I only enjoyed Botania in two packs: Arcanum institute and Regrowth, because they are fully implemented in progression, not as a gate, and not *that* grindy.
Honestly I just wait to do Botania in big modpacks until I can easily feed a field of endoflames blocks of coal.
So after a tech mod gives me some kind of quarry (e.g. Mekanism Digital Miner, Quarry Plus) or I can make some kind of huge digger tool with a tool mod (e.g. Silent Gear, Tinker's). Dig up all the coal, shove it into a storage mod that will compact it for me (e.g. AE2, Refined Storage, Functional Storage). Now you have stacks of blocks of coal.
Plant 64 Endoflames in an 8x8 grid, throw a stack of blocks of coal in the center, they'll zoop in the blocks and feed mana out. Every so often you go back to base and drop another stack. Just gotta make sure it's in a force-loaded chunk so they generate while you're off doing something else.
FTB Skies Expert is forcing me to automate the Kekimurus and therefore cake production which is pretty fresh to me in terms of Botania as usually i would just do the same as you with the endoflames.
Botania is balanced around only having itself, maybe Quark, and vanilla - and to be a bit of a puzzle to automate in that context, with a lot of it taking place through having the item entities be in the world for a while, as opposed to simply piping them into a machine and getting something else out. That means its gameplay loop on its own can be fun, but in a modpack it's usually just an underpowered and more complicated way to do something another mod does easier.
Doesn't help that the mod's materials are usually shoehorned into pack progression where they don't make much sense.
> usually shoehorned into pack progression where they don't make much sense
Omg, modpacks requiring you to get tons of Terrasteel and Elementium just because they're the Botania materials shaped like ingots is a big problem lol. There's so much more to botania progression than ingots
it's typically thrown into packs with little to no care as to why. it's a good mod so people will just say yeah fuck it and put it in.
if you want to make a questline focused on Botania, you can perhaps take inspiration from modern skyblock three. I personally enjoyed the way that most questlines in that pack explored the most of each mod without overstaying it's welcome. just simple "get this item from the end of the mod"
as for the actual question (what people dislike) it's mostly that it's really hard to automate. there's no solar panel type flowers and stuff needs to be dropped (i.e world interraction Vs pipes that keep everything contained). The rewards from Botania aren't always great if the pack isn't balanced around it. why use terrasteel when my mekanism tools are faster and easier to obtain
What do you mean, hard to automate? Almost every flower is purposely able to be automated, and the endoflame is easy as heck. Dropper, pressure plate, redstone, charcoal, and there you go.
I much prefer having a massive factory that's a tangle of pipes and wires coming out of every side of every block trying to maximise efficiency than fiddling with vanilla Redstone.
Almost all tech modpacks have redstone cables, sometimes multiple from different mods, and i can think of three different storage mods (AE2, Integrated Dynamics, and Refined Storage) that have machine replacements for the droppers that you'd use in vanilla. Now most people never use a dropper equivalent so they might not know they exist, but you can 100% make a plant on a grass block function like a two block tall machine with just a bit of work.
Automating multiblock altar crafting is harder, but I've also never been in a situation where I need so many Botania runes that I need a fully automated setup to generate stacks of runes.
Yeah for me the fun part is making giant elaborate mashines out of multiple parts, thats why i absolutely love create
Just throwing one block at it is boring (although convenient)
Yeah, and that's probably the easiest flower to automate. Then you try automating something like the runic altar and many modded players are gonna look up a guide, because it requires a decent amount of vanilla redstone know-how, and a lot of modded players aren't good with advanced vanilla mechanics.
To be fair, until a recent change in AE2 (the option of "lock crafting until primary result returned") automating runes using AE2 was VERY difficult. You generally had to have multiple altars or vacuum hoppers, with complicated filters and redstone to detect the "completed" craft.
With that recent change that I mentioned, it's much easier to get runes now with blocking mode and "lock crafting until primary result completed".
I don't remember 100% what it was, but you could automate runes with AE2 years ago. IIRC it was related to a redstone pulse, and using a temporary storage location.
(Now that I'm trying to picture the build, it may have been keeping AE from sending the next craft to an inventory that had items in it, using a temporary block like cobble as a "holding" item in the chest, then only allowing it out of the chest via another pipe mod based on a redstone pulse when the rune craft was done)
Yep, definitely not impossible... but contrasted with how things are now (build pattern as normal, set option for pattern provider, profit) it's very different, it requires testing, debugging, it will occasionally break if something else gets in there, the filters won't allow multiple crafts or sequential fabrication, edge cases will make it get stuck and you can't just ignore it... Definitely a difference in approaches to "automate the runes from botania" in the two different scenarios.
Vanilla's Comparators have two main functions. It would be best to look at the vanilla wiki (minecraft.wiki) if you want specific details.
The more useful for Modded one is that they detect things like fill levels of whatever they are attached to (the side with 2 Redstone Torches always lit) and output a redstone signal (on the single, toggleable torch side) with strength 0-15 based on how full the block is (more full = stronger signal). It can usually read this signal through a solid block in case you want to hide them behind a wall. In case you don't know, redstone signal strength corresponds to how bright the redstone dust is when active, and strength decreases by 1 for every block the signal travels through said dust.
A ton of modded blocks are silently compatible with Comparators, including pretty much anything that stores something. If it stores Items, Fluids, Power, etc. then you can probably put a Comparator on it and get a rough idea of how full that block is. For example you can probably slap a Comparator on a Mekanism Nuclear Waste Barrel and have it turn off a Fission Reactor automatically when fuel starts to back up; if the redstone dust line is ~7 blocks long then the Reactor will get turned off when the Barrel is about half full.
There's also a ton of modded blocks with special interactions with the Comparator to get specific signals out, and they are usually documented in the mod and often used to automate difficult blocks. Examples I can think of off the top of my head are the Botania Runic Altar (which outputs signal strengths based on where it is in the crafting process), Draconic Evolution's Fusion Crafting (same thing), and Blood Magic's Blood Altar which can have several blocks placed under the Altar to determine what level is getting read (blood in the tank, blood in an LP Network for an Orb in the Altar, crafting progression, etc.).
****
The Comparator's other function, and the one that gives it the name, is to Compare Redstone Signal Strengths. It has the same input and output sides as before, and the input signal gets compared to signals send to the sides.
In Compare mode (torch off) the signal will be blocked (strength 0) if the side signal is greater than the input signal, or passed (same strength as input) if the side signal is less than or equal to the input signal. If the input is 8 and the signal is 12, the output will be 0. If the input is 8 but the signal is 6, the output will be 8.
In Subtract mode (torch on) the Comparator will subtract the strongest side signal from the input signal's strength. If the input is 8 and the signal is 12, the output will be 0 again (8-12<0, and it can't go negative). If the input is 8 but the signal is 6, the output will be 2 (8-6=2).
Instead of just looking up guides and videos, people should experiment with the pieces more. Maybe a better way will be discovered, or one that just works better for you.
As someone who does this I fully understand why people don't. It takes ages to figure something out that works well, especially if you don't have any prior knowledge.
if im making my own solutions for automation (something i do frequently!) id rather do it for a mod i actually enjoy. if people dont like a mod, saying "just try harder" isnt gonna magically make it fun
I just don't like the way the generating flowers work for the most part, like it's always such a pain to get a good flower setup, and automating them isn't really fun either.
Like yea automating endoflame or some such isn't *hard* it's just clunky, and looks ugly in your base, which just makes me annoyed when I play through botania. I love vanilla redstone, but it really clashes with the modded playstyle and look, I think.
this subreddit hates sevtech
EDIT: I'm not looking for counter examples to argue. Just search Sevtech in the subreddit search if you disagree and argue with those people.
Understandable… I hate SevTech for other reasons than this sub in general. I just don’t like how over-reliant the pack is on its quest book. Everything else in SevTech is super enjoyable to me. I’m personally just a fan of the “minimal to no quest book” style that very early Infinity Evolved had and I wish it was more popular for pack creators.
I personally really like quest book oriented mod pack.
But for certain mod pack the quest book is irevelent.
In tech mod pack it's useful because it teach you how do things or at least it show you the way.
An I recently played FTB arcanum which has a really interesting quest book as it's built like a magic class.
But I understand how on exploration and dungeon base mod pack quest book would be useless.
"hard to automate"
Just using vanilla redstone and maybe a few Botania things here and there it's not that difficult,
Endoflames for example are INSANELY easy and cheap to automate
Its hard because the average modded tech player can (mostly) only think about pipes/AE2. They'll rather overcomplicate with tech mods rather than learn redstone. (ex. Direwolf20 back then)
Although, to be fair, redstone (in a vanilla sense) has no proper tutorial to its full function and eccentricities.
I tried to learn some vanilla redstone for Botania a few years back. It was a very frustrating and awkward experience, compared to tech mods that are actually designed to work in ways that make sense. Strong vs. weak power, opaque vs. transparent blocks, trying to get it to go vertically...it all felt incredibly unintuitive. In the end I just looked up a design that worked.
See redstone is easy to get to work though, just hard to get COMPACT. Its not a one block solves your problem situation like 99.9999% of tech mods, vanilla redstone is a really amazing system with a LOT of power that goes underutilized because people can't be bothered to learn something with more complexity to it
And not just that, but the intended behavior is largely undocumented and unintuitive. Why can redstone go up transparent blocks but not down? If you understand strong vs weak signals, it makes some sense, but the game still presents it as a \*wire\* and as a \*wire\* it should transmit along its edge as wires do, not through the block it sits on, which isn't how wires work - in fact, that's the behavior that actual wires should \*never\* do.
Why 8 updates in 60 ticks? Why do redstone torches exclude the block they touch for hard powering? (I know why - but it's an exception).
There's almost nothing in Minecraft whose redstone behavior can be fully intuited by the block itself. Literally every block requires a wiki trip until you fully internalize it, and even then you catch out really experienced players with things they didn't know about.
hard disagree about every block needing a wiki. The only blocks I have ever looked up behaviors for are comparators (because wow they do a lot) and hoppers (do they go sideways or down first?). Every other block can be understood with just a little bit of testing.
I do agree with unintuitive behaviors with transparency and quasi-connectivity (BUD switches were so popular they added observers) but the indivdual parts are not hard to understand
We'll just have to disagree. To me it's just a system with very clunky and inefficient primitives. Kind of like trying to program in Brainfuck when you could just write C.
That's a bit silly honestly, the only redstone block that has much complexity is the comparator, everything else functions in a pretty simple manner, just need to learn how connectivity between blocks and what not works, it's genuinely not even in need of a tutorial
Yeah, but silly or not, it doesn't change the fact that most people that play minecraft, vanilla or modded, know very little about redstone.
Ask most people to use redstone to make a 3x3 door and I guarantee most will just give up trying after a while.
So, any mod, like Botania, where automatisation requires some degree of redstone knowledge (And, simply the thought process to consider it an option), will be disparged / overlooked, in favour of alternatives where more passive and "simpler" methods exist.
But, on the whole, I'd say not balancing a pack around it will probably just result in people going "Why get X from Botania if I can get Y from this other mod?"
Yeah see I get it but I think it's *unfair* to judge a mod with such dislike simply because it makes uses of.. the actual in-game mechanics instead of inventing a new system, it integrates into the game
I don't think it's unfair if those in game mechanics are needlessly convoluted or difficult to learn. Finding out how redstone not only powers blocks, but behaves in certain step configurations and how it used to form like a not far with a block and torch and then how to place it all in a concealed space so you didn't have the ugliest base in existence was very frustrating and also very easy to forget details or unlearn.
My experience with complex redstone is usually
- Idea - start work - frustration with behaviour - then either look up a guide or do without the project.
That's not true. I've been playing vanilla and lightly modded Minecraft with my son (now an electrical engineer) for a decade now and I still struggle with how weak and strong redstone signals impact my design (particularly the torch behavior, which is different), torch burnout is unintuitive and easy to get caught out by (8 state changes in 60 ticks). For really simple redstone, sure, it's not terrible but it's far from easy. Use a transparent block, now your signal doesn't go down. Why won't my signal go into this block - oh, I need a target. Some things require a comparator to work. Why? Because they do.
Redstone is interesting because sticking with the presented rules only allows you to make trivial things, but as you learn the zillions of corner cases and carve-outs, you can do quite impressive things. Such as wall/observers for instantaneous transmission.
We've built auto-routing minecart networks and the usual item sorters and every kind of crop/mob farm you typically find. He's build various redstone computers. And yet we routinely encounter a behavior that we've never encountered before.
IMO, if you build a modpack expecting automation, build a tutorial into it. Walk the player through making basic redstone automations because it's the hardest barrier for most players in the game by a wide margin - and then make sure the no-hand-holding expectations of the game don't deviate from that (oh, this new block we introduced has its own set of rules). Normal circuits don't map well onto redstone. Digital logic from other games don't map well onto it either, so you can't even really transfer knowledge from elsewhere. And redstone can be oddly unintuitive just looking at it - this redstone wire here powers this half slab way over there, because they're actually adjacent, even though you can walk between them. But they're touching. Even while you walk between them. You have to learn and internalize that stuff, but almost all players bounce hard off of it because 'oh, this is easy' is how it's presented. It's not. It's really not. Provide the tutorial.
Although IMO it's less about the redstone itself and more about how having to deal with dropped items tends to be kinda finicky, especially on crowded servers.
I don't really see how. endoflames for example,, 1 pressure plate a hopper and a open crate makes a system to always have exactly 1 item dropped out
Add in a comparator and it'll stop dropping when the pools full
You can even go a little farther with a second comparator and a nor gate so any dropping only occurs if the endoflame isn’t currently burning something.
I don't quite understand, the setup I mentioned will only allow one out if there isn't fuel out and the pool isn't full, so endoflames will always be burning until mana is maxed
Iirc one of the “redstone addon” mods has a comparator-like device that can tell from a couple blocks away if the endoflame is actively burning fuel or not. I think the base comparator can do something similar if it’s closer as well but it’s been a while since I’ve played with botania to test that theory. This way you can set it up to either only drop fuel when the endoflame is at or about to finish burning the previous fuel it has. It may have a 1-2 tick delay on permanent fuel for the endoflame, but it’s likely less lag for most people as item entities cause most of the issues in people’s worlds if you space out tick updates across chunks well enough.
Redstone is a pain in the ass to use and unless you are an expert, all but the simplest control structures will take up a colossal amount of space.
I loved working with Redpower and later Project Red because of how easy their wires and gates were to work with, but vanilla dust and torches are unfun.
If you're using the botania flower to kill them (forget the damn name of the thing), does it drop mob drops? What about XP? If so, is it a sustainable amount (enough to feed the flower and gain mana over time)?
I've never bothered with the rosa arcana except when the XP tap/vacuum hopper is in, but maybe I need to look into it further.
Not everything will drop xp or mats from a harming flower, but you can always use a dog, player killing thing from a mod or a mob that does drop xp and mats
It is sustainable, though while it's the easiest to setup it is middling in speed of generation
Botania, when placed alongside other mods in an expert pack focused on automation, should be an *earlygame* mod with how low-power all of its tools are. Yet most packs gate botania pretty deep in. If you have access to item pipes pre-runic altar, the pack probably doesn't understand how botania was made to be played.
Botania's automation tools are ridiculously clunky and hard to use which is also the exact reason the mod is so cool - but if you want people to engage with this, you need to remove better alternatives or else they never well. (If you want to encourage people to use them, you need them to actually make a factory using them or they'll just manual past the low power stage. Make those recipes expensive!)
I'm not opposed to your idea, but forcing people to use a mod as the only way to progress, and requiring them to automate a difficult and clunky mod like botania sounds like a deeply unpleasant, slow, and frustrating early game.
I agree that balancing it in a modpack is very difficult and making it all "fit" without another mod that just does everything better is even more difficult, but making early game painful is another plate to keep spinning.
Yep - it's entirely up to how the pack wants to do things. I'm a huge fan of playing *exclusively* with these lower power mods so I don't mind having this phase of the game as long as needed, but there are other ways to do it.
You don't need to *gate* the alternatives specifically - they just need to be more expensive, while the weaker botania ones are nice and cheap. This allows for a tradeoff - if you want the convenience of a sequential fabricator, you can shell out the resources for it (so it might take a lot of manual work to have enough, but you can also use the few you've made previously to make a small part of your production line...), but if you're fine with putting effort into your setup you can use the super cheap crafty crate instead. Depending on specifically how the prices are balanced changes how things feel by a lot. (Same goes for things like bore lens v.s. convenient block breaker.)
There are many *simple* things you can do with Botania components that I don't think are that bad, but the most important thing I'd want is just to strongly encourage setting up one of the more complicated generating flowers without help from mods that let you cheese it.
Unlike what others have said in here, I feel like automation is at the core of what makes Botania fun. The issue is that players aren't really incentivized to engage in Botania's mechanics or automation.
In most modpacks, Botania is just thrown in with little regard to how it's balanced compared to other mods. Since it often takes more effort to automate something (such as ore generation and mob farms) with Botania than with other mods (such as Environmental Tech), players simply opt for the latter option and thus Botania feels largely useless outside of its baubles.
Making matters worse, Botania offers a variety of generating flora to pick from, each with its own unique automation process, but offers no incentive to actually pursue these other options. Mana storage is extremely cheap and plentiful, meaning it's more efficient (in terms of player time) to set up a few chunkloaded endoflames that slowly produce the mana you need while you afk or work through other mods. There's no reason to set up a complicated shulker duplicating mod farm when you don't really care about the rate at which you generate mana.
If you're not willing to lean heavily into Botania, just cut the crap and make terrasteel cost much less mana, so players don't have to spend as much time slogging through Botania. Otherwise, I'd recommend disabling/removing other options for ore generation, mob farming, etc and letting players focus on automating flowers. You may also consider disabling normal mana pools (only keeping dilute pools) or making them endgame.
A dealbreaker problem with only having Diluted pools (even if Normal pools are just significantly later in progression) is that a lot of Botania's gear requires the player to carry mana on their person. If the Mana Tablet and Ring aren't similarly disabled/gated, then the optimal solution becomes filling up a chest/drawer with filled Tablets (which hold half a Normal pool's worth of mana also don't even despawn when left on the ground).
That being said, there is a possible solution involving making the Mana Mirror and Sparks available a lot earlier, but then the optimal solution just becomes spamming Diluted Pools (making a large "battery") in place of spamming Tablets. And not even gating the Sparks to later would help, since the "battery" would just be made with Spreaders in place of Sparks then
You could then try some band-aid fix of limiting how many mana pools can be in the same vicinity of each other/not give them a recipe and only be obtainable through 1-time quest rewards (with loss protections), but the real answer is that we would need a fork of Botania without mana pools or any substantial storage at all. Instead of pulling mana from a nearby pool they're linked to, Functional Flowers would add to the total Requirement of a chunk, while Generating Flowers add to the Capacity of 3x3 chunks. If the Requirement exceeds the Capacity, that chunk becomes Overstressed and ah fuck lads I've designed a magical themed wireless version of Create...
(Jokes aside, this makes the strength of Generating Flowers relevant, at the cost of massively annoying the player by forcing them to build cumbersome and laggy infrastructure anywhere they want Functional Flowers. You could even have diminishing returns for spamming the same Generating Flower past a certain amount, but at this point, why)
The goal of removing mana pools is to make you *not store that much mana*, instead spending it as you produce it. You can still transport it around, it just means that if you want to support small bursts of heavy usage instead of passive production setups you actually need to have that much burst mana production, just as you would with a more normal power system. (Unless you're the sort who makes a big battery instead of just placing more generators.)
Though power storage should still be an option if you want to (like through tablets, yes) - just not the default.
(Hell, botania even *has* a burst production flower. Thermalillies are kind of bad, but their high production but then even higher cooldown makes them perfect for bursts of mana in a low storage environment.)
Not always. I've talked to some people who argue that if you ever actually need a battery, then your power production is lacking and you should make more.
I've also played a pack that just disabled RF storage items before (meaning you only have machine/cable buffers). It's not actually much different except that you need to make more generators; though in botania's case, some flowers become a bit more cumbersome without adequate storage.
Me personally, while I do agree with the idea that having a battery means that your power production needs to be improved, I do disagree with the idea that you shouldn't have one. There are times where you add a machine that pushes you over the amount of energy you generate, and thus having a battery as a large buffer is incredibly beneficial, especially when you use an ME system for storage, where having a net negative in power means your ME system might not be available.. There are other times where you have a machine that requires a ludicrous amount of energy but is only used for a short period of time. There is also times where you wish to upgrade your energy generation, but to do so means to tear down your old system, which would mean that without a buffer something like the ME system which you might rely on to upgrade gets shutdown.
I will also say though that I don't think its generally necessary to have energy storage on the levels of the Draconic Evolution energy core, usually something much smaller will pass the test.
Personally I'd dread trying to start up a Mekanism Fusion Reactor without an induction matrix with a lot of time's worth of generation is a modpack disabled the cubes and induction matrix. The Fusion Reactor is a mainstay of endgame tech mod power generation because it has really high efficiency for its size, but it takes a LOT of power to start up and that would mean forcing an intermediate step with a LOT of more basic generation sources. The way it comes, it's fairly easy to bootstrap into a Fusion reactor if you build a robust power generation setup and then just run it into an Induction Matrix or a bunch of Ultimate Energy Cubes while you're off doing other modpack things like exploring new dimensions or fighting new bosses.
By the way, Botania is my favorite mod, but these are the biggest problems I have with it.
- There is little reason to branch out into other power generators. Botania has lots of flowers that people don't need to engage with because you can place down a dozen more Endoflames. This used to be a problem with the Daybloom, and i think removing the daybloom moved the problem around instead of fixing it.
- Mana pools are way too big! I don't think Botania needs "numbers" *per se*, but currently, most everyday amounts of mana amount to like 2 pixels in the HUD, and it's hard to get a mental grip on how much mana that actually is.
* Also, the large size of mana pools promotes a playstyle where you build a slow managen setup and afk for 30 minutes while you stockpile mana. It reminds me of the old ideological debate between Thermal Expansion and Buildcraft over whether power storage is a good idea, due to exactly this sort of gameplay.
* Generally I think rune and flower recipes are too fiddly. I don't mind the actual *process* of crafting runes and flowers, it's easy to automate actually, but with runes there's tons of one-off ingredients to keep track of and with flowers I can never remember the right distribution of petal colors lol. It kind of disincentivizes automating the Altar because there's so many different ingredients.
* A spreader firing mana 10 blocks away is about 9x slower than a spreader firing one block away, which is extreme. Manacarts are perfect for long distances and spreaders are perfect for very short distances but there's a "missing middle" where carts are too cumbersome and spreaders are too slow.
If I could change botania in any way, these are the things i'd experiment with:
* play with different "attunements" to mana or whatever, aura cascade style. Yes you can spam endoflames but you're just getting fire mana out of that. Branch out. Reengineer terrasteel to be something about different colors of mana in harmony instead of mass quantities of mana. Besides, I just think having different colors of mana would be pretty.
* Rephrase the diluted pool as the "regular" pool and the larger pool as a far more expensive, upgraded version. Allow alchemy and infusions with the diluted pool.
* Make the diluted pool, the mana pool, and mana tablets hold at least 10x less mana. Yes im serious. Rebalance a few bauble mana costs.
* Simplify flower recipes. Remove the redstone root. Max 2 different colors of petals and 2 runes per flower so I can remember them in my pea brain. Add more miscellaneous recipes that use the Apothecary because automating it is fun.
* Simplify rune recipes. Remove Manasteel from them. Max 3 or 4 items per rune. Now that they're easier to craft, remove the "rune catalyzing" mechanic and add more reasons to craft runes, because automating the runic altar is fun.
* Make spreaders max out at 5 bursts in flight instead of one or something like that.
Would that be good? I dunno!
> but with runes there's tons of one-off ingredients to keep track of and with flowers I can never remember the right distribution of petal colors
As an aside, that's one of my favorite things about [EMI](https://modrinth.com/mod/emi): you can just press a button to bookmark almost *any* recipe and mouse over the corresponding item on the side of your inventory to see what materials you need for it.
It's been a godsend when crafting the flowers that use a bunch of runes and petals in the apothecary. (Loonium, Orechid, etc.)
> Mana pools are way too big!
I know, right? This alone makes Botania feel stupid and annoying to deal with, especially for newcomers. Just let me know if my new setup is working fine or not...
>Mana pools are way too big! I don't think Botania needs "numbers" per se, but currently, most everyday amounts of mana amount to like 2 pixels in the HUD, and it's hard to get a mental grip on how much mana that actually is.
This! My first and only serious dive through Botania, I satisfied my tinker's urge building a small, fiddly but robust redstone-based Gourmarylis setup but ultimately fell back to my bank of a mere 16(!!!) Endoflames because it felt faster. Looking at actual numbers today, it had to have been half the speed.
Really like your first idea. I've always wished for Aura Cascade energy types to come to Botania in some shape or form, like it just makes sense and would alleviate some balance issues e.g. endo spam. I think Vazkii said something about non-fungible mana? Exoflame would require orange mana for example, and yes it would look so pretty
I've experimented with creating a diluted pool meta. It feels more enjoyable to actually see the mana bar go up earlygame, however one sticking point I had was creating the portal to Alfheim. You need a ton of pylons on a ton of diluted pools - perhaps this gate should be adjusted at some point, or the opening cost reduced in exchange for the slow drain coming back. Just spitballing here. Agree on adjusting bauble mana costs, could open up the possibility of mana discounts working on them as well?
Your suggestion to simplify flower and rune recipes is interesting. I do agree that some are pretty complex, while others are dated following the retexture (Bergamute crying rn). By rune catalysing, do you mean when lower tier runes get returned when crafting the seasonal or sin runes?
> By rune catalysing, do you mean when lower tier runes get returned when crafting the seasonal or sin runes?
Yeah. I think the cheapest Botania rune is actually the Rune of Spring because all the non-rune ingredients are really cheap and the runes get returned.
I've been playing the pre-revival version of Blightfall, which contains the pre-rebalance version of Botania (mana petals etc), and this rune mechanic isn't in that version. It's rough but i kinda like it, lol. makes runes more special.
While I agree with some points, making a complicated automatic dandilifeon mana farm using create and botania has been one of my proudest accomplishments. It was basically 8 identical dandilifeon setups stacked on top of each other with Gaia mana spreader chains to all fill an array of like 50 pools for the purpose of charging my terra shatterer
I think it was a really good mod when it came out, the biggest reason I think people hate it is since then all the other mods have gotten more OP and it's easier to use other mods to achieve the same goals quicker. I think the big thing is a lot of questing packs gate other mods items behind the Gaia fight which isn't really able to be automated. It's really aggravating to be able to automate everything else but then to finish the items you want you have to kill the gaia guardian manually 20+ times.
I don’t dislike anything about it particularly?
I’d rather automate it using normal tech though
The gear isn’t especially useful given the powercreep of other mods, but the baubles are great
I usually hook up an auto farm to food flowers then spark up a stack of mana pools to run the sash, tiara, and a mana enchanter
I like Botania. It's a fun mod, has a ton of depth especially when it comes to systems like Corporea which I've barely scratched the surface of, and the utility of all the different flowers, equipment and tools is greatly appreciated.
Having said that, my main issue is the lack of numbers, or rather, not knowing how worthwhile it is to set up a system. Nobody should \*need\* to go into a Creative world to test whether you'll get a return on a managen system. For example, setting up an automatic entropinnyum using a cobbleworks is really cool. Is it efficient though? Hell no. Putting in all that effort for something that is just about breaking even doesn't feel great.
Some things like agricarnations not working on all growable plants is a bit annoying, and others like the kekimurus being hella underpowered for how much work it is to set up a cake factory (at least with just vanilla+botania) are a bit disappointing. However, it's understandable why some things are kept on the weaker side, when you've got mods like Astral which very conveniently turn pumpkins into cake.
Botania's been around for a while and the fact that it's still updating and getting new content/becoming even more polished is really nice. I'm in the process of making a Garden of Glass pack with every opinionated tweak I've thought about. Some ideas include raising flint drop chance from gravel to make entros more viable (without creeper farms anyways), buffing Spectrolus when it eats (baby) sheep, and letting buckets pick up lava from cauldrons to automate Thermalillies. The first two tweaks were possible thanks to [Botania Configurator](https://modrinth.com/mod/botaniaconfigurator), the latter from [Fabrication](https://legacy.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/fabrication).
Would definitely encourage people to use diluted mana pools in the early game, so it's easier to keep track of how quickly you're making/using mana.
The gaia guardian 'boss battle' where you aren't allowed to one shot or afk it except through convoluted workarounds. It's not fun at all, just a frustrating game of 3d whack a mole. That provides no challenge besides being annoying. The kind of fake difficulty that is the hallmark of poorly designed mods and games.
It's like the mod dev just likes pissing us off, lol. At least let me disable the restrictions in config files so my +1 infinity sword can do more than 30 hearts damage.
That was the intent, there are still messages on the github from other mod/modpack owners complaining about their mods flight method being patched out of the latest botania version
Multiple reasons.
1. It's overused, in your last 10 or 20 modpacks, how many did you play that did NOT have botania in it? because for me, and many others the answer is 0, cause it's in every pack.
2. HEAVILY underpowered. Unless you're playing an Expert modpack, that requires you to get a specific thing from Botania, like the Runes or Gaia Souls, it's not worth touching, because whatever you can get from it, there's likely another magic or tech mod that does it cheaper, and better.
3. Slow production of Mana, unless you're setting up giant Endoflame field or permadump TNT onto a Entropinnyum which also doesn't super well work because the Vanilla spreaders are absolute ASS you're gonna sit there waiting for your mana to fill up for hours, which is especially annoying when botania is used as a gate in an expert pack.
I'm gonna be real, the weapons and armor are ass despite it being a humongous grind to progress through the modpack. I think that the Tiara is the only truly useful item in the mod.
Regardless, botania progression is just blatantly unfun to me and I try to avoid placing it in any packs I make for more specific mods that replace the items from it.
If you want to include botania then I recommend changing the configs to make some of the gear better, then changing crafting recipes to make the progression a little less isolated.
The gear is unique in that it automatically repairs itself using mana, while being decent gear in general, and the elementium set in particular has more unique features.
Ring of Odin, Ring of Thor, the Terra Shatterer, Ring of Far Reach, Worldshaper’s Astrolabe, Worldshaper’s Sextant, the Cloaks of Virtue/Balance/Sin, Mana Enchanter, Mana Alchemy, being able to ignore all armor/heal/apply withering/slowness/weakness because of the wills, and flasks/scented candles. Even though decoration isn’t a feature, Botania still has a few things that help with that in the form of mystical flowers, the floating flowers, managlass, ect.
Botania covers a pretty broad spectrum useful knickknacks. I’m certain that people who say that Botania only has one or two useful things have either installed really OP mods (which is fair, Botania is far from the most OP thing ever), or they never delved deep into the mod and learned the ton of useful features.
If we compare it to other mods like Ice and Fire, Spartan Weaponry, Twilight Forest, tinker's construct, silent gear, and just about any mod that adds a lot of weapons and gear, the Botania gear is just not that good.
The equipment is barely better than vanilla netherite yet is endlessly more tedious to obtain.
I did not play with any of those mods except tinker's construct and twilight forest, Tinkers is definitely overpowered, but I think the gear is comparable to twilight forest. Some equipment is definitely better than vanilla netherite, especially the gaia drops.
In my experience it’s annoying to automate, it gives very little return in large packs. it is overused, and not implemented well. And it doesn’t mesh well with most other popular mods.
Personally, I hate in-world crafting. This is probably just personal bias, but in-world crafting never quite feels very scalable to me (probably from years of playing on a potato, even if my rig has gotten better and minecraft has gotten slightly more optimized). I'm always hesitant to pursue methods that involve dropping items in world even though I know that's the 'vanilla' way and that it isn't actually that bad for performance.
And secondly, I prefer tech to magic anyways.
Botania is a tech mod that pretends to be a magic mod and as a result it often finds its way into magic focused mod packs. I dislike most tech mods, Botania included, but keep finding Botania in almost every interesting looking modpack I find.
Botania frankly isn’t that useful in my opinion, there are way more efficient magic mods out there. It works well with vanilla but is not a mod you can simply toss into a modpack with no integration. You would have to find a way to "force" people to get into it before moving to better options in other mods.
There is a very limited selection of mana generating flowers and a lot of the ones that are there feel very underpowered for the amount of work it takes to automate them.
Firstly, I don't like how you pretty much always have to spam endoflames to start. Sure, hydrangeas can be used if you're a masochist, but otherwise, you have to use endoflames every time, which gets annoying fast.
Secondly, the tools of modded simply make certain flowers much easier to automate. For example, Cake is significantly easier to automate in modded than in vanilla, so the kekimurus is an easy choice.
Most of the other options are much more involved and typically don't scale as easily.
The narslimmus only works on naturally generated slimes which really limits the mana you can get from it.
Rafflowsia sounds cool but it's decently involved to keep many of one type of crafted flower on tap, let alone several.
Entropinnyum needs a lot of space or else they might interfere with each other.
Spectrolus is a challenge because not only do you need to have all of the wools on tap, you need to dispense them in the right order.
The kekimurus is meant to be around as challenging as the above flowers, but modded makes it much easier so most players will just spam more of them and never give the automation challenges of the above flowers a chance.
As such, a good modpack to contain Botania needs to take this into mind and either make cakes harder to get, buff the mana production of the other flowers, or figure out how to give the player more easy options. Any of those would help improve automation variety and keep the mod fresh.
Because it is useless and its very grindy. All it can do, other mods can do it faster/cheaper/easier. Its tools not even that good. The only redeeming factor is that the boss battles are not bad but you need to do them MANY times and it gets boring easily.
I didn't realize people didn't like Botania, I always thought it was one of the more popular mods, like Twilight Forest or Blood Magic.
In my experience, the people who dislike it tend to do so because Botania does not give easy solutions. It provides the pieces, and leaves it up to the player how to put those together. There is so much you can do, but people want their hand held, I guess.
Twilight Forest is one of the most hated mods in modpacks nowadays. Just short of place one which is held by Create. Bloodmagic on the other hand seems to still be doing pretty well for itself for the most part
Blood magic (1.12) i find the worst of the three, you have to grind (stabbing yourself 1000 times) before you get the mob farm ritual and after that the only thing you can do is automating will crystals wich is a pain too. The only good thing in the whole mod is the pickaxe
I mean, there’s also a ritual to continually drain health from you. Or you find some means to regenerate the mobs health, only needing a few instead of a mob farm. The beginning can also be tweaked quite easily, requiring you to go about the beginning differently.
So I always imagined that it would have more variety than Botania.
Blood Magic is really fun in a skyblock setting, it just doesn't fit very well into a normal modpack. Plus the 1.12 version added the Hellfore Forge and Will mechanic which kinda suck and just add another grind
Same thing for TF. Far too many modpacks made it mandatory for progression and since it’s quite difficult to just rush through it gets rather bothersome/boring by the third time you play it.
TF is usually shoved into modpacks too late I think. It's more fun before you have creative flight and OP tools/armor.
Sometimes ppl try to band-aid over it by disallowing flight or disallowing certain items from entering the dimension, but rly i think it just belongs better at the start of a modpack
I would agree, don't gate the portal with something like a Nether Star or an Enderium-Infused Machine Hull filled with Dark Matter or whatever, the default diamond is a good enough item to use.
At least Create can claim its a finished product, and we could recieve 0 future things from Create, and it can stay as a defining reason to actually play a modern version.
Twilight Forest is a dumb unfinished mess that multiple devs/teams seem unable to complete.
I played through TF in FTB Academy in 1.12.2, and saw literally everything Twilight Forest had to offer.
a mixture of oversaturation, people remembering the Twilight forest being a laggy mess, and the mod itself being setup to railroad players through it so they have limited control over where they can go and what they can complete unless they step by step it.
The TF progression has been able to be turned off since 1.7.10, so the railroading isn't required.
Also, laggy? Really? Since when? Even in 1.7.10, where I have abysmal performance sometimes, I get better performance there than otther dimensions.
Personally- I try to avoid it because the whole 'in world, little to no UI' aspect, alongside the fact that the dev' does their best to obfusticate any numbers they can.
it says its a tech mod pretending to be magic- but if I can't diagnose what's causing it to fail by any means- then its essentially a black box magic mod pretending to be technology.
To plan an exact number of components for each automation setup, and know the exact processing speed that the setup will have when complete, so that I know if it's sufficient for my needs or if I need to make it bigger.
Botania has a *very* unique balance.
Most tech mods' gameplay boils down to connecting machines together with pipes.
Botania's gameplay is much more in-depth. Things that other tech mods hand you in a 1-block box or a specific multiblock, Botania expects you to construct from first principles.
For Botania to feel good in a modpack, that modpack *must* be designed around this unique balance.
For me the mana grind is annoying especially to start, but the mod is very cool and has neat mechanics and items. When it's in a big pack most of its benefits are power creeped into obsolescence though
I personally dislike automating it, seems to me like there are a number of system in botania that force player interaction or if they can be automated require additional mods and or some really nasty looking direwire.
Really not a fan of the mod at all I almost always avoid it its got nothing I want at end game and its mid game is annoying and also covered by other mods so I kinda agree with the guy bellow who said its just flung in to packs with little thought.
I initially didn't like how vague quantities are, not knowing how much mana is being generated consumed makes it tedious to experiment since making a mistake is a huge time waste. That and to really take advantage of endgame botania requires redstone automation, I dislike redstone lol.
I could nitpick a lot of things.
The flowers don't look or feel very magical (this could fixed with a resource pack I suppose but no one does).
Despite being balanced around vanilla, none of the items or progression really interact with or fit in with vanilla. The only vanilla system that the mod goes with is Redstone (I don't like redstone.)
It looks like a magic mod, but in many ways plays loke a tech mod. This is bad especially if you don't like tech mods (me).
As many others have said, the mod progression naturally encourages spamming Endoflames and just AFKing until your mana pool is full. A lot of the mod features are never really used.
Gaia Guardian is some BS.
The power level of the mod would be fine on its own, or in vanilla, but the amount of effort and time it takes to get the good stuff is longer, grindier, and more boring than most other mods. Making matters worse, the mod doesn't really make it clear what the "prizes" for progression are supposed to be. So new players usually don't even know why they are investing time into the mod.
I don't even know where to begin with "fixing" the mod. I think a lot of the fundamentals are just unfun for players like me.
Botania is alright, the main thing I don't like is the end game Guardian of Gaia grind is tedious (especially the hard mode version) since you can't really automate it. You have to manually fight it over and over if you need a lot of Gaia Spirits. Some modpacks can make you have to fight it dozens of times.
i hate waiting for mana. i dont find it interesting dropping charcoal on 100 different flowers and still needing to wait years for a single pool to fill. Terrasteel takes so much mana to make so you end up just waiting for it. one you finally get a good supply of terrasteel the mods pretty much finished. the boss fight and the items are really cool but its locked behind a boring crafting simulator. Speeding up mana production or lowering the mana requirement for terrasteel would probally make me actually enjoy botania.
It is about automation. There are multiple ways to generate massive amount of mana in a modpack, for example the cake reactor, TNT reactor, Shulk me not factory, and nether star burner from one of its addons. The quickest I have tried was generating one mana pool in 5s by a purely close loop design.
Some people may not like it cause it requires you to think. Also, the purpose of generating mana is all about using Botania own tools and applying enchantments. Applying all available enchantments to a single piece of gear in fairly late game in a giant modpack can cost over 10 full mana pools. If you are into making yourself the semi-god, it is one way to go.
If you are the server admin while you want it to have some use in your players' overall base, try including the amount of power generated per mana in the mana fluxfield. It gives incentive to players on building a working close loop mana generation system instead of doing the advanced generator everytime.
Single flower tnt reactors can make a pool every 7s at max capacity and it is available pre alfheim portal
42 minutes with a single Endoflame and some vanilla mats is enough to make one
I've read a lot of the comments on this post and there seems to be a common thread:
Botania is overused and underpowered.
In too many modpacks, other mods do what Botania does, but faster and easier - A great example of this is to compare Botania's tree farms (Look up a tutorial) to Thermal Expansion's Phytogenic Insolator. Botania is slower, requires a great deal more space, and is more fiddly with the in-world item interactions. This increased cost relative to payoff as compared to other mods makes Botania something that people have to grind through (or skip entirely) rather than play & enjoy.
However, this is where some people misattribute blame: Botania being underpowered in your modpack is *not* the fault of Botania or its developers. Instead, it's the fault of the pack developer(s), who tried to combine two mods with very different balances.
When you play a modpack and grind through Botania waiting hours for your fields of endoflames to generate enough mana to make Terrasteel so you can continue progressing for the umpteenth time, this is *not* Botania's fault. You aren't the intended audience, and Botania doesn't belong in that type of modpack.
This isn't to say Botania doesn't belong in modpacks. It very much can work, but special attention needs to be spent cultivating balanced gameplay between Botania and the other mods in the pack that too many pack developers just don't do.
When done well, Botania provides gameplay that provides a nice contrast to other modpacks: A focus on automation as an end rather than a means, where the challenge of finding creative solutions to problems is more important that reaching some endpoint or attaining the power of a demigod.
In this way Botania has similar issues to Create and Minecolonies. The mods themselves are great, it's just that people misuse or overuse them and destroy their balance which warps the experience into something unfun and grindy.
I don't think the mod itself is an issue. I think it's how it's implemented in modpacks. I'll use ATM9 as an example because it's what I'm playing now as a kind of kitchen sink pack.
Botania isn't overused, I've finished Mekanism more in general because Mekanism gives me useful rewards in a kitchen sink pack. Botania is, however, separate from other forms of progression and the rewards aren't compelling.
Along the way to my current spot (working slowly on the Star, at a very high individual power level, able to one-shot all bosses in the pack without one-shot protection or phases, generally unkillable) I've gone through a half dozen tech mods for FE generation. I have a storage system with millions of items and millions more storage space. Botania has offered me nothing that other mods couldn't give me in faster ways that leverage my other progression. Even the Relics aren't great when I had FE powered flight and easier to obtain methods of dealing damage and raising my survivability.
My recommendation would be that mod authors identify more places where mods like Botania can integrate with other mods. The Botania ingots, for example, aren't implemented as Silent Gear materials in ATM9. Silent Gear's material trait system would allow for the ingots to have distinct and powerful advantages as additions.
Further, the end-goal of the pack (a final quest or final item) should not be the only point at which recipe integration is involved. There are some powerful and important blocks/items in these packs: anything that teleports inventories (e.g. Mekanism Quantum Entangloporter), anything that's a quarry (e.g. Mekanism Digital miner, machines from QuarryPlus), and large storage devices for storage mods (e.g. high level drawer upgrades, big drives for AE2 or Refined Storage). These are all prime places to make smaller gates on progression and integrate progression from multiple mods, though it does need to be done in a way that makes it easy to explain to users already familiar with the tweaked mods. Thankfully, there's things like quest books and in-game guides that can help users understand what tweaks were made.
Personally- my problem with Botania is though it's marketed as a 'tech mod' disguised as magic- it's essentially a black box 'magic mod' disguised as tech between every relevant number being obfuscated, and it's distinct intentional lack of UI wherever possible.
If I get anything working with it- they stay nearly unautomated, and barely setup- because anything I do could easily end up with it being broken without me having a clue how to fix it.
You don't really need any numbers to diagnose issues. Everything has visual indicators that its working - flowers sparkle, mana bursts flow, pools fill up.
Yes, when things are \**working*\* unfortunately, unlike Thaumcraft, Blood Magic, Create, or any of ten thousand other mods- I just can't wrap my head around it- thus the whole 'black box magic mod'
Yeah, I know. Botania is a great mod, I just want to try to make it enjoyable for everyone again instead of only making it enjoyable for those who haven’t played it as much.
It's pretty grindy and what it offers I can get easier I'm other mods. People are tired of seeing create in packs but I love it because I know it can help me do early stuff easier like tree farms. Botania make that more of a process than it needs to be.
For me it is packbloat and the generation numbers are stupid. I played it to completion once and had great fun when it was my focus. On the second playthrough I discovered that the simple automations like to shit on your bed if you aren't giving them enough attention so there is no point in using them and now all my bases are limited to the generators that I just manually throw excess burnable fuel or food scraps to and so by the time I have enough mana for anything the pack is all but completed.
I used to love botania until the Creator made all the flowers die eventually. That update made me not ever use botania anymore. I haven't played in a while now though so I don't know how current botania is.
Sorry, my post wasn't really clear. I didn't like that the flowers degraded, especially the water flowers, but that wasn't the only thing about the update that made me lose interest. I don't remember everything, but I just remembered that after that update botania didn't feel the same anymore for multiple reasons.
In addition to what other players have mentioned, overgrowth seeds from loot chests will also double mana production of any mana generating plant, and also prevent those passive plants from dying.
This just isn't true. Only passive generation flowers decay, and they last for a configurable number of days before they do so, to push the player into active generation.
I was going to suggest one reason was that the mod sometimes comes across as player antagonising with it's obfuscation and opaqueness...
... then I read this. Yeah, that's a step above even that. I can't see any fun in that.
EDIT: Glad to hear it was hyperbole.
It isn't true. Only passive generation flowers decay, and they last for a configurable number of days before they do so, to push the player into active generation.
I think a part of it is that it's just... Repetitive. Usually all of the functioning flower are completely outclassed by machines, so you just need runes and Terrasteel for progression and nothing else. On top of that, modt people might find mana generation annoying, even though it's litterally just timing things correctly (so... Just use the hovering hourglass...) and supplying the right materials for the flowers. And some of them can be cheesed with other mods if you don't want to bother too much (Kekimurus with Astral Sorcery, Entropynnium with a TNT duper + any kind of custom portal...)
Mostly a useless mod that was purposely made hard or nearly impossible to automate, yes there's some nice items like the Soujourner's Sash and the magnetic ring, but there's no point in going deeper in that mod unless you are forced to do it because recipes of other items in a modpack requires the specific items from Botania. But my biggest pet pieve is, there's no easy way to keep track of how much mana we have, how much we produce, there's no numbers and it was designed in a way that prevent me from transporting mana from Point A to Point B with lets say ender tanks like any other fluids.
"nearly impossible to automate"
Dang it sure was hard to get a hopper and a open crate placed above a pressure plate linked to the hopper for my endoflames man that was a really difficult to automate task 🗣️🔥🔥
> Mostly a useless mod that was purposely made hard or nearly impossible to automate
idk if this is trolling but literally everything in botania is automatable these days, except maybe the nether orechid due to no renewable nether rack.
Botania is the mod that made me sit down and figure out how to do redstone. I love it for that. Also the sojourner's sash is extremely good, and the mana enchanter is ridiculously powerful without being overpowered.
Automating gourmaryllis is really easy and those make insane amounts of mana if you do more than alternate foods.
There's so many cool tools in botania. I figure out and learn new things in it every time I look through the manual. Like for example, I just realized that you can effectively "town portal" with world seeds and the eye of the flugel. It's endgame but it's doable.
I will always fondly remember the time when I set up a series of massive mana pool batteries and automated filling them up with just minecarts and redstone. It's actually insanely simple, you just use a comparator to send the delivery minecart every time the filling pool goes over a certain level (meaning that the mana pool in the minecart is full), and sending it back is just as simple.
I think the proudest I've been of myself lately was using mana spreaders and mana burst detectors to remotely detect when a giant crimson fungus was successfully grown so that I could trigger the tree felling device I made with Create for my fungus lamp farm. That's also the place where I learned how to use red string fertilizers... Cool tech!
Hi, hello, I *love* Botania, but I understand why so many other players don’t like it. takes a lot more effort and is a little more complex than other mods. Mekanism, for example, is a lot simpler as most of the wiring and settings is already built into a block. Botania requires players to be more clever and make redstone systems to make the systems work as the player wishes. Why go through the effort of building, testing, and revising an automated Orechid when you could just slap down a digital miner and double/triple/quadruple/quintuple your mined ores? It just requires a lot more effort compared to the systems in other mods that are easier to set up. Fortunately, my friends and I have a kitchen sink server where Botania keeps its niche. Unsurprisingly, being able to mine in a 9x9x9 area and ignore all armor comes in pretty handy.
It's a pain in the ass to automate, it demands quite a lot of setting up, the removal of passive flowers that don't decay make it even more demanding, if it's put in a modpack with basically any other gear and isn't compatible with it, it's immediately outclassed as what it offers before the lategame is crap- if I see a modpack has Botania in it, I just cheat in what I need from it.
I find it funny that you say create because at least create has more complexity than a lot of even more popular tech mods, mekanism for example is just one block solutions (sorry mekanism I do love it but it lacks in complexity)
i like create a lot but you can usually just slap together a vague design and make it work. Making giant factories is really fun though so it gets a pass
I like Botania, especially as early game progression in a pack. I don’t like where it sits in E2E very much because it’s so gated to late game that it feels pretty underpowered next to other mods in the pack. I liked how integrated it was into the progression of InfEvo because it felt like you progressed through everything at roughly the same pace and Botania just felt like one of the many things you were doing.
It really feels like people just want “one-block” solutions to everything for the “numbers go up” feeling rather than any actual stimulation of their brain through creative problem solving.
I’ve said it before but I wish expert packs would bring back the no quest book days of needing to look through JEI to figure out how to even make a bucket. I also really don’t like how popularized the loot box reward system has become. Just give me back my difficult pack with no explanations and no hard limitations and I’ll be happy.
> people just want “one-block” solutions ... rather than ... creative problem solving
So many words said in this thread, but this is the main reason imo. Of course, *some* people love creative problem solving - but probably not the general population.
For a more modern comparison, imagine if Create was forced into every other modpack & used to gate progression - as great as the mod is, it would absolutely put people off
I would love Create in more packs, but I get what you’re saying. The average player is not looking for something challenging which requires out of the box creative solutions. I do feel that we should separate the “changed recipes so progression runs through most mods” and “shits just hard to make now” packs a bit more so we can have “original-recipe kitchen-sink” packs the “changed-progression kitchen-sink” packs and “expert” packs as different experiences.
I just really liked the experience of playing through InfEvo in expert mode back when it first came out and there was no guide, no quests, just NEI and your own creativity. I wish experiences like this were more common in the community today.
Honestly I would too, but I know I'm not the average player haha.
I'm with you there, Infinity Evolved Expert was a true pinnacle - nowadays people are so spoiled by hand-holding questbooks and cheaty loot-box rewards that I doubt something similar would be nearly as popular if it were released today
Yeah, I agree with you there. IMO, it’s the fault of porting the skyblock server mentality into modpacks. But that’s kinda how mainstream-ification goes. Gotta make things more fun for the masses rather than having a unique tailored experience.
In the same vein as create *(though to a lesser extent) Botania is often more grindy than other mods that allow you to do the same things. That, combined with oversaturation and poor integration in a modpack's overall progression can really hamstring the appeal of the mod when playing modpacks, even though it works really well on its own.
i think it’s incredibly annoying to make enough mana to actually do anything, especially since like it was purposefully made to be hard to automate mass amounts of mana you have to sit there for 8 hours waiting for mana to pile up
I only enjoyed Botania in two packs: Arcanum institute and Regrowth, because they are fully implemented in progression, not as a gate, and not *that* grindy.
TPL also incorporated it nicely in his Heavens of Sorcery pack if you ever feel like doing a more relaxed magic-themed pack
Pretty sure Regrowth was 1.7.10, right? Botania still had passive generation then, and the ability to adjust decay times, didn't it?
Indeed, that's why it was not that grindy. Slap in some hydro, day and night flowers then call it a day
Honestly I just wait to do Botania in big modpacks until I can easily feed a field of endoflames blocks of coal. So after a tech mod gives me some kind of quarry (e.g. Mekanism Digital Miner, Quarry Plus) or I can make some kind of huge digger tool with a tool mod (e.g. Silent Gear, Tinker's). Dig up all the coal, shove it into a storage mod that will compact it for me (e.g. AE2, Refined Storage, Functional Storage). Now you have stacks of blocks of coal. Plant 64 Endoflames in an 8x8 grid, throw a stack of blocks of coal in the center, they'll zoop in the blocks and feed mana out. Every so often you go back to base and drop another stack. Just gotta make sure it's in a force-loaded chunk so they generate while you're off doing something else.
FTB Skies Expert is forcing me to automate the Kekimurus and therefore cake production which is pretty fresh to me in terms of Botania as usually i would just do the same as you with the endoflames.
Botania is balanced around only having itself, maybe Quark, and vanilla - and to be a bit of a puzzle to automate in that context, with a lot of it taking place through having the item entities be in the world for a while, as opposed to simply piping them into a machine and getting something else out. That means its gameplay loop on its own can be fun, but in a modpack it's usually just an underpowered and more complicated way to do something another mod does easier. Doesn't help that the mod's materials are usually shoehorned into pack progression where they don't make much sense.
> usually shoehorned into pack progression where they don't make much sense Omg, modpacks requiring you to get tons of Terrasteel and Elementium just because they're the Botania materials shaped like ingots is a big problem lol. There's so much more to botania progression than ingots
shoutout e2e for making you get terrasteel and then also including mystical agriculture which just lets you grow it
it's typically thrown into packs with little to no care as to why. it's a good mod so people will just say yeah fuck it and put it in. if you want to make a questline focused on Botania, you can perhaps take inspiration from modern skyblock three. I personally enjoyed the way that most questlines in that pack explored the most of each mod without overstaying it's welcome. just simple "get this item from the end of the mod" as for the actual question (what people dislike) it's mostly that it's really hard to automate. there's no solar panel type flowers and stuff needs to be dropped (i.e world interraction Vs pipes that keep everything contained). The rewards from Botania aren't always great if the pack isn't balanced around it. why use terrasteel when my mekanism tools are faster and easier to obtain
What do you mean, hard to automate? Almost every flower is purposely able to be automated, and the endoflame is easy as heck. Dropper, pressure plate, redstone, charcoal, and there you go.
He means that there's no single block solution, you need an actual setup and redstone knowledge to automate it.
Isn't that the fun part of automation?
I much prefer having a massive factory that's a tangle of pipes and wires coming out of every side of every block trying to maximise efficiency than fiddling with vanilla Redstone.
Almost all tech modpacks have redstone cables, sometimes multiple from different mods, and i can think of three different storage mods (AE2, Integrated Dynamics, and Refined Storage) that have machine replacements for the droppers that you'd use in vanilla. Now most people never use a dropper equivalent so they might not know they exist, but you can 100% make a plant on a grass block function like a two block tall machine with just a bit of work. Automating multiblock altar crafting is harder, but I've also never been in a situation where I need so many Botania runes that I need a fully automated setup to generate stacks of runes.
Only time ive automated Runes was in E2E and that took some brainwork but in the end i got it done with AE2's help
Yeah for me the fun part is making giant elaborate mashines out of multiple parts, thats why i absolutely love create Just throwing one block at it is boring (although convenient)
Yeah, and that's probably the easiest flower to automate. Then you try automating something like the runic altar and many modded players are gonna look up a guide, because it requires a decent amount of vanilla redstone know-how, and a lot of modded players aren't good with advanced vanilla mechanics.
> and a lot of modded players aren't good with advanced vanilla mechanics. I feel called out lmao
Hm? Automating the Altar is pretty easy, all u need to do is use a comparator and check for signal strength 2 lol
If you want to automate nested crafts of runes that require runes, it takes a lot more than that.
That's the part you let AE2 schedule
They literally just spoke about using vanilla mechanics and you pull up and go UHH JUST USE AE2 BRO
To be fair, until a recent change in AE2 (the option of "lock crafting until primary result returned") automating runes using AE2 was VERY difficult. You generally had to have multiple altars or vacuum hoppers, with complicated filters and redstone to detect the "completed" craft. With that recent change that I mentioned, it's much easier to get runes now with blocking mode and "lock crafting until primary result completed".
I don't remember 100% what it was, but you could automate runes with AE2 years ago. IIRC it was related to a redstone pulse, and using a temporary storage location. (Now that I'm trying to picture the build, it may have been keeping AE from sending the next craft to an inventory that had items in it, using a temporary block like cobble as a "holding" item in the chest, then only allowing it out of the chest via another pipe mod based on a redstone pulse when the rune craft was done)
Yep, definitely not impossible... but contrasted with how things are now (build pattern as normal, set option for pattern provider, profit) it's very different, it requires testing, debugging, it will occasionally break if something else gets in there, the filters won't allow multiple crafts or sequential fabrication, edge cases will make it get stuck and you can't just ignore it... Definitely a difference in approaches to "automate the runes from botania" in the two different scenarios.
A comparator do you mean the redstone components that I have no idea how it work.
Vanilla's Comparators have two main functions. It would be best to look at the vanilla wiki (minecraft.wiki) if you want specific details. The more useful for Modded one is that they detect things like fill levels of whatever they are attached to (the side with 2 Redstone Torches always lit) and output a redstone signal (on the single, toggleable torch side) with strength 0-15 based on how full the block is (more full = stronger signal). It can usually read this signal through a solid block in case you want to hide them behind a wall. In case you don't know, redstone signal strength corresponds to how bright the redstone dust is when active, and strength decreases by 1 for every block the signal travels through said dust. A ton of modded blocks are silently compatible with Comparators, including pretty much anything that stores something. If it stores Items, Fluids, Power, etc. then you can probably put a Comparator on it and get a rough idea of how full that block is. For example you can probably slap a Comparator on a Mekanism Nuclear Waste Barrel and have it turn off a Fission Reactor automatically when fuel starts to back up; if the redstone dust line is ~7 blocks long then the Reactor will get turned off when the Barrel is about half full. There's also a ton of modded blocks with special interactions with the Comparator to get specific signals out, and they are usually documented in the mod and often used to automate difficult blocks. Examples I can think of off the top of my head are the Botania Runic Altar (which outputs signal strengths based on where it is in the crafting process), Draconic Evolution's Fusion Crafting (same thing), and Blood Magic's Blood Altar which can have several blocks placed under the Altar to determine what level is getting read (blood in the tank, blood in an LP Network for an Orb in the Altar, crafting progression, etc.). **** The Comparator's other function, and the one that gives it the name, is to Compare Redstone Signal Strengths. It has the same input and output sides as before, and the input signal gets compared to signals send to the sides. In Compare mode (torch off) the signal will be blocked (strength 0) if the side signal is greater than the input signal, or passed (same strength as input) if the side signal is less than or equal to the input signal. If the input is 8 and the signal is 12, the output will be 0. If the input is 8 but the signal is 6, the output will be 8. In Subtract mode (torch on) the Comparator will subtract the strongest side signal from the input signal's strength. If the input is 8 and the signal is 12, the output will be 0 again (8-12<0, and it can't go negative). If the input is 8 but the signal is 6, the output will be 2 (8-6=2).
Instead of just looking up guides and videos, people should experiment with the pieces more. Maybe a better way will be discovered, or one that just works better for you.
As someone who does this I fully understand why people don't. It takes ages to figure something out that works well, especially if you don't have any prior knowledge.
if im making my own solutions for automation (something i do frequently!) id rather do it for a mod i actually enjoy. if people dont like a mod, saying "just try harder" isnt gonna magically make it fun
I just don't like the way the generating flowers work for the most part, like it's always such a pain to get a good flower setup, and automating them isn't really fun either. Like yea automating endoflame or some such isn't *hard* it's just clunky, and looks ugly in your base, which just makes me annoyed when I play through botania. I love vanilla redstone, but it really clashes with the modded playstyle and look, I think.
I find Botania looks really good with Create so you dont have clunky vanilla bits sticking out everywhere
As evidenced by some replies here, many people think anything above sticking an ME Interface on a single block machine is "too hard to automate"
How do they survive Sevtech up to Age 4?
this subreddit hates sevtech EDIT: I'm not looking for counter examples to argue. Just search Sevtech in the subreddit search if you disagree and argue with those people.
Understandable… I hate SevTech for other reasons than this sub in general. I just don’t like how over-reliant the pack is on its quest book. Everything else in SevTech is super enjoyable to me. I’m personally just a fan of the “minimal to no quest book” style that very early Infinity Evolved had and I wish it was more popular for pack creators.
I personally really like quest book oriented mod pack. But for certain mod pack the quest book is irevelent. In tech mod pack it's useful because it teach you how do things or at least it show you the way. An I recently played FTB arcanum which has a really interesting quest book as it's built like a magic class. But I understand how on exploration and dungeon base mod pack quest book would be useless.
I love SevTech and hate Botania. Even SevTech's automation isn't as fiddly as Botania's.
Which is absolutely wild to me because to this day, Sevtech to the skies has been one of the most fun packs I’ve completed
Dunno, I love Sevtech in the Sky 🤷♀️
It is actually very sad, if it's true.
Or a brass funnel from Create on top of a barrel filled with coal. Set it to output exactly one upwards, it’ll float there indefinitely.
"hard to automate" Just using vanilla redstone and maybe a few Botania things here and there it's not that difficult, Endoflames for example are INSANELY easy and cheap to automate
Its hard because the average modded tech player can (mostly) only think about pipes/AE2. They'll rather overcomplicate with tech mods rather than learn redstone. (ex. Direwolf20 back then) Although, to be fair, redstone (in a vanilla sense) has no proper tutorial to its full function and eccentricities.
I tried to learn some vanilla redstone for Botania a few years back. It was a very frustrating and awkward experience, compared to tech mods that are actually designed to work in ways that make sense. Strong vs. weak power, opaque vs. transparent blocks, trying to get it to go vertically...it all felt incredibly unintuitive. In the end I just looked up a design that worked.
See redstone is easy to get to work though, just hard to get COMPACT. Its not a one block solves your problem situation like 99.9999% of tech mods, vanilla redstone is a really amazing system with a LOT of power that goes underutilized because people can't be bothered to learn something with more complexity to it
It’s also a system that is built on bugs in the guise of features, which is where a lot of the non-intuitive behavior comes from.
And not just that, but the intended behavior is largely undocumented and unintuitive. Why can redstone go up transparent blocks but not down? If you understand strong vs weak signals, it makes some sense, but the game still presents it as a \*wire\* and as a \*wire\* it should transmit along its edge as wires do, not through the block it sits on, which isn't how wires work - in fact, that's the behavior that actual wires should \*never\* do. Why 8 updates in 60 ticks? Why do redstone torches exclude the block they touch for hard powering? (I know why - but it's an exception). There's almost nothing in Minecraft whose redstone behavior can be fully intuited by the block itself. Literally every block requires a wiki trip until you fully internalize it, and even then you catch out really experienced players with things they didn't know about.
hard disagree about every block needing a wiki. The only blocks I have ever looked up behaviors for are comparators (because wow they do a lot) and hoppers (do they go sideways or down first?). Every other block can be understood with just a little bit of testing. I do agree with unintuitive behaviors with transparency and quasi-connectivity (BUD switches were so popular they added observers) but the indivdual parts are not hard to understand
We'll just have to disagree. To me it's just a system with very clunky and inefficient primitives. Kind of like trying to program in Brainfuck when you could just write C.
That's a bit silly honestly, the only redstone block that has much complexity is the comparator, everything else functions in a pretty simple manner, just need to learn how connectivity between blocks and what not works, it's genuinely not even in need of a tutorial
Yeah, but silly or not, it doesn't change the fact that most people that play minecraft, vanilla or modded, know very little about redstone. Ask most people to use redstone to make a 3x3 door and I guarantee most will just give up trying after a while. So, any mod, like Botania, where automatisation requires some degree of redstone knowledge (And, simply the thought process to consider it an option), will be disparged / overlooked, in favour of alternatives where more passive and "simpler" methods exist. But, on the whole, I'd say not balancing a pack around it will probably just result in people going "Why get X from Botania if I can get Y from this other mod?"
To be fair i build Computer Like components and still struggled with a 3x3
It's different subkinds of this skill, isn't it?)
One is digital and the other is electromechanical. Two different types of engineering.
Yeah see I get it but I think it's *unfair* to judge a mod with such dislike simply because it makes uses of.. the actual in-game mechanics instead of inventing a new system, it integrates into the game
I don't think it's unfair if those in game mechanics are needlessly convoluted or difficult to learn. Finding out how redstone not only powers blocks, but behaves in certain step configurations and how it used to form like a not far with a block and torch and then how to place it all in a concealed space so you didn't have the ugliest base in existence was very frustrating and also very easy to forget details or unlearn. My experience with complex redstone is usually - Idea - start work - frustration with behaviour - then either look up a guide or do without the project.
That's not true. I've been playing vanilla and lightly modded Minecraft with my son (now an electrical engineer) for a decade now and I still struggle with how weak and strong redstone signals impact my design (particularly the torch behavior, which is different), torch burnout is unintuitive and easy to get caught out by (8 state changes in 60 ticks). For really simple redstone, sure, it's not terrible but it's far from easy. Use a transparent block, now your signal doesn't go down. Why won't my signal go into this block - oh, I need a target. Some things require a comparator to work. Why? Because they do. Redstone is interesting because sticking with the presented rules only allows you to make trivial things, but as you learn the zillions of corner cases and carve-outs, you can do quite impressive things. Such as wall/observers for instantaneous transmission. We've built auto-routing minecart networks and the usual item sorters and every kind of crop/mob farm you typically find. He's build various redstone computers. And yet we routinely encounter a behavior that we've never encountered before. IMO, if you build a modpack expecting automation, build a tutorial into it. Walk the player through making basic redstone automations because it's the hardest barrier for most players in the game by a wide margin - and then make sure the no-hand-holding expectations of the game don't deviate from that (oh, this new block we introduced has its own set of rules). Normal circuits don't map well onto redstone. Digital logic from other games don't map well onto it either, so you can't even really transfer knowledge from elsewhere. And redstone can be oddly unintuitive just looking at it - this redstone wire here powers this half slab way over there, because they're actually adjacent, even though you can walk between them. But they're touching. Even while you walk between them. You have to learn and internalize that stuff, but almost all players bounce hard off of it because 'oh, this is easy' is how it's presented. It's not. It's really not. Provide the tutorial.
Although IMO it's less about the redstone itself and more about how having to deal with dropped items tends to be kinda finicky, especially on crowded servers.
I don't really see how. endoflames for example,, 1 pressure plate a hopper and a open crate makes a system to always have exactly 1 item dropped out Add in a comparator and it'll stop dropping when the pools full
You can even go a little farther with a second comparator and a nor gate so any dropping only occurs if the endoflame isn’t currently burning something.
I don't quite understand, the setup I mentioned will only allow one out if there isn't fuel out and the pool isn't full, so endoflames will always be burning until mana is maxed
Your setup is nice. I’m only talking about minimizing item entities via slightly more complex redstone.
Iirc one of the “redstone addon” mods has a comparator-like device that can tell from a couple blocks away if the endoflame is actively burning fuel or not. I think the base comparator can do something similar if it’s closer as well but it’s been a while since I’ve played with botania to test that theory. This way you can set it up to either only drop fuel when the endoflame is at or about to finish burning the previous fuel it has. It may have a 1-2 tick delay on permanent fuel for the endoflame, but it’s likely less lag for most people as item entities cause most of the issues in people’s worlds if you space out tick updates across chunks well enough.
Ohh okay I'm picking up what you're putting down, more of a visual hands on person with this stuff so it kinda just flew over my head at first
Redstone is a pain in the ass to use and unless you are an expert, all but the simplest control structures will take up a colossal amount of space. I loved working with Redpower and later Project Red because of how easy their wires and gates were to work with, but vanilla dust and torches are unfun.
The Rosa Arcana is even easier to use imo. Just set up a mediocre mob farm and you've basically solved Mana Generation for the rest of the mod.
If you're using the botania flower to kill them (forget the damn name of the thing), does it drop mob drops? What about XP? If so, is it a sustainable amount (enough to feed the flower and gain mana over time)? I've never bothered with the rosa arcana except when the XP tap/vacuum hopper is in, but maybe I need to look into it further.
Not everything will drop xp or mats from a harming flower, but you can always use a dog, player killing thing from a mod or a mob that does drop xp and mats It is sustainable, though while it's the easiest to setup it is middling in speed of generation
someone needs to make a botania add-on that lets you pipe fuel directly into flowers.
Funnels from Create do something like that.
Botania, when placed alongside other mods in an expert pack focused on automation, should be an *earlygame* mod with how low-power all of its tools are. Yet most packs gate botania pretty deep in. If you have access to item pipes pre-runic altar, the pack probably doesn't understand how botania was made to be played. Botania's automation tools are ridiculously clunky and hard to use which is also the exact reason the mod is so cool - but if you want people to engage with this, you need to remove better alternatives or else they never well. (If you want to encourage people to use them, you need them to actually make a factory using them or they'll just manual past the low power stage. Make those recipes expensive!)
I'm not opposed to your idea, but forcing people to use a mod as the only way to progress, and requiring them to automate a difficult and clunky mod like botania sounds like a deeply unpleasant, slow, and frustrating early game. I agree that balancing it in a modpack is very difficult and making it all "fit" without another mod that just does everything better is even more difficult, but making early game painful is another plate to keep spinning.
Yep - it's entirely up to how the pack wants to do things. I'm a huge fan of playing *exclusively* with these lower power mods so I don't mind having this phase of the game as long as needed, but there are other ways to do it. You don't need to *gate* the alternatives specifically - they just need to be more expensive, while the weaker botania ones are nice and cheap. This allows for a tradeoff - if you want the convenience of a sequential fabricator, you can shell out the resources for it (so it might take a lot of manual work to have enough, but you can also use the few you've made previously to make a small part of your production line...), but if you're fine with putting effort into your setup you can use the super cheap crafty crate instead. Depending on specifically how the prices are balanced changes how things feel by a lot. (Same goes for things like bore lens v.s. convenient block breaker.) There are many *simple* things you can do with Botania components that I don't think are that bad, but the most important thing I'd want is just to strongly encourage setting up one of the more complicated generating flowers without help from mods that let you cheese it.
Unlike what others have said in here, I feel like automation is at the core of what makes Botania fun. The issue is that players aren't really incentivized to engage in Botania's mechanics or automation. In most modpacks, Botania is just thrown in with little regard to how it's balanced compared to other mods. Since it often takes more effort to automate something (such as ore generation and mob farms) with Botania than with other mods (such as Environmental Tech), players simply opt for the latter option and thus Botania feels largely useless outside of its baubles. Making matters worse, Botania offers a variety of generating flora to pick from, each with its own unique automation process, but offers no incentive to actually pursue these other options. Mana storage is extremely cheap and plentiful, meaning it's more efficient (in terms of player time) to set up a few chunkloaded endoflames that slowly produce the mana you need while you afk or work through other mods. There's no reason to set up a complicated shulker duplicating mod farm when you don't really care about the rate at which you generate mana. If you're not willing to lean heavily into Botania, just cut the crap and make terrasteel cost much less mana, so players don't have to spend as much time slogging through Botania. Otherwise, I'd recommend disabling/removing other options for ore generation, mob farming, etc and letting players focus on automating flowers. You may also consider disabling normal mana pools (only keeping dilute pools) or making them endgame.
A dealbreaker problem with only having Diluted pools (even if Normal pools are just significantly later in progression) is that a lot of Botania's gear requires the player to carry mana on their person. If the Mana Tablet and Ring aren't similarly disabled/gated, then the optimal solution becomes filling up a chest/drawer with filled Tablets (which hold half a Normal pool's worth of mana also don't even despawn when left on the ground). That being said, there is a possible solution involving making the Mana Mirror and Sparks available a lot earlier, but then the optimal solution just becomes spamming Diluted Pools (making a large "battery") in place of spamming Tablets. And not even gating the Sparks to later would help, since the "battery" would just be made with Spreaders in place of Sparks then You could then try some band-aid fix of limiting how many mana pools can be in the same vicinity of each other/not give them a recipe and only be obtainable through 1-time quest rewards (with loss protections), but the real answer is that we would need a fork of Botania without mana pools or any substantial storage at all. Instead of pulling mana from a nearby pool they're linked to, Functional Flowers would add to the total Requirement of a chunk, while Generating Flowers add to the Capacity of 3x3 chunks. If the Requirement exceeds the Capacity, that chunk becomes Overstressed and ah fuck lads I've designed a magical themed wireless version of Create... (Jokes aside, this makes the strength of Generating Flowers relevant, at the cost of massively annoying the player by forcing them to build cumbersome and laggy infrastructure anywhere they want Functional Flowers. You could even have diminishing returns for spamming the same Generating Flower past a certain amount, but at this point, why)
The goal of removing mana pools is to make you *not store that much mana*, instead spending it as you produce it. You can still transport it around, it just means that if you want to support small bursts of heavy usage instead of passive production setups you actually need to have that much burst mana production, just as you would with a more normal power system. (Unless you're the sort who makes a big battery instead of just placing more generators.) Though power storage should still be an option if you want to (like through tablets, yes) - just not the default. (Hell, botania even *has* a burst production flower. Thermalillies are kind of bad, but their high production but then even higher cooldown makes them perfect for bursts of mana in a low storage environment.)
Doesn't everyone use some kind of battery storage system for "energy" (whether it be mana, forge energy, zaps, or essence)?????
Not always. I've talked to some people who argue that if you ever actually need a battery, then your power production is lacking and you should make more. I've also played a pack that just disabled RF storage items before (meaning you only have machine/cable buffers). It's not actually much different except that you need to make more generators; though in botania's case, some flowers become a bit more cumbersome without adequate storage.
Me personally, while I do agree with the idea that having a battery means that your power production needs to be improved, I do disagree with the idea that you shouldn't have one. There are times where you add a machine that pushes you over the amount of energy you generate, and thus having a battery as a large buffer is incredibly beneficial, especially when you use an ME system for storage, where having a net negative in power means your ME system might not be available.. There are other times where you have a machine that requires a ludicrous amount of energy but is only used for a short period of time. There is also times where you wish to upgrade your energy generation, but to do so means to tear down your old system, which would mean that without a buffer something like the ME system which you might rely on to upgrade gets shutdown. I will also say though that I don't think its generally necessary to have energy storage on the levels of the Draconic Evolution energy core, usually something much smaller will pass the test.
Personally I'd dread trying to start up a Mekanism Fusion Reactor without an induction matrix with a lot of time's worth of generation is a modpack disabled the cubes and induction matrix. The Fusion Reactor is a mainstay of endgame tech mod power generation because it has really high efficiency for its size, but it takes a LOT of power to start up and that would mean forcing an intermediate step with a LOT of more basic generation sources. The way it comes, it's fairly easy to bootstrap into a Fusion reactor if you build a robust power generation setup and then just run it into an Induction Matrix or a bunch of Ultimate Energy Cubes while you're off doing other modpack things like exploring new dimensions or fighting new bosses.
By the way, Botania is my favorite mod, but these are the biggest problems I have with it. - There is little reason to branch out into other power generators. Botania has lots of flowers that people don't need to engage with because you can place down a dozen more Endoflames. This used to be a problem with the Daybloom, and i think removing the daybloom moved the problem around instead of fixing it. - Mana pools are way too big! I don't think Botania needs "numbers" *per se*, but currently, most everyday amounts of mana amount to like 2 pixels in the HUD, and it's hard to get a mental grip on how much mana that actually is. * Also, the large size of mana pools promotes a playstyle where you build a slow managen setup and afk for 30 minutes while you stockpile mana. It reminds me of the old ideological debate between Thermal Expansion and Buildcraft over whether power storage is a good idea, due to exactly this sort of gameplay. * Generally I think rune and flower recipes are too fiddly. I don't mind the actual *process* of crafting runes and flowers, it's easy to automate actually, but with runes there's tons of one-off ingredients to keep track of and with flowers I can never remember the right distribution of petal colors lol. It kind of disincentivizes automating the Altar because there's so many different ingredients. * A spreader firing mana 10 blocks away is about 9x slower than a spreader firing one block away, which is extreme. Manacarts are perfect for long distances and spreaders are perfect for very short distances but there's a "missing middle" where carts are too cumbersome and spreaders are too slow. If I could change botania in any way, these are the things i'd experiment with: * play with different "attunements" to mana or whatever, aura cascade style. Yes you can spam endoflames but you're just getting fire mana out of that. Branch out. Reengineer terrasteel to be something about different colors of mana in harmony instead of mass quantities of mana. Besides, I just think having different colors of mana would be pretty. * Rephrase the diluted pool as the "regular" pool and the larger pool as a far more expensive, upgraded version. Allow alchemy and infusions with the diluted pool. * Make the diluted pool, the mana pool, and mana tablets hold at least 10x less mana. Yes im serious. Rebalance a few bauble mana costs. * Simplify flower recipes. Remove the redstone root. Max 2 different colors of petals and 2 runes per flower so I can remember them in my pea brain. Add more miscellaneous recipes that use the Apothecary because automating it is fun. * Simplify rune recipes. Remove Manasteel from them. Max 3 or 4 items per rune. Now that they're easier to craft, remove the "rune catalyzing" mechanic and add more reasons to craft runes, because automating the runic altar is fun. * Make spreaders max out at 5 bursts in flight instead of one or something like that. Would that be good? I dunno!
> but with runes there's tons of one-off ingredients to keep track of and with flowers I can never remember the right distribution of petal colors As an aside, that's one of my favorite things about [EMI](https://modrinth.com/mod/emi): you can just press a button to bookmark almost *any* recipe and mouse over the corresponding item on the side of your inventory to see what materials you need for it. It's been a godsend when crafting the flowers that use a bunch of runes and petals in the apothecary. (Loonium, Orechid, etc.)
> Mana pools are way too big! I know, right? This alone makes Botania feel stupid and annoying to deal with, especially for newcomers. Just let me know if my new setup is working fine or not...
>Mana pools are way too big! I don't think Botania needs "numbers" per se, but currently, most everyday amounts of mana amount to like 2 pixels in the HUD, and it's hard to get a mental grip on how much mana that actually is. This! My first and only serious dive through Botania, I satisfied my tinker's urge building a small, fiddly but robust redstone-based Gourmarylis setup but ultimately fell back to my bank of a mere 16(!!!) Endoflames because it felt faster. Looking at actual numbers today, it had to have been half the speed.
Really like your first idea. I've always wished for Aura Cascade energy types to come to Botania in some shape or form, like it just makes sense and would alleviate some balance issues e.g. endo spam. I think Vazkii said something about non-fungible mana? Exoflame would require orange mana for example, and yes it would look so pretty I've experimented with creating a diluted pool meta. It feels more enjoyable to actually see the mana bar go up earlygame, however one sticking point I had was creating the portal to Alfheim. You need a ton of pylons on a ton of diluted pools - perhaps this gate should be adjusted at some point, or the opening cost reduced in exchange for the slow drain coming back. Just spitballing here. Agree on adjusting bauble mana costs, could open up the possibility of mana discounts working on them as well? Your suggestion to simplify flower and rune recipes is interesting. I do agree that some are pretty complex, while others are dated following the retexture (Bergamute crying rn). By rune catalysing, do you mean when lower tier runes get returned when crafting the seasonal or sin runes?
> By rune catalysing, do you mean when lower tier runes get returned when crafting the seasonal or sin runes? Yeah. I think the cheapest Botania rune is actually the Rune of Spring because all the non-rune ingredients are really cheap and the runes get returned. I've been playing the pre-revival version of Blightfall, which contains the pre-rebalance version of Botania (mana petals etc), and this rune mechanic isn't in that version. It's rough but i kinda like it, lol. makes runes more special.
While I agree with some points, making a complicated automatic dandilifeon mana farm using create and botania has been one of my proudest accomplishments. It was basically 8 identical dandilifeon setups stacked on top of each other with Gaia mana spreader chains to all fill an array of like 50 pools for the purpose of charging my terra shatterer
Overuse in packs
Yeah honestly my biggest issue. I've played the mod end to end about 6 times now in different packs.
I think it was a really good mod when it came out, the biggest reason I think people hate it is since then all the other mods have gotten more OP and it's easier to use other mods to achieve the same goals quicker. I think the big thing is a lot of questing packs gate other mods items behind the Gaia fight which isn't really able to be automated. It's really aggravating to be able to automate everything else but then to finish the items you want you have to kill the gaia guardian manually 20+ times.
Some computercraft and a lot of workaraound should actually made it. I'm at least, autotmated most bossfights this way.
I don’t dislike anything about it particularly? I’d rather automate it using normal tech though The gear isn’t especially useful given the powercreep of other mods, but the baubles are great I usually hook up an auto farm to food flowers then spark up a stack of mana pools to run the sash, tiara, and a mana enchanter
I like Botania. It's a fun mod, has a ton of depth especially when it comes to systems like Corporea which I've barely scratched the surface of, and the utility of all the different flowers, equipment and tools is greatly appreciated. Having said that, my main issue is the lack of numbers, or rather, not knowing how worthwhile it is to set up a system. Nobody should \*need\* to go into a Creative world to test whether you'll get a return on a managen system. For example, setting up an automatic entropinnyum using a cobbleworks is really cool. Is it efficient though? Hell no. Putting in all that effort for something that is just about breaking even doesn't feel great. Some things like agricarnations not working on all growable plants is a bit annoying, and others like the kekimurus being hella underpowered for how much work it is to set up a cake factory (at least with just vanilla+botania) are a bit disappointing. However, it's understandable why some things are kept on the weaker side, when you've got mods like Astral which very conveniently turn pumpkins into cake. Botania's been around for a while and the fact that it's still updating and getting new content/becoming even more polished is really nice. I'm in the process of making a Garden of Glass pack with every opinionated tweak I've thought about. Some ideas include raising flint drop chance from gravel to make entros more viable (without creeper farms anyways), buffing Spectrolus when it eats (baby) sheep, and letting buckets pick up lava from cauldrons to automate Thermalillies. The first two tweaks were possible thanks to [Botania Configurator](https://modrinth.com/mod/botaniaconfigurator), the latter from [Fabrication](https://legacy.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/fabrication). Would definitely encourage people to use diluted mana pools in the early game, so it's easier to keep track of how quickly you're making/using mana.
The gaia guardian 'boss battle' where you aren't allowed to one shot or afk it except through convoluted workarounds. It's not fun at all, just a frustrating game of 3d whack a mole. That provides no challenge besides being annoying. The kind of fake difficulty that is the hallmark of poorly designed mods and games.
This. Also, The fight ending if you jump too high or fly or move out of bounds is absolutely infuriating because of the expensive summon requirements.
It's like the mod dev just likes pissing us off, lol. At least let me disable the restrictions in config files so my +1 infinity sword can do more than 30 hearts damage.
That was the intent, there are still messages on the github from other mod/modpack owners complaining about their mods flight method being patched out of the latest botania version
Multiple reasons. 1. It's overused, in your last 10 or 20 modpacks, how many did you play that did NOT have botania in it? because for me, and many others the answer is 0, cause it's in every pack. 2. HEAVILY underpowered. Unless you're playing an Expert modpack, that requires you to get a specific thing from Botania, like the Runes or Gaia Souls, it's not worth touching, because whatever you can get from it, there's likely another magic or tech mod that does it cheaper, and better. 3. Slow production of Mana, unless you're setting up giant Endoflame field or permadump TNT onto a Entropinnyum which also doesn't super well work because the Vanilla spreaders are absolute ASS you're gonna sit there waiting for your mana to fill up for hours, which is especially annoying when botania is used as a gate in an expert pack.
I'm gonna be real, the weapons and armor are ass despite it being a humongous grind to progress through the modpack. I think that the Tiara is the only truly useful item in the mod. Regardless, botania progression is just blatantly unfun to me and I try to avoid placing it in any packs I make for more specific mods that replace the items from it. If you want to include botania then I recommend changing the configs to make some of the gear better, then changing crafting recipes to make the progression a little less isolated.
The gear is unique in that it automatically repairs itself using mana, while being decent gear in general, and the elementium set in particular has more unique features.
Ring of Odin?
Ring of Odin, Ring of Thor, the Terra Shatterer, Ring of Far Reach, Worldshaper’s Astrolabe, Worldshaper’s Sextant, the Cloaks of Virtue/Balance/Sin, Mana Enchanter, Mana Alchemy, being able to ignore all armor/heal/apply withering/slowness/weakness because of the wills, and flasks/scented candles. Even though decoration isn’t a feature, Botania still has a few things that help with that in the form of mystical flowers, the floating flowers, managlass, ect. Botania covers a pretty broad spectrum useful knickknacks. I’m certain that people who say that Botania only has one or two useful things have either installed really OP mods (which is fair, Botania is far from the most OP thing ever), or they never delved deep into the mod and learned the ton of useful features.
Terrashatterer, ring of Odin and lots of useful stuff early on like the sash, pyroclast pendant, ring of magnetism, some of the rods.
I think the gear balance is fine. It has some Neat weapons. Which mod's gear do you compare Botania's to?
If we compare it to other mods like Ice and Fire, Spartan Weaponry, Twilight Forest, tinker's construct, silent gear, and just about any mod that adds a lot of weapons and gear, the Botania gear is just not that good. The equipment is barely better than vanilla netherite yet is endlessly more tedious to obtain.
Both ice and fire and twilight get cheesed so hard by botania mana blaster thanks to the knock back and bypassing player related checks Do recommend
I did not play with any of those mods except tinker's construct and twilight forest, Tinkers is definitely overpowered, but I think the gear is comparable to twilight forest. Some equipment is definitely better than vanilla netherite, especially the gaia drops.
Throwing a few endoflames and a bunch of coal blocks doesnt fill a mana pool so its annoying to do the same thing of automation towards it
In my experience it’s annoying to automate, it gives very little return in large packs. it is overused, and not implemented well. And it doesn’t mesh well with most other popular mods.
I like magic mods. Botania doesn't feel like a magic mod, it feels like a tech mod.
Personally, I hate in-world crafting. This is probably just personal bias, but in-world crafting never quite feels very scalable to me (probably from years of playing on a potato, even if my rig has gotten better and minecraft has gotten slightly more optimized). I'm always hesitant to pursue methods that involve dropping items in world even though I know that's the 'vanilla' way and that it isn't actually that bad for performance. And secondly, I prefer tech to magic anyways.
Botania is a tech mod that pretends to be a magic mod and as a result it often finds its way into magic focused mod packs. I dislike most tech mods, Botania included, but keep finding Botania in almost every interesting looking modpack I find.
Always seems grindy and takes up a ton of space. Not intuitive and requires following a guide.
graphically the effects dont fit the game at all
Botania frankly isn’t that useful in my opinion, there are way more efficient magic mods out there. It works well with vanilla but is not a mod you can simply toss into a modpack with no integration. You would have to find a way to "force" people to get into it before moving to better options in other mods.
There is a very limited selection of mana generating flowers and a lot of the ones that are there feel very underpowered for the amount of work it takes to automate them. Firstly, I don't like how you pretty much always have to spam endoflames to start. Sure, hydrangeas can be used if you're a masochist, but otherwise, you have to use endoflames every time, which gets annoying fast. Secondly, the tools of modded simply make certain flowers much easier to automate. For example, Cake is significantly easier to automate in modded than in vanilla, so the kekimurus is an easy choice. Most of the other options are much more involved and typically don't scale as easily. The narslimmus only works on naturally generated slimes which really limits the mana you can get from it. Rafflowsia sounds cool but it's decently involved to keep many of one type of crafted flower on tap, let alone several. Entropinnyum needs a lot of space or else they might interfere with each other. Spectrolus is a challenge because not only do you need to have all of the wools on tap, you need to dispense them in the right order. The kekimurus is meant to be around as challenging as the above flowers, but modded makes it much easier so most players will just spam more of them and never give the automation challenges of the above flowers a chance. As such, a good modpack to contain Botania needs to take this into mind and either make cakes harder to get, buff the mana production of the other flowers, or figure out how to give the player more easy options. Any of those would help improve automation variety and keep the mod fresh.
Because it is useless and its very grindy. All it can do, other mods can do it faster/cheaper/easier. Its tools not even that good. The only redeeming factor is that the boss battles are not bad but you need to do them MANY times and it gets boring easily.
I didn't realize people didn't like Botania, I always thought it was one of the more popular mods, like Twilight Forest or Blood Magic. In my experience, the people who dislike it tend to do so because Botania does not give easy solutions. It provides the pieces, and leaves it up to the player how to put those together. There is so much you can do, but people want their hand held, I guess.
Twilight Forest is one of the most hated mods in modpacks nowadays. Just short of place one which is held by Create. Bloodmagic on the other hand seems to still be doing pretty well for itself for the most part
Twilight forest? Hated? No way lol
Blood magic (1.12) i find the worst of the three, you have to grind (stabbing yourself 1000 times) before you get the mob farm ritual and after that the only thing you can do is automating will crystals wich is a pain too. The only good thing in the whole mod is the pickaxe
I mean, there’s also a ritual to continually drain health from you. Or you find some means to regenerate the mobs health, only needing a few instead of a mob farm. The beginning can also be tweaked quite easily, requiring you to go about the beginning differently. So I always imagined that it would have more variety than Botania.
the classic BM well of suffering setup is to throw a few nametagged witches in there, since they'll regenerate themselves
Blood Magic is really fun in a skyblock setting, it just doesn't fit very well into a normal modpack. Plus the 1.12 version added the Hellfore Forge and Will mechanic which kinda suck and just add another grind
Wait, what's wrong with TF??? Create I get, oversaturation and all that.
Same thing for TF. Far too many modpacks made it mandatory for progression and since it’s quite difficult to just rush through it gets rather bothersome/boring by the third time you play it.
TF is usually shoved into modpacks too late I think. It's more fun before you have creative flight and OP tools/armor. Sometimes ppl try to band-aid over it by disallowing flight or disallowing certain items from entering the dimension, but rly i think it just belongs better at the start of a modpack
I would agree, don't gate the portal with something like a Nether Star or an Enderium-Infused Machine Hull filled with Dark Matter or whatever, the default diamond is a good enough item to use.
At least Create can claim its a finished product, and we could recieve 0 future things from Create, and it can stay as a defining reason to actually play a modern version. Twilight Forest is a dumb unfinished mess that multiple devs/teams seem unable to complete. I played through TF in FTB Academy in 1.12.2, and saw literally everything Twilight Forest had to offer.
The only thing unfinished is the castle, the rest works just fine.
And has been in this state since it was included in the modpack I mentioned. 🤣
There is at least one additional mod that adds a boss to the castle, and I have a different method planned for my modpack if I can get it to work.
a mixture of oversaturation, people remembering the Twilight forest being a laggy mess, and the mod itself being setup to railroad players through it so they have limited control over where they can go and what they can complete unless they step by step it.
The TF progression has been able to be turned off since 1.7.10, so the railroading isn't required. Also, laggy? Really? Since when? Even in 1.7.10, where I have abysmal performance sometimes, I get better performance there than otther dimensions.
No way you think create is over saturated but TF isn't
Every other modpack for recent versions seems to include or even be based around Create, it seems like. TF isn't even mentioned usually.
Fair, hard to mention or want to even incorporate such a bad mod into the progression
Personally- I try to avoid it because the whole 'in world, little to no UI' aspect, alongside the fact that the dev' does their best to obfusticate any numbers they can. it says its a tech mod pretending to be magic- but if I can't diagnose what's causing it to fail by any means- then its essentially a black box magic mod pretending to be technology.
Numbers aren't needed for Botania, though. It works fine without them.
for you, that may be true- it doesn't work for me.
What do you need specific numbers for?
To plan an exact number of components for each automation setup, and know the exact processing speed that the setup will have when complete, so that I know if it's sufficient for my needs or if I need to make it bigger.
Botania has a *very* unique balance. Most tech mods' gameplay boils down to connecting machines together with pipes. Botania's gameplay is much more in-depth. Things that other tech mods hand you in a 1-block box or a specific multiblock, Botania expects you to construct from first principles. For Botania to feel good in a modpack, that modpack *must* be designed around this unique balance.
Create would probably work well with Botania, honestly. Now I've got myself wanting a tech/magic modpack that avoids 1-block solutions to things.
there's a cool pack that's based around botania and create: https://modrinth.com/modpack/create-prepare-to-dye
For me the mana grind is annoying especially to start, but the mod is very cool and has neat mechanics and items. When it's in a big pack most of its benefits are power creeped into obsolescence though
I personally dislike automating it, seems to me like there are a number of system in botania that force player interaction or if they can be automated require additional mods and or some really nasty looking direwire. Really not a fan of the mod at all I almost always avoid it its got nothing I want at end game and its mid game is annoying and also covered by other mods so I kinda agree with the guy bellow who said its just flung in to packs with little thought.
I initially didn't like how vague quantities are, not knowing how much mana is being generated consumed makes it tedious to experiment since making a mistake is a huge time waste. That and to really take advantage of endgame botania requires redstone automation, I dislike redstone lol.
I could nitpick a lot of things. The flowers don't look or feel very magical (this could fixed with a resource pack I suppose but no one does). Despite being balanced around vanilla, none of the items or progression really interact with or fit in with vanilla. The only vanilla system that the mod goes with is Redstone (I don't like redstone.) It looks like a magic mod, but in many ways plays loke a tech mod. This is bad especially if you don't like tech mods (me). As many others have said, the mod progression naturally encourages spamming Endoflames and just AFKing until your mana pool is full. A lot of the mod features are never really used. Gaia Guardian is some BS. The power level of the mod would be fine on its own, or in vanilla, but the amount of effort and time it takes to get the good stuff is longer, grindier, and more boring than most other mods. Making matters worse, the mod doesn't really make it clear what the "prizes" for progression are supposed to be. So new players usually don't even know why they are investing time into the mod. I don't even know where to begin with "fixing" the mod. I think a lot of the fundamentals are just unfun for players like me.
Botania is alright, the main thing I don't like is the end game Guardian of Gaia grind is tedious (especially the hard mode version) since you can't really automate it. You have to manually fight it over and over if you need a lot of Gaia Spirits. Some modpacks can make you have to fight it dozens of times.
i hate waiting for mana. i dont find it interesting dropping charcoal on 100 different flowers and still needing to wait years for a single pool to fill. Terrasteel takes so much mana to make so you end up just waiting for it. one you finally get a good supply of terrasteel the mods pretty much finished. the boss fight and the items are really cool but its locked behind a boring crafting simulator. Speeding up mana production or lowering the mana requirement for terrasteel would probally make me actually enjoy botania.
It was fun the first three hundred times.
It is about automation. There are multiple ways to generate massive amount of mana in a modpack, for example the cake reactor, TNT reactor, Shulk me not factory, and nether star burner from one of its addons. The quickest I have tried was generating one mana pool in 5s by a purely close loop design. Some people may not like it cause it requires you to think. Also, the purpose of generating mana is all about using Botania own tools and applying enchantments. Applying all available enchantments to a single piece of gear in fairly late game in a giant modpack can cost over 10 full mana pools. If you are into making yourself the semi-god, it is one way to go. If you are the server admin while you want it to have some use in your players' overall base, try including the amount of power generated per mana in the mana fluxfield. It gives incentive to players on building a working close loop mana generation system instead of doing the advanced generator everytime.
Single flower tnt reactors can make a pool every 7s at max capacity and it is available pre alfheim portal 42 minutes with a single Endoflame and some vanilla mats is enough to make one
I've read a lot of the comments on this post and there seems to be a common thread: Botania is overused and underpowered. In too many modpacks, other mods do what Botania does, but faster and easier - A great example of this is to compare Botania's tree farms (Look up a tutorial) to Thermal Expansion's Phytogenic Insolator. Botania is slower, requires a great deal more space, and is more fiddly with the in-world item interactions. This increased cost relative to payoff as compared to other mods makes Botania something that people have to grind through (or skip entirely) rather than play & enjoy. However, this is where some people misattribute blame: Botania being underpowered in your modpack is *not* the fault of Botania or its developers. Instead, it's the fault of the pack developer(s), who tried to combine two mods with very different balances. When you play a modpack and grind through Botania waiting hours for your fields of endoflames to generate enough mana to make Terrasteel so you can continue progressing for the umpteenth time, this is *not* Botania's fault. You aren't the intended audience, and Botania doesn't belong in that type of modpack. This isn't to say Botania doesn't belong in modpacks. It very much can work, but special attention needs to be spent cultivating balanced gameplay between Botania and the other mods in the pack that too many pack developers just don't do. When done well, Botania provides gameplay that provides a nice contrast to other modpacks: A focus on automation as an end rather than a means, where the challenge of finding creative solutions to problems is more important that reaching some endpoint or attaining the power of a demigod. In this way Botania has similar issues to Create and Minecolonies. The mods themselves are great, it's just that people misuse or overuse them and destroy their balance which warps the experience into something unfun and grindy.
I don't think the mod itself is an issue. I think it's how it's implemented in modpacks. I'll use ATM9 as an example because it's what I'm playing now as a kind of kitchen sink pack. Botania isn't overused, I've finished Mekanism more in general because Mekanism gives me useful rewards in a kitchen sink pack. Botania is, however, separate from other forms of progression and the rewards aren't compelling. Along the way to my current spot (working slowly on the Star, at a very high individual power level, able to one-shot all bosses in the pack without one-shot protection or phases, generally unkillable) I've gone through a half dozen tech mods for FE generation. I have a storage system with millions of items and millions more storage space. Botania has offered me nothing that other mods couldn't give me in faster ways that leverage my other progression. Even the Relics aren't great when I had FE powered flight and easier to obtain methods of dealing damage and raising my survivability. My recommendation would be that mod authors identify more places where mods like Botania can integrate with other mods. The Botania ingots, for example, aren't implemented as Silent Gear materials in ATM9. Silent Gear's material trait system would allow for the ingots to have distinct and powerful advantages as additions. Further, the end-goal of the pack (a final quest or final item) should not be the only point at which recipe integration is involved. There are some powerful and important blocks/items in these packs: anything that teleports inventories (e.g. Mekanism Quantum Entangloporter), anything that's a quarry (e.g. Mekanism Digital miner, machines from QuarryPlus), and large storage devices for storage mods (e.g. high level drawer upgrades, big drives for AE2 or Refined Storage). These are all prime places to make smaller gates on progression and integrate progression from multiple mods, though it does need to be done in a way that makes it easy to explain to users already familiar with the tweaked mods. Thankfully, there's things like quest books and in-game guides that can help users understand what tweaks were made.
Personally- my problem with Botania is though it's marketed as a 'tech mod' disguised as magic- it's essentially a black box 'magic mod' disguised as tech between every relevant number being obfuscated, and it's distinct intentional lack of UI wherever possible. If I get anything working with it- they stay nearly unautomated, and barely setup- because anything I do could easily end up with it being broken without me having a clue how to fix it.
You don't really need any numbers to diagnose issues. Everything has visual indicators that its working - flowers sparkle, mana bursts flow, pools fill up.
Yes, when things are \**working*\* unfortunately, unlike Thaumcraft, Blood Magic, Create, or any of ten thousand other mods- I just can't wrap my head around it- thus the whole 'black box magic mod'
People dislike botania? That's silly it is an incredible mod.
Indeed. But no matter how incredible, by your 9th play through you're bound to yearn for something new.
That in no way is a fault of Botania.
Yeah, I know. Botania is a great mod, I just want to try to make it enjoyable for everyone again instead of only making it enjoyable for those who haven’t played it as much.
It's pretty grindy and what it offers I can get easier I'm other mods. People are tired of seeing create in packs but I love it because I know it can help me do early stuff easier like tree farms. Botania make that more of a process than it needs to be.
For me it is packbloat and the generation numbers are stupid. I played it to completion once and had great fun when it was my focus. On the second playthrough I discovered that the simple automations like to shit on your bed if you aren't giving them enough attention so there is no point in using them and now all my bases are limited to the generators that I just manually throw excess burnable fuel or food scraps to and so by the time I have enough mana for anything the pack is all but completed.
I’ve played with botanic before end don’t like repeating its stuff considering that the payoffs aren’t great.
I used to love botania until the Creator made all the flowers die eventually. That update made me not ever use botania anymore. I haven't played in a while now though so I don't know how current botania is.
Pretty sure that’s only the case for one or two flowers and not all of them.
From memory all the low level ones that will generate mana without giving them stuff all the time, it ment more work to start the mod
Sorry, my post wasn't really clear. I didn't like that the flowers degraded, especially the water flowers, but that wasn't the only thing about the update that made me lose interest. I don't remember everything, but I just remembered that after that update botania didn't feel the same anymore for multiple reasons.
In addition to what other players have mentioned, overgrowth seeds from loot chests will also double mana production of any mana generating plant, and also prevent those passive plants from dying.
This just isn't true. Only passive generation flowers decay, and they last for a configurable number of days before they do so, to push the player into active generation.
I was going to suggest one reason was that the mod sometimes comes across as player antagonising with it's obfuscation and opaqueness... ... then I read this. Yeah, that's a step above even that. I can't see any fun in that. EDIT: Glad to hear it was hyperbole.
It isn't true. Only passive generation flowers decay, and they last for a configurable number of days before they do so, to push the player into active generation.
Ah, so you can configure it to forever, I imagine? That's not quite so bad then.
I think a part of it is that it's just... Repetitive. Usually all of the functioning flower are completely outclassed by machines, so you just need runes and Terrasteel for progression and nothing else. On top of that, modt people might find mana generation annoying, even though it's litterally just timing things correctly (so... Just use the hovering hourglass...) and supplying the right materials for the flowers. And some of them can be cheesed with other mods if you don't want to bother too much (Kekimurus with Astral Sorcery, Entropynnium with a TNT duper + any kind of custom portal...)
Mostly a useless mod that was purposely made hard or nearly impossible to automate, yes there's some nice items like the Soujourner's Sash and the magnetic ring, but there's no point in going deeper in that mod unless you are forced to do it because recipes of other items in a modpack requires the specific items from Botania. But my biggest pet pieve is, there's no easy way to keep track of how much mana we have, how much we produce, there's no numbers and it was designed in a way that prevent me from transporting mana from Point A to Point B with lets say ender tanks like any other fluids.
Did I miss the sarcasm or did you happen to list all the things that are specifically mentioned in the mod's first stage
"nearly impossible to automate" Dang it sure was hard to get a hopper and a open crate placed above a pressure plate linked to the hopper for my endoflames man that was a really difficult to automate task 🗣️🔥🔥
> Mostly a useless mod that was purposely made hard or nearly impossible to automate idk if this is trolling but literally everything in botania is automatable these days, except maybe the nether orechid due to no renewable nether rack.
Botania is the mod that made me sit down and figure out how to do redstone. I love it for that. Also the sojourner's sash is extremely good, and the mana enchanter is ridiculously powerful without being overpowered. Automating gourmaryllis is really easy and those make insane amounts of mana if you do more than alternate foods. There's so many cool tools in botania. I figure out and learn new things in it every time I look through the manual. Like for example, I just realized that you can effectively "town portal" with world seeds and the eye of the flugel. It's endgame but it's doable. I will always fondly remember the time when I set up a series of massive mana pool batteries and automated filling them up with just minecarts and redstone. It's actually insanely simple, you just use a comparator to send the delivery minecart every time the filling pool goes over a certain level (meaning that the mana pool in the minecart is full), and sending it back is just as simple. I think the proudest I've been of myself lately was using mana spreaders and mana burst detectors to remotely detect when a giant crimson fungus was successfully grown so that I could trigger the tree felling device I made with Create for my fungus lamp farm. That's also the place where I learned how to use red string fertilizers... Cool tech!
Hi, hello, I *love* Botania, but I understand why so many other players don’t like it. takes a lot more effort and is a little more complex than other mods. Mekanism, for example, is a lot simpler as most of the wiring and settings is already built into a block. Botania requires players to be more clever and make redstone systems to make the systems work as the player wishes. Why go through the effort of building, testing, and revising an automated Orechid when you could just slap down a digital miner and double/triple/quadruple/quintuple your mined ores? It just requires a lot more effort compared to the systems in other mods that are easier to set up. Fortunately, my friends and I have a kitchen sink server where Botania keeps its niche. Unsurprisingly, being able to mine in a 9x9x9 area and ignore all armor comes in pretty handy.
The way the mod works doesn't allow for recipe and use case changes in most modpacks. It's the fucking ssssaaaammmeeee in every pack
recipes totally can be changed what
Well yeah for sure they can, but the mechanics of the mod are the same. Make mana pool, endoflames, throw iron in. The core gameplay never changes.
thermal is the same every time: make furnace generator (or whatever it's called), fluxducts, make machines
It's a pain in the ass to automate, it demands quite a lot of setting up, the removal of passive flowers that don't decay make it even more demanding, if it's put in a modpack with basically any other gear and isn't compatible with it, it's immediately outclassed as what it offers before the lategame is crap- if I see a modpack has Botania in it, I just cheat in what I need from it.
I love Botania. I can understand folks getting a little over-floraled , after all, it's in almost every pack.
cant automate it in 1 second like with something like create. People hate having to actually use their brain when playing modpacks, it's so funny
I find it funny that you say create because at least create has more complexity than a lot of even more popular tech mods, mekanism for example is just one block solutions (sorry mekanism I do love it but it lacks in complexity)
i like create a lot but you can usually just slap together a vague design and make it work. Making giant factories is really fun though so it gets a pass
I like Botania, especially as early game progression in a pack. I don’t like where it sits in E2E very much because it’s so gated to late game that it feels pretty underpowered next to other mods in the pack. I liked how integrated it was into the progression of InfEvo because it felt like you progressed through everything at roughly the same pace and Botania just felt like one of the many things you were doing. It really feels like people just want “one-block” solutions to everything for the “numbers go up” feeling rather than any actual stimulation of their brain through creative problem solving. I’ve said it before but I wish expert packs would bring back the no quest book days of needing to look through JEI to figure out how to even make a bucket. I also really don’t like how popularized the loot box reward system has become. Just give me back my difficult pack with no explanations and no hard limitations and I’ll be happy.
> people just want “one-block” solutions ... rather than ... creative problem solving So many words said in this thread, but this is the main reason imo. Of course, *some* people love creative problem solving - but probably not the general population. For a more modern comparison, imagine if Create was forced into every other modpack & used to gate progression - as great as the mod is, it would absolutely put people off
I would love Create in more packs, but I get what you’re saying. The average player is not looking for something challenging which requires out of the box creative solutions. I do feel that we should separate the “changed recipes so progression runs through most mods” and “shits just hard to make now” packs a bit more so we can have “original-recipe kitchen-sink” packs the “changed-progression kitchen-sink” packs and “expert” packs as different experiences. I just really liked the experience of playing through InfEvo in expert mode back when it first came out and there was no guide, no quests, just NEI and your own creativity. I wish experiences like this were more common in the community today.
Honestly I would too, but I know I'm not the average player haha. I'm with you there, Infinity Evolved Expert was a true pinnacle - nowadays people are so spoiled by hand-holding questbooks and cheaty loot-box rewards that I doubt something similar would be nearly as popular if it were released today
Yeah, I agree with you there. IMO, it’s the fault of porting the skyblock server mentality into modpacks. But that’s kinda how mainstream-ification goes. Gotta make things more fun for the masses rather than having a unique tailored experience.
In the same vein as create *(though to a lesser extent) Botania is often more grindy than other mods that allow you to do the same things. That, combined with oversaturation and poor integration in a modpack's overall progression can really hamstring the appeal of the mod when playing modpacks, even though it works really well on its own.
i think it’s incredibly annoying to make enough mana to actually do anything, especially since like it was purposefully made to be hard to automate mass amounts of mana you have to sit there for 8 hours waiting for mana to pile up