Minecraft Version

1.21.1

Immersive Engineering Version

ImmersiveEngineering-1.21.1-12.2.0-187

Expected Behavior

1. When a gunpowder barrel explodes, it should produce an explosion noise like TNT does.
2. When a gunpowder barrel explodes, it should set off nearby gunpowder barrels like TNT sets off nearby TNT.
3. Gunpowder barrels can easily destroy stone and other "durable" blocks, as true to their purpose in the manual as a mining explosive.

Actual Behavior

1. Only very rarely does a gunpowder barrel produce an explosion noise, and when it does there seems to be no apparent difference from other detonations.
2. Gunpowder barrels do not affect each other. Notably, gunpowder barrels set off TNT and TNT can set off gunpowder barrels.
3. The performance of gunpowder barrels is very inconsistent. On the surface, they produce a very (roughly 3x3) small crater, with most of their power destroying a massive area of grass and leaves and damaging entities. Attempts to use them to destroy buildings are fruitless, they do no damage to wooden planks or logs, only destroying glass, torches, flower pots, carpets, and killing mobs. When underground, gunpowder barrels perform much better, boring through stone easily, but there are still inconsistencies to be found. For example, attempting to detonate this setup:
   
   Has absolutely no effect, which seems at odds with the barrel's purpose for mining charges.
   Additional odd scenarios showing poor performance have also occurred. In all of the following setups, detonating the gunpowder barrel produces no result other than breaking tall grass and killing mobs:
   
   
   

Steps to reproduce

1. Detonate a gunpowder barrel
   2.1 Place two gunpowder barrels next to each other
   2.2 Detonate one of the barrels
   3.1 Assemble any of the shown setups and detonate the gunpowder barrel.

Debug Crash Log

-N/A-

The behavior related to block breaking is intentional! If you detonate a low-power explosive on the face of something, it might shatter the face, but mostly? It'll create a shockwave. This is very similar - you're meant to use drilling and blasting.

Bury your barrels further into the wall like you're a miner drilling into the rock, and then detonate them. My personal method is to dig as far into the rock as I can with a pickaxe when I stand right up against it, and then to place and detonate the barrel.

With the relation of planks and logs, I can see about how to tweak them for that, but the way that Minecraft does explosion resistance and other things is baffling. Planks quite literally have 3.75x the blast resistance of sandstone, and I tweaked them to work how I expected underground. Even worse is that planks have the same blast resistance as ores, so if I don't want to have problems with breaking ores? Things of blast resistance 3 need to be only broken when blasting.

It should produce a noise, I'm not sure why it's not; I thought I fixed that. I'll see about how to make sure it does that, same with setting off other powder barrels or being set off by the same.

Yeah seconding void on this (since she designed the barrel overhaul). Drilling and blasting works quite well:

That was a single barrel, burried in deepslate

I fixed the missing sound and the triggering.

I'm leaving it to @voidsong-dragonfly to overhaul the manual entry a bit to help clarify the barrel's behavior ^^