A few suggestions on additions to the tech tree

[staygr...@gmail.com]

While the obvious urgent matters are being tended to (XP rebalance, enchanting and repairs) I would like to request some comments and ideas on what features you see next as enhancing the game experience.

I personally feel that something is needed to give gameplay more realism and encourage innovation by giving users tools to go experiment with.

Here are a few of my thoughts, obviously I am only writing this to encourage more ideas. 

- 1) Item Compactor/Decompactor: While I have already brought this up on the list a while back, it feels to me as if this sort of factory can only help encourage trade by finally making it practical and worthwhile to trade very cheap goods which people don't even bother moving like rotten flesh, carrots, gravel and so on. This because the transport is currently unwieldy and with sharding coming up, it seems as if it only makes sense to give back something for the headache of breaking up rail lines and established transport infrastructure that took months if not longer to build. Lots to fine-tune here, can items that don't stack get compacted? What about those that only go to 16 per stack like pearls, signs and such? Can enchanted items be compacted?  

- 2) Item Recycler: While this has been kicked around before, this has obviously not been a priority. Would finally give more for newfriends to do, and for more experienced players as well. To reuse all of the junk we throw away now. Also would be a good way to reduce inventories by incentivizing these transformations. But generally speaking, I'd see it as something great because it makes players sensitive to garbage being an issue. What is the material that gets output from such a recycler? Should the cost be trivial to encourage use?

-3) Multi-block Factories: (reminder) This has been getting quite a lot of traction in previous discussions as a way to reduce botting and would love to not see this being ignored. It will obviously allow for a tremendous expansion of the tech tree. Possibly a way to eliminate all of these hoppers currently lagging things out. Very important to flesh out what they would do, and design a whole framework for these to be put together.  

- 4) Wireless Communication Protocol: To me this feels like it could lead to some pretty amazing contraptions being built. Sending commands to devices across the server. And the ability to manage snitch networks from a distance. Programmable rail without massive redstone multi-line traces running alongside rail lines. Many things we really need. Basically leveraging the http messaging that programs like macromod allow us to. This is the future, and I've been dreaming about how exciting it could make some things be compared to what we have now.

- 5) Online Banking: pruby (currently on sabbatical) was mentioning to me that he couldn't run ripplepay anymore due to the fact that NoCheatPlus would constantly kick his bot, and there's nothing he could do about it. Not sure that's the only reason he hasn't reactivated it, but certainly having specific entities be granted exemptions from these banning programs would seem to me to be a sensible thing, Could bring accusations of favoritism and lead to monopolistic rule, I guess. But certainly it seems to me that it would be a hell of a lot better than staying in the medieval times of having to constantly carry hard currency with us, as IRL has demonstrated it's not really much of a popular anymore. Civilizations evolve, we need to bring these modern features to CivCraft instead of staying in the Stone Age of commerce. Could lead to stock trading finally becoming interesting, and many more things.

[justin kilpatrick]

1) I like the idea of a general compactor, I think its worth making, I think the point of a general compactor is that it would take a double chest worth of stuff and turn it into one item, no exceptions or other rules required, if we make it too complicated people will not use it. 

2) How exactly would you recycle stuff? Would it just take junk and output useful stuff? 

3) Gmlax started contraptions, in which all of these ideas (1-5) would fit quite well, its designed to be a super flexible future of factorymod and in game automation, he has had to step out due to real world issues, but the idea lives up and every time we have to say "well a compactor would be a new type of factory and be a lot of work to make in FM" I think of contraptions and how its not only easier but designed with these sorts of expansions in mind, not to mention stuff like long distance communication and more elegant in game automaton that is both efficient and flexible. 

4) see 3, we can't sustain much more automation without a huge focus on efficiency. 

5) see 3, his bots problem was with gravity, he never could figure it out and we where always hesitant to grant exceptions. 

[Jacob Sokora]

Ttk I was thinking one stack to one item for compactor but still same concept

[justin kilpatrick]

the issue is getting compactor items to stack, do we want them too?

[Jacob Sokora]

I would say yes. That way you can compact things nicely without giving too much advantage. If it compacts a doublechest into one item you can carry 64 double chests in one slot. With one stack to one item it's just a bit more than a double chest per slot which I think is more balanced. You also wouldn't be able to compact anything with lore

[justin kilpatrick]

no lore?

[Jacob Sokora]

Yeah because the way the compactor works is it takes the first stack in the chest, plus a special item called a crate (just a chest with lore) and outputs one of the original item (let's say a carrot) with the lore "This is a compacted stack of items" or something like that. Then the decompactor would take any item with that lore and give you 64 of the same item type

[justin kilpatrick]

ah, so for full chest compaction of arbitrary items we would need to keep track of the lore of the item in a database and then use it to tell the decompactor what to place in a chest. 

[Jacob Sokora]

No need to put anything in a database, you just put a generic lore in the config and a compacted item is just a normal item with that lore