Delerium76

Not abandoned. I found a recent post from Onewolfe in the FTB forums for this modpack. Here's what he said:

odd, I never encountered them actually escaping the pen until TFC. I've seen that glitch described in that post, but for me they just "glitched" like a phantom, but stay inside. Also, it was 2 cows with a 3x3 space to roam, so they aren't exactly being pushed like that post described.

For some reason my cows keep escaping their pens. I'm guessing it might be due to the varying size mechanic, not sure. For the time being, I blocked them in with wooden walls, although it's ugly and feeding them is a pain, it prevents the escape.

sweet. those were my main gripes, other than that great modpack!

Love that there is a Terrafirma pack on FTB, but I have a few complaints about modpack choices here: 1. Mapwriter keeps losing my waypoints (and imho it's very clunky to begin with). Might want to replace it with another map tool (or do what most of the other packs do and package several together disabled) 2. Thut's modpack keeps spawning volcanos everywhere, which brings my pc to a grinding halt, and I really don't see what this modpack brings to the table. Sadly, I'm afraid to remove it on my current game since it generates all those blocks I'm not sure what it will do to my existing world. 3. Enviromine "air quality" really really sucks. The air filter mask is so late game to make with the materials, and since this mod shifts the water level up high, this mod has you digging pretty deep just to get there. Overall it just feels like there needs to be some tweaking to bring a bit more of the basics to the early game, and that goes for terra in general. Way too much of this game is packed behind grind. While I do like grind, I also like to feel like I'm progressing somewhere, and right now I feel like I'm not.

Yet the usability problem still exists due to the fact that until you can make a red steel bucket (pretty far into the game), you can only build a sluice around surface water, and even then as I have mentioned before, it's annoyingly time consuming to build one around a lake or ocean due to the sand/dirt/gravel sliding everywhere as you dig your trenches for the sluice, requiring at least 2 blocks below water level to complete. Then you have to wait eons for the sluice to even find something (if it even does), and with such a low probability of a return, there's no guarantee that it will spit out a representation of the metals below it before it hits the "exhausted" point, then you are moving on to the next location and waiting again. None of this even sounds appealing, and to be honest it would probably be faster finding everything by roaming the landscape just searching that "10-20%" that you claim is small. So yeah, sluice is probably useless to me.

oh perhaps you are right there, but I'm not one of those players who ever saw it or used it in it's "abused" form, yet I still find it's functioning a bit understated for the trouble it takes to make it. I literally tossed mine away after using it once. Perhaps later I might use one again once to "prospect" and find a rare mineral I can't find, but to be honest, I feel like that prospecting ability should be attached to something other than a "sluice", because intuitively people just won't logically think, "oh I should carry this big thing around me for miles, take a while to set it up at each location, just to see what metals are in the ground below me" For this purpose the prospecting tool should be more portable.

Your last line is exactly it, but not in the point you seem to be trying to make. Gameplay/balance would be that the quantity produced in the game be greater than real life (contrary to your first paragraph)simply for the sake of usefulness, otherwise it will never be used,and the believability/reality aspect would be HOW the tool works.

ok, while I agree with you about all these points, you aren't really talking about the sluice. To be honest, a sluice isn't a prospecting tool in real life as has been pointed out. It's used in conjunction with a gold pan for a hobbyist to collect gold and rare gemstones from streams. The only thing it tells you about location is that gold deposits are "Somewhere" up-stream, which in all honesty could be quite far from that spot, and likewise it relies on your gravel and debris collection to actually come from that spot (which isn't how the sluice works in-game, as you could get your gravel from anywhere. Here's my thoughts. Most, if not all, lakes in the game have gravel at the bottom. Worldgen could place "special" gravel at these locations (changed to regular gravel if manually picked up), and when attaching a sluice to this lake it would "convert" this special gravel (perhaps in a radius around the sluice) to regular gravel, with ore being the byproduct. Now, the type of ore could still be indicative of the minerals below the lake, or it could be random. This would allow us to acquire more minerals from larger bodies of water, but still be based on "using something to get something" instead of getting "something for nothing".

I just started this pack yesterday, and from a new player perspective, setting up and using a sluice was a disappointment. Early game I have found no way to transport water so the only means i had to make a sluice was to create a runoff from a lake. This was time consuming and a little frustrating due to the dirt/gravel block physics of this mod. After getting it all set up, I throw gravel in it whenever I pass by and check it's contents. In the whole time from creation to overworked over the course of a day or two, it generated 1 small ore, period. I don't see it being useful as a prospecting tool either (and believable factor, it's a little silly), because it's such a cumbersome thing to set up that most people would just rather forget it altogether. With my experience, after I picked it back up I chucked it in a chest to be forgotten. What's the point of a tool that doesn't get used?