RFC: Automation challenge for the new elemental matter 2.0 multis

[RecursivePineapple]

Your GTNH Discord Username

recursive_pineapple

Your Pack Version

N/A

Your Proposal

I'm working on some new late game multis and I'd like some feedback on the automation challenge before I commit to anything. I think this will be a good feature but I don't want to make it excessively difficult (I like automation challenges so I'm not a good benchmark for this).

Your Goal

I'm currently working on some late game (UEV+) multis. Their goal is to reduce machine spam by adding several expensive but powerful machines that transform items into elemental matter, then back into various items. This is only meant for state/shape changes, so the machines won't ever replace EBFs, LCRs, etc, but they will replace bending machines, cutting machines, fluid extractors, etc.
Currently, they just take as much power as you can shove into them and I'm not a fan of how simple they are. They have a complex parallels system that runs as many recipes as it can within a recipe cycle, so I want to limit the parallels depending on how accurate the automation is, along with a hard cap governed by a tiering mechanic. My goal with this is to allow you to throw something together, but get a bad result (10-25% of the hard cap). The better your automation, the more parallels the machine will have.

The machines will keep track of several numbers, and you can feed specific items into an input bus to tweak these numbers. The accuracy is determined based on how close the numbers are to the machine's target (they can be positive or negative).

Let's say a machine starts with A=5, B=-2, C=8, D=4, with the targets set to zero. The total accuracy would be the absolute sum of all 4 numbers subtracted by their targets (|5 - 0| + |-2 - 0| + |8 - 0| + |4 - 0| = 19). The parallel equation would be something like parallels = cap * (sum == 0 ? 1 : (1 / sum)). If the hard cap was 10,000 then this machine would have ~526 parallels.
If we fed an item into the machine that decreases C by 4 but increases D by 2, you'd get an accuracy of 17, with a parallel count of ~588.

There would be around a dozen items with different effects, and each machine would have different targets. The items won't be too expensive since they'd be used in large quantities, but they also won't be cheap. I'm not sure if all machines of the same type will have the same targets, or if a machine will be imprinted with random targets when you place it (like the CAL). The numbers will be randomly modified up or down by 1 or 2 every recipe cycle, so you won't be able to manually fix the numbers without automation.

The numbers will be exposed by a custom hatch. You will be able to configure each hatch to compare one of the numbers with a constant and emit a redstone signal if the condition is true. Alternatively, you could scan the hatch to get all of the numbers (useful for opencomputers).

This would be automatable by redstone, but to get a good result you'd need to build a massive circuit or use opencomputers.

Your Vision

I think this will be a good addition because the late game because it's mostly waiting and multiblock spam. I think this automation puzzle will be an interesting open-ended optimization challenge; most 'official' automation in the game is success or failure, while the only optimization automation problems are the handful of emergent logistics problems.

I know that a lot of people want a solution that can be found on the wiki, so I've tried to make that possible. At the same time, I want to make the automation easy enough that most people wouldn't need to resort to that but complex enough to be rewarding. I think my proposal is simple enough, but I'd like to hear any comments or concerns first.

Final Checklist

• I have searched this issue tracker and there is nothing similar already. Posting on a closed issue saying I like this change please reconsider adding it will prompt us to investigate and reopen it once we confirm your report.
• I understand this change request may not attract enough attention and thus not be implemented.
• I understand this change request may be rejected due to other community members think it's inappropriate.
• I believe this feature would make the pack better.

[serenibyss]

I think this is far too much scope for one set of machines, covering a massive part of the later game machines with one thing, and boxing out space for more machines to do this a bit more dynamically. I think the automation described here has potential, and with some fleshing out, could be something pretty interesting if used for something more akin to waterline or godforge exotic materials where its very clearly a single challenge to solve and successfully automate to produce something required, rather than a challenge repeated many times potentially to achieve the breadth and scale of what this is trying to cover.

Ultimately: I would love to see this automation challenge expanded upon for something much smaller in scope, not for general material processing like is proposed here

[FourIsTheNumber]

Agree with maya, the challenge itself might be fine but the scope of the system is way way too high. There are already several proposals for various general processing machines that this system would obsolete with a single mechanic. This takes up way too much design space real estate and is ultimately not particularly interesting, since it is introducing a single automation challenge used for far too many things.

In theory, this should even obsolete things like black hole - you can arbitrarily exclude these components, of course, but that's an example of how much this limits the design space. The existence of this system would prevent making things like that in the future for a wide variety of processes.

[RecursivePineapple]

It's not really arbitrary. It's only meant for things that change the shape of a 'uniform' material without any chemical process. Lore wise the inputs get turned into atom soup (bose-einstein condensate) which is reassembled in another machine into a shape, so it can't accept something like wafers.
Basically, it's a fancy fluid extractor and fluid solidifier.

[FourIsTheNumber]

It's not really arbitrary. It's only meant for things that change the shape of a 'uniform' material without any chemical process. Lore wise the inputs get turned into atom soup (bose-einstein condensate) which is reassembled in another machine into a shape, so it can't accept something like wafers. Basically, it's a fancy fluid extractor and fluid solidifier.

It would be arbitrary to exclude black hole. I used that wording on purpose :P There's no logical reason such a machine could not produce superdense plates.

[RecursivePineapple]

@FourIsTheNumber Good timing, I was just going to reply again lol.
It'll never replace your multis. It'll be able to make metal blocks, but it definitely won't be able to make super dense plates or singularities. The last step works by 3d printing atoms and it wouldn't have enough force to be able to compress metal, so it wouldn't make sense lore-wise.

[EnderProyects]

@FourIsTheNumber Good timing, I was just going to reply again lol. It'll never replace your multis. It'll be able to make metal blocks, but it definitely won't be able to make super dense plates or singularities. The last step works by 3d printing atoms and it wouldn't have enough force to be able to compress metal, so it wouldn't make sense lore-wise.

So it would only work for plates, foils, screws, rings ( all of that) ... until a certain tier, like idk ZPM or UV? ( I dont mean energy tiers, I mean lockeable material tiers)

[FourIsTheNumber]

@FourIsTheNumber Good timing, I was just going to reply again lol. It'll never replace your multis. It'll be able to make metal blocks, but it definitely won't be able to make super dense plates or singularities. The last step works by 3d printing atoms and it wouldn't have enough force to be able to compress metal, so it wouldn't make sense lore-wise.

I know you would not have replaced it, my point was not about black hole specifically (since this would obviously be excluded for balance reasons), but about the way in which replacing so many machines (cutter, bending machine, extruder, solidifier, fluid extractor, mixer (?)) would severely limit future design space and would throw out a bunch of other things.

[FourIsTheNumber]

In general I dislike the idea of condensing so many things into a single mechanic, when there is ample design space for a host of unique multis/mechanics for lategame processing right now.

[RecursivePineapple]

I don't see it as taking the other multi's place because there are multiple paths to making the same part (eg plates). You could solidify plates, bend plates or extrude plates. They all have trade-offs, just like this will have trade offs with the other multis.
Will there only be one way to do things in the late game? That seems like an odd choice to me when the early game has so many alternatives.

[RecursivePineapple]

@EnderProyects I'm not sure where the limit will be, but I imagine there would be one. Fluid extractors and solidifiers don't really have tiers since most of the recipes are MV, even though it makes zero sense.

[EnderProyects]

@EnderProyects I'm not sure where the limit will be, but I imagine there would be one. Fluid extractors and solidifiers don't really have tiers since most of the recipes are MV, even though it makes zero sense.

I mean that there are certain materials that doesnt make sense to "reconfigure the atoms" like many post mid game alloys, magic materials and scify ones, I like the idea, but for periodic table and mundane materials/alloys

[FourIsTheNumber]

I don't see it as taking the other multi's place because there are multiple paths to making the same part (eg plates). You could solidify plates, bend plates or extrude plates. They all have trade-offs, just like this will have trade offs with the other multis. Will there only be one way to do things in the late game? That seems like an odd choice to me when the early game has so many alternatives.

This seems like a stretch. There is virtually always a single processing machine for any purpose - in your example, extruder is just objectively worse and not used for plates. Bender is always superior. Fluid extractor is used in cases where you have fluid. Very rarely for specific materials this recipe ends up being faster, but this is hardly a common occurence.

The "how should I make plates flowchart", for the entire game, looks like:
Do I have ingots -> bending machine
Do I have fluid -> fluid solidifier
Did I suffer head trauma -> extruder

Your system inherently does not distinguish between fluids and ingots so it removes even this minor distinction. So no, I don't really see it as likely that we could create another general processing machine that could compete with this system without obsoleting it entirely.

[RecursivePineapple]

@FourIsTheNumber Which multis are planned? Reducing this to only being a fluid extractor kinda gimps the vision, but I haven't worked on the other output multis yet.

[serenibyss]

In general, late/endgame multis should favor specialization rather than combining more mechanics into one trivializing machine or set of machines. This RFC proposes the opposite, so it should be reduced in scope or should pull the favorable parts of its mechanics out into something else. While there may not be many "firm plans" at the moment for many of these machines, its loosely planned to do this for spammed earlier tier machines

[RecursivePineapple]

@serenibyss @FourIsTheNumber
I've thought about this for a bit and I've decided to reduce the scope to only fluid extracting materials. In exchange I'll add a new assembler that uses items, fluids, and elemental matter. IMO, it'd feel half-finished if I made 3 multis and this new system for only 1 task.

I'll see if I can come up with any other useful machines that don't interfere with the existing plans, but I still have no idea what those plans are, so expect to be bothered again lmao.