This guide contains information on how to create two things, but focusing on the first:
- How to create suggestions the IE team is likely to look at or implement into the base mod
- How to create addons that fit within the IE theme and the IE balance point
These points are intimately related because what makes for a good addon is content that doesn't quite fit as a suggestion to IE, but is still within its style and its balance point, making for suitable external content.
A good example of this is Immersive Petroleum, which adds a fuel and chemistry expansion at the endgame of IE. With biodiesel and high-cetane biodiesel, IE doesn't have much use for new fuels or fuel production mechanics. For those who like petrochemistry, however, IP provides a lot of interesting IE-style content that's within the balance window of IE.
Overall, it's about realism-inspired technology: Instead of glowing red tubes, it offers actual, hanging powerlines. Instead of one block that magically spits out dusts when ore is put in, it offers a crusher, a multiblock that features rotating wheels and spits out particles as it breaks the ore. Instead of a Laser that turns power into magical light and ores, it offers an Excavator, another massive, resource intensive, multiblock which digs ores out of the ground with a big rotating bucketwheel.
IE is about making tech mods more balanced and more pretty, and adding its own twist by going for retro-futurism (think BioShock, Order 1886, SkyCaptain and the World of Tomorrow) rather than clinical white+grey future cubes.
The above is verbatim from the mod's page and lays out the foundation of Immersive Engineering's style:
- Large, multiblock processing machines with good visuals
- Realism-inspired technology set in a retrofuturistic aesthetic based roughly between 1880 and 1920
- "Low" industrial technology, without super futuristic machines or magical overpowered recipes
The basis of the Immersive Engineering aesthetic was Hazard creating some Thaumcraft-inspired posts and Blusunrize asking Hazard if she could make a mod around the posts and wires between them: Overhead, non-block-based wiring is utterly central to the Immersive Engineering Aesthetic. If your suggestion is block-based conduits, it won't be added.
Immersive Engineering has a few things that have been suggested often but are not going to be implemented.
The list below is taken verbatim from the discord, and ones with further considerations are marked:
*Higher amounts of ore multiplication
**Coal based energy production
**Steam engines
More guns
*More ores
Conveyor belts that don't use entities
A power tier beyond HV
Insulated HV wires
Exploding machines
*Vehicles
* These are reasonable for addons. Vehicles are hard and so the IE team doesn't want to add them, and properly balanced higher ore multiplication with a longer process can be an interesting extension to IE.
** These need to be implemented very carefully. Coal power is so often implemented in extremely boring ways in modded, and IE gets called steampunk enough a steam engine would only cause more. Implement at your own risk!
IE also does not want any suggestions surrounding the nuclear reactor. They're not looking for community input, as shown by this verbatim excerpt from the discord:
We don't talk about that. It's missing assets and game design elements.
Please just stop talking about it, it gives me anxiety.
IE values suggestions with four characteristics, all four of which are necessary to make the best addons:
- Not on the list of unacceptable suggestions
- Useful gameplay feature
- Matches IE's style
- Can be visually interesting
- Is viable to implement
These qualities should roughly be checked in the order they are presented in, with failing to satisfy one of these meaning that the suggestion or addon should be redesigned until it satisfies all of the constraints provided.
Additional questions can be helpful to narrow down suggestions, such as the ones below:
How much do you want to follow a realistic time-period for your content?
How much of an idea do you have right now for it?
Ideas without much of a current basis are just that, ideas. They are not full suggestions, and are likely to be set aside. Coming up with ideas like "add a megatesla magnet to attract asteroids" is relatively simple - anyone can spitball hundreds of ideas per hour if they get going fast enough. Actually giving full suggestions with their ideas fleshed out and a good idea of mechanics, benefits, and rewards is much harder, but the more work put in, the better the results.
Taking a look at the suggestion from before, which was posted in the IE Discord:
Add a giant (megatesla) magnet to IE to attract iron-nickel bearing asteroids to be mined for resources
Let's disassemble this idea to see whether it's a good idea for IE, going by each point.
- This suggestion is not on the no-implement list, so we're good there!
- This suggestion does add a useful gameplay feature (ore collection), but it does not add a new feature. Sometimes this can be ok, if it's a new specialty process or interesting, but this idea seems to be a worse excavator. For now, this idea can pass, but it's on thin ice and needs something stellar to make up for being just ore collection agian.
- Does this suggestion fit in the IE style? Well, that's subjective, but let's pull a few words from the style:
- Realism-inspired: While this suggestion seems to not use magic on the surface, how is this magnet going to be strong enough to attract asteroids but not also rip your machines off the ground? No-one has made a magnet this big or even this close IRL, either.
- Retrofuturistic: Magnets, especially electromagnets, were coming out of the infancy of their study in the 1880s, and were established but still new technology in the 1920s. Even with allowances for things like the railgun, technology like this is firmly out of reach of the mod.
- Not futuristic: This sounds like the plot of a scifi C-movie flick where the central gimmick is the studio got an electromagnet for free from the scrapyard as their crane was decomissioned, It's very futuristic, more movie mad science than actual technology.
- Sub-Conclusion:, this does not fit the IE style. Normally, we'd stop here, but let's see the whole list.
- A large magnet could be made visually interesting, especially if a render for the colliding asteroid was made. The suggestion does pass on its visual merits, but it's not super stellar or anything. This does not make up for 2).
- Making an asteroid render as well as a massive magnet model is a lot of work for what is essentially a different formulation of the excavator. It is viable to implement, but it is a lot of work for questionable gain.
Overall, we see that this idea is mediocre in many aspects, bad in several, and abjectly terrible in one or two. This suggestion was rejected by BluSunrize for either being worse than the excavator - and thus unlikely to be used - or obsoleting the excavator - thus making IE content useless - while being unrealistic and not meshing with the IE style.
Let's go back to the guiding questions from last section:
How much do you want to follow a realistic time-period for your content?
How much of an idea do you have right now for it?
First, tackle if you have enough of an idea to really make a suggestion: If your idea isn't fully fleshed out, if the team couldn't reasonably implement a feature from it, consider adding more thought to it. Suggesting "rebalance the mineral veins to have more common resources" is fine, but a suggestion that gives details on how to do that, such as what veins to change and how, and which materials need their percentages change? That is a lot easier to see the reasoning behin and implement.
If you're having trouble fleshing out your idea, go look at real life examples of similar ideas, preferably ones during IE's rough time period (1880-1920) to get some inspiration. Lots of times the information is out there, just waiting for people to find it - lots of engineers tried incredibly dumb things you can learn from. If you're still looking for inspiration, posting in the discord will let people help you brainstorm, as will taking a look at functions Minecraft has that you could adapt into your suggestion to flesh it out fully.
Second, make sure your suggestion isn't some form of "magic". IE works inside of a setting that has magic (Minecraft) but deliberately tries not to interact with the actual magic parts of it, instead using materials that may be magical for engineering. An example here is the High-Cetane Biodiesel introduced in 1.20.4, which uses strength potion to boost its energy content - this uses a material not in a magical process in an IE machine (for instance, automatic enchanting), but as an additive to the biodiesel, similar to real world cetane.
Third, make sure your suggestion isn't unsuitable for IE in other ways. Semiconductors, fusion reactors, and lasers may look cool, but they're out of scope for a retrofuturistic mod. If your idea is too tightly entwined in ideas of the future, consider a solution that doesn't have a "futuristic" aesthetic but solves the same goal - replacing a fusion reactor with using heat exchangers in the Nether and a portal to pipe steam back to the overworld, or replacing semiconductor computing with new vacuum tubes or a miniaturized redstone contraption.
Fourth, make sure your suggestion isn't overbalanced or OP for IE. IE doesn't add some things like high-functioning singleblocks for a reason, and if your suggestion is in that category, it may be a good idea to step back and think if you really need all of this in only one block. Maybe it would be better to have your single-block tree cutting device be a saw multiblock closer to a Garden Cloche than a slab made of steel with a saw inside. Suggestions that start out overpowered or overbalanced are often the least likely to succeed, as often they're simply "feature but better".
Weird Science is the umbrella IE puts its use of magical materials and magical properties under. The mod specifically avoids the use or the trappings of magic as a description or aesthetic, instead framing it as "anomalous engineering". Think about how Black Mesa uses materials from Xen that are hard to understand or don't fit with reality to do science and engineering work, without calling them magical. Similarly, IE uses anomalous engineering to interact with Minecraft systems that otherwise don't mesh with its technology framework, integrating "not sufficiently understood" materials and properties into engineering processes and producing hybrid technologies.
An example might be a synthetic nether portal that allows running big pipes of water, steam, or slurry through. The nether portal itself is stabilized by some sort of engineering (say, encasing the obsidian in a purpur and steel shell and cooling it) and thus the engineering is introduced. Anomalous material properties (purpur, obsidian) being connected with portals are used to create a design useful to the engineer, and then new capabilities are unlocked.
This kind of design can be somewhat hard to do well with, so make sure to check with the mod authors before submitting suggestions heavily integrating weird science into the mod!