Tekkit v. BTW

[schubeast]

With all that's being discussed about BWF and other Forge community shenanigans, I thought I would open up this question:

What's your experience with Tekkit or Technic compared to BetterThanWolves?

For me, I discovered both of these amazing mods over a year ago, and have played them on and off ever since. As a Engineering major in college, I find the ability for massive technological process design in tekkit to be truly awesome. I've built massive factories, with complex automated mining, processing, sorting, and crafting systems. Hell, I've even built a working, moving airship that can drop TNT or nukes and has a forcefield. But for me, building my first tube kiln was more of an accomplishment than any of that. I view tekkit as a toy; everything in it is SO overpowered, SO easy to obtain, its not really that much of a challenge, and it has no concept of a unified vision. On the other hand, FlowerChild's masterpiece is a most well thought out, balanced, challenging game. Building mechanisms in BTW makes me feel like some convoluted medieval alchemist, one that spends their time killing the undead in the night, bottling souls by day, and looking forward to some mysterious place called "Home". BTW is a game, and an awesome one at that, and tekkit, also a powerful and engaging game in its own right, are both impressive accomplishments. But let's not mix them.

[Battosay]

Be very careful here.

[Graphite]

Dangerous topic to choose for your post, but the content doesn't seem too unreasonable, so sure, let's try for a constructive comparison. Post probably would've been better in off-topic, though. That having been said:

I've never played tekkit, but a few weeks ago I did decide to try out the Feed the Beast pack. It certainly contains a lot of toys, but to be honest it was just such a jumbled together mess that I didn't even know where to start. Well... almost, that is... Industrialcraft 2 was part of it, which makes that the mandatory opener as you just feel like you're screwing yourself if you don't start out with a macerator to double your ores.

All in all, I've played it just long enough to identify the few mods that might hold my interest. The most important ones being forestry, buildcraft, and railcraft as they actually promote building larger stuff and seem to atleast care a little bit about balance. Industrialcraft and its ilk really don't do it for me as you can fit most of that stuff into a 5x5 room. What particularly annoyed me was that IC2's windmill actually penalises you for incorporating it into any structure. That certainly gave me a good WTF moment.

Anyhow, I moved the interesting mods to a separate install and have been playing that for the past few days. As such I'm afraid I can't tell you yet how well those play together, but I can tell that I do miss the 'direction' that BtW offers. In BtW every step makes you feel proud of your accomplishments and so far I'm having trouble even identifying said steps, let alone feel accomplished by reaching them.

All things considering I agree that forge mods tend to feel more like a box of toys in a sandbox world, whereas BtW provides a consistent set of rules within which you must do your stuff. Both styles have their place and I suspect I will be developing both worlds gradually based on which one I feel like playing at the time.

One final thing about the major mod-packs. Use them to identify the mods that interest, but for the love of God make a separate install with just those mods after that. You'll be far better off that way.

[nukularpower]

Just since it was mentioned, one of the worst parts, imo, about the whole incompatibility thing is not being to use Railcraft with BTW. Railcraft has come a hell of a long way, and is by far my favorite Forge tech-mod now - it's the only one that really has a hint of the BTW style challenge factor, and is just as (or more) comprehensive in what you can do with it (with a ton of work) as mods like IC2, which is one that I personally won't use under any circumstances anymore. Railcraft is definately not just about rails these days.

But don't use the version in Tekkit, as it doesn't have most of the cool stuff.

[Mason11987]

For me, I discovered both of these amazing mods over a year ago,

The thing I'd like to stress the most here is that Tekkit isn't amod. It's a collection of mods which a lot of different people (some of which never wanted to be included in tekkit) spent a lot of time developing.

The end result might not be my favorite Minecraft modded experience, but at least we ought to respect that the parts that were mashed together to form Tekkit are the actual mods, and Tekkit is simply the package they were put together in without the support of the people who did the difficult work to bring you that experience.

[BigShinyToys]

Tekkit and Technic are not mods they are mod packs they contain a lot of different mods made by separate people / groups. I don't like how people think of them as "mods" because all they do is rework incompatibilities mainly be changing block numbers in configures. I would like to see more credit go the individual authors.

That said i prefer making my own mod packs to play. Computer craft is one of my main mods and then probable Industry craft and Build craft with thermal exchange. Normally I have redpower (not updated since 1.2.5) as well the bundled cables are essential for controlling multiple blocks with one computer. not being a professional programmer working with lua is a fun experience I can understand why to real programmers it would be boring but to me it is a nice intellectual challenge.

Comparing BTW to them is not really possible one it built around a group of mods and them other has been built from the group up with with very strong design designations that make it a complete experience. I think some forge mods are quite good yes overpowered but how doesn't like to ICBM there friends ounce in a while. Where as BTW is a more complex mod (in a good way) because of multi block systems.

In the end when forced to chose between BTW and Computer Craft I choses both ;) using multi MC
http://forkk.net/MultiMC4/ a very good tool. I would have loved to run BTW multi block equipment with a CC computer system but that is neither here nor there.

[Graphite]

...Railcraft has come a hell of a long way, and is by far my favorite Forge tech-mod now...

Have to say that Railcraft indeed looks very promising. One of the few things I am fully picturing now is massive railroads leading to various oilwells, with tank-carts with world anchors attached driving to and fro to deliver precious oil to my base. Still got some building to do before I can do that, though.

That does remind me of unintended side-effects between mods. One of the other mods I have is Thaumcraft 3 and it adds these flowers to the desert that give you blaze powder. This is one of the components for the blast furnace from Railcraft, that went from hard to get to utterly trivial to obtain in large quantities. Fortunately one of the other ones is netherbrick, so I still need to go hunt for a nether fortress before I can build one. It's certainly one example of how separate mods can "clash" even when not intended.

[nukularpower]

You know, I didn't even think about that... died like 5 times in the nether finding a nether fort and trying to set up some kind of blaze farm (never tried that one before, and failed at any rate) - guess I could have looked for a desert instead.

[Mason11987]

...Railcraft has come a hell of a long way, and is by far my favorite Forge tech-mod now...

Have to say that Railcraft indeed looks very promising. One of the few things I am fully picturing now is massive railroads leading to various oilwells, with tank-carts with world anchors attached driving to and fro to deliver precious oil to my base. Still got some building to do before I can do that, though.

That does remind me of unintended side-effects between mods. One of the other mods I have is Thaumcraft 3 and it adds these flowers to the desert that give you blaze powder. This is one of the components for the blast furnace from Railcraft, that went from hard to get to utterly trivial to obtain in large quantities. Fortunately one of the other ones is netherbrick, so I still need to go hunt for a nether fortress before I can build one. It's certainly one example of how separate mods can "clash" even when not intended.

IC2 allows you to compress netherrack into netherbrick so even that is trivial.

[Graphite]

You know, I didn't even think about that... died like 5 times in the nether finding a nether fort and trying to set up some kind of blaze farm (never tried that one before, and failed at any rate) - guess I could have looked for a desert instead.

And thank you for demonstrating that players will always go for the path of least resistance, even if they're really rather aware that it's really an exploit ;)

IC2 allows you to compress netherrack into netherbrick so even that is trivial.

Quite aware of that, but as I mentioned earlier I moved to a custom install of a few of the mods of FTB, so no IC2 "cheating" for me ;)

[nukularpower]

And thank you for demonstrating that players will always go for the path of least resistance, even if they're really rather aware that it's really an exploit ;)

I said could have, not would have - not like I have any deserts around anyways thanks to this stupid biome mod I wish I hadn't installed. The only thing that I demonstrated was that I forgot about those TC3 flowers, which are, it could be argued, intended for that very use, since they don't do anything else. I like the nether personally and would have gone for netherwart regardless :P

[schubeast]

I understand of course that Tekkit is a modpack, it's just easier to refer to it as a single entity
That being said, I would also add that I am truly a BTW convert when it comes to gameplay experiance, and think that it is sacralige to rip it off (BFW) for the sake of some cool blocks. My question was really more about what other BTW players have seen of the other stuff out there.

[BinoAl]

My experience with tekkit (albeit rather limited) was not too bad, aside from all the community drama. Granted, I played it for a couple days straight I had free, then never touched it again. I felt like EE was too overpowered in the context of all the other tech mods, but I tried a world without any EE with a couple friends, and it wasn't too bad. I still vastly prefer BTW, of course, but despite the mishmash of conflicting designs, it was enjoyable, however long it lasted

[Benanov]

My experience with Tekkit is that it took 2-3 minutes to load on my venerable P4, was a pile of conflicting mods, crashed a lot in SMP because RedPower did this weird "I'll just use the first open BlockID I find" 'compatibility' hack (we found it and fixed it) and really it's just too much to play with.

We (DaveYanakov, Warr1024, and myself) ended up playing IC2 pretty much exclusively, because that was the most 'complete' mod in the pack. I think we also used some additional weapons (the halberds were cool) and maybe we used a bit of the sapphire/ruby/emerald "gems" from one of the other mods as a cheap substitute for actual diamond.

I don't miss it much from Tekkit. I do miss Rei's, because I suck at navigation, to the point where I'd almost call it an "accessibility mod" for me, but I've adapted, as one must.

We found out we'd rather play one good complete mod, instead of picking and choosing parts of a conglomeration. It makes for a better experience.

[SterlingRed]

A friend of mine started a tekkit server and we got into an argument over tekkit being a terrible mess. He thought it was cool, so I joined the server to prove him wrong. It took a week.

In one week I constructed one of my best aesthetic factories ever (only because I had marble and basalt to work with, btw now has white stone I'm just missing a dark one). I maxed out the ee star energy collector pattern, and had built a completly automated mine and ore processing system using ic2 and bc. I'd even built in a system to automate the mass fabricator and powered the whole thing with a mach2 nuclear reactor. And I was working full time IRL too so in total this probably only took me about 30 hours of play time to do.
At this point, it was possible to obtain anything we wanted pretty much without playing any other mod in the pack at all. We'd essentially entered creative mode. Any further tech tree development was done just for the sake of building the machines, but that quickly got boring as there was no rewarding feeling at the end of a build as we'd already gotten access to pretty much everything.
I quit playing after the first week. The server shut down a week later due to inactivity and was relaunched as twilight forest.
I know since then ee is more balanced than it was, which would play a major role in changing what happened on that server.
But from a fundamental perspective, tekkit and technic are mod packs that don't work. The mods in them are not designed toward a unified goal or purpose and each mod isn't specialized enough to isolate the tech trees and features.
I'd much rather have BTW, it has a coehesive design direction with internal consistency and provides many more challenges and play experiences than all of tekkit can provide. I finished tekkit in a week. I've been playing my current world 3 days a week (12-15 hrs a week) for at least six months (since whenever btb died).

[Rianaru]

I'll second what SterlingRed said about those packs, and add that of every technic world I started(I think three) never lasted more than a few days because the pack lacks cohesive direction and design. In short, it was just lots of area with no depth and fairly limited and vague goals.

[gftweek]

From watching some let's plays, it seems that the Feed the Beast mod pack as well as being more official (as long as they never include BWF) actually tries to tie the mods together unlike Tekkit/Technic.

For example the IC2 mining drill requires Railcraft steel, so you can't just build it as soon as you find your first 3 diamonds. While I don't think this provides much in the way of a cohesive game, nor a logical and intuitive tech tree, at least there is something tying them together other than forge compatibility. It still doesn't get around the fact that there are 5 machines to do everything in slightly different ways (most of them OP).

The only reason I looked at the FTB pack is that all of the traditional vanilla only let's players seem to have started using it. I never bothered to install it though, just looked through the included mods to see if I would like to try any of them together, the result was a very short list.

[Graphite]

I think that's mostly Greg's tech you're noticing there. His mod adjusts a whole load of recipes to make IC2 a bit more balanced (though in some cases I'd have to say tedious instead). I agree with him that solarpanels are a totally cheap trick, though he really made them late game tech, I believe :P

[Extreme Boyheat]

I discovered BTW through one of the early releases of the Technic mod-pack.
After that whole indecent thing about not asking permission I've stuck with BTW ever since. :)

[JesterxMailMan89]

My very first mod was IC way back in 1.3 beta or something like that. I love IC, always have and always will. I probably put it with BTW on my list of favorite mods, mostly for the nostalgia.

However, when all these mods suddenly got smooshed together into the huge clumped mess it is now, I shrank back very quickly. IC2, build craft, forestry, and logistic pipes were probably the most mods I ever had at one time that felt comfortable. Ive always thought IC2 and buildcraft worked well together while still maintaining some sort of tech tree and difficulty. EE and Redpower though totally throw those out the window, EE especially.

I discovered BTW a little after technic came out and actually was on a return to vanilla MC. I think the feact BTW maintained the classic feel of vanilla MC while still adding new material was one of the reasons I really got into it. Ever since then Ive never looked back.

[FriedPigeon]

For me, Tekkit/Technic packs and BTW are just different modes of minecraft. Tekkit/Technic is the creative mode while BTW is the survival mode.
Neither really works well in the others role in my opinion.

But what is this Feed the Beast -pack? Is it a creative mode like Tekkit/Technic or is it aiming for survival?

[Mr_Hosed]

Never bothered with Tekkit (Been playing with mods since 1.2 Beta so compatibilty packs are just annoying to me), but I've played most of the mods in it individually and in my own mix-ups. For me, the most annoying thing about the mod packs is it removes incentive on the modders to provide a complete experience. It's glaringly obvious when you run one of the large mods by it self. Half the crap doesn't really work well without atleast a couple of other mods mixed in; missing features.

Anymore I stick to 2 worlds, BTW and Thaumcraft. Azanor seems to have a holistic design in mind with his mod much like Flowerchild does. I actually cringe when I hear people mixing TC3 up with Buildcraft and IC2. Talk about a mismatch of design directions.

I do have to say I like using little add-on mods that modify small chunks of gameplay like Icey's Breeding mod for Forge and Hardcore beds for forge. When modding first started for MC those were the kinds of mods that made something like Forge make sense...

[Mason11987]

But what is this Feed the Beast -pack? Is it a creative mode like Tekkit/Technic or is it aiming for survival?

playing with the FTB packis very similar to playing with Technic.

They have previously done and plan a special map style "Feed the Beast" which is fairly unique.

[Charzy]

I don't get why each side hates the other. I like Forge mods, including the FTB/Technic packs, and I like BTW :/
Sometimes it's nice to play with your massive, automated machine world, walking as a God among Steves. Other times, it's more fun to have a more hardcore game.

[Gears]

I like Tekkit about as much as I like BTW. I will have times where I will want to play in a hardcore environment, and times where I want to just drain the ocean with a ring because I hate squid.

Both of these mods have their places in the modding community.