Issues with the new Generation Systems

I’m well aware that some people are having issues both with using and understanding the new systems. Sorry it’s a bit confusing; hopefully with time it will get clearer as more resources become available.
The new system uses a Context Free Grammar tree based system to try to expand and elaborate on ages when you first visit them. It uses a rule based system that basically writes the age much like you do, only it’s more clever and has access to all the symbols. 😉
There are some balancing issues with the rules at the moment. This means it is sometimes a bit overzealous when adding symbols in some places, like phases, periods, colors, and terrain modifiers (it gets too many caves, ravines, and tendrils). These are balancing issues, not bugs. I really needed a big team of testers to evaluate the latest changes, but didn’t have that. Instead, it’s a balance-as-we-go thing. It’s a huge, free mod, what did you expect? 😛

What I really need from the community is some patience, understanding, and general feedback on how the elaboration system feels. What needs to be tweaked? What is too common? Are there some features which the grammar system doesn’t seem to add many of? In your random travels, what has been very frequent? What have you barely seen at all?

Thanks for your understanding of this on-going balancing project. 🙂 Remember that Mystcraft isn’t version 1 yet. 😉

Cheers!

45 thoughts on “Issues with the new Generation Systems”

  1. that basically writes the age much like you do, “only it’s more clever”
    Made me laugh so hard!

  2. I love Mystcraft I have not had a chance to play with the new 1.5.2 version but I will soon l will look out for things I need to report amd get back to you twitter @patrick paul BTW love the new writing system. Bye

  3. Well i have about 29 ages in my server and most of them 12 out of 29 have a dirt layer from top to bottem also i have twilight forest with it all the other ages exept 1 are twilight forest biomes these are all descriptive books without any manual writing

  4. Maybe consider putting a “template” type interface in a block that shows an outline of basic ages, Direwolf did a great explanation when he did a walk through of when the page system first came out. In regards to the elaboration system, what mDiyo did with the informational books would be a good idea, either that or a good wiki. Hope this all made sense.

  5. I seem to have issues with DivineRPG biomes where dirt and grass are blocks of some valuable material (gold blocks = dirt and iron blocks = grass in a Dravite biome). Not sure if that’s a bug or if I just got really lucky.

  6. There needs to be a way of specifically blocking features from being written to worlds by this new system. It was described as being possible in the Myst books, so it should be possible in the mod. A system of saying “no caves” or “no water” or “no moons”.

      1. That’s a balance issue, known, and mostly fixed for next build. Solving it with a “No Tendrils” symbol is like removing a nail with a sledge hammer. 😉

  7. The only thing I am asking now is making new textures for Book Binder, Writing Table and re-enable Link Modifier or make crafting recipes lemme say when you add diamond and linkink book, the book will become intra-linked, it will also say so in its description where originally only world or book name was.

  8. Would an in-game guide of sorts come in handy? For creating ages… and understanding of different symbols…

  9. Спасибо друг за мод. Я долго ждал его на 1.5.2. К сожалению у меня не работает крафт Linking Book, поэтому пользоваться модом я не могу – жду обновления (а может я просто криворукий и неправильно его поставил?). В любом случае, когда я смогу юзать твой мод, то буду стараться отписываться о багах и проблемах.
    P.S. Знаю что все что написано выше тебе не понятно, но будет прикольно (наверно) переписываться с тобой на разных языках 🙂
    Cheers!

      1. Постараюсь поделится с тобой всеми своими впечатлениями. Не пропадай.
        with love from Kiev 🙂

          1. Google translate had no problem translating Russian to English… “I will try to share with you all my experiences. Keep in touch.”

  10. Hey so far have to say love the mod and have had great enjoyment with it.
    if you want more testers pope me an email I am a server admin and am happy to sign a non disclosure agreement if needs be as would the players i would pick from the community on our server. I have a dedi and can have a set instance of MC running just for testing.

  11. Actually i like the “new system”. I think you should implement more ways to get pages, even in a very advanced gameplay i cant have enough pages to mess around,maybe a UU-Matter recepie that gives you a random page…or some other recepie with some rare mineral that you can only find on a mystcraft age.

  12. Yup, I’m getting tendrils and caves being added more than anything else.

    In terms of helping make things clearer, a method of categorizing each of the pages, like in the older versions, would go a long way. I regularly find pages that I have no idea what their use would be or how/where to use them.

  13. Would very much like it to do Testing for you! tell me where I can talk/write with you bout that.
    Greetz
    Bitterholz

  14. The crafting recipe for the linking book just flat out wrk for me. anyone know if the new update is incompatible with any large mods?

  15. I played around with it yesterday, made about 15 Ages, nearly all had tendrils of some kind and a section of the Twilight Forest biomes. The last one was interesting, was a void age with a Rainbow and abandoned Mineshafts everywhere, with a few libraries. One sky colour was very prevelant and that was purple.

  16. I feel that the Random Age Generation is pretty fair.
    Two Changes/Balancing things would be nice to see,

    Re-Implement the whole “what is generated” thing.
    If say I add 16 blank pages to a book. I would like to know 16 things about that age.
    If say I added only 1 Blank Page I would get one random fact about that Age.

    Something that would be great would be to see more of the “Side-Effects” of the Ages on Screen so that we’re not walking around in an age with decay and suddenly die because it wasn’t visible at first.

    I do also like how Mostly Stable random ages can be Developed though by random chance.

  17. Love Mystcraft but the new ink mixer being able to add modifiers is my current issue. I love that I can add different items to make modifiers to the book but seeing that it flashes colors is my issue. Like many males, I have a color deficiency. Green can look the same as brown, red, orange, yellow. Blue can also be purple, red, pink, magenta and so on. I think a better option would be to add a tool tip displaying modifier or % chance for xxxx modifier. This will make the mod easier for people with color deficiency to use your all aspects of the mod.

    Again, I love Mystcraft and appreciate the hard work you do make this mod for everyone to enjoy.

    1. Whoops. Sorry, didn’t think about color blindness! I don’t want to have actual percentages involved, but perhaps I can do something more clever that doesn’t rely on color.

      1. Many coders don’t think about. I appreciate you thinking on this and I am sure you will find something that will be suitable. Thanks for all your work.

  18. I have a bit of quick notes on the balance.
    First of all, biomes. I’ve come across about 6 libraries (in one age) and found, about 2 Desert Oil Field pages. I mean, you have an Oil Block symbol, which adds tons of instability and decay, but Desert Oil Field doesn’t add it at all. As a consequence, that’s a huge disbalance.
    And secondly, ores & tendrils. Again, in libraries there’s somewhat many of ore pages. (Nether Quartz Ore symbol is the most common one). It also occurs that some random ages (with just one link panel in it) have crystals and netherquartzore tenrils in them. (they are really frequent, even in dw20 spotlight he’s got netherquartzoretendrils)

  19. hello all of the crafting recipies are broken for me and i have checked the incompatible mods and i have none of them installed here is a list og the mods i have:

    Damage indicators, extended workbench, biomes o plenty, buildcraft,, chicken chunks, computercraft, equivelent exchange 3, ender storage, forestry, iron chest, miscperipherals, modularpower suits, natura, nei, obsidian pressure plates, rialcraft tinkers construct, thaumcraft 3, twilight forest, balkons weapons, zans minimaps, and applied energistics. It will let me use spawned books but i cannot craft linked books or use the table to make a custom age. It has not crashed so i have no crash report to give to you.

  20. I’ve noticed a rather serious bug, if you have a stack greater than one of any page and put it in a notebook through shift clicking the stack will get eaten and only one page will be placed in the notebook.

    Similarly, if you shift click any page from your inventory to a notebook and the same page already exists in the section of the notebook you are in, the page will be eaten.

    The tempt fix is, obviously, advise people to NOT use shift-clicking on pages.

  21. I’ve always been a great fan of myst and mystcraft, but now I am building the island of myst, and I wonder, and you going to make one men prison books, and (the possibility to make) animations in the little boxes in the books?

    1. One man prison books, while probably technically possible, are not on the road map. This is simply for the issue of fun. Getting yourself trapped in a book isn’t fun, because it ends the game for you. Extra bad on a server.
      Animations for the panels ARE, however, on the road map. I’m very much looking forward to them working. 🙂 (And working on them. :P)

  22. I’m getting a TON of random color changes and other things, such as Biomes, added against my will, that really shouldn’t be… does that happen more when I underspecify other things? Also Water Color doesn’t seem to be working right, unless I’m using it wrong.

    1. Water color doesn’t take a gradient, just a flat color.
      Otherwise, the grammar is still being balanced. There should be a balance update release this week.

        1. It’s also possible that the biomes you got don’t correctly allow overriding of the color. Some mod-added biomes don’t seem to.

  23. Hello, does your mod allow for creating a world and then copying it WITHOUT the mod itself onto existing vanilla server for example?

    Also can i make ‘age’ that consists only of Ore Veins floating midair with void wide-open (no bedrock)? that’s what i need to do and absolutely no generators i found so far can do that. :((( i really want to use a vanilla+RareOres floating-ore-veins world with MCPC+ Bukkit-Forge bridge server.

    :/

    1. Well, Tendrils exist, and you can give them ore veins. I have more generators planned! 🙂
      As for importing the age into a Mystcraft-less world, there could be some issues, but you could replace the Overworld chunks with the chunks of the age.

    2. quote:
      Also can i make ‘age’ that consists only of Ore Veins floating midair with void wide-open (no bedrock)? that’s what i need to do and absolutely no generators i found so far can do that. 🙁 (( i really want to use a vanilla+RareOres floating-ore-veins world with MCPC+ Bukkit-Forge bridge server.

      Something like

      void, coal ore, tendrils, iron ore, tendrils, …

      would do what you want. However, the instability would be so high as to render the world unplayable. Diamond tendrils alone are “world destroying” levels of instability; if you actually listed all 7 types of ores, you would almost be guaranteed to have white decay.

      Oh: And that’s bad.

      You might consider something like Draco’s Mazes. They can take materials, and require you to walk on them — potentially carefully if you have a void world. However, they won’t generate properly in a void. Ask Draco nicely, and he might be able to generate some sort of “combo tendril” that can generate ores and stone.

      Beyond that? Ore veins in the air … you might want to use 0.9.5 with 1.4.7, and Custom Ore Generation — this would allow you to define veins that are just what you want — normal ore veins that appear in the air in a void, with no instability. However, this would be “fly around and generate” — that technique will not work with anything later, and new chunks would just be void.

  24. This mod is not working for me. Whenever I want to make a descriptive book, no book appears in the slot it should. I have watched Direwolf’s tutorial and I have read the wiki. Nothing I do makes the mod work. I can spawn the books in, and that works, but beyond that, it’s hopeless.

  25. Как и обещал – вот мои впечатления. Мод работает, багов не наблюдается. Генерируются действительно замечательные миры. У меня уже полные карманы листков для создания задуманных мною миров, но вот почему то сколько не экспериментирую – все не так. Думаю нужно придерживаться какого то порядка листов в книге чтобы все было как надо. В общем many thanks for the mod, полез на Вики вычитывать то чего еще не знаю 🙂

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