pirated software and pirated textbooks. If they had not done that their country would not have prospered as they could not have afforded to pay for textbooks and software to teach kids, etc. So copyright laws, IMO, are a double edged sword. They encourage innovation but it also makes things more expensive. In the case of minecraft mods, that added cost is 'time'. Copyright law in the US right now is pretty draconian and ive read many times that it has gotten so strong that its stifling innovation, not encouraging it.

On a side note: am I understanding your new ic2 addon correctly? I could build arrays of hundreds of solar panels, but not have it cause the lag? So the only downside of your addon vs one like compact solar panels would be loading all the chunks needed?

I don't know. I studied Quantum mechanics at university (albeit briefly - I switched to another course two years in), and my opinion of qCraft has always been quite negative. It's a weird mod, and QM is definitely weird, and there are some roughly similar concepts (many QM "oddities" are based on measurement, and qCraft largely deals with observational changes)... but it just feels like it doesn't represent QM from a scientific point of view, but rather from a layman's point of view. It's the sort of education, which, while I guess technically not wrong, might also instil a lot of bad conceptions of QM.

I can't really pin down what good teaching of QM would look like, although if anyone is interested in trying to explain it to children, I'd highly recommend taking a look at Uncle Albert's Quantum Quest. I guess the two things that I'd really want to see in a Minecraft mod that tried to properly teach QM would be a) something akin to the double slit experiment (which - in it's many variations - explains a lot of what QM comes down to), and b) probability waves and distributions. Sure, there are mathematical and rigorous ways of teaching these that probably aren't appropriate for children, but most kids can comprehend the concept of things being more likely to end up in one place than another.

tl;dr - I'm not a fan of qCraft, because I don't think it teaches QM, but rather it tells everyone that QM is weird, which is not in of itself worthy of teaching.

For that kind of money, i'd suggest building a desktop.
Not only can I run FTB at around 60-80 fps with everything on high, but it only cost me around 470 ish dollars (without a hard drive or OS).

My Build:

Gigabyte B75M-D3h motherboard
HD radeon 7770 2GB GPU
intel Celeron G540 CPU
After market CPU heatsink
CX600M PSU
ATX-238 Raidmax case
2X4GB ram sticks

A SSD will be about 1$/gig
or a SATA hard drive will be cheaper

an OS is around 100$

total around 700/800



if you're set on a laptop, i'd suggest a ASUS or Lenovo laptop.
this ASUS latop here
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B007S63H1S/ref=dp_olp_0?ie=UTF8&condition=all
is pretty nice, it was the one i owned prior to my desktop and ran FTB rather well (around 20 fps)

Phew - thanks for clearing that up! Was worried I'd borked my RAM or something.

My saviour.

Now I just need better RAM. Time to do a buy. ;-)

EDIT: will this be better? I'm okay when it comes to PCs, however RAM always eludes me! Link to RAM.

a ssd will definitely increase performance then and given recent price drops around them you should be able to pick up one within your budget

£6 outside your budget but its a very good ssd http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-250GB-mSATA-Solid-State/dp/B00HFD9C5O/ref=sr_1_2?m=A2OAJ7377F756P&s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1417993391&sr=1-2

Weird the price went up from when i posted it but let me see if i can find it on amazon or something better.


EDIT: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Core-i5-4460-1150-BX80646I54460/dp/B00JIJUBAS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486771690&sr=8-1&keywords=i5+4460


if you can stretch get https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Core-i5-4690K-Processor-BX80646I54690K/dp/B00KPRWB9G/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1486771852&sr=1-1&keywords=i5+4690k

Do you have a after market cooler or the stock cooler that came with your 4150? the one for the 4150 should work as these two cpus dont come with a stock cooler.

Probably got them off the dragons. Dragons LOVE tacos.

here is the processor on amazon

Yeah, shes old. But silly me didn't enable -XX:ParallelGCThreads, which is the only saving grace of having an almost 10 year old hex-core to play on. I miss my i7 laptop.

I think more important than his eye not recognizing it is his screen not being able to display it. I think the highest refresh rate available right now is 240hz, and that's pretty hard to get your hands on.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08128ZYV1/ref=sspa_mw_detail_0?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This guy looks substantially better for a couple hundred extra.

This might be a good place to start.

you mean like this?

I would rather go with this since my 1 mSATA slot is used by a wireless card and normal SATA SSDs are faster anyway. But idk if having it on an SSD actually help with my enormous CPU and RAM usage.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-Technology-120GB-Solid-2-5-inch/dp/B00A1ZTZOG/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1417993989&sr=1-1&keywords=kingston+120gb

I think they're overrated and can only get things cool but not chilled.

I prefer reusable plastic IceCube s

It's also on Amazon from JINX, who don't sell it on their website (presumably for legal reasons)

According to your PC specs, you have 4 ram slots and only 2 should be occupied atm. It's DDR3 style RAM so it's super cheap.

I'll edit with a link to something that should work. Here

My RAM is two of these: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B005T63BJM

If we're talking brownouts just buy a UPS.

I have 7 of these.

https://www.amazon.com/APC-BR1000G-Back-UPS-8-outlet-Uninterruptible/dp/B0038ZTZ3W/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1467984046&sr=8-2-spons&keywords=APC+UPS&psc=1

Found it:

https://www.amazon.com/JINX-Minecraft-Portrait-Poster-Picture/dp/B00WNEU3B2

Look at the second image for that product.

So, now we have two questions. How did JINX decide to use modded Minecraft for their product, and why did Minecraft Merch steal the picture from them.

EDIT: As someone else pointed out, JINX does the merchandise for Mojang. So, it shouldn't be so surprising that this image appears both places.