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Commiellama

Powder kegs not quite what they were...

9 posts in this topic

In B78 powder kegs were incredibly difficult to get without sulfur, but they were immensely powerful and rewarding as tools for gathering ores or blowing yourself into many small pieces.

 

No longer are they days when we could set one off and gather a chest or two full of ore with a healthy potion of rocks and gems for good measure, but now...

 

 

 

A blast radius of 3 blocks in rock. 

 

 

 

In order to get a keg there's time spent finding sulfur, tool wear acquiring it, time spent finding saltpeter, a fair bit of pick axe wear digging that up, plenty of wear on the axe felling enough trees to fill up a charcoal pit, wear on the shovel digging up 128 pieces of charcoal, put it all together and you're rewarded with a small pop and maybe 8 pieces of ore. I feel the reward is nowhere near enough considering the time and effort to get 128 saltpeters, 128 sulfurs and 128 charcoals, that much charcoal alone could have fueled 4 max size blooms. Gather 384 resources to get about 8 back, and an hour's work for what could be done in a few seconds in a mine.

 

The scarcity of gunpowder in B78 meant that powder kegs weren't so overpowered even though they were re-usable, but now they are so useless I'm not sure why they're still in the game.

 

What do other people think, were B78 kegs too powerful, or okay considering the cost? Would we like B78 proportioned explosions again, or maybe even 50% of the old power?

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Bioxx stated in Paks TFC Tuesday stream that he was unhappy with results of b78 kegs and although they are currently reduced by 75% he intends on making them proportional to amount of powder in them.

But yeah the powder keg was more than a little disappointing. I was also annoyed with all the cobble. In end it took me about same amount of time to dig out all the cobble as it would have taken to dig out hole in its entirety.

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Would it make more sense to make powder kegs with variable payload amounts? Maybe there's the 100% full powder keg that has 100% of the power, but one with only 25% of the materials has 25% of the effect?

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Yes, as I said Bioxx stated that he wants blast to be proportional to amount of powder in them. So half full = half the power. I imagine since Bioxx didn't like the giant crater the old ones left he was going to change the mechanics before reimplementing the power. But this was via a stream chat, not a Q&A, so hard to know exactly what he means.

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Just for reference, in my dev environment I changed the blast strength back to the original value and set off a powder keg at the top of an ore vein. I had located the vein in a previous save and then recreated the world, so there was literally no terrain removed except for a 1x1 tunnel going straight down to the top of the vein, and the block next to the keg to place the torch. The explosion resulted in 20 stacks of ore. The vein just happened to be rich native gold, so that was 112 ingots worth of gold. Even if the vein had been of poor quality, that is still 48 ingots. Also with the change making the blocks more likely to turn into cobblestone rather than drop rocks, my inventory was essentially clean except for the ore, and the occasional gem and raw stone block. I didn't have to sit there and compress all of the rock into cobblestone to free up inventory slots, or worry about having chests or something to put all the junk away so that I had inventory space to collect all the ore before it despawned. Yes the cobblestone would be a pain to clean up if you wanted to go through and find any ore that you might have missed, but other than that there's really no reason to not just leave it all there.

 

The 78 kegs were ridiculously OP. Even if a system is implemented where the blast is proportional to the powder inside, I would not be surprised if it was made so you have to fill the entire barrel (12 stacks) with gunpowder to get back to the old size.

 

Edit: To put that into perspective, a full size blast furnace is made with 152 wrought iron ingots. All it would take is 2 powder kegs in a rich vein and you would have enough ore to make the full size blast furnace, a steel anvil, and still have about enough iron ore to make a full set of steel armor and weapons/tools.

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I didn't feel too cheaty with the gains from B78 kegs because I knew to get to that point I'd killed hundreds of creepers, which involved dancing around hordes of skeletons to get to them, it was a long process but was definitely very rewarding at the end. Now that gunpowder is much easier to acquire, I accepted that the keg wouldn't be reusable and felt that it could be less powerful to compensate for the ease of acquisition, but it should at least be a viable mining option, as it is you need to put way more resources into it than you get out.

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its not very believable that it would give you all the resources back, should just be made cheap and fixed.

 

It should just be a very convenient way to clear large tunnels into the earth. If you have the resources to make the barrel you are probably bored of digging anyway.

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It should just be a very convenient way to clear large tunnels into the earth.

 

Powder kegs make big circular craters in the earth.. not tunnels. They are intended to be used for basically destroying and clearing out relatively large areas of terrain.

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You could keep the current blast radius but lower the amount of gunpowder needed to 32. People still have to go through getting all 3 materials for it, the placement of the keg and safe retrieval of dropped items. Right now, it's more worth it to use your gunpowder on fireworks than on barrels ^^

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