Can I recommend a change of name for this mod? I find the majority of the recipes in this to be far from equal. Wood and obsidian are not remotely related and an exchange between them should at the very least also require a fire fuel and/or sand. Changing ender pearls to iron to gold to diamond is hardly equal in value. And getting mycelium from grass is crossing from the plant kingdom to the fungus kingdom which is, again, not equal. The basics of this mod are not equal at all in my idea of what is minecraft so a change in name to something a little less all consuming I feel should be at least considered. I think, "Ideas of Equivalence" or "Alchemical Advancement" would be a more fitting names. Don't get me wrong, this is a fantastic mod, just not one I feel has anything to do with equal values, especially within the concept of alchemy, which I'm fairly certain is your inspiration judging by the minium and philosopher's stones. Just because it's the newest in a line of mods based off the original Equivalent Exchange doesn't mean it needs to keep to the name.

No

Kinnichi, read up on the manga/anime Fullmetal Alchemist and you will see the inspiration and why the name makes sense. Equivalent simply refers to the "value" of things. So to get something you need to trade in another "something" which is of equal value. That actually makes a lot of sense in a gaming perspective as well. The mod would be over powered if you could take something of lesser value and turn into something of greater value. The important part here is how you define the value of things.
As I understand Pahimar is working on the system called DynEMC to define a well balanced value for each item in the game.

feature request:
Pahimar adds a statistical reporting on how often each transmutation is done, and adds an option for dynamic-dynamic EMC (automatic recipe cost adjusting) -- if people keep setting up transmutations of gold to iron, then obviously the current value of gold is more than iron -- a truly balanced Equivalence would have people do transmutations in both directions in about the same amount.

Yes, it is a bit excessive. Though, I think that iron was the original number from EE2. It's been about a year since I played with EE2, so I'm not sure how much Pahimar has changed it.

@rlrobman123 and that's how DynEMC will work! It will scan for X (iron for example) and Y (let it be gold in this example) in some chunks, count them, divide greater value by lesser value, and the result will be how much of more common stuff (iron in this case) is needed to make more rare stuff (gold)! And then the recipe thing.

@EterniaLogic minecraft is hell of a lot different from our universe. Plus, alchemy ain't science. We count "rarity value", EMC. Not the density of the material. It would be lame to add density mechanics to minecraft, and it'll be harder for pahimar to balance it that just counting EMC with DynEMC system.

Nope. Pahs once said to me on twitter that worldgen rarities are too random to get a fix value out of. Someone will just have to assign base material values by hand then the system will calculate the others by looking at the recipies
-----Original Message-----
From: Roman Sandu [email protected]
Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 12:03:19
To: pahimar/[email protected]
Reply-To: pahimar/Equivalent-Exchange-3 [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Equivalent-Exchange-3] Name of the mod is misleading due to
equivalent values being subjective. (#387)

@rlrobman123 and that's how DynEMC will work! It will scan for X (iron for example) and Y (let it be gold in this example) in some chunks, count them, divide greater value by lesser value, and the result will be how much of more common stuff (iron in this case) is needed to make more rare stuff (gold)! And then the recipe thing.

@EterniaLogic minecraft is hell of a lot different from our universe. Plus, alchemy ain't science. We count "rarity value", EMC. Not the density on the material. It would be lame to add density mechanics to minecraft, and it'll be harder for pahimar to balance it that just counting EMC with DynEMC system.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#387 (comment)

@Astorian well, that's strange. Because Pah could just get an average value of rare stuff and common stuff in, like, 256 chunks, and it would be perfectly fine IMO. But anyways, fixed values would be good too. Some control over EMC balance is a great thing to have, cuz mods can add some weird recipes that would unbalance some stuff... But it could be considered as a feature too...

I understand the namesake of the mod but I haven't found any of the recipes to be equal in value to me. Especially the ender pearls one. The only equal exchange to me, THE ONLY, is from one wood to another because it takes the same amount of time to find a spruce tree as it does a jungle tree as it does an oak as it does a birch. I think there's more factors that need to be taken into account for recipes to be considered equal.
There's the progression through the game as one factor: Ender pearls are worth way more before you find the end portal and get to the end and soon become nearly as worthless as string. There's the time invested in harvesting the item: Obsidian takes not only the time to break a block, but also the time taken to get to lava layers or lakes, in comparison, wood is pretty much everywhere on the surface and saplings let you get wood anywhere that trees aren't. And lastly there's the experience spending that needs to be spent: It could take several level 30 enchants to get one silk touch pickaxe/shovel/axe to get your mycellium/grass/redstone ore/etc... The worth of an item in Minecraft is too inconsistent to make the exchanges be completely equal. The only way I could see these recipes becoming more balanced would be if minium shards were nearly as rare as wither skulls and had only 30-50 uses. That way they're a payed convenience.

Gold is very dense, so we transmute 1kg of iron to 1kg of gold.

FMA isn't based on weight value, it's based on true value to the reciever - the nearest Pahiamer can do is to assign each type of item a virtual value (called EMC) to say that in general 8 of X is worth 2 of Y.
I was just thinking that if stats on which transmutations are most often used could be used to adjust those EMC values... if it turns out that everyone is making cobble and turning it into everything else, but no one ever does the reverse, then cobble should be cheaper, or diamonds more expensive. (before you jump up and down saying noone would ever do the reverse, what if the relation was 1M to one --- you could run a quarry for 48 hrs at max speed, or you could just transmute 1 diamond.... At that ratio i think you might end up with people creating cobble for building projects from a single diamond, but never the reverse.

That extreme example demonstrates that there is a ratio where a->b is silly, and at the other end of the spectrum a ratio where b->a is silly. Somewhere inbetween is the true "Equivalent" value for the 2 items

@laz2727 1kg of iron = 1kg of gold? No, no way. I think you probably meant 1kg of iron = 1g of gold.

@kol999
They mean the density on the periodic table. It requires 3 times the number of iron collected to get 1 gold. (79Au / 26 Fe = 3.038461538)

Though in the mod, it seems to be 8 iron ingots for 1 gold. The elements in minecraft are different from our universe.

He did that for more equalizing since how widely iron is found; in chunk
sized quarry I found three stacks of iron on average

@kol999 and @Astorian The original EMC values were based LOOSELY around worldgen rates with decent results, but the stuff that isn't implicitly world-gen is nebulous at best. Iron, gold, diamond, coal, these have a general rarity which you can quantify in "parts per thousand", with reasonable accuracy. It's all the other stuff that hinges on those values that pushes or pulls the validity of the values.

Pahimar's solution to this is to simply give a lowest-common-denominator suggested weight to every possible item based on recipes and existing values, leaving only those which cannot be evaluated in a deterministic way (ie. Recipes).

At this point, it would be quite reasonable to assign the values to those naturally generated nodes using some world-gen rates, though this becomes unreliable at best outside of a vanilla scope. With that in mind, it is far better to make it purely config-based (as Pahimar is running with), even if (within the context of vanilla) setting baselines by world gen ratios isn't entirely inaccurate.

@AartBluestoke
TL;DR
I REALLY liked the idea here to log transactions and suggest weight shifts based on how often conversions get used. That seems like a really awesome way for server owners to determine a middleground for evaluations. Just wanted to post that.