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Common Sense Balancing Standard (CSBS)

  • No ore tripling, quadrupling, quintupling, etc. Ever.
    • The absolute limit on ore multiplication is 2.6 ingots per ore block, with typical gains being closer to 1.6.
  • A single block can never store more than 36 stacks of items, even when it's part of a multiblock structure.
  • Furnace-burning fuels should produce no more than 30RF per furnace fuel tick.
    • It can produce this as slowly or as quickly as you want.
  • Wireless interactions are permissible, and a trivial wireless implementation generally performs well.
    • However, well-designed network-topography-aware systems (i.e. wires) often outstrip the performance of wireless systems, and occasionally even dumb cellular systems do. More importantly, wireless is unsatisfying gameplay.
  • Time is not a balancing mechanic.
    • Free energy that takes a long time to generate is still free energy (this is why there are no time constraints placed on energy generation).
  • Material cost is not a balancing mechanic.
    • An overpowered machine that requires 26 expensive casing blocks is overpowered, and also not a real multiblock machine.
  • RF is RF. Forge Energy is RF. Tesla is RF.
    • More generally, if something is RF-compatible, the same guidelines apply.
    • This does NOT mean API or ABI compatibility. This means user-facing compatibility. If I can run power from a Salty Snacks machine to an RF machine, Salty Snacks is RF-compatible.

Extra Reading

  • Vazkii has some really good writing on passive generation and why you want to avoid it.
  • Vazkii also has some good writing on target audience, and why configurability can be bad.
  • Extra Credits has a whole video on first-order optimization.
    • This is really important, and it seems like we aren't getting it as modpack creators. Please think about these things. They matter.
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