SevTech RevIewFirst off, I am not Sevadus, I acknowledge Darkosto did not make this pack for me. I’m your typical power-gamer, and I like modded minecraft for the overwhelming variety of options to play the game. This review is to help other people who are also not Sevadus figure out whether or not SevTech is a fitting pack to play for them. This is not a coward’s review, and I’ll keep my thoughts straightforward, however I also don’t believe in calling a pack ‘ohmagerdbest4eva’ or ‘steaming garbage’ due to the amount of configurations and variety of tastes. instead it depends on whether or not if the pack is a good fit for you to play, and I’m judging this pack based on how well it fit my expectations, and if the pack remained consistent with its pacing.Tldr; Starts off great, and meets the hype associated with the pack, until you get to Age 5. And then it becomes a kitchen sink pack with many unchanged recipes, and lack of mod intergration between them, the rewards and payoff don’t seem very balanced. The pack really ends in Stage 4, collapses in Stage 5, and you can see my specific commentary on Creative Stage way below.Expectations My expectation for the pack was a progression pack to play with friends, and hoping to learn how to use some new mods I really didn’t try before such as BWM or at least figure out some new mod interactions that I haven’t heard of before. Judging by Darkosto’s style I wasn’t expecting anything close to PO2:K’s style of op’ness, or an almost fanatical approach to progression, but something more relaxed. But then again I’ve also heard that Sevadus wanted to play this pack for six months straight.PlayThrough Started with the pack on v3.0.3 with 4 players total, which helped mitigate a lot of the RNG and exploration challenges early on. My total tim was 7.5 days, Qvist was 3.5 days, and I couldn’t get the time play of the other two, but it seemed they were mostly comparable. Right now on v3.0.6 we have crafted the Creative Power Cube, Creative Modifier, Creative jJetpack, and are waiting on the 2M Blank Slates needed for the 4 Tier 16 Blood Tanks, as well as our cobblegen farm to produce the Ocutuple Compressed Cobble, and the 6M Stone also needed for the Blood Runes for the Blood Tanks, everything else is pretty much set, so even if I didn’t fire up the pack tomorrow, I would consider it a legitimate playthrough in my eyes. Now that you have context, let’s go to the actual review.ConsStagingNot a fan of staging overall. I think it falls into the trap of ‘this is cooler to develop and create’ than it is actually to play, which I think makes it overhyped in the pack development community This is going to be a more personal point than other bullets, but the idea of having information hidden to you somewhat in a progression pack is worrisome, a typical scenario being that you set up a farm for wheat/sugar cane/ etc. based on the current information you have, and then later on when you unlock some recipes, you get punished for not knowing that carrots were the main microcrafting ingredient in the next stage (this didn’t actually materialize in SevTech, but the fear was constantly there most of the time, and just not having an ability to figure out what was really needed felt like it hindered the experience more than helped).A more concrete feelbad example was early on one of my teammates broke rocks in the chunks all around our base before we told him about the obscure trick with Geolosys (if a rock doesn’t auto break, it’s a sample in disguise), causing us to lose possible information on nearby chunks we had. To be honest the psychological annoyance at losing information was greater than the actual material loss, but I mean I judge things by fun most of the time, and it didn't feel fun at the time.Implementation of magic mods (specifically AbyssalCraft, Astral Sorcery, Blood Magic) Blood Magic and Abyssalcraft felt like they were just shoe-d into the pack Hunting shoggoths / getting them to build early on was pretty fun, especially with your limited toolset, however after that pretty much all required Abyssalcraft progression just drops away, you never need it again except for the odd Shard of Oblivion or two in the Creative Compressor recipe. Astral Sorcery was pretty much ungated by Stage 3 leading to a lot of progression breaks (can do into more details in comments below or look up the issues I made in SevTech Tracker)Lack of Balance Between Choices (so they don’t feel like real choices)I’m not the type of person who goes for variety in methods for the sake of variety, maybe I’ll try something different just to learn, but if it’s clearly obvious there are better ways to do something, I’m not going to diversify into the worse choice.Specifically the biggest offender was Refined Storage (and the QuantumStorage / RebornStorage addons) versus Applied Energistics by itself The quantum disk is the default recipe and is intended to stay that way which pretty makes any other storage kind of obsolete, and this is available early in Stage 5.Normally I’d score a point for Applied Energistics in terms of autocrafter speed, and it’s also easier to parallelize due to how ME Interfaces and Molecular Assemblers interact, however the microcrafting in the pack isn’t very demanding, so there’s less of a reason to go ME, and lastly Reborn Storage (Refined Storage gets two addons, Applied Energistics gets none) just puts it over the top.Astral Sorcery’s gating was just untouched at Stage 2 or 3, if you knew how the tools or rituals worked, you could’ve made Obsidian tier tools that could mine faster than Cobalt, or vein mining axes before you even had the vein mining enchantment unlocked, the Illumination Wand creates witherproof blocks, and the Vicio Mantle + Vicio Wand (Stage two) is available earlier and leaves the entire Viescraft mod and even up to Diamond jetpack in the dust. Let's not even mention Armara.The final point I want to make here is that balancing between what each mod does best is VERY difficult (and that difficulty only scales with the number of mods included), but it’s not impossible, some packs like GTNH, ATM:ER (All the Mods Team took two attempts, but ATM:ER was worth it), and AoE all pull this off nicely in providing progressive choices, and if there’s more than one choice of similar power levels - then they will alter recipes/gate them appropriatelyBetween Lands / Twilight Forest / BeneathThe integration of BetweenLands was pretty skimpy and was focused only on traditional resource gathering such as mining/caving in the BetweenLands, and being another dimension to geolosys veins if you want. It felt like there was a lot of missed potential in asking the player to hunt down a ShallowBreath or take over a Wight Forterss at a later stage.Beneath inclusion also felt unnecessary or redundant, it only had two resources, and while you could hunt mobs in there, you also had the hunting dimension. The mod could be removed and the resources could be in BetweenLands or Twilight Forest and I don’t think I would’ve noticed.TF was same old song and dance. Run in, kill the bosses, and then use either a vital mob drop as part of the recipe, or use the trophy as a part of a recipe. The one nice change was the caminite reactor as part of a crafting recipe, as that required finding something in world - but personally I didn’t think it was novel enough and by the time it we finished the Livh Tower, most of the group felt like Twilight was still becoming a chore (yes this was without flight, and yes we were not attuned with Armara).LootTablesThis one is a bit minor but I thought that some of the loot tables changes were a bit heavy-handed or could’ve been implemented better. For example Enderman drop Ender Dust instead of Pearls, which is handled by In Control, however I don’t think in Control has a method to make the drop be affected by Fortune as it doesn’t actually change anything in the loot tables, and as far as I’’m aware focuses on the drop event (someone correct/confirm me).This issue also comes up with Blazes, if the plan was to make these somewhat rare but necessary mob drops not work with Looting, then maybe a blurb or two about Looting not working on them would’ve been nice.Same with fishing loot tables/Nether Fortress Loot Tables, I’m assuming it was partially to accommodate some of the early game functions (such as spear fishing) and to remove the chances of powerful books like Mending from fishing, however using LootTweaker instead of InControl for fortune drops, and then editing to only remove books from loot tables could’ve also worked.EndgameI’ve decided to move most of the endgame criticism and review to the bottom as part of things I’m discounting because a) I’m not sure if the endgame I experienced will be the same after Darkosto updates it and b) I’m not sure if the majority of people will make it to endgame, so it’s less relevant anyways.ProsTerrific Early Game with so many improvements done to explorationSo first shout out to Blargerist and Dimensional Control, which is the mod behind the logical heat map for the biomes, it’s a very intimdating mod, but very powerful tool for pack devs (you can even use it to re-create Quark’s realistic… without Quark gasp).Where do I even start with this? Sevtech had a lot of hype going into it (at least from my circle I normally talk with on Discord) and it felt like the early to midgame met all of that hype. Starting off as vanilla with no mapping, moving to antique atlas, and then moving to JourneyMap felt like such a smooth progression. It was very well done, no other way to put it.The biggest issue with exploration is the RNG element to it. Unfortunately that’s also the best element of it. By using a heat map, yet still asking the player to go to various biomes is a great way to mitigate the frustration of the RNG, while keeping the nice parts of exploration. It’s the equivalent of saying, you have to explore a certain amount, BUT if you get really unlucky, there’s a soft cap of 3k blocks traveled that you will find what you are looking for, it just gives the player at least some feeling there is a light of the end of the tunnel.I also feel like most developers would just throw in Nature's Compass mod, alter it with a slightly ‘grindy’ recipe to mitigate the exploring effect and call it a day - the idea to use the heat map was just 10/10 and way more innovative.Not to mention how DIFFICULT it is to develop worldgen either from a pack developer or mod developer perspective, with constantly restarting worlds, dealing with structure generation, proper exploring rewards, or bizarre mod interactiosn with worldgen, such as an AE2 meteor destroying a slime island, causing the slime to leak onto a volcano. It certainly beats putting nine cobblestone into a 3x3 grid, and then repeating that 7 more times.Ore Dictionary / Metals / Microcrafting CleanlinessAnother shoutout to Darkosto (and FirstNecron helping him with scripting) as the pack consistently stuck to ONE TYPE OF INGOT from a mod (only Mek's Osmium, or only IE's Copper, etc all throughout). It basically rendered the ore dictionary redundant for most metal processing, and while this had some minor quirks (eg. GalaticCraft forcing its ores to process ONLY into its own ingots, so most GalaticCraft ores weren’t usable to a degree), figuring out recipes was such a breeze. You didn’t need to review a recipe 3-4 times over, patiently waiting for JEI to cycle through all of the different types of stupid copper and figuring out which one had the best copper processing.Some might be once again disappointed that they can’t min-max the system by finding out specifically that XYZ’s mod offers a 2.2x multipler versus 2x from ABC mod, but I don’t think that was in the spirit of the pack, overall the clarity of the ore processing and crafting it provided was great. Also personally I don't think JEI diving makes for great gameplay content anyways.I want to re-iterate point number 1, I’m not a modder or a professional coder, but what was done with the Zenscript with the pack is some real shit. If you are an aspiring pack-dev or looking for certain ideas or ways on how to implement things, I highly recommend checking out and poking around SevTech’s scripts (although if you’re a beginner, I recommend checking out the scripts in ATM3, SevTech is if you already have some experience).Clarity and ProgressionSo this is where you can start seeing the benefits of Staging, by limiting information and combining it with a nice tree of advancements, it's clear to figure out what you can/cannot craft or do, and made pacing early on very seamless. Some players might like diving deep into JEI and figuring out their options or doing their due diligence, it’s a fun part of the decision making process, but personally the less time I can spend on doing the research and just making the builds, the more fun it is for me, and it was almost always clear on what direction I had to take. Also the advancements were very well done and well-named. I honestly think players have a pretty low standard for questbooks, because even a poorly written manual is still valuable source, but when you get a nice, clearly written one, the difference is so much more stark.Early Game Mod Integration Can I just point out how much of a genius it is to take a simple ‘rock’ form ImmersiveCraft, then using GameStages to disguise it as a ‘Sample’ from Geolsoys, or even a Custom Sample made by ContentTweaker? I’m still blown away by the simple combination of an item and a worldgen mod to make for this very nice progressive experience (minus the whole feelbad situation I mentioned earlier). The use of Mob Stages was smooth, and removing Skeletons from the early game was great, and later stage zombies had diamond armor (I mean it still made them trivial to deal with, but it's a nice appreciable effect).RecipesOne nice recipe was for making Industrial Foregoing cases, which either needed an expensive 5x5 crafting recipe, or a less expensive 3x3 in-world crafting recipe from Compact's Machines Miniturization Field. I think that in-world processes are just a great way to play minecraft instead of GUI Simulator 9000 (eg. see Botania's popularity), and automating the Compact machines crafting with in-world builders was fun. Personally I'd love to see a pack with Funky Locomotion and Compact Machines really push the limits on autocrafting with miniturization fields.Things That I’m Purposefully Discounting for This Review: StagingStaging was just not performant at all at various points in the pack, I’ve even seen streamers with powerful builds just entirely freeze up as you re-render when you get to the next stage, and JEi needs to be re-synced with all of the recipes even when you transfer dimensions. Another issue was just by logging in you could get rendering issues occasionally, where fences are planks, the ore you were just missing is stone and etc. However this is modded minecraft, and it comes with the territory, so that's why I'm discounting it, but it was a constant nagging issue in the pack.Progression BreaksThere were a number of progression breaking bugs you just could not get around without either using creative mode, or updating/editing the pack scripts/configs yourself, I’m not including these because I’m assuming that it’s fixed or will be fixed by the time the majority of players get to the lategame, you can search my name in the Issues tracker of SevTech for the progression breaks I found but it ranged from advancements not triggering properly, ores not dropping in correct quantities or even at all, quartz grindstone being the only machine that can process titanium, etc, all of these are fixable though and don’t seem intentional, so I'm discounting them, I'm assuming future players won't have this problem.RecipesThere were a lot of thematic inconsistencies that really ruined the pacing of the endgame or just made unnecessary things inconvenient, the link should explain it all, I'm assuming it will get addressed, and since it has been acknowledged, I'm discounting it from the review.Certain ModsI didn’t like the inclusion of Mo’Bends, BetterFoiliage, Fancy Block Particles, or Realistic Item Drops. I was able to disable BetterFoilage and SmoothFont with configurations, but couldn’t figure out if I could disable the others while connecting to the same server as my friends.Twilight Forest and Betweenlands PerformanceAs expected, they were extremely non-performant when it comes to world generation. But as usual that comes with the territory. Pregen chunks if you have the capability.EndgameIt’s not that the endgame is ‘bad’, or even ‘unfinished’. In fact it’s more accurate to say that the endgame felt like it was barely touched, some creative recipes were put together as stretch goals as acknowledge for the powergaming minority (that’s a pro).Aside from the issues already mentioned in the ‘Thematic Inconsistencies’ link, I wholly disliked the ExtraPlanets implementation in the pack, there’s nothing wrong in the mod itself, but the pack barely made use of the resources of different generation of each planet. I’d imagine a lot of players would be losing interest or motivation in Stage 5 when the pack opens up hugely to only be a kitchen-sink (its a disappointing twist in pacing and in progression) and then have to grind through a bunch of planets repeating the same task of finding a dungeon, killing larger version of overworld mob, and ignoring/out-regenerating the effects of environmental damage.Lastly, it’s time to bring up the creative recipes and Blood magic again, in vanilla Blood Magic, the Tier 6 Altar is unobtainable, but The creative energy cube also requires some advancement in Environmental Tech, which came out of nowhere as the pack didn’t really ask for any ET progress beforehand, and it felt like it was just a slapped-on timegate since ET multiblocks (default recipes) only use items obtainable in ET. It would’ve been nice to say that there are naturally spawning Erodium/Pladium blocks in Omothol (final Abyssalcraft dimension), to give a player to go to AC progression if they don’t want to spend time chunkloading some void miners There’s a couple more, but really you can also just look up my issues I made on the GH if you want more details, will follow-up tomorrow.ConclusionAll in all, it was a fun pack, and when commenting below, please keep in mind this pack was provided free to you, and if wasn't technically designed with most players in mind (although that also shouldn't be an entirely get out of jail card when it comes to criticism). And remember if the pack just stops being fun to play, instead of lashing out and bashing on it... you can just play another pack.WILD Speculation (the fun part)Maybe the pack may have been released earlier than was originally planned? It didn’t feel finished or endgame definitely needs to be hashed outMaybe Applied Energistics 2 was only added so that darkosto doesn’t have to deal with all of the people who compalined about AE2 not being in Sky Factory 3?Tips and TricksI'm going to be adding some of my builds and tips to the Google Doc by Borg, it'll be too much for this one thread already. via /r/feedthebeast https://ift.tt/2GVGPpe
No comments:
Post a Comment