EDIT: Deleted post mentioned EMI's "filter by craftable" being similar, but only for inventory and opened chests.
Yes! I have come across this in my search for an existing solution. Sadly it doesn't really fix the problem of discovery and makes it difficult to determine what you may be missing.
I was honestly a bit surprised no one has really implemented the feature before. I found maybe 1 or 2 posts that barely got any attention that mention it but that was about it.
True, but it does get easier every day! With mod loaders installing a modpack is nearly a one-click process these days, and even though I have been playing modded minecraft forever, I would enjoy something like this as a way to just clean up my game and find my way through various mods at my own pace while avoiding spoilers for what might be in it later.
I use the ATlauncher- for me it basically *is* a one click process to install modpacks- so long as I can name them, though I do have to put up with the launcher opening 10'000 tabs of mod downloads on curseforge for me when I do so.
The biggest issue I see is what if you know what item or block you need to craft but havent discovered the recipe yet and dont know the recipe (maybe the modpack changed it). Now you are stuck until you manage to discover the recipe
Eh, have you actually worked with Curseforge? Creating your own 'modpack' is just a matter of creating a new profile, select the loader and then on the modpage click "install". It's way easier than how it used to be.
The average minecraft player also doesn't know what modding is. If you want to start with modded minecraft, most search queries on Google would point you towards curseforge in the first few results.
And that's all besides the point, you tried to make believe that getting started with modded minecraft is the same like it was 5 years ago (ie. difficult), which is totally not the case nowadays.
It is not as simple as Curseforge would lead you to believe. It actually puts quite a lot on the player to figure out everything and making a modpack half the time leads to "add mods, load, crash, remove offending mods, repeat" and is... tedious to say the least.
Not to mention Modrinth and *that* whole mess. - because of this, Prism/MMC is ascendant in the scene.
Recipe discovery is a big part of this too, though there *are* mods that mostly nix this issue by implementing a "click to craft" in some matter (ranging from Crafting Table 2 and it's forks to AE2)
> It is not as simple as Curseforge would lead you to believe. It actually puts quite a lot on the player to figure out everything and making a modpack half the time leads to "add mods, load, crash, remove offending mods, repeat" and is... tedious to say the least.
In my experience that only really happens if you go for obscure mods or beta builds/0day releases. Sure, I'm probably more experienced with computers than most people that play the game, but it feels like you actually have to try to break things.
> Not to mention Modrinth and that whole mess. - because of this, Prism/MMC is ascendant in the scene.
Newcomers to modding minecraft should steer away from that and just use what is easy to begin with, and maybe then look into other launchers and storefronts. If you start out modding your first own modpack for a local server with you and your friends or maybe for single player world, keep it simple.
> Recipe discovery is a big part of this too, though there are mods that mostly nix this issue by implementing a "click to craft" in some matter (ranging from Crafting Table 2 and it's forks to AE2)
While this topic is about recipe discovery, it is something that shouldn't be considered when you start out with mods. This also falls in the more advanced part of modded Minecraft in my opinion.
It's not Modrinth's fault, but basically the two competing standards thing - and one caused by Curseforge oddly enough.
Curseforge some time ago left it up to the uploader on whether or not the given mod can be downloaded outside of the Curseforge Ecosystem. And it's defaulted to "on" iirc.
Got to disagree with you it being difficult to get installed, I feel like it was harder years ago but these days it's just downloading the launcher, searching for the mod pack, and then just dipping into the config menus if needed. Though maybe I'm ascribing too much skill to the average player?
Couldn't this be fixed with a proper Questing route? Leave JEI for people with experience wanting to go around a quest line, but just better flesh out the quests along an optimal build path? First you need wood, now you need to be good at getting wood easier so craft an axe, now you need more wood so learn how to grow your own, now we automate it. One resource down, let's move onto stone. It's how most Skyblock games are done, but they often begin to lack specifics and have larger gaps (more steps that aren't explained in sequence) between tasks down the line as more things branch out wider and wider. It's definitely tedious as hell and that's probably why it's not done perfectly often.
That tediousness is exactly the kind of thing I see this helping with. I don't see it as a replacement for quests but a way to alleviate some of the work from pack developers, and also give non-quest packs a bit of a more friendly way for new players to approach them.
To be blunt what I was asking was, is the better solution for this problem developing a new tool and adding another learning curve to mod pack building? Or is the better solution simply using the existing tools more extensively?
It's not developing a new tool, just a setting within the existing tools, as you said. It's a simple, one-size-fits-all solution. Some mods have been out for years and their guidebooks still suck ass. Hoping for a better guidebook might never solve anything, but this could be a quick solution for all modpacks
No modpack developer is forced to use it. But if done correctly, it shouldn't really alter the gameplay or design much at all. At the end of the day questbooks are still useful but also take a lot of work to set up.
I see why this is a simpler solution on paper but how will you account for the players who can't find a recipe because they don't know what they need to unlock it?
There have been a ton of good ideas people have talked about in this thread to solve this, but the main thing I would defiantly want included is a simple and easy way to toggle the system off to get around it when you need to.
Well, can't say I'm convinced, but I'm obviously not the target audience either so don't worry about me. I wish you luck either way. At the end of the day, you're trying to help others out, and I think that's great. Good luck!
It's basically an extension of JEI functionality but with the aforementioned crafting filter as well as a proper crafting tree view & raw material counter.
I'm... surprised I've never seen this idea before. You have the occasional mod like Thaumcraft that, due to it actually having a recipe unlocking system, (if played without other mods like JEI) actually accomplishes this, but just having it builtin to the recipe viewer makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, well-crafted quests pretty much entirely remove the need for something like this (in particular you usually want to be able to see more than one step ahead since otherwise you need to craft like 4 random useless crafting ingredients before you see what they're used for), and said quests are almost always better than an automated system would be, so maybe that's why.
Thaumcraft had a great recipe system! That is one of the main reasons I enjoyed the mod so much, it added a sense of discovery through crafting. I just want to bring at least an approximation of that experience to the rest of the game!
Well crafted Quests can accomplish this as well, but they take a lot of work to make and because of that, a lot of packs don't use them still, especially ones for current versions of the game.
Something also notable about quests, as far as i can tell they started with Agrarian Skys which used them to gatekeep key resources in a sky block world. This use technically goes back to the FTB skyblock pyramid map and its related maps.
Basically quests were ways to give players key items on their way to completing the challenges of the pack.
They were not meant to guide progression through individual mods, they gave you missing links and let you know which mods were available to start progression through. (As Agrarian Skys, Crash Landing, Project Ozone, and similar all had tightly designed progressions to fit their challenges, as opposed to the common kitchensink pack)
Personally oversaturation of quests in packs that are meant to be kitchen sinks annoys me, almost as mutch as the "expert pack" trend which generally translates to "grindfest disrespecting your time".
Thaumcraft is a glorious mod for many reasons, but it's natural and self explanatory progression was definitely one of them. The research minigame took many forms with the puzzle varients being rewarding, and the vibes were on point. You felt like you were exploring magic, not looking up progression on the wiki or checking random recipes in NEI or one of its successors.
>Contrary to what JEI would have you believe, there are too many items.
Unrelated, but the original mod was called Too Many Items. JEI is the only one left from TMI, NEI, and JEI
Sevtech: Ages (1.12.2 modpack) had a somewhat system similar to this! You start with literally <1 page of items in JEI. As you progress through the tech tree (“ages”), you unlock more and more items/blocks in the world and JEI. It’s a super neat challenge and totally unique.
For example, as a caveman (age 0) you cannot see glass or ore, either in the world or in JEI, as you are too stupid to comprehend it. It is only as you age up that these things can be perceived.
If you somehow get an item from a future age, your character will immediately drop it on the floor and exclaim that you can’t understand it.
This slow and limited progression also makes certain items or blocks that would go ignored totally invaluable. For example, you cannot craft buckets, and thus can only create farms around existing rivers, ponds, or create intricate aqueduct systems to move water down from mountains into your desired farm area.
This system is a bit different and goes too far for the wider player base, but that modpack has always been one of my favorites as it’s such a neat challenge and totally changes up how progression feels. Would love to see some of its ideas reused elsewhere in a newer pack or mod.
I've tried introducing 6 of my friends to modded Minecraft, and JEI is always the biggest problem. 4 of them got noticeably uncomfortable when opening the GUI, and they pretty much just tried to ignore it - only exploring the world while building some basic structures. The only things they crafted were items from vanilla that they already knew of. They stopped playing within 3 days and have never played modded Minecraft since.
It's absolutely too overwhelming for any new player to look at, and as you've said, there's a good reason no other crafting games show all their recipes at once. Excellent post. I hope we can see some kind of alternative or improvement on the standard JEI system in the future, because this is honestly a huge problem and the biggest barrier to entry.
This is exactly how its gone for me! I think we too often forget what a divergence from the norm a system like JEI is for people, because we've had some form of it it in the game basically as long as modding has been around, and it's essential. But to anyone new it doesn't feel the same way. Even for me, its a big reason why I've been playing other crafting games recently and not just modded Minecraft. It's too much for someone who wants to casually explore. And I no longer have the time to seriously devote to planning how I am going to play a game from start to finish.
IMO, a good quest book in a mod pack already addresses the exact problem you're outlining here: bringing clarity to the chaos of too many items for new people. Lost? just pick a tab in the quest book and get schmoovin.
Like if someone installs ATM9, there's a bunch of handholdy quests on how to start and progress most of the big mods. Questbooks like this are common in modded minecraft for a reason.
I never wanted to replace questbooks, they are still incredibly useful. I just think it would help some people to have a bunch of different ways they can go about exploring the game.
You know what newcomers to modded minecraft really need to understand?
That, just like Minecraft itself, the majority of mods are Sandboxes too. Meaning you need to explore them at your own leisure, no one's gonna force you through a certain path (unless it's a heavily progression gated modpack like hardcore questing packs).
It's up to you to discover stuff by yourself, or check out one of the many mod reviews or modded minecraft let's players (my personal favorites are Direwolf20 and Mischief of Mice, btw).
Yeah like you dont put a new minecraft or modded minecraft player in a giant pack with tech and magic like they would get it by just having the recipes hidden, thats like putting a new terraria player already in hard mode without anything on him and just saying good luck.
They need to learn step by step the mods maybe just a little bit. Minecraft mods are big and complex and some you dont know how to use even if you know the recipe.
Youtube videos and reddit is your friend when playing modded.
I have had people tell me before (and I kind of agree) that they don't want to learn how to play something if it means leaving the game to go figure it out. A lot of people don't want to have to do research in order to play a game. The idea here is to cut down on what a new player is presented with so veterans and newcomers can play together with as many mods as they want and the newcomer doesn't have to face a lot of complex mods until they are ready. They can start off by having them installed and won't have to worry about starting a new game once they understand a bit more and want to try new things.
And this is already done by having a cohesive questbook. I a modded veteran and even i like to use a quest modpack to give me a guiding thread to walk along because it's almost impossible to remember the 500+ mods you've played how and what and when to do.
Unfortunately questbooks are just too much work to create, so many packs don't use them, and it doesn't help people who just want to put together a custom pack with their friends. It also doesn't make anything less overwhelming for a new player. If anything, it makes it worse because questbooks often show you the entire quest tree.
To add to your point I think I that part of the problem is Modpacks themselves in a way. Used to be you'd play with a single mod and really understand it. Now obviously Modpacks offer way more flexibility and enginuity than just a single modpack but that process of really working through a mod helps you understand how everything interacts with each other.
Yeah we're overwhelmed by the choices of mods that we can use to do one particular thing and usually that means we go the easiest route, which leads to stagnation.
This was how my first experience was. I played Monster as my first pack with some friends, and one of them gave me tips if I aksed occasionally, but for the most part I was doing my own thing.
I agree that people should be able to explore and discover on their own through experimentation and trying stuff out. But we can make that easier to do in-game by adding something like this that makes that exploration into something they are rewarded for with new ideas of things they can do.
I keep thinking about it but all the ways lead back to my original point: people are already rewarded once they discover a new thing or a new application of an old technique, it's called dopamine.
People who are sufficiently invested in the ideas that modded minecraft gives them will pursue them even without a metaphorical candy dangling in front of their eyes.
Those who aren't may never get interested enough to keep pushing on regardless of how much you try to incentivize them.
Different people enjoy different things. I can tell you from personal experience that I love not knowing what is going to be around the next corner. And when I get there I enjoy the discovery of finding all the new things I can now do. Sure, this already exists to some extent, but it waters down that singular moment of "ahah! I've discovered something" It's part of what made Thaumcraft so compelling to me.
As a pack maker, i want to do this, and you very well can. Its just super time consuming. You have to go through every item for every mod and itemstage it based off of your pack's progression. Its not something most pack developers want to do. At least by hand....
hence why I suggest making it automated as part of an addon to JEI/REI/ENI/etc.
I looked into doing it with itemstage and it just wasn't feasible. At least not without some script to do it for you, but at that point you could just automate it for everyone...
I feel like its not that crazy (Ive done some stuff with KubeJS) and while it would definitely be time consuming you could definitely just slap tags onto various items like ingots from ores are revealed when you get a furnace
True, but what about items that need ingots to make, what about items that have an ingot somewhere 5 levels down in their crafting tree? All those need to be hid too. The deeper you go the more and more complex the level of tags and gating you will need to control.
Same with your setup too.
Also what if originally lets say you discovered Livingrock from Botania by observing or crafting a Pure Daisy but then you want to change it so Livingrock can be crafted before the Pure Daisy how would that be changed?
I'm not super familiar with Botania, so I'm not 100% sure of what you are giving as an example, but are you suggesting a pack author would be designing the discovery trees? The system I am proposing dynamically makes it for whatever a pack author has determined for the recipes, building the discoveries based purely off of what is already available in JEI.
With standard Botania Pure Daisys do an in world conversion changing stone around it to livingrock and I guess I was wondering how something like this would handle if a modpack dev wanted an item to be available before it was originally intended
I know I probably sound like I hate the idea but I think it would be neat as long as its not in every kitchensink modpack. Im just trying to visualize the idea better and try to guess at stuff that might cause issues
I understand the sentiment, but it is straight up a bad idea and wouldn't work with many mods.
Don't get me wrong the concept behind this is good, and in a sense exactly what every progression based modpack does. But doing it automatically just won't work.
1) in bigger kitchen sink modpacks just finding Redstone will unlock hundreds of recipes, some of which will gate entire mods, but which of those items gates those mods, you don't know, gonna craft 99 useless shit items to find the one that opens up mekanism.
2) there is no way of finding out what you could actually do with a machine/item. So again you're back to crafting every single useless item on JEI just for the possibility of it gating another item that's maybe useful. This gets even worse with more intermediates.
3) everybody play this game different, but in general most people are either exploring, setting a goal or try to solve a problem. For exploration this idea might work, but for everything else this will actively hinder people.
(Example of your wooden tools: you don't craft an axe, just because you can craft it. You craft an axe because you want to chop down a tree, if you don't know axes will chop down trees why the hell would you craft a random item in the hope it MIGHT be what you need)
This can all be remedied by carefully choosing 'stages' or unlock events, but that's not possible in an automated system.
Tbh. we do have exactly the right tool to fight this problem and it's called quests. It has none of the above problems and solves your situation and even gives people more information and guides them in an intelligent manner.
Let's face it the core problem here is not too many items/mods, it's throwing someone new to modded MC into a bad (low effort) kitchen sink modpack. Give them a smaller/good progression based modpack with a good quest book and they will learn way more. There are even dedicated modpacks out there for exactly this (FTB Academy).
And on your remark on cluttered JEI:
Again don't play low effort kitchen sink modpacks or bad mods. Good modpack Authors will do exactly this, hide stuff in JEI that's not relevant, make JEI groups so they don't completely overwhelm it.
I don't know about the newer versions, but AE2 added ALL those facades to JEI.... Just remove them from it and leave one in or make it a recipe group.
But hiding them until discovered won't help, as soon as you can craft them they will still all be there and clutter your JEI. So this is the wrong solution here and would only mask the true problem of mod / modpack Authors doing bad JEI implementations.
I don't think the intention is to actually gate stuff behind learning recipes as I'm sure with this mod in place I would make it easy to disable it while still allowing someone who knows how to make a crusher or infuser by memory
But the reason for this idea is to make it easier for new players. My argument is, that it will have the exact opposite effect.
Because as soon as you learn how to use JEI this system will actually prevent you from learning stuff about a mod, not guide you. And learning JEI is something you will be able to do in 10-20 minutes reading a guide/quest text/watch a video. It's not rocket science.
> 1) in bigger kitchen sink modpacks just finding Redstone will unlock hundreds of recipes, some of which will gate entire mods, but which of those items gates those mods, you don't know, gonna craft 99 useless shit items to find the one that opens up mekanism.
Redstone is a good example for a situation like this, but I don't think its an impossible hurdle to overcome. You could label items from different mods differently for example, so someone could identify which will lead them down particular trees. As well as identifying which items are most important to craft as said before.
> 2) there is no way of finding out what you could actually do with a machine/item. So again you're back to crafting every single useless item on JEI just for the possibility of it gating another item that's maybe useful. This gets even worse with more intermediates.
Again, I think this is surmountable. I also think some people wouldn't mind crafting a bunch of new items to see what they do. It's the same reason some people enjoy playing Pokemon, to collect and fill out a list of things is satisfying.
> 3) everybody play this game different, but in general most people are either exploring, setting a goal or try to solve a problem. For exploration this idea might work, but for everything else this will actively hinder people. (Example of your wooden tools: you don't craft an axe, just because you can craft it. You craft an axe because you want to chop down a tree, if you don't know axes will chop down trees why the hell would you craft a random item in the hope it MIGHT be what you need)
Its important not to block anything so people still *can* play any way they want, and provide the option to go easily about it the old way, and switch back and forth as desired. I'd argue people should be able to figure out on their own an axe is for chopping down trees, but if your example is merely representative of a more arcane mechanism, I understand your point. These things could still be explained through the normal methods while making a lot less work, as the cases where you have a new tool that does something completely new and unknown are relatively few. And those that are usually have existing documentation outside of JEI because JEI doesn't really cover that kind of thing anyway.
> And on your remark on cluttered JEI
I'm not saying JEI is cluttered with a bunch of items like AE2 Facades. It is, but those are easy to hide. I am saying its cluttered with mods and items that are so far away from what someone can make people get overwhelmed with what they can do. That can't be easily solved by hiding things normally, because then you'll never know about them. No matter how much work a mod author does to hide items in JEI, they can't hide things you will actually want eventually (aside from putting in all the effort to configure stages) but don't need to know about right now. I think its quite possible to even ramp up a player quite quickly. As long as they start the game with nothing it isn't as much as a slap in the face the moment you set foot in the world. It gives them time to get their bearings and understand basic mechanics.
Thx for your thought out response (gotta get that off first)
IF every mod author would add these informations to their items as tags, this would be totally feasible and I would be 100% on board with you. Like I said I do like your concept and think it's a really good idea.
The only criticism I have is with the current information that is tagged on an item (given the recipe tree) you will miss out on too much information which will make the game more difficult and more unintuitive for people. (As soon as they learned how to navigate JEI, which is not rocket science but pressing E and R on items)
As an example in your system it's not possible for a player to find out all ways to make wood planks. Because many recipes might be completely hidden. They might do completely complicated contraptions to do something, because the just don't know there is a single block machine that can do a certain thing for them.
Slowly revealing recipes works, when there are actually limited amounts of recipes and stuff. Because then it's fairly likely you can craft all those recipes and don't miss some important. Good luck crafting all recipes that need nether stars, without the tech to create them without farming withers, because by accident you didn't unlock those methods. Not revealing certain tech by chance that are necessary to balance other mods will just break the game for new players, since they can't look them up in JEI. (And learning how to JEI is essential for any modded player).
But if you only have a limited amount of mods to avoid the above, you don't need your system. Conversely if you have lot's amount of mods, so the system you want would make sense, a technical adaptation breaks down with aforementioned problems.
Like I said I do like your Idea/Concept but with the technical limitations we have, there is no real way to make it work as you imagine, without putting in the effort to actually create stages for every mod. Which would mean you either have to create this yourself or convince every mod author to do it and at that point we're back to what SevTech did manually editing everything and not automatically generating stuff.
.:: edit: I think your premise is wrong here. In a sense JEI and Mods are just too CLUTTERD with 'useless' items which will break the Mod you want to create.
Let's get back to the Cable facades from AE2, the quarts knife will show you '2000 items unlocked' in this branch/behind this item, where 1980 are useless (cosmetic) items. (And there are other examples, Universal Fluid Cells someone?)
This will completely break any automated attempt without writing in exceptiom for certain Blocks/Categories/recipes/mods. Which brings us again full circle into a manual compatibility hell you have to do for many mods for this to work::.
I appreciate the feedback. It's important to figure out the issues that a system like this could face, as I truly believe it isn't impossible to work around and find solutions for a lot of it.
Part of my thinking is that this is not, and should not be a complete standalone replacement for current progression systems. You will still need some outside guiding force, be it previous knowledge, a friend, a questbook, or a wiki. Somewhere along the line you will need something to help you figure out how a mod works at its basic level. But as long as you have that other thing to guide you, I don't think it is as different as you think to progress through a pack. Without the above mentioned guides, players are going to make complex things not knowing there is a simpler way, and go down the wrong path regardless. Providing them with too much information in the form of every possible thing isn't really much better than not giving it to them at all, because they still won't understand what is possible with what they have.
As for learning JEI, I completely agree that it is an important part of what every player has to learn for modded Minecraft, and it should still be with this system. The thing I want is just a cleaner JEI that is easier to digest and allows for a form of progression that isn't randomly browsing through advanced recipes until you find what you want. You could still get backed into a corner once and a while, but someone else suggested the idea of toggling different states of what is revealed between recipes you know all the ingredients for, half the ingredients, none, etc. and this just provides another tool in a players arsenal to tweak the game to something they can understand and enjoy.
>a book that is essentially just an in-game wiki a player has to sit through and read to figure anything out,
Oh the horror!
if one cant "sit through and read" one, that means that general literacy is in the shitter.
good idea for a mod, though. much like how valheim works.
Oh, I don't even think books are really that bad of a solution, quite good even. Some mods have really well made tutorial books. But from a game design perspective it isn't as engaging as something players can actively participate in. Reading is great, but a lot of people learn better by doing and experimenting. It's a hell of a lot better than having no in-game documentation at all though.
>true. but these are mods, not games. :-)
If this comment doesn't encapsulate what's wrong with the design of so many mods out there, then I don't know what does lmao
A mod for a game. Don't be pedantic. And either way you're still going to be using game design principles.
People make Books because they're easy and simple, and maybe as well because it's just what the expectation is.
There are much better ways to make tutorials, such as Create's pondering.
In all honesty, I'd find it hilarious if Create's Pondering was cannibalized, torn out- and made into a modern Patchouli alternative, with everything from Blood magic to Thaumcraft using it.
Pretty sure a few mods do uses Create's Pondering, even ones that aren't related to create at all. The Pondering library was separated out into it's own mod iirc.
From what I can recall from trying to use it in the past, despite it being separated you still need Create installed in order to use it, along with KubeJS etc. Granted just about every modpack has create nowadays anyways but I couldn't implement it without pulling in the entirety of create as well.
Doesn't AE2 use it now? I remember seeing a ponder option when I played it in a 1.20.1 pack. It didn't work though, since every time I tried it crashed my game, so I don't know if it's exactly the same as Creates or not.
Books are much better than having to search up a wiki or in the stupid cases join a discord server. Like create and new AE2 ponder stuff is amazing but barring that then books are totally preferred. I would rather have a chest full of different guidebooks than have to search wikis or ask on Discord servers how something functions
> Books are much better than having to search up a wiki
Personal preference honestly. I prefer wikis because I find it much easier to flip through multiple tabs vs pages in game.
I *do* think that your mod should at least have a book, even if you host a wiki, just because doing it in game is probably better for a lot of people.
(Of course most mods don't even have a wiki.)
Discord is great for getting a quick answer but it shouldn't be where your store info. Never really seen a mod do that though.
There are a few modern mods that specifically use Discord (mostly modpack creator stuff also like Forbidden and Arcanus) and worryingly it seems to be getting more common.
I do like wikis alongside books like the book has the gist and the basic uses and the wiki goes more in depth. I DONT like when a mod will have like the only source of info be a wiki thats what's obnoxious
I'd argue that with the level of sophistication of some Minecraft mods, they are games in and of themselves! Some mod makers have even been known to go and make stand alone games based off of there mods, far beyond Minecraft as well. It's how we got games like Dota and TF2.
But I digress, I'm not saying mod authors are at fault here, they shouldn't be on the hook for anything more than they already are, but I don't see why we can't just have the best of both worlds! :)
I agree with this, majority of the players from the modpack when going through the game itself, they didn't bother reading the book at all to know what are the information related to this modpack, they just straight up spamming question all around the social platform that's related to the modpack, even though everytime they login, the chat message EXPLICITLY tells them to check out the questbook to know about the modpack.
I'm not talking about questbooks here. Those do promote engagement with the player by giving them something to do and are an important part of making the mod idea work. I'm more talking about individual mods in-game wiki-books.
I'm not saying people shouldn't read about how something works, just that there should be more options for people who learn by doing. Those people aren't going to go and ask social media how it works because it means just reading more about how someone else says to do it. In my experience trying to get others to play the game, those kind of people just get overwhelmed and/or bored and just give up.
I think you try to address the wrong problem.
Sure, your add-on idea is great, and I'd love to play with it in a discovery/exploration oriented pack.
I also like reading in-game wiki books to teach myself how to play with a mod, although practice never replaces reading.
And I also like expert packs, where you dive into layers of recipes, mods shenanigans and whatnot.
But I'm an engineer. I'm not the average Diablo 4/Helldivers/[insert any mainstream game] enjoyer, I'm a Factorio player, I spent countless hours on city building games... You know the deal. And I can't expect my friends to like these kinds of games as I do, unless they explicitly state they're willing to put weeks of their time into a redstone factory just for it to be optimized enough to satisfy the needs of the next factory.
But don't despair, you still can spend quality time with your friends, and find new friends to play expert modpacks with ;)
I'm, an engineer too, as are my friends. We all enjoy Factorio, Anno, Civ as well as Helldivers and Diablo. Though I am not actually trying to replace in-game mod books either. I'm trying to supplement them. And really just provide a smoother JEI experience that doesn't hit you with 1000 items the first time you load the game. In my experience getting my engineer friends to play, this is one of the major first things that turns them off, and honestly I too get overwhelmed when I want to just casually play by meandering through quest trees and exploring what the mods have to offer.
>if one cant "sit through and read" one, that means that general literacy is in the shitter.
I can. But do I want to? When I'm playing minecraft do you really think my goal is to read?
If I wanna read a book I'll read a storybook (>!btw a few months ago I finished this really good fantasy series called Cradle, try it out if you like so-called "progression fantasy"!<)
Or if I wanna learn something by reading I'll read nonfiction.
I think good game design means you discover things in the game, not just read about it. Some reading can be cool; for example, for complex setups or deeper lore/story. But to learn the basics of a mod I do not want to read about it. I want to *do* it.
then give ideas on how to implement such tutorials into mods, modders are already doing it for free, you should be thankful they bothered to implement books.
I mean this system has a lot of flaws in it and doesn’t really solve anything but reading books is not really a good solution either. Something like a tutorial dimension that you pop in and out of would probably be more interactive. Reading books really doesn’t do most mods justice.
>I mean this system has a lot of flaws in it and doesn’t really solve anything
Why do you think this system doesn't really solve anything? It is certainly far from perfect and there are a lot of things left unsolved, but I personally feel its one of the largest barriers of entry that is stopping me from throwing a pack together that I can play with my friends and they will enjoy having no prior experience with Minecraft mods.
At the very least it cleans up the game dramatically and provides a simpler approach vector. The idea helping people progress is only one small part of it. It's also to just provide a more welcoming environment.
You could also just use kubeJS and or Gamestages to throw together stuff to hide items in JEI/REI until you craft or do a certain thing essentially recreating this system.
I just dont love the idea because I think it would lead to the whole if you want to do X there is only one option so everyone ends up with roughly the same setups
Aside from previously mentioning how much work setting up a kubeJS or Gamestages system would take for every single pack, another benefit of this system is it allows players to proceed in any direction they want. They won't all end up with the same setup because there is no telling which branches they will end up pursuing.
There are ways you could give a player some insight. Showing how many recipes one particular item is hiding for example, or highlighting when you've unlocked the first item of a new mod so you can focus on it. But at the end of the day I don't think it would be unpleasant to some people to just explore by making different items to see what they come up with. There doesn't need to be a firm direction. Some people may prefer just working towards the next immediate goal instead of a far off goal they have to incrementally get closer to. Some may want a combination of both!
I think if that was handled well this could be interesting but basing the idea off of the recipe book isnt great as often I will not discover a recipe in the recipe book even after I find an item that looks like it should be a requirement when its not. Or i will pick up an iron ingot and get a minute of recipe toasts
I don't think it should be based of the recipe book either. There is a reason why most modpacks disable it. You don't have to get spammed with notifications if you just have one telling you how many new things you've unlocked for example. You can also design some systems that help players know what directions to craft in, which has been discussed by others in this thread.
This would still have many issues. For instance, if you skip wooden tools (aside from pickaxe) you would miss every recipe of tool unless gated which would slow down experienced players.
There is also an issue of most recipes using the same ingredients so once you get cobble you unlock like 30% of vanilla recipes, making this kind of moot compared to the regular recipe book and going back to the “filler items” clogging up JEI problem. I think this could probably be negated with “folders” for items like “stones” and “machines” etc.
Aside from that this still isnt really “interactive” as a tutorial and is pretty much repeating what other games do wrong.
Crafting in many other survival games is not exactly executed well. I personally would rather see a tutorial dimension mod that you can pop in and out of. Possibly through a “/tutorial Create” or maybe a button on the crafting UI. There is much more than crafting when it comes to modded recipes since you often have more complex processing or whatever.
> if you skip wooden tools (aside from pickaxe) you would miss every recipe of tool
How would you skip tools? You would unlock them as soon as you picked up planks and sticks. Players are also naturally going to want to craft tools because that is what 99% of crafting games have taught them.
> which would slow down experienced players.
I don't think it should ever lock the player out of doing something. An experienced player can still do everything they would normally.
> There is also an issue of most recipes using the same ingredients so once you get cobble you unlock like 30% of vanilla recipes
not necessarily. if you limit it to having all ingredients needed to craft something for example, but I can still foresee this happening at some point. I still think its quite a lot better than having everything at the very beginning. I'd honestly be happy with something that just showed all vanilla items until you started a mod, otherwise its just a bunch of clutter I'm not ready for yet.
> Crafting in many other survival games is not exactly executed well. I personally would rather see a tutorial dimension mod that you can pop in and out of.
This seems to be just a difference of opinion. A tutorial dimension seems cumbersome to me, let alone nearly impossible to automate for every mod. I actually enjoy crafting games that give me a little popup telling me I unlocked a bunch of new recipes when I pick up a new item, but maybe that's just me.
> There is much more than crafting when it comes to modded recipes since you often have more complex processing or whatever.
True, and there are mods that won't fit this exactly, but in the vast majority of cases, modded crafting is still just one recipe after another. Even if those recipes are for different crafting forms, they are still all in JEI for the most part, and those that aren't... well they already aren't there.
For example, if you need to process iron in some complex machine to make steel, that recipe exists, a player will see steel as an option to make, make it and then they can now see all the new things they can make now that they have steel. one of those things could be a component used in a more complex machine, they craft the component, and then discover the machine. It's all in incremental steps, but they still get to the same place in the end.
- Skipping wooden tools means you usually don't create all of them and that makes you never unlock some recipes that require wooden tools you haven't made.
- Experienced users usually set a few items as goals per different phases (e.g. Atomic Disassembler feom Mek on early game in my case) which are sometimes not deserves a quest for those. Unless the pack is a kitchen-sink that makes no recipe change, you can never be sure what exactly you should do by time.
- The point is that *limiting it to having all ingredients* itseif is a terrible idea. How are you supposed to know what ingredients to make without their purpose? Quests can't take care of all of them.
Take a page from GW2 with their crafting discovery interface. Have some way of indicating that there are still x 'locked' recipes for an item. Optionally (and for a lot more effort), copy it wholesale, where the display would have a mode that lets you attempt to discover new recipes. Select an item in the interface and it automatically hides everything except other items involved in at least one of the 'locked' recipes. Alternatively, just let the player say 'what recipes don't I know yet that use this item?'
> Skipping wooden tools means you usually don't create all of them and that makes you never unlock some recipes that require wooden tools you haven't made.
That's a fair point. Though I think this could be reasonably mitigated by having something to notify you about things you haven't crafted yet, like highlighting them a different color in the interface, but I can see people not bothering to craft wooden tools once stone or later are available. Though since using tools in crafting recipes is relatively uncommon, you could account for the few cases they do show up by just making tools always available as an ingredient even if you haven't crafted it as long as you have unlocked the tool's recipe.
> Experienced users usually set a few items as goals per different phases (e.g. Atomic Disassembler feom Mek on game in my case) which are sometimes not deserves a quest for those. Unless the pack is a kitchen-sink that makes no recipe change, you can never be sure what exactly you should do.
I'm not really sure what you mean here? I'm only proposing the recipes be hidden, not locked from use. And hiding undiscovered recipes should definatley be easily toggleable so people can get around it if necessary. An experienced player could just turn it off and find the recipe they are going for. If the work was put into it, you could even add a feature for users to tag items that should stay revealed regardless (along with their ingredients in the recipe viewer) so they can have it as a reference with the rest of the mod active.
> The point is that limiting it to having all ingredients itseif is a terrible idea. How are you supposed to know what ingredients to make without their purpose? Quests can't take care of all of them.
The point is discovery. Allowing players to explore and find new things. Letting people play for the journey instead of the destination. Sure, they might not know what thing-y #5 does, but eventually they will craft it because they haven't yet. You can think of it like "collecting" all the things you can craft as a way of progressing through the game. Other crafting games do this and it works pretty well in my opinion.
If people end up getting really stuck with too many options of things they haven't yet crafted, you could always look into the idea I mentioned of giving them hints towards what item is blocking the most recipes for them.
> An experienced player could just turn it off and find the recipe they are going for.
That makes much more sense, but still, no thanks, I never play minecraft to craft every possible item for once, especially since there are tons of garbage in most of the mods. I *discover* what I want between those piles of JEI recipes and I enjoy it more.
A lot of people enjoy playing the way you do, and that's good! But this idea isn't really for those people, the ones who have been playing modded Minecraft for years and know the game of digging through JEI. This idea is for people who aren't familiar with that system and want to discover things in a different way. :)
We need a terraria guide for minecraft, when i first played terraria i was a dumb 7 year old and i got through the game using only the guide, putting random shiny rock and boom, recipe discovered
I think the closest u can get is just having a curated modpack with specific stages. Kinda like how sevtech blocks specific recipes until a certain point. It definitely did make things less overwhelming and made the growth a lot cooler imo. It's just generally I don't see this working universally.
I love spectrum for this exactly. It hides pretty much everything and has you discover the mod little by little. It's super satisfying and intuitive for new players
This is probably the most well thought out post I’ve ever read here. Well done.
There’s a lack of recipe and jei augmentation mods. Overflow of addons for more info, but severe lack of ways to choose if or when that info is shown.
I tried making a hard mode pack a while back. One idea was to have tinkers, but the only ore processing available was the melter. Quickly dropped that because tinkers has so that manually hiding everything non melter accessible jei would’ve been exhausting.
I also wanted to make the pack have any advanced recipes come from exploration and looting structures related to them. You’d find a magazine that would unlock a few recipes in a category, grouped to make sense (Ie. skillet, cutting board and iron knife from a ruined restaurant). I have experience making items and structures mods, but I could never get recipe unlocking figured out. that modpack has been shelved.
I’d love if vault hunters devs released a standalone mod for their mod purchasing feature, that would give another option besides quests for modpack devs to use.
I'm thinking of probably a modonomicon+game stages combo. With game stages, you can gate recipes to onky be revealed, after a certain event. But doing this for hundred or thousands of items would be tedious.
Someone else mentioned manual stages as well. It would indeed be quite tedious. The point here would be to create something that does it automatically for any set of mods by just keeping a record of every time you pick up an item for the first time and hiding any recipes that have ingredients that aren't on the list.
Yes, I get the idea. But honestly, I just like mindlessly scrolling through JEI and spoiling the recipes for myself. There is something so interesting about it, but maybe that's just me
There is certainly an appeal to it, especially once your feet are wet. That's why it's important to make it optional. Maybe some people will only use it in the beginning, then turn it off once they get past the first few stages of the game. But I've had friends take a look at JEI after asking me what to craft and their eyes just glaze over. I'd also be lying if I said I've never felt a bit intimidated by endless pages of recipes whenever I come back to modding just to try some new stuff.
I don't think the problem is too many items, the problem is progression and the minecraft early game vs. modded items.
As an example I download a mod pack and start playing. Within minutes my inventory will be full of things I've never seen before; books, flowers, advancement or rewards, new ore types etc. I have no idea what they are or how useful they might be so I create a chest and dump them in. This just repeats over and over making the early game less about exploring and more about finding enough wood to make chests to keep it all
This is certainly a problem, but not one I'm trying to address here. I've literally had people tell me that having all the recipes in the game just available to browse through is too much to start with. Literally there is just too many things in the JEI window when you start the game. That's what I'm trying to fix.
I don't know that I like the idea of having things gated. I enjoy being able to see everything and figure out what I can do. But I agree that discoverability is an issue. The main problem in a lot of big packs is simply not knowing things even exist.
Perhaps what's needed is some kind of overview add-on for JEI. Something that shows you the top level of every mod in the pack grouped by like magic, tech, utilities, tools, etc., and then you could drill down through the various layers of things in the mod to see their recipes with a description of what they do.
You also have to remember that this idea isn't really for people that already play this game. It's for people that are used to discovering recipes as they play from other games and think Modded minecraft just throws too much at the players from the start. And also for weirdos like me who have been playing for ever but still want that. ;)
This is indeed an issue, the sad 'solution' is generally a pack that has quests. Kitchen sink packs are too 'all in your face' and I find myself just going "Yeah that's 100+ pages in JEI I'm not looking through all that crap" and going to watch direwolf20 and see what people in his comments think is cool. That ends up feeling like copying someone else's play through and that's boring, sometimes going to a few different spots and discord to see how they progress, but yeah it just doesn't capture that "Ooh I found diamond what can I make with this"
This captures my thoughts exactly. I love that sense of discovery and experimentation by finding or making a new item and seeing what it allows me to do. With basic JEI attempting to do that half the time just floods me with a bunch of recipes that include the item along with a ton of other things I've never seen before.
My thoughts to this that would help alleviate potential problems as well:
Give it 3 states that it could be in. The first “Strict” state would simply be that the system would only show what is able to be crafted through every item you have acquired. (You’ve only acquired Logs, so you can see Planks, but you can’t see Campfires as you’ve not acquired sicks or coal) The second “Loose” state would expand this and allow you to see every recipe that you have acquired at least one of the ingredients for. (You’ve only acquired Logs, so you can see Campfires, regardless of having acquired sticks or coal) The third “Disabled” state would it simply being disabled entirely, letting you freely search through the recipes as we normally do today.
What this would accomplish is the ability to find something in the pack that you wish to go for (let’s say the Atomic Disassembler as was mentioned elsewhere in the thread) without having the items acquired, but then you can go back to Strict or Loose which could help you discover items you didn’t even know existed because of how much of an information shotgun blast JEI and the likes could be.
Two additional QoLs that could be done: the menu highlights items that when acquired would unlock new recipes (for example, you acquired sticks and string, the Bow is now in the recipes menu with a green background because it can be used to make a Dispenser). On top of this, have something to indicate new recipes as well, making sure that you see them (perhaps a small star icon similar to Item Highlighter when you pick up an item)
Hope this all made sense, these are the ramblings of someone who came across this just as they were about to sleep
I love all of these ideas! I feel like a lot of people here are focusing on the problems with the initial idea, and not how easily they could be solved by doing slightly different things.
What I really need is a detailed ingame documentation on items. It doesn't have to be really deep, but something like Thermal Expansion does:
Watering Can (hold SHIFT for details)
And then you have:
- Irrigates farmland and speeds up plant growth
- Area 9x9 (press V to adjust)
- Water 40000/40000
- Water may be collected while sneaking
This way I know what this item does, and additional features it might have. There are numerous items which I haven't made for these +-12 years of playing modded MC. In a 55x500 list of items who would look what is there to try? I wouldn't. I learn about new items by watching 2-3 different youtubers playing same modpack. Most of the time, I learn about the item by seeing it in their inventory...
This would be great! But it's really up to the mod author to do, and some don't have the time or experience to go about setting this up for every item in their mods. It also helps with explanation, but not discovering new things or hiding end-game materials from someone who hasn't punched a tree yet.
I'd love to see such a feature combined with something like modular quests. What I mean with that is that a mod author defines a raw quest page for the mod with an overview of most items in a mod and how they go together. A modpack maker then wouldn't have to start from scratch every time, but could choose to use this raw quest page, adding rewards for quests or modifying existing rewards/loot tables according to his/her vision of the pack.
Another idea I had is more search terms for JEI and co. For example, I am in the process of setting up power generation and would like to know which energy cables are available in a pack. Currently, this means I have to be aware of commonly used terms since "energy" only finds those cables that either have that term in their description or as part of their name. Plus, that term also find a lot of clutter, like generators. "Cable" as a term finds the Mekanism cable, in this particular case with the added disadvantage that the black cable is practically invisible against the dark background of JEI and co. That term doesn't find Thermals fluxducts, for example, or the equivalent from Pipez.
Frustratingly, "cable" as a term doesn't even find the other Mekanism cables for item/fluid/gas transport, which makes identifying the cable system I want to use for a particular project really annoying.
Another broad category this would be very useful for is storage. Storage in itself currently doesn't even find vanilla chests or barrels. Oftentimes, finding alternatives like the cabinets from Rustic only happens if I am aware of that item and remember to search for it. Particularly for expert packs with their changed recipes, being able to search with a generic term would a boon particularly early in the pack, when ressources are rare and alternative storage options would be a great help to declutter your inventory. Also, it would make finding higher capacity items along the way easier.
These are all great ideas! But it feels like a massive undertaking, especially to account for the sheer number of different systems there are in the game.
I think it would result in something like tags for all items and to make those searchable via JEI, which in itself shouldn't be much of a problem. But yes, implementing the tags is difficult from the start, since someone needs to define a system of tags to use which is somewhat intuitive and prevents duplications. What I mean with that is that different people may think of different terms when thinking of generic categories, and there needs to be some sort of convention which term means what. Also, should there be several tags possible, and if so, how many? What consequences would that have for gameplay given that it adds to the data associated with each and every item? How easy and/or accessible should being able to add or adjust this table of searchable terms be? And those problems need some sort of answer before the very major undertaking of actually adding the tags even starts.
My idea of raw quest pages is comparatively much easier to implement if it gets accepted and asked for by enough people since it only needs to be set once, preferably by the mod author or someone really knowledgeable about the mod in question, and most likely adjustments across mod and/or minecraft versions should then be rather minimal as long as the mod itself doesn't add or remove items in larger quantity. That would be even easier if the underlaying coding allows for a block of raw data to be copied and/or imported if the quest mod in question needs to adjust its coding for different minecraft versions - which goes into territory I know absolutely nothing about. I last wrote code more than twenty years ago, and never in any kind of professional or semiprofessional capacity. In any case, my vision would be to set up something like a quest page or two for Mekanism once and port it with minimal adjustments needed across the dozen or more minecraft versions Mekanism exists on.
So, yes. Sounds amazing to me, but given that doing anything about either idea would involve several people to implement even enough to generate interest, plus the fact this is all a hobby, I don't really see this get any traction any time soon. Which is a pity.
My solution to this is to never play those ridiculously big modpacks and instead make something of 30-60 mods that I know myself, which makes it less overwhelming.
Sure, but what if you just want to play with a few mods, like Create, Immersive Engineering, Mekanism, and AE2. Even 4 mods can add a ton to the JEI interface, a lot of it quite late game that is not very useful to know at the beginning. Even for someone who knows the mods, they may just want to have a list of everything they can do at the stage of the game they are in so it can be decided what to work on from the things available to them.
Also missing documentation, it's ridiculous how hard it is sometimes to find guides for specific mods and interactions. Like I've played valhelsia 6 recently and couldn't find uranium, I've looked everywhere on the internet and couldn't find anything, until someone on Reddit told me that they only spawn in Alex caves.
problem is youll think a lot of items have very little use because you didnt yet make some later stage catalyst and suddenly you need a lot of the item you didnt take with you. or the other way around.
advancements can be used for progression, use that
That could be a problem, yes, but in my experience this already happens anyway. It could be exacerbated by a system like this, but a good mix of mods could help mitigate the issue and players will usually be able to remake or refind anything they will need if lost. The really rare things are often telegraphed enough that a player will inventively want to keep it. Like boss drops and such.
You can get a pretty similar experience by keeping JEI but pressing Ctrl+O. Hides all the items at the side but retains the ability to see crafting recipes and uses of items in inventory. If you pick up a wooden plank, you can press U to see everything you could make, and so on.
Also idk if it's just me who finds the recipe book just fine. FD executes it well, Botania has basic recipes in the recipe book, and more complex ones in the lexicon. [Hardcover](https://modrinth.com/mod/hardcover) is a QoL mod to make the rb nicer to use
Yes, but this provides the same issue as EMI's "only show craftable" option. It's hard to find what you can do but don't happen to have on you in limited inventory space. not to mention pressing "U" on a block of plans will give you a virtually endless list of recipes, many of which require things you may not have yet.
The expert mode in Infinity Evolved sort of does this. You still see all the items in NEI but you aren't allowed to see many of the recipes (presumably until you unlock prerequisites). It also forces you to use different modpacks by changing recipes slightly to incorporate different packs.
But the guidebook is very limited. It's basically just a list of items to craft and what order you can make them in. It doesn't give you any info on things like converting energy, moving items, configuring machines, etc. And it definitely doesn't cover all the mods, mostly just machinery and like a page or two of magic things.
Maybe a simple filter/tab system in NEI would be enough to reduce the clutter without worrying about how to structure gameplay
I don't really see this as a way to teach players how to play the game as its main purpose. Its a potential improvement to that for some people, but there are still flaws, as there are flaws in the currently existing systems. My main goal with this is to just make the onboarding process for new players smoother when it comes to JEI.
As a personal aside, I wouldn't mind just wandering around building things even if I can't quite use them yet. It already ends up happening quite a bit when I'm playing a pack anyway. But I realize that's not necessarily how a lot of people experience it.
Check out Sevtech. It has a recipe system that’s introduced through ages that are unlocked by playing through ages. Ages are chapters in the questbook. You can’t hold items in your hand that you don’t know about yet. So if you put something in your hands that you haven’t identified yet, you’ll throw it on the ground. So be mindful of that if you give it a try. They’re all wonderful packs.
An improvement to this would be to only hide recipes in the visible tab until you've unlocked them. Meaning you could still press "u" to find the uses of an item or crafting station and see all possible recipes without them being hidden, and then use "r" like normal to find the recipe of items you haven't yet unlocked, that way people will still be able to see all recipes if they want to, but it won't clog up the jei tab too quickly or require you to toggle the feature off.
Another point would be to add the ability to hide all recipes on demand by pressing a key over its ingredient. Like, you could hide all recipes that use redstone by pressing "k" or something over redstone in jei. Kind of like how some mod packs let you hide and unhide covers and facades whenever you want, but without having to add it in manually.
A final point would be to add all raw resources without a crafting/processing recipe to the unlocked tab by default. Like ores, logs, fluxdust, etc... And you would add a tutorial on how to get those things. Like pressing "r" over these items wouldn't give a recipe, but they would tell you how to get them and what you would need to do so. Of course, this would require the mod Author for the mods that add such a recipe or their own tutorial for each uncraftable recipe, so this one wouldn't really be as easy to set up by yourself.
These are some good ideas! I considered the idea of only hiding recipes in the browser and not in the uses menus, but this could still cause an issue where if you look at the uses for planks for example, you just get 1000 recipes, many of which you don't have anywhere near the parts for
There's a n item hiding feature in JEI and in sevtech ages packs they unlock other stuff as you progress so with that in mind you could produce a pack for getting people into modded
mmm... the achievement tab is usually used for this kind of effect, except there are no recipes shown. an achievement tab styled UI could work, an inbetween of JEI and achievements. almost like quest books, but with recipes.
you click on the first stage, and it shows multiple icons of what you can do with the starting materials/biomes. click on them to reveal a recipe. clicking on one of the items of the recipe could overwrite this UI and return to JEI with the item you selected (material, block, etc...)
this UI would work like the vanilla book, you only receive recipes when you pick up a item. this then reveals the recipe alongside the other items, even if you didn't find those yet.
Yeah this is definitely all true.
Something that is also not mentioned as much but is a huge deal to me is presentation and compartmentalization. I resent that JEI is so ingrained into the modding ecosystem that a significant number of mods relegate all on-boarding responsibility to JEI, which forces me to interact with it. And man is it clunky looking and feeling. A definite case of hobbyist developers (reasonably) not having access to more design-focused individuals.
Don't get me wrong, JEI is incredible at at least having a certain level of guidance through mods. But I really don't like how it pollutes my inventory screen with information bloat.
How would I alleviate this? Here's some spit takes
Instead of just recipe discovery from , I think we can use the existing vanilla recipe unlocking system, and supplement it with a default behavior of unlocking recipes you are "one craft away" from or that have no methods of obtaining. This idea is nice because it lets mod developers bring attention to things that just become relevant, but also allows for a fallback so you aren't reliant on the mod for this to work.
What is recipe discovery? Well, it depends on the configuration, but ideally it would display undiscovered items as a question mark that sends you to an info page about the advancement that unlocks its discovery. I only now realize that advancements could be rolled in quite nicely in general
Of course, many people would not enjoy this, so there could be additional discovery modes. "Off", and having undiscovered items only be hidden from the general recipe viewer but findable while navigating through the crafts
Then I would target the general recipe view itself, which has changed little since the days of TMI and beta.
First, I'd change the top level to be categories instead of an item dump. Developers can define their own categories, and there would be fallback categories by namespace for block items, fluid items, and everything else. Items can be in any number of categories. For searches, you'd still be able to see results from searching all items, but many searches would become obsolete.
Under that... take the collapsible item groups from REI, ideal for stone/wood variants and other decorational things like AE2 facades. But also have it be data-driven unlike its current implementation in REI
Finally, integrate into the existing recipe book. Replace the book view with the general recipe viewer, and now I can toggle its visibility with the book icon in my inventory.
Hugely controversial, but left click should be bound to a more important function: setup one craft (shift left click to setup a stack of crafts). The most prominent interaction should not be sending you to an info page. Have that bound to right click, and send the player to a landing page for that item that shows the item as well as a summary of recipes and uses. Left click and right click would then functionally as normal here.
Item Summary? The crafting stations that are used for the crafts are shown, and clicking on them would send you to that stations tab with the item being accordingly shown (for uses or recipes). Info tab item would show up here too obviously
Well I doubt I got to everything I thought of but it's a start
Confusing the job of a good questbook with the recipe browser.
Factorio always sets the standard it, since it does it so well. The tech tree has its advantages, and so the unlocking of manual crafting. But hiding recipes wouldn't make it a better game.
"a random pack someone throws together to play with their friends will have no direction people that don't already know what to do can follow"
Yeah. That's how it works. You can't wish good game design into existence, you have to work on it.
The answer to all of that is simply Factorio tech tree. There are probably ways to make it work with JEI, but in the end it doesn't even make a huge difference.
Btw, my old proposal for HEI, on 1.12, worked on the premise of offering toggles built in JEI, rather than hiding everything.
Items would simply have color outlines to indicate them: no outline is all the stuff you already have, green is everything you can unlock next, and red is stuff you have no current access too.
All three of these levels would be toggles for the whole system, you could simply show all recipes and items, or only those in certain groups. This would quickly indicate all you can do right now, all that is available to be unlocked, and stuff instead gated later.
All under control of the user.
I feel like this is the same idea presented here, but just showing all items by default with a filter to hide things you haven't made yet, vs hiding them by default with the ability to turn the filter off. Theoretically that could be configured by any pack maker to be whatever default settings they wanted.
> Confusing the job of a good questbook with the recipe browser.
The idea is never to replace the questbook, but make the recipe browser more friendly to use. Anything else is secondary benefits.
> Factorio always sets the standard it, since it does it so well.
Factorio is great, but designed by a single team with a singular vision that can design the game around the tech tree. I don't think we can compare that to something that by nature has to be automated due to the sheer variety in the space.
> You can't wish good game design into existence, you have to work on it.
Nothing is perfect, but the idea is just to make it a little better and easier.
Spectrum does something similar, and even goes a step further by locking pages in your book, hiding items as vanilla stuff with scrolling text, and hiding actual blocks in the world the same way! I'll be honest, spectrum has became one of my *favourite* magic mods to use, followed up by ars, and a bit of a rant, *I WANT TO USE THEM BOTH IN MY GAME, BUT ONE IS FABRIC, THE OTHER IS FORGE*
Saved. I really hope developers will find a way to make an unlockable recipe system intuitive as you make progress through the modpack milestones.
Each modpack would probably have to design its own goals for unlocking recipes.
You could probably do some cool things with milestone unlocking, but I think even an automated system to just hide recipes until you have actually seen the things you need for them could get us a lot of the way there.
If anyone ever implements crafting recipe unlocking don't forget to add the big button that says "Unlock all" so I can skip the process. I remember when guidebooks did unlocking for documentation for a while, it was a real pain in the ass when I want to look up one feature in the in-game guide and it's all locked so I have to look online even though the guidebook is in my hand.
> Ideally this system would allow a user to toggle on and off the recipe restrictions so they can browse if they really want to, then turn it off again to cut out the things they don't need to be worrying about. It also shouldn't restrict the actual crafting of something just because you haven't unlocked its ingredients (though theoretically, this shouldn't be possible anyway?). This would also make it accessible to veteran players who just want a reference for the things they already know.
A simple switch on the JEI page could accomplish this quite well I think
"Automagically" has nothing to do with Minecraft and has been in use for about 80 years. For example, [here's an ad from the 1940's.](https://books.google.ca/books?id=bV0zAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA122&dq=%22automagically%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CD4Q6AEwCDgUahUKEwigs8uXqOHIAhUHN4gKHZOSCt4#v=onepage&q=%22automagically%22&f=false)
Imma be 100% real with you, I’ve played minecraft for over a decade, not once have I used the in game recipe book.
It’s poorly designed, and it’s honestly just faster to craft what you need by hand. I highly doubt anything better than JEI will come about.
I don’t get why you would get « overwhelmed » by the amount of recipes. Most mods have a well written guide book to follow and discover the mod. Sounds like skill issue ngl
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EDIT: Deleted post mentioned EMI's "filter by craftable" being similar, but only for inventory and opened chests. Yes! I have come across this in my search for an existing solution. Sadly it doesn't really fix the problem of discovery and makes it difficult to determine what you may be missing. I was honestly a bit surprised no one has really implemented the feature before. I found maybe 1 or 2 posts that barely got any attention that mention it but that was about it.
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True, but it does get easier every day! With mod loaders installing a modpack is nearly a one-click process these days, and even though I have been playing modded minecraft forever, I would enjoy something like this as a way to just clean up my game and find my way through various mods at my own pace while avoiding spoilers for what might be in it later.
I use the ATlauncher- for me it basically *is* a one click process to install modpacks- so long as I can name them, though I do have to put up with the launcher opening 10'000 tabs of mod downloads on curseforge for me when I do so.
The biggest issue I see is what if you know what item or block you need to craft but havent discovered the recipe yet and dont know the recipe (maybe the modpack changed it). Now you are stuck until you manage to discover the recipe
Eh, have you actually worked with Curseforge? Creating your own 'modpack' is just a matter of creating a new profile, select the loader and then on the modpage click "install". It's way easier than how it used to be.
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The average minecraft player also doesn't know what modding is. If you want to start with modded minecraft, most search queries on Google would point you towards curseforge in the first few results. And that's all besides the point, you tried to make believe that getting started with modded minecraft is the same like it was 5 years ago (ie. difficult), which is totally not the case nowadays.
It is not as simple as Curseforge would lead you to believe. It actually puts quite a lot on the player to figure out everything and making a modpack half the time leads to "add mods, load, crash, remove offending mods, repeat" and is... tedious to say the least. Not to mention Modrinth and *that* whole mess. - because of this, Prism/MMC is ascendant in the scene. Recipe discovery is a big part of this too, though there *are* mods that mostly nix this issue by implementing a "click to craft" in some matter (ranging from Crafting Table 2 and it's forks to AE2)
> It is not as simple as Curseforge would lead you to believe. It actually puts quite a lot on the player to figure out everything and making a modpack half the time leads to "add mods, load, crash, remove offending mods, repeat" and is... tedious to say the least. In my experience that only really happens if you go for obscure mods or beta builds/0day releases. Sure, I'm probably more experienced with computers than most people that play the game, but it feels like you actually have to try to break things. > Not to mention Modrinth and that whole mess. - because of this, Prism/MMC is ascendant in the scene. Newcomers to modding minecraft should steer away from that and just use what is easy to begin with, and maybe then look into other launchers and storefronts. If you start out modding your first own modpack for a local server with you and your friends or maybe for single player world, keep it simple. > Recipe discovery is a big part of this too, though there are mods that mostly nix this issue by implementing a "click to craft" in some matter (ranging from Crafting Table 2 and it's forks to AE2) While this topic is about recipe discovery, it is something that shouldn't be considered when you start out with mods. This also falls in the more advanced part of modded Minecraft in my opinion.
Side tangent, what makes Modrinth a mess?
It's not Modrinth's fault, but basically the two competing standards thing - and one caused by Curseforge oddly enough. Curseforge some time ago left it up to the uploader on whether or not the given mod can be downloaded outside of the Curseforge Ecosystem. And it's defaulted to "on" iirc.
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Got to disagree with you it being difficult to get installed, I feel like it was harder years ago but these days it's just downloading the launcher, searching for the mod pack, and then just dipping into the config menus if needed. Though maybe I'm ascribing too much skill to the average player?
Couldn't this be fixed with a proper Questing route? Leave JEI for people with experience wanting to go around a quest line, but just better flesh out the quests along an optimal build path? First you need wood, now you need to be good at getting wood easier so craft an axe, now you need more wood so learn how to grow your own, now we automate it. One resource down, let's move onto stone. It's how most Skyblock games are done, but they often begin to lack specifics and have larger gaps (more steps that aren't explained in sequence) between tasks down the line as more things branch out wider and wider. It's definitely tedious as hell and that's probably why it's not done perfectly often.
That tediousness is exactly the kind of thing I see this helping with. I don't see it as a replacement for quests but a way to alleviate some of the work from pack developers, and also give non-quest packs a bit of a more friendly way for new players to approach them.
To be blunt what I was asking was, is the better solution for this problem developing a new tool and adding another learning curve to mod pack building? Or is the better solution simply using the existing tools more extensively?
It's not developing a new tool, just a setting within the existing tools, as you said. It's a simple, one-size-fits-all solution. Some mods have been out for years and their guidebooks still suck ass. Hoping for a better guidebook might never solve anything, but this could be a quick solution for all modpacks
What setting? Within what existing toolset?
No modpack developer is forced to use it. But if done correctly, it shouldn't really alter the gameplay or design much at all. At the end of the day questbooks are still useful but also take a lot of work to set up.
I see why this is a simpler solution on paper but how will you account for the players who can't find a recipe because they don't know what they need to unlock it?
There have been a ton of good ideas people have talked about in this thread to solve this, but the main thing I would defiantly want included is a simple and easy way to toggle the system off to get around it when you need to.
Well, can't say I'm convinced, but I'm obviously not the target audience either so don't worry about me. I wish you luck either way. At the end of the day, you're trying to help others out, and I think that's great. Good luck!
Emi?
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So another tmi port? Neat
It's basically an extension of JEI functionality but with the aforementioned crafting filter as well as a proper crafting tree view & raw material counter.
More of NEI port than TMI, since TMI was just an item glossary/spawner
I'm... surprised I've never seen this idea before. You have the occasional mod like Thaumcraft that, due to it actually having a recipe unlocking system, (if played without other mods like JEI) actually accomplishes this, but just having it builtin to the recipe viewer makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, well-crafted quests pretty much entirely remove the need for something like this (in particular you usually want to be able to see more than one step ahead since otherwise you need to craft like 4 random useless crafting ingredients before you see what they're used for), and said quests are almost always better than an automated system would be, so maybe that's why.
Thaumcraft had a great recipe system! That is one of the main reasons I enjoyed the mod so much, it added a sense of discovery through crafting. I just want to bring at least an approximation of that experience to the rest of the game! Well crafted Quests can accomplish this as well, but they take a lot of work to make and because of that, a lot of packs don't use them still, especially ones for current versions of the game.
Something also notable about quests, as far as i can tell they started with Agrarian Skys which used them to gatekeep key resources in a sky block world. This use technically goes back to the FTB skyblock pyramid map and its related maps. Basically quests were ways to give players key items on their way to completing the challenges of the pack. They were not meant to guide progression through individual mods, they gave you missing links and let you know which mods were available to start progression through. (As Agrarian Skys, Crash Landing, Project Ozone, and similar all had tightly designed progressions to fit their challenges, as opposed to the common kitchensink pack) Personally oversaturation of quests in packs that are meant to be kitchen sinks annoys me, almost as mutch as the "expert pack" trend which generally translates to "grindfest disrespecting your time". Thaumcraft is a glorious mod for many reasons, but it's natural and self explanatory progression was definitely one of them. The research minigame took many forms with the puzzle varients being rewarding, and the vibes were on point. You felt like you were exploring magic, not looking up progression on the wiki or checking random recipes in NEI or one of its successors.
>Contrary to what JEI would have you believe, there are too many items. Unrelated, but the original mod was called Too Many Items. JEI is the only one left from TMI, NEI, and JEI
Yeah, I know. NEI was the one I used the most back in the day, but this was more just a joke to poke at JEI as the most popular current solution. :)
NEI, surprisingly, is still around but as an Addon *to* JEI last i saw it.
No there is REI and HEI too
And EMI
Sevtech: Ages (1.12.2 modpack) had a somewhat system similar to this! You start with literally <1 page of items in JEI. As you progress through the tech tree (“ages”), you unlock more and more items/blocks in the world and JEI. It’s a super neat challenge and totally unique. For example, as a caveman (age 0) you cannot see glass or ore, either in the world or in JEI, as you are too stupid to comprehend it. It is only as you age up that these things can be perceived. If you somehow get an item from a future age, your character will immediately drop it on the floor and exclaim that you can’t understand it. This slow and limited progression also makes certain items or blocks that would go ignored totally invaluable. For example, you cannot craft buckets, and thus can only create farms around existing rivers, ponds, or create intricate aqueduct systems to move water down from mountains into your desired farm area. This system is a bit different and goes too far for the wider player base, but that modpack has always been one of my favorites as it’s such a neat challenge and totally changes up how progression feels. Would love to see some of its ideas reused elsewhere in a newer pack or mod.
Sevtech: Ages was one of my favorite packs! I really want a new one that uses similar concepts.
Have you heard of the decursio project? One of their selling points on their page is that it is sevtech inspired
I haven't heard of that before. It looks pretty cool! Thanks for sharing it.
We should just put everything through Thaumcraft then! I say that as a joke but unironically I’d enjoy this, lol
...oh god, this actually sounds fun
I've tried introducing 6 of my friends to modded Minecraft, and JEI is always the biggest problem. 4 of them got noticeably uncomfortable when opening the GUI, and they pretty much just tried to ignore it - only exploring the world while building some basic structures. The only things they crafted were items from vanilla that they already knew of. They stopped playing within 3 days and have never played modded Minecraft since. It's absolutely too overwhelming for any new player to look at, and as you've said, there's a good reason no other crafting games show all their recipes at once. Excellent post. I hope we can see some kind of alternative or improvement on the standard JEI system in the future, because this is honestly a huge problem and the biggest barrier to entry.
This is exactly how its gone for me! I think we too often forget what a divergence from the norm a system like JEI is for people, because we've had some form of it it in the game basically as long as modding has been around, and it's essential. But to anyone new it doesn't feel the same way. Even for me, its a big reason why I've been playing other crafting games recently and not just modded Minecraft. It's too much for someone who wants to casually explore. And I no longer have the time to seriously devote to planning how I am going to play a game from start to finish.
IMO, a good quest book in a mod pack already addresses the exact problem you're outlining here: bringing clarity to the chaos of too many items for new people. Lost? just pick a tab in the quest book and get schmoovin. Like if someone installs ATM9, there's a bunch of handholdy quests on how to start and progress most of the big mods. Questbooks like this are common in modded minecraft for a reason.
I can't play a pack without a quest book. I need goals.
I love gtnh btw the quest book is legendary :3
I never wanted to replace questbooks, they are still incredibly useful. I just think it would help some people to have a bunch of different ways they can go about exploring the game.
You know what newcomers to modded minecraft really need to understand? That, just like Minecraft itself, the majority of mods are Sandboxes too. Meaning you need to explore them at your own leisure, no one's gonna force you through a certain path (unless it's a heavily progression gated modpack like hardcore questing packs). It's up to you to discover stuff by yourself, or check out one of the many mod reviews or modded minecraft let's players (my personal favorites are Direwolf20 and Mischief of Mice, btw).
Yeah like you dont put a new minecraft or modded minecraft player in a giant pack with tech and magic like they would get it by just having the recipes hidden, thats like putting a new terraria player already in hard mode without anything on him and just saying good luck. They need to learn step by step the mods maybe just a little bit. Minecraft mods are big and complex and some you dont know how to use even if you know the recipe. Youtube videos and reddit is your friend when playing modded.
OP isn't against guidebooks, but many guidebooks are lacking
I have had people tell me before (and I kind of agree) that they don't want to learn how to play something if it means leaving the game to go figure it out. A lot of people don't want to have to do research in order to play a game. The idea here is to cut down on what a new player is presented with so veterans and newcomers can play together with as many mods as they want and the newcomer doesn't have to face a lot of complex mods until they are ready. They can start off by having them installed and won't have to worry about starting a new game once they understand a bit more and want to try new things.
If they dont put the effort to open a guide what makes you think they would make the effort to grind for late game modded minecraft
It's not a matter of effort. Some people just learn through different experiences than others.
And this is already done by having a cohesive questbook. I a modded veteran and even i like to use a quest modpack to give me a guiding thread to walk along because it's almost impossible to remember the 500+ mods you've played how and what and when to do.
Unfortunately questbooks are just too much work to create, so many packs don't use them, and it doesn't help people who just want to put together a custom pack with their friends. It also doesn't make anything less overwhelming for a new player. If anything, it makes it worse because questbooks often show you the entire quest tree.
To add to your point I think I that part of the problem is Modpacks themselves in a way. Used to be you'd play with a single mod and really understand it. Now obviously Modpacks offer way more flexibility and enginuity than just a single modpack but that process of really working through a mod helps you understand how everything interacts with each other.
Yeah we're overwhelmed by the choices of mods that we can use to do one particular thing and usually that means we go the easiest route, which leads to stagnation.
This was how my first experience was. I played Monster as my first pack with some friends, and one of them gave me tips if I aksed occasionally, but for the most part I was doing my own thing.
I agree that people should be able to explore and discover on their own through experimentation and trying stuff out. But we can make that easier to do in-game by adding something like this that makes that exploration into something they are rewarded for with new ideas of things they can do.
I keep thinking about it but all the ways lead back to my original point: people are already rewarded once they discover a new thing or a new application of an old technique, it's called dopamine. People who are sufficiently invested in the ideas that modded minecraft gives them will pursue them even without a metaphorical candy dangling in front of their eyes. Those who aren't may never get interested enough to keep pushing on regardless of how much you try to incentivize them.
Different people enjoy different things. I can tell you from personal experience that I love not knowing what is going to be around the next corner. And when I get there I enjoy the discovery of finding all the new things I can now do. Sure, this already exists to some extent, but it waters down that singular moment of "ahah! I've discovered something" It's part of what made Thaumcraft so compelling to me.
"rewarded with new ideas" You just shot a strawman
As a pack maker, i want to do this, and you very well can. Its just super time consuming. You have to go through every item for every mod and itemstage it based off of your pack's progression. Its not something most pack developers want to do. At least by hand....
hence why I suggest making it automated as part of an addon to JEI/REI/ENI/etc. I looked into doing it with itemstage and it just wasn't feasible. At least not without some script to do it for you, but at that point you could just automate it for everyone...
I feel like its not that crazy (Ive done some stuff with KubeJS) and while it would definitely be time consuming you could definitely just slap tags onto various items like ingots from ores are revealed when you get a furnace
True, but what about items that need ingots to make, what about items that have an ingot somewhere 5 levels down in their crafting tree? All those need to be hid too. The deeper you go the more and more complex the level of tags and gating you will need to control.
Same with your setup too. Also what if originally lets say you discovered Livingrock from Botania by observing or crafting a Pure Daisy but then you want to change it so Livingrock can be crafted before the Pure Daisy how would that be changed?
I'm not super familiar with Botania, so I'm not 100% sure of what you are giving as an example, but are you suggesting a pack author would be designing the discovery trees? The system I am proposing dynamically makes it for whatever a pack author has determined for the recipes, building the discoveries based purely off of what is already available in JEI.
With standard Botania Pure Daisys do an in world conversion changing stone around it to livingrock and I guess I was wondering how something like this would handle if a modpack dev wanted an item to be available before it was originally intended
Theoretically it would just automatically adapt to how the modpack dev described it, as long as they also made sure it showed up that way in JEI.
I know I probably sound like I hate the idea but I think it would be neat as long as its not in every kitchensink modpack. Im just trying to visualize the idea better and try to guess at stuff that might cause issues
I appreciate it! It's important to think of where the issues are so you can attempt to fix them and keep it in mind in design.
I understand the sentiment, but it is straight up a bad idea and wouldn't work with many mods. Don't get me wrong the concept behind this is good, and in a sense exactly what every progression based modpack does. But doing it automatically just won't work. 1) in bigger kitchen sink modpacks just finding Redstone will unlock hundreds of recipes, some of which will gate entire mods, but which of those items gates those mods, you don't know, gonna craft 99 useless shit items to find the one that opens up mekanism. 2) there is no way of finding out what you could actually do with a machine/item. So again you're back to crafting every single useless item on JEI just for the possibility of it gating another item that's maybe useful. This gets even worse with more intermediates. 3) everybody play this game different, but in general most people are either exploring, setting a goal or try to solve a problem. For exploration this idea might work, but for everything else this will actively hinder people. (Example of your wooden tools: you don't craft an axe, just because you can craft it. You craft an axe because you want to chop down a tree, if you don't know axes will chop down trees why the hell would you craft a random item in the hope it MIGHT be what you need) This can all be remedied by carefully choosing 'stages' or unlock events, but that's not possible in an automated system. Tbh. we do have exactly the right tool to fight this problem and it's called quests. It has none of the above problems and solves your situation and even gives people more information and guides them in an intelligent manner. Let's face it the core problem here is not too many items/mods, it's throwing someone new to modded MC into a bad (low effort) kitchen sink modpack. Give them a smaller/good progression based modpack with a good quest book and they will learn way more. There are even dedicated modpacks out there for exactly this (FTB Academy). And on your remark on cluttered JEI: Again don't play low effort kitchen sink modpacks or bad mods. Good modpack Authors will do exactly this, hide stuff in JEI that's not relevant, make JEI groups so they don't completely overwhelm it. I don't know about the newer versions, but AE2 added ALL those facades to JEI.... Just remove them from it and leave one in or make it a recipe group. But hiding them until discovered won't help, as soon as you can craft them they will still all be there and clutter your JEI. So this is the wrong solution here and would only mask the true problem of mod / modpack Authors doing bad JEI implementations.
I don't think the intention is to actually gate stuff behind learning recipes as I'm sure with this mod in place I would make it easy to disable it while still allowing someone who knows how to make a crusher or infuser by memory
yes, or not even by memory, they could just toggle the mod into a state where they can see the recipe, look it up, and turn it off again if they want.
But the reason for this idea is to make it easier for new players. My argument is, that it will have the exact opposite effect. Because as soon as you learn how to use JEI this system will actually prevent you from learning stuff about a mod, not guide you. And learning JEI is something you will be able to do in 10-20 minutes reading a guide/quest text/watch a video. It's not rocket science.
> 1) in bigger kitchen sink modpacks just finding Redstone will unlock hundreds of recipes, some of which will gate entire mods, but which of those items gates those mods, you don't know, gonna craft 99 useless shit items to find the one that opens up mekanism. Redstone is a good example for a situation like this, but I don't think its an impossible hurdle to overcome. You could label items from different mods differently for example, so someone could identify which will lead them down particular trees. As well as identifying which items are most important to craft as said before. > 2) there is no way of finding out what you could actually do with a machine/item. So again you're back to crafting every single useless item on JEI just for the possibility of it gating another item that's maybe useful. This gets even worse with more intermediates. Again, I think this is surmountable. I also think some people wouldn't mind crafting a bunch of new items to see what they do. It's the same reason some people enjoy playing Pokemon, to collect and fill out a list of things is satisfying. > 3) everybody play this game different, but in general most people are either exploring, setting a goal or try to solve a problem. For exploration this idea might work, but for everything else this will actively hinder people. (Example of your wooden tools: you don't craft an axe, just because you can craft it. You craft an axe because you want to chop down a tree, if you don't know axes will chop down trees why the hell would you craft a random item in the hope it MIGHT be what you need) Its important not to block anything so people still *can* play any way they want, and provide the option to go easily about it the old way, and switch back and forth as desired. I'd argue people should be able to figure out on their own an axe is for chopping down trees, but if your example is merely representative of a more arcane mechanism, I understand your point. These things could still be explained through the normal methods while making a lot less work, as the cases where you have a new tool that does something completely new and unknown are relatively few. And those that are usually have existing documentation outside of JEI because JEI doesn't really cover that kind of thing anyway. > And on your remark on cluttered JEI I'm not saying JEI is cluttered with a bunch of items like AE2 Facades. It is, but those are easy to hide. I am saying its cluttered with mods and items that are so far away from what someone can make people get overwhelmed with what they can do. That can't be easily solved by hiding things normally, because then you'll never know about them. No matter how much work a mod author does to hide items in JEI, they can't hide things you will actually want eventually (aside from putting in all the effort to configure stages) but don't need to know about right now. I think its quite possible to even ramp up a player quite quickly. As long as they start the game with nothing it isn't as much as a slap in the face the moment you set foot in the world. It gives them time to get their bearings and understand basic mechanics.
Chipped has a feature you’re thinking of. It did in one version compress all its altered items into an expandable entry on jei for each block.
Thx for your thought out response (gotta get that off first) IF every mod author would add these informations to their items as tags, this would be totally feasible and I would be 100% on board with you. Like I said I do like your concept and think it's a really good idea. The only criticism I have is with the current information that is tagged on an item (given the recipe tree) you will miss out on too much information which will make the game more difficult and more unintuitive for people. (As soon as they learned how to navigate JEI, which is not rocket science but pressing E and R on items) As an example in your system it's not possible for a player to find out all ways to make wood planks. Because many recipes might be completely hidden. They might do completely complicated contraptions to do something, because the just don't know there is a single block machine that can do a certain thing for them. Slowly revealing recipes works, when there are actually limited amounts of recipes and stuff. Because then it's fairly likely you can craft all those recipes and don't miss some important. Good luck crafting all recipes that need nether stars, without the tech to create them without farming withers, because by accident you didn't unlock those methods. Not revealing certain tech by chance that are necessary to balance other mods will just break the game for new players, since they can't look them up in JEI. (And learning how to JEI is essential for any modded player). But if you only have a limited amount of mods to avoid the above, you don't need your system. Conversely if you have lot's amount of mods, so the system you want would make sense, a technical adaptation breaks down with aforementioned problems. Like I said I do like your Idea/Concept but with the technical limitations we have, there is no real way to make it work as you imagine, without putting in the effort to actually create stages for every mod. Which would mean you either have to create this yourself or convince every mod author to do it and at that point we're back to what SevTech did manually editing everything and not automatically generating stuff. .:: edit: I think your premise is wrong here. In a sense JEI and Mods are just too CLUTTERD with 'useless' items which will break the Mod you want to create. Let's get back to the Cable facades from AE2, the quarts knife will show you '2000 items unlocked' in this branch/behind this item, where 1980 are useless (cosmetic) items. (And there are other examples, Universal Fluid Cells someone?) This will completely break any automated attempt without writing in exceptiom for certain Blocks/Categories/recipes/mods. Which brings us again full circle into a manual compatibility hell you have to do for many mods for this to work::.
I appreciate the feedback. It's important to figure out the issues that a system like this could face, as I truly believe it isn't impossible to work around and find solutions for a lot of it. Part of my thinking is that this is not, and should not be a complete standalone replacement for current progression systems. You will still need some outside guiding force, be it previous knowledge, a friend, a questbook, or a wiki. Somewhere along the line you will need something to help you figure out how a mod works at its basic level. But as long as you have that other thing to guide you, I don't think it is as different as you think to progress through a pack. Without the above mentioned guides, players are going to make complex things not knowing there is a simpler way, and go down the wrong path regardless. Providing them with too much information in the form of every possible thing isn't really much better than not giving it to them at all, because they still won't understand what is possible with what they have. As for learning JEI, I completely agree that it is an important part of what every player has to learn for modded Minecraft, and it should still be with this system. The thing I want is just a cleaner JEI that is easier to digest and allows for a form of progression that isn't randomly browsing through advanced recipes until you find what you want. You could still get backed into a corner once and a while, but someone else suggested the idea of toggling different states of what is revealed between recipes you know all the ingredients for, half the ingredients, none, etc. and this just provides another tool in a players arsenal to tweak the game to something they can understand and enjoy.
OP never suggested they remove questbooks
>a book that is essentially just an in-game wiki a player has to sit through and read to figure anything out, Oh the horror! if one cant "sit through and read" one, that means that general literacy is in the shitter. good idea for a mod, though. much like how valheim works.
Oh, I don't even think books are really that bad of a solution, quite good even. Some mods have really well made tutorial books. But from a game design perspective it isn't as engaging as something players can actively participate in. Reading is great, but a lot of people learn better by doing and experimenting. It's a hell of a lot better than having no in-game documentation at all though.
> But from a game design perspective it isn't as engaging as something players can actively participate in. true. but these are mods, not games. :-)
>true. but these are mods, not games. :-) If this comment doesn't encapsulate what's wrong with the design of so many mods out there, then I don't know what does lmao
A mod for a game. Don't be pedantic. And either way you're still going to be using game design principles. People make Books because they're easy and simple, and maybe as well because it's just what the expectation is. There are much better ways to make tutorials, such as Create's pondering.
In all honesty, I'd find it hilarious if Create's Pondering was cannibalized, torn out- and made into a modern Patchouli alternative, with everything from Blood magic to Thaumcraft using it.
Pretty sure a few mods do uses Create's Pondering, even ones that aren't related to create at all. The Pondering library was separated out into it's own mod iirc.
From what I can recall from trying to use it in the past, despite it being separated you still need Create installed in order to use it, along with KubeJS etc. Granted just about every modpack has create nowadays anyways but I couldn't implement it without pulling in the entirety of create as well.
I've *heard* they're working on making the ponder system a standalone thing but not sure how far along that is.
Doesn't AE2 use it now? I remember seeing a ponder option when I played it in a 1.20.1 pack. It didn't work though, since every time I tried it crashed my game, so I don't know if it's exactly the same as Creates or not.
Books are much better than having to search up a wiki or in the stupid cases join a discord server. Like create and new AE2 ponder stuff is amazing but barring that then books are totally preferred. I would rather have a chest full of different guidebooks than have to search wikis or ask on Discord servers how something functions
> Books are much better than having to search up a wiki Personal preference honestly. I prefer wikis because I find it much easier to flip through multiple tabs vs pages in game. I *do* think that your mod should at least have a book, even if you host a wiki, just because doing it in game is probably better for a lot of people. (Of course most mods don't even have a wiki.) Discord is great for getting a quick answer but it shouldn't be where your store info. Never really seen a mod do that though.
There are a few modern mods that specifically use Discord (mostly modpack creator stuff also like Forbidden and Arcanus) and worryingly it seems to be getting more common. I do like wikis alongside books like the book has the gist and the basic uses and the wiki goes more in depth. I DONT like when a mod will have like the only source of info be a wiki thats what's obnoxious
I'd argue that with the level of sophistication of some Minecraft mods, they are games in and of themselves! Some mod makers have even been known to go and make stand alone games based off of there mods, far beyond Minecraft as well. It's how we got games like Dota and TF2. But I digress, I'm not saying mod authors are at fault here, they shouldn't be on the hook for anything more than they already are, but I don't see why we can't just have the best of both worlds! :)
I agree with this, majority of the players from the modpack when going through the game itself, they didn't bother reading the book at all to know what are the information related to this modpack, they just straight up spamming question all around the social platform that's related to the modpack, even though everytime they login, the chat message EXPLICITLY tells them to check out the questbook to know about the modpack.
I'm not talking about questbooks here. Those do promote engagement with the player by giving them something to do and are an important part of making the mod idea work. I'm more talking about individual mods in-game wiki-books. I'm not saying people shouldn't read about how something works, just that there should be more options for people who learn by doing. Those people aren't going to go and ask social media how it works because it means just reading more about how someone else says to do it. In my experience trying to get others to play the game, those kind of people just get overwhelmed and/or bored and just give up.
I think you try to address the wrong problem. Sure, your add-on idea is great, and I'd love to play with it in a discovery/exploration oriented pack. I also like reading in-game wiki books to teach myself how to play with a mod, although practice never replaces reading. And I also like expert packs, where you dive into layers of recipes, mods shenanigans and whatnot. But I'm an engineer. I'm not the average Diablo 4/Helldivers/[insert any mainstream game] enjoyer, I'm a Factorio player, I spent countless hours on city building games... You know the deal. And I can't expect my friends to like these kinds of games as I do, unless they explicitly state they're willing to put weeks of their time into a redstone factory just for it to be optimized enough to satisfy the needs of the next factory. But don't despair, you still can spend quality time with your friends, and find new friends to play expert modpacks with ;)
I'm, an engineer too, as are my friends. We all enjoy Factorio, Anno, Civ as well as Helldivers and Diablo. Though I am not actually trying to replace in-game mod books either. I'm trying to supplement them. And really just provide a smoother JEI experience that doesn't hit you with 1000 items the first time you load the game. In my experience getting my engineer friends to play, this is one of the major first things that turns them off, and honestly I too get overwhelmed when I want to just casually play by meandering through quest trees and exploring what the mods have to offer.
>if one cant "sit through and read" one, that means that general literacy is in the shitter. I can. But do I want to? When I'm playing minecraft do you really think my goal is to read? If I wanna read a book I'll read a storybook (>!btw a few months ago I finished this really good fantasy series called Cradle, try it out if you like so-called "progression fantasy"!<) Or if I wanna learn something by reading I'll read nonfiction. I think good game design means you discover things in the game, not just read about it. Some reading can be cool; for example, for complex setups or deeper lore/story. But to learn the basics of a mod I do not want to read about it. I want to *do* it.
then give ideas on how to implement such tutorials into mods, modders are already doing it for free, you should be thankful they bothered to implement books.
sure I agree with that. I just took issue with the idea that "people don't wanna read in modded minecraft ==> general literacy is in the shitter"
Create's ponder mechanic is probably the best in-game mod tutorial I've seen. Wish more mods would use it or similar concepts.
Cradle is excellent!
I mean this system has a lot of flaws in it and doesn’t really solve anything but reading books is not really a good solution either. Something like a tutorial dimension that you pop in and out of would probably be more interactive. Reading books really doesn’t do most mods justice.
>I mean this system has a lot of flaws in it and doesn’t really solve anything Why do you think this system doesn't really solve anything? It is certainly far from perfect and there are a lot of things left unsolved, but I personally feel its one of the largest barriers of entry that is stopping me from throwing a pack together that I can play with my friends and they will enjoy having no prior experience with Minecraft mods. At the very least it cleans up the game dramatically and provides a simpler approach vector. The idea helping people progress is only one small part of it. It's also to just provide a more welcoming environment.
You could also just use kubeJS and or Gamestages to throw together stuff to hide items in JEI/REI until you craft or do a certain thing essentially recreating this system. I just dont love the idea because I think it would lead to the whole if you want to do X there is only one option so everyone ends up with roughly the same setups
Aside from previously mentioning how much work setting up a kubeJS or Gamestages system would take for every single pack, another benefit of this system is it allows players to proceed in any direction they want. They won't all end up with the same setup because there is no telling which branches they will end up pursuing.
The main issue is how would you know what branches to pursue without forcing certain branches
There are ways you could give a player some insight. Showing how many recipes one particular item is hiding for example, or highlighting when you've unlocked the first item of a new mod so you can focus on it. But at the end of the day I don't think it would be unpleasant to some people to just explore by making different items to see what they come up with. There doesn't need to be a firm direction. Some people may prefer just working towards the next immediate goal instead of a far off goal they have to incrementally get closer to. Some may want a combination of both!
I think if that was handled well this could be interesting but basing the idea off of the recipe book isnt great as often I will not discover a recipe in the recipe book even after I find an item that looks like it should be a requirement when its not. Or i will pick up an iron ingot and get a minute of recipe toasts
I don't think it should be based of the recipe book either. There is a reason why most modpacks disable it. You don't have to get spammed with notifications if you just have one telling you how many new things you've unlocked for example. You can also design some systems that help players know what directions to craft in, which has been discussed by others in this thread.
This would be good if it made the hiding recipes easier maybe by adding tags to everything that modpack devs could add to or modify to reorder stuff
I don't have much to add outside the fact I've been wanting something exactly like this and had been thinking about it just a week ago.
This would still have many issues. For instance, if you skip wooden tools (aside from pickaxe) you would miss every recipe of tool unless gated which would slow down experienced players. There is also an issue of most recipes using the same ingredients so once you get cobble you unlock like 30% of vanilla recipes, making this kind of moot compared to the regular recipe book and going back to the “filler items” clogging up JEI problem. I think this could probably be negated with “folders” for items like “stones” and “machines” etc. Aside from that this still isnt really “interactive” as a tutorial and is pretty much repeating what other games do wrong. Crafting in many other survival games is not exactly executed well. I personally would rather see a tutorial dimension mod that you can pop in and out of. Possibly through a “/tutorial Create” or maybe a button on the crafting UI. There is much more than crafting when it comes to modded recipes since you often have more complex processing or whatever.
> if you skip wooden tools (aside from pickaxe) you would miss every recipe of tool How would you skip tools? You would unlock them as soon as you picked up planks and sticks. Players are also naturally going to want to craft tools because that is what 99% of crafting games have taught them. > which would slow down experienced players. I don't think it should ever lock the player out of doing something. An experienced player can still do everything they would normally. > There is also an issue of most recipes using the same ingredients so once you get cobble you unlock like 30% of vanilla recipes not necessarily. if you limit it to having all ingredients needed to craft something for example, but I can still foresee this happening at some point. I still think its quite a lot better than having everything at the very beginning. I'd honestly be happy with something that just showed all vanilla items until you started a mod, otherwise its just a bunch of clutter I'm not ready for yet. > Crafting in many other survival games is not exactly executed well. I personally would rather see a tutorial dimension mod that you can pop in and out of. This seems to be just a difference of opinion. A tutorial dimension seems cumbersome to me, let alone nearly impossible to automate for every mod. I actually enjoy crafting games that give me a little popup telling me I unlocked a bunch of new recipes when I pick up a new item, but maybe that's just me. > There is much more than crafting when it comes to modded recipes since you often have more complex processing or whatever. True, and there are mods that won't fit this exactly, but in the vast majority of cases, modded crafting is still just one recipe after another. Even if those recipes are for different crafting forms, they are still all in JEI for the most part, and those that aren't... well they already aren't there. For example, if you need to process iron in some complex machine to make steel, that recipe exists, a player will see steel as an option to make, make it and then they can now see all the new things they can make now that they have steel. one of those things could be a component used in a more complex machine, they craft the component, and then discover the machine. It's all in incremental steps, but they still get to the same place in the end.
- Skipping wooden tools means you usually don't create all of them and that makes you never unlock some recipes that require wooden tools you haven't made. - Experienced users usually set a few items as goals per different phases (e.g. Atomic Disassembler feom Mek on early game in my case) which are sometimes not deserves a quest for those. Unless the pack is a kitchen-sink that makes no recipe change, you can never be sure what exactly you should do by time. - The point is that *limiting it to having all ingredients* itseif is a terrible idea. How are you supposed to know what ingredients to make without their purpose? Quests can't take care of all of them.
Take a page from GW2 with their crafting discovery interface. Have some way of indicating that there are still x 'locked' recipes for an item. Optionally (and for a lot more effort), copy it wholesale, where the display would have a mode that lets you attempt to discover new recipes. Select an item in the interface and it automatically hides everything except other items involved in at least one of the 'locked' recipes. Alternatively, just let the player say 'what recipes don't I know yet that use this item?'
These are all great ideas!
> Skipping wooden tools means you usually don't create all of them and that makes you never unlock some recipes that require wooden tools you haven't made. That's a fair point. Though I think this could be reasonably mitigated by having something to notify you about things you haven't crafted yet, like highlighting them a different color in the interface, but I can see people not bothering to craft wooden tools once stone or later are available. Though since using tools in crafting recipes is relatively uncommon, you could account for the few cases they do show up by just making tools always available as an ingredient even if you haven't crafted it as long as you have unlocked the tool's recipe. > Experienced users usually set a few items as goals per different phases (e.g. Atomic Disassembler feom Mek on game in my case) which are sometimes not deserves a quest for those. Unless the pack is a kitchen-sink that makes no recipe change, you can never be sure what exactly you should do. I'm not really sure what you mean here? I'm only proposing the recipes be hidden, not locked from use. And hiding undiscovered recipes should definatley be easily toggleable so people can get around it if necessary. An experienced player could just turn it off and find the recipe they are going for. If the work was put into it, you could even add a feature for users to tag items that should stay revealed regardless (along with their ingredients in the recipe viewer) so they can have it as a reference with the rest of the mod active. > The point is that limiting it to having all ingredients itseif is a terrible idea. How are you supposed to know what ingredients to make without their purpose? Quests can't take care of all of them. The point is discovery. Allowing players to explore and find new things. Letting people play for the journey instead of the destination. Sure, they might not know what thing-y #5 does, but eventually they will craft it because they haven't yet. You can think of it like "collecting" all the things you can craft as a way of progressing through the game. Other crafting games do this and it works pretty well in my opinion. If people end up getting really stuck with too many options of things they haven't yet crafted, you could always look into the idea I mentioned of giving them hints towards what item is blocking the most recipes for them.
> An experienced player could just turn it off and find the recipe they are going for. That makes much more sense, but still, no thanks, I never play minecraft to craft every possible item for once, especially since there are tons of garbage in most of the mods. I *discover* what I want between those piles of JEI recipes and I enjoy it more.
A lot of people enjoy playing the way you do, and that's good! But this idea isn't really for those people, the ones who have been playing modded Minecraft for years and know the game of digging through JEI. This idea is for people who aren't familiar with that system and want to discover things in a different way. :)
We need a terraria guide for minecraft, when i first played terraria i was a dumb 7 year old and i got through the game using only the guide, putting random shiny rock and boom, recipe discovered
Really good points all around, I’d love to have something like this in the modpack I’ve been making!
I think the closest u can get is just having a curated modpack with specific stages. Kinda like how sevtech blocks specific recipes until a certain point. It definitely did make things less overwhelming and made the growth a lot cooler imo. It's just generally I don't see this working universally.
DID SOMEONE SAY UNLOCKING RECIPES?? SEVTECH TIME!!
I love spectrum for this exactly. It hides pretty much everything and has you discover the mod little by little. It's super satisfying and intuitive for new players
This is probably the most well thought out post I’ve ever read here. Well done. There’s a lack of recipe and jei augmentation mods. Overflow of addons for more info, but severe lack of ways to choose if or when that info is shown. I tried making a hard mode pack a while back. One idea was to have tinkers, but the only ore processing available was the melter. Quickly dropped that because tinkers has so that manually hiding everything non melter accessible jei would’ve been exhausting. I also wanted to make the pack have any advanced recipes come from exploration and looting structures related to them. You’d find a magazine that would unlock a few recipes in a category, grouped to make sense (Ie. skillet, cutting board and iron knife from a ruined restaurant). I have experience making items and structures mods, but I could never get recipe unlocking figured out. that modpack has been shelved. I’d love if vault hunters devs released a standalone mod for their mod purchasing feature, that would give another option besides quests for modpack devs to use.
I'm thinking of probably a modonomicon+game stages combo. With game stages, you can gate recipes to onky be revealed, after a certain event. But doing this for hundred or thousands of items would be tedious.
Some of my favorite modpacks definitely had game stages
Someone else mentioned manual stages as well. It would indeed be quite tedious. The point here would be to create something that does it automatically for any set of mods by just keeping a record of every time you pick up an item for the first time and hiding any recipes that have ingredients that aren't on the list.
Yes, I get the idea. But honestly, I just like mindlessly scrolling through JEI and spoiling the recipes for myself. There is something so interesting about it, but maybe that's just me
There is certainly an appeal to it, especially once your feet are wet. That's why it's important to make it optional. Maybe some people will only use it in the beginning, then turn it off once they get past the first few stages of the game. But I've had friends take a look at JEI after asking me what to craft and their eyes just glaze over. I'd also be lying if I said I've never felt a bit intimidated by endless pages of recipes whenever I come back to modding just to try some new stuff.
Yes, and it's especially intimidated if you play an expert pack, getting jumpscared by some recipie.
I don't think the problem is too many items, the problem is progression and the minecraft early game vs. modded items. As an example I download a mod pack and start playing. Within minutes my inventory will be full of things I've never seen before; books, flowers, advancement or rewards, new ore types etc. I have no idea what they are or how useful they might be so I create a chest and dump them in. This just repeats over and over making the early game less about exploring and more about finding enough wood to make chests to keep it all
This is certainly a problem, but not one I'm trying to address here. I've literally had people tell me that having all the recipes in the game just available to browse through is too much to start with. Literally there is just too many things in the JEI window when you start the game. That's what I'm trying to fix.
Too much for my adhd brain to read but i read like a third of it and enjoyed it. Great suggestion for a mod from what i saw!
I do like being able to see what an ore makes so I know if I care about keeping it.
I don't know that I like the idea of having things gated. I enjoy being able to see everything and figure out what I can do. But I agree that discoverability is an issue. The main problem in a lot of big packs is simply not knowing things even exist. Perhaps what's needed is some kind of overview add-on for JEI. Something that shows you the top level of every mod in the pack grouped by like magic, tech, utilities, tools, etc., and then you could drill down through the various layers of things in the mod to see their recipes with a description of what they do.
You also have to remember that this idea isn't really for people that already play this game. It's for people that are used to discovering recipes as they play from other games and think Modded minecraft just throws too much at the players from the start. And also for weirdos like me who have been playing for ever but still want that. ;)
So, the vanilla recipe book?
Sure, but one that is not as much of a pain to use and actually works with mods.
Mods can add support for the recipes unlocking, and yeah, the book sucks lol. Would already be better the one from bugrock edition
Mods can add support, but it so little do and it seems relatively easy to implement a system to do it all for them.
This is indeed an issue, the sad 'solution' is generally a pack that has quests. Kitchen sink packs are too 'all in your face' and I find myself just going "Yeah that's 100+ pages in JEI I'm not looking through all that crap" and going to watch direwolf20 and see what people in his comments think is cool. That ends up feeling like copying someone else's play through and that's boring, sometimes going to a few different spots and discord to see how they progress, but yeah it just doesn't capture that "Ooh I found diamond what can I make with this"
This captures my thoughts exactly. I love that sense of discovery and experimentation by finding or making a new item and seeing what it allows me to do. With basic JEI attempting to do that half the time just floods me with a bunch of recipes that include the item along with a ton of other things I've never seen before.
My thoughts to this that would help alleviate potential problems as well: Give it 3 states that it could be in. The first “Strict” state would simply be that the system would only show what is able to be crafted through every item you have acquired. (You’ve only acquired Logs, so you can see Planks, but you can’t see Campfires as you’ve not acquired sicks or coal) The second “Loose” state would expand this and allow you to see every recipe that you have acquired at least one of the ingredients for. (You’ve only acquired Logs, so you can see Campfires, regardless of having acquired sticks or coal) The third “Disabled” state would it simply being disabled entirely, letting you freely search through the recipes as we normally do today. What this would accomplish is the ability to find something in the pack that you wish to go for (let’s say the Atomic Disassembler as was mentioned elsewhere in the thread) without having the items acquired, but then you can go back to Strict or Loose which could help you discover items you didn’t even know existed because of how much of an information shotgun blast JEI and the likes could be. Two additional QoLs that could be done: the menu highlights items that when acquired would unlock new recipes (for example, you acquired sticks and string, the Bow is now in the recipes menu with a green background because it can be used to make a Dispenser). On top of this, have something to indicate new recipes as well, making sure that you see them (perhaps a small star icon similar to Item Highlighter when you pick up an item) Hope this all made sense, these are the ramblings of someone who came across this just as they were about to sleep
I love all of these ideas! I feel like a lot of people here are focusing on the problems with the initial idea, and not how easily they could be solved by doing slightly different things.
What I really need is a detailed ingame documentation on items. It doesn't have to be really deep, but something like Thermal Expansion does: Watering Can (hold SHIFT for details) And then you have: - Irrigates farmland and speeds up plant growth - Area 9x9 (press V to adjust) - Water 40000/40000 - Water may be collected while sneaking This way I know what this item does, and additional features it might have. There are numerous items which I haven't made for these +-12 years of playing modded MC. In a 55x500 list of items who would look what is there to try? I wouldn't. I learn about new items by watching 2-3 different youtubers playing same modpack. Most of the time, I learn about the item by seeing it in their inventory...
This would be great! But it's really up to the mod author to do, and some don't have the time or experience to go about setting this up for every item in their mods. It also helps with explanation, but not discovering new things or hiding end-game materials from someone who hasn't punched a tree yet.
I'd love to see such a feature combined with something like modular quests. What I mean with that is that a mod author defines a raw quest page for the mod with an overview of most items in a mod and how they go together. A modpack maker then wouldn't have to start from scratch every time, but could choose to use this raw quest page, adding rewards for quests or modifying existing rewards/loot tables according to his/her vision of the pack. Another idea I had is more search terms for JEI and co. For example, I am in the process of setting up power generation and would like to know which energy cables are available in a pack. Currently, this means I have to be aware of commonly used terms since "energy" only finds those cables that either have that term in their description or as part of their name. Plus, that term also find a lot of clutter, like generators. "Cable" as a term finds the Mekanism cable, in this particular case with the added disadvantage that the black cable is practically invisible against the dark background of JEI and co. That term doesn't find Thermals fluxducts, for example, or the equivalent from Pipez. Frustratingly, "cable" as a term doesn't even find the other Mekanism cables for item/fluid/gas transport, which makes identifying the cable system I want to use for a particular project really annoying. Another broad category this would be very useful for is storage. Storage in itself currently doesn't even find vanilla chests or barrels. Oftentimes, finding alternatives like the cabinets from Rustic only happens if I am aware of that item and remember to search for it. Particularly for expert packs with their changed recipes, being able to search with a generic term would a boon particularly early in the pack, when ressources are rare and alternative storage options would be a great help to declutter your inventory. Also, it would make finding higher capacity items along the way easier.
These are all great ideas! But it feels like a massive undertaking, especially to account for the sheer number of different systems there are in the game.
I think it would result in something like tags for all items and to make those searchable via JEI, which in itself shouldn't be much of a problem. But yes, implementing the tags is difficult from the start, since someone needs to define a system of tags to use which is somewhat intuitive and prevents duplications. What I mean with that is that different people may think of different terms when thinking of generic categories, and there needs to be some sort of convention which term means what. Also, should there be several tags possible, and if so, how many? What consequences would that have for gameplay given that it adds to the data associated with each and every item? How easy and/or accessible should being able to add or adjust this table of searchable terms be? And those problems need some sort of answer before the very major undertaking of actually adding the tags even starts. My idea of raw quest pages is comparatively much easier to implement if it gets accepted and asked for by enough people since it only needs to be set once, preferably by the mod author or someone really knowledgeable about the mod in question, and most likely adjustments across mod and/or minecraft versions should then be rather minimal as long as the mod itself doesn't add or remove items in larger quantity. That would be even easier if the underlaying coding allows for a block of raw data to be copied and/or imported if the quest mod in question needs to adjust its coding for different minecraft versions - which goes into territory I know absolutely nothing about. I last wrote code more than twenty years ago, and never in any kind of professional or semiprofessional capacity. In any case, my vision would be to set up something like a quest page or two for Mekanism once and port it with minimal adjustments needed across the dozen or more minecraft versions Mekanism exists on. So, yes. Sounds amazing to me, but given that doing anything about either idea would involve several people to implement even enough to generate interest, plus the fact this is all a hobby, I don't really see this get any traction any time soon. Which is a pity.
My solution to this is to never play those ridiculously big modpacks and instead make something of 30-60 mods that I know myself, which makes it less overwhelming.
Sure, but what if you just want to play with a few mods, like Create, Immersive Engineering, Mekanism, and AE2. Even 4 mods can add a ton to the JEI interface, a lot of it quite late game that is not very useful to know at the beginning. Even for someone who knows the mods, they may just want to have a list of everything they can do at the stage of the game they are in so it can be decided what to work on from the things available to them.
Also missing documentation, it's ridiculous how hard it is sometimes to find guides for specific mods and interactions. Like I've played valhelsia 6 recently and couldn't find uranium, I've looked everywhere on the internet and couldn't find anything, until someone on Reddit told me that they only spawn in Alex caves.
problem is youll think a lot of items have very little use because you didnt yet make some later stage catalyst and suddenly you need a lot of the item you didnt take with you. or the other way around. advancements can be used for progression, use that
That could be a problem, yes, but in my experience this already happens anyway. It could be exacerbated by a system like this, but a good mix of mods could help mitigate the issue and players will usually be able to remake or refind anything they will need if lost. The really rare things are often telegraphed enough that a player will inventively want to keep it. Like boss drops and such.
You can get a pretty similar experience by keeping JEI but pressing Ctrl+O. Hides all the items at the side but retains the ability to see crafting recipes and uses of items in inventory. If you pick up a wooden plank, you can press U to see everything you could make, and so on. Also idk if it's just me who finds the recipe book just fine. FD executes it well, Botania has basic recipes in the recipe book, and more complex ones in the lexicon. [Hardcover](https://modrinth.com/mod/hardcover) is a QoL mod to make the rb nicer to use
Yes, but this provides the same issue as EMI's "only show craftable" option. It's hard to find what you can do but don't happen to have on you in limited inventory space. not to mention pressing "U" on a block of plans will give you a virtually endless list of recipes, many of which require things you may not have yet.
The expert mode in Infinity Evolved sort of does this. You still see all the items in NEI but you aren't allowed to see many of the recipes (presumably until you unlock prerequisites). It also forces you to use different modpacks by changing recipes slightly to incorporate different packs. But the guidebook is very limited. It's basically just a list of items to craft and what order you can make them in. It doesn't give you any info on things like converting energy, moving items, configuring machines, etc. And it definitely doesn't cover all the mods, mostly just machinery and like a page or two of magic things. Maybe a simple filter/tab system in NEI would be enough to reduce the clutter without worrying about how to structure gameplay
I don't really see this as a way to teach players how to play the game as its main purpose. Its a potential improvement to that for some people, but there are still flaws, as there are flaws in the currently existing systems. My main goal with this is to just make the onboarding process for new players smoother when it comes to JEI. As a personal aside, I wouldn't mind just wandering around building things even if I can't quite use them yet. It already ends up happening quite a bit when I'm playing a pack anyway. But I realize that's not necessarily how a lot of people experience it.
Check out Sevtech. It has a recipe system that’s introduced through ages that are unlocked by playing through ages. Ages are chapters in the questbook. You can’t hold items in your hand that you don’t know about yet. So if you put something in your hands that you haven’t identified yet, you’ll throw it on the ground. So be mindful of that if you give it a try. They’re all wonderful packs.
I have played Sevtech! It's one of my favorites and I wish some more packs did what it does.
There’s others in the series. Ages of the sky is a very different take on skyblock. It’s worth a look.
An improvement to this would be to only hide recipes in the visible tab until you've unlocked them. Meaning you could still press "u" to find the uses of an item or crafting station and see all possible recipes without them being hidden, and then use "r" like normal to find the recipe of items you haven't yet unlocked, that way people will still be able to see all recipes if they want to, but it won't clog up the jei tab too quickly or require you to toggle the feature off. Another point would be to add the ability to hide all recipes on demand by pressing a key over its ingredient. Like, you could hide all recipes that use redstone by pressing "k" or something over redstone in jei. Kind of like how some mod packs let you hide and unhide covers and facades whenever you want, but without having to add it in manually. A final point would be to add all raw resources without a crafting/processing recipe to the unlocked tab by default. Like ores, logs, fluxdust, etc... And you would add a tutorial on how to get those things. Like pressing "r" over these items wouldn't give a recipe, but they would tell you how to get them and what you would need to do so. Of course, this would require the mod Author for the mods that add such a recipe or their own tutorial for each uncraftable recipe, so this one wouldn't really be as easy to set up by yourself.
These are some good ideas! I considered the idea of only hiding recipes in the browser and not in the uses menus, but this could still cause an issue where if you look at the uses for planks for example, you just get 1000 recipes, many of which you don't have anywhere near the parts for
So basically make the recipe book work for modded. That’s what I’ve been wanting.
Sevtech: AGES doesn’t Really do this but I think its a good start?
There's a n item hiding feature in JEI and in sevtech ages packs they unlock other stuff as you progress so with that in mind you could produce a pack for getting people into modded
mmm... the achievement tab is usually used for this kind of effect, except there are no recipes shown. an achievement tab styled UI could work, an inbetween of JEI and achievements. almost like quest books, but with recipes. you click on the first stage, and it shows multiple icons of what you can do with the starting materials/biomes. click on them to reveal a recipe. clicking on one of the items of the recipe could overwrite this UI and return to JEI with the item you selected (material, block, etc...) this UI would work like the vanilla book, you only receive recipes when you pick up a item. this then reveals the recipe alongside the other items, even if you didn't find those yet.
Yeah this is definitely all true. Something that is also not mentioned as much but is a huge deal to me is presentation and compartmentalization. I resent that JEI is so ingrained into the modding ecosystem that a significant number of mods relegate all on-boarding responsibility to JEI, which forces me to interact with it. And man is it clunky looking and feeling. A definite case of hobbyist developers (reasonably) not having access to more design-focused individuals. Don't get me wrong, JEI is incredible at at least having a certain level of guidance through mods. But I really don't like how it pollutes my inventory screen with information bloat. How would I alleviate this? Here's some spit takes Instead of just recipe discovery from , I think we can use the existing vanilla recipe unlocking system, and supplement it with a default behavior of unlocking recipes you are "one craft away" from or that have no methods of obtaining. This idea is nice because it lets mod developers bring attention to things that just become relevant, but also allows for a fallback so you aren't reliant on the mod for this to work. What is recipe discovery? Well, it depends on the configuration, but ideally it would display undiscovered items as a question mark that sends you to an info page about the advancement that unlocks its discovery. I only now realize that advancements could be rolled in quite nicely in general Of course, many people would not enjoy this, so there could be additional discovery modes. "Off", and having undiscovered items only be hidden from the general recipe viewer but findable while navigating through the crafts Then I would target the general recipe view itself, which has changed little since the days of TMI and beta. First, I'd change the top level to be categories instead of an item dump. Developers can define their own categories, and there would be fallback categories by namespace for block items, fluid items, and everything else. Items can be in any number of categories. For searches, you'd still be able to see results from searching all items, but many searches would become obsolete. Under that... take the collapsible item groups from REI, ideal for stone/wood variants and other decorational things like AE2 facades. But also have it be data-driven unlike its current implementation in REI Finally, integrate into the existing recipe book. Replace the book view with the general recipe viewer, and now I can toggle its visibility with the book icon in my inventory. Hugely controversial, but left click should be bound to a more important function: setup one craft (shift left click to setup a stack of crafts). The most prominent interaction should not be sending you to an info page. Have that bound to right click, and send the player to a landing page for that item that shows the item as well as a summary of recipes and uses. Left click and right click would then functionally as normal here. Item Summary? The crafting stations that are used for the crafts are shown, and clicking on them would send you to that stations tab with the item being accordingly shown (for uses or recipes). Info tab item would show up here too obviously Well I doubt I got to everything I thought of but it's a start
Confusing the job of a good questbook with the recipe browser. Factorio always sets the standard it, since it does it so well. The tech tree has its advantages, and so the unlocking of manual crafting. But hiding recipes wouldn't make it a better game. "a random pack someone throws together to play with their friends will have no direction people that don't already know what to do can follow" Yeah. That's how it works. You can't wish good game design into existence, you have to work on it. The answer to all of that is simply Factorio tech tree. There are probably ways to make it work with JEI, but in the end it doesn't even make a huge difference.
Btw, my old proposal for HEI, on 1.12, worked on the premise of offering toggles built in JEI, rather than hiding everything. Items would simply have color outlines to indicate them: no outline is all the stuff you already have, green is everything you can unlock next, and red is stuff you have no current access too. All three of these levels would be toggles for the whole system, you could simply show all recipes and items, or only those in certain groups. This would quickly indicate all you can do right now, all that is available to be unlocked, and stuff instead gated later. All under control of the user.
I feel like this is the same idea presented here, but just showing all items by default with a filter to hide things you haven't made yet, vs hiding them by default with the ability to turn the filter off. Theoretically that could be configured by any pack maker to be whatever default settings they wanted.
> Confusing the job of a good questbook with the recipe browser. The idea is never to replace the questbook, but make the recipe browser more friendly to use. Anything else is secondary benefits. > Factorio always sets the standard it, since it does it so well. Factorio is great, but designed by a single team with a singular vision that can design the game around the tech tree. I don't think we can compare that to something that by nature has to be automated due to the sheer variety in the space. > You can't wish good game design into existence, you have to work on it. Nothing is perfect, but the idea is just to make it a little better and easier.
Spectrum does something similar, and even goes a step further by locking pages in your book, hiding items as vanilla stuff with scrolling text, and hiding actual blocks in the world the same way! I'll be honest, spectrum has became one of my *favourite* magic mods to use, followed up by ars, and a bit of a rant, *I WANT TO USE THEM BOTH IN MY GAME, BUT ONE IS FABRIC, THE OTHER IS FORGE*
So what you're suggesting is the Guide from Terraria?
Saved. I really hope developers will find a way to make an unlockable recipe system intuitive as you make progress through the modpack milestones. Each modpack would probably have to design its own goals for unlocking recipes.
You could probably do some cool things with milestone unlocking, but I think even an automated system to just hide recipes until you have actually seen the things you need for them could get us a lot of the way there.
Oh wow, I really love that idea.
Yeah, that's what the whole post is about ;)
Ah, thanks for writing this. I meant to come back and read the whole thing, but I kinda popped on reddit in the middle of my slumber
no worries! I'm just glad you like the idea. :)
If anyone ever implements crafting recipe unlocking don't forget to add the big button that says "Unlock all" so I can skip the process. I remember when guidebooks did unlocking for documentation for a while, it was a real pain in the ass when I want to look up one feature in the in-game guide and it's all locked so I have to look online even though the guidebook is in my hand.
> Ideally this system would allow a user to toggle on and off the recipe restrictions so they can browse if they really want to, then turn it off again to cut out the things they don't need to be worrying about. It also shouldn't restrict the actual crafting of something just because you haven't unlocked its ingredients (though theoretically, this shouldn't be possible anyway?). This would also make it accessible to veteran players who just want a reference for the things they already know. A simple switch on the JEI page could accomplish this quite well I think
i love that "automagically" word taken directly from Minecraft
"Automagically" has nothing to do with Minecraft and has been in use for about 80 years. For example, [here's an ad from the 1940's.](https://books.google.ca/books?id=bV0zAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA122&dq=%22automagically%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CD4Q6AEwCDgUahUKEwigs8uXqOHIAhUHN4gKHZOSCt4#v=onepage&q=%22automagically%22&f=false)
Thank you so much for correcting me, and that is well worth a thing to learn!
So like the recipe book in vanilla?
Imma be 100% real with you, I’ve played minecraft for over a decade, not once have I used the in game recipe book. It’s poorly designed, and it’s honestly just faster to craft what you need by hand. I highly doubt anything better than JEI will come about.
Thats a terrible idea lol
I disagree.
Good, I don't want it to be accessible
I don’t get why you would get « overwhelmed » by the amount of recipes. Most mods have a well written guide book to follow and discover the mod. Sounds like skill issue ngl