So I’m collecting a list of Excessively Asked Questions. They’re like FAQs that have been done to death. So in an effort to preserve my own sanity, I’m adding a little humor to the FAQ style.
Anything having to do with TMI. Versions of TMI for versions 1.8.1 and before had no API and thus I couldn’t do anything about some items showing or not showing. There are unofficial patches for TMI, but I don’t keep track of which one is currently functional. TheEnlightened is tracking the TMI patch at the moment, though. Versions of TMI for 1.0.0 and beyond have an API, so future versions should hopefully not have these sorts of problems.
“Risu’s Recipe Book is broken.” Yes, yes it is. There are better recipe listing mods out there. This is not my bug, don’t ask me to change RedPower to make up for it. Or try Uristqwerty’s CraftGuide.
“Mod X has the same ore type.” That’s why I spent days writing something called the Forge Ore Dictionary. Any mod that implements it (which DOES include IC²) will treat both types of ores interchangably. Further, I added the option to disable the generation of certain RedPower ores to the config file, in case you wanted to use it this way.
“Bukkit…” Full stop. The first rule of me allowing a Bukkit port (which I granted Maeyanie, and only Maeyanie, the permission to do) is: We don’t talk about Bukkit. Guess what the second rule is? And the third?
“Volcanoes and trees…” Are not quite finished. I intend to pattern the placement code, and improve the volcano. 1.8’s chunk handling broke both pretty seriously, causing sharp slices which are especially noticeable in volcanoes. And no, I will not provide options to disable them.
“But the volcanoes…” Are staying. And they’re going to get better. The validation will improve they will always have a big lava pool under, instead of a puddle. They will get bigger, they will stop losing edges, they will appear in clusters rather than evenly all over, they sometimes have calderas full of lava.
“But the trees are so big…” Yes, they are. And I like them that way. Build a treehouse, it’s fun. You know you want to.
“I installed RP 1.7.1 on Minecraft 1.8.1, and it crashes.” Well, yes. That’s why there’s a huge bold font link on the forum thread to this blog, where I post the versions that run on 1.8.1. I wish I could make it so that running the wrong version would unlock a special mode where magical fairies sprinkle fairy dust on you twice every hour, but that’s just not the world we live in.
“Parse Error” Most text editors are able to handle multiplatform text files. Notepad is an extremely stupid text editor. Notepad cannot. You might have noticed that the config file comes up as one giant run-on sentence, instead of a properly formatted config file, at which point a sensible person would have tried a non-broken editor. But no, instead, you pressed your luck, saved the config file, and corrupted it. Delete the config and let RedPower make you a clean one. And use a better text editor (wordpad, for example) in the future.
“autoAssign is disabled” RedPower has a nice feature called autoAssign, which remaps ID conflicts for you. Unfortunately, if it did this every time you changed your mods, it would remap existing blocks and corrupt your worlds. Instead, RedPower automatically turns off autoAssign every time it runs, to protect your worlds. If you see this message, you have an ID conflict, and RedPower is refusing to corrupt your worlds without asking. If you don’t mind that, and just want your game to run, edit the config file and turn on autoAssign. And don’t use notepad.
“Every time I craft X on my server, I get Y!” Yes, you have just discovered that the config files of the client and server have to match. If they don’t, this will happen. Simple. Get a copy of the config from your server operator, and it will work properly.
“My handsaw gets used up in a single use.” Somehow, you’ve managed to incorrectly install Forge. There are many ways to do this. You might have used a frontend program that told you that it conflicted with ModLoader, and then prevented the overwrite. Or you may have installed ModLoader on top of Forge.
“Does [material] have a use?” Some do, some don’t yet. I opted to add all the materials that I see myself using right away, so that people won’t have to generate new worlds when I add things that use them. Stock up on your Tungsten, you’ll be glad you did.
“You should make lights shine the color that they are.” I wanted to, and when I saw 1.8 the first time, I thought that Notch had actually added colored light. Instead, he moved to a new system of multitexturing for light level code (basically using a second texture where the coordinates are torchlight and sunlight levels), which actually makes it much, much more difficult to ever make this happen. It would now take not just a complete rewrite, but also a redesign, of the lighting code.
“Make cover plates work on X other mod”. It’s impossible. It’s not a matter of adding cover plates to another block type, but making a block type work inside cover plates. Covers require a huge amount of code, including a lot of custom rendering, and any blocks that use them have to be written, from the ground up, to make use of them. Anything using them would require RedPower Core to function, even if it was possible. So just use the RedPower equivalents.
“Brass is copper and zinc…” Which is great, if that was all there was to the story. The distinction between brass and bronze is a lot fuzzier now, with lots of brasses and bronzes that contain neither zinc nor tin, or some combination of both. The primary distinction is that bronze is meant to be cast, while brass is generally intended for machining (which means “being cut by sharp tools”). Brass is certainly the metal I intended to add. Which brings us to Tin. Why Tin? Because tin has more secondary uses, and I’m trying to avoid making headaches for IC² users. Imagine if instead of generating Tin, which could be shared with IC² using the ore dictionary, RedPower actually generated Zinc instead? Two white metals, virtually indistinguishable but incompatible. And no, I’m not going to be renaming brass to bronze, or sharing bronze with IC².