Mods / Crystal Growth Chambers
Author: CandyCaprine
Side: Both
Created: Sep 4th at 10:29 PM
Last modified: Sep 14th at 4:32 AM
Downloads: 465
Follow Unfollow 34
Latest release (for Vintage Story 1.21.0 and 1.21.1, potentially outdated):
crystalgrowth_1.0.4.zip
1-click install
What?
Crystal growth chambers are a brand new piece of technology that allow you to take basic resources, shove them in a fancy machine, and after some time, you'll have fresh crystals to harvest for more resources!
Why?
Because I want to have some kind of passive resource generation. This mod is tagged as a cheat because you can use it to circumvent the necessity of exploration and mining, but I like to think it's been at least moderately balanced. Growing crystals takes a long time, even with the top tier of chamber, and the initial yields are pretty poor. In order to actually make incredible use of growth chambers, you'll need a whole lot in cellars.
How?
Simple! In order to get started, you just need a growth chamber. The most basic ceramic growth chamber only requires a clay planter, some bricks, sticks, and dirt. Stone growth chambers need firewood and rusty gears, plus cobblestone and gravel. Metal growth chambers require plentiful metal infrastructure; two ingots, a plate, a stone slab, and a temporal gear. Better growth chambers will grow crystals faster! Once you have your growth chamber, place it down with an empty space above and right click on it with a stone, nugget, or mineral. Within a few seconds, a budding crystal will appear in the space above, and begin to grow! Crystals grow best in damp places with little to no natural sunlight, so they do very well in cellars. A good cellar will reduce the growth times by up to half!
Other Features
- Crystals will display their growth progress when looked at. The time per stage will not be updated if changes to the room are made, meaning the time remaining may appear to go negative. Crystals will grow based on their environment, meaning the time remaining widget is only accurate if the environment is not changed from when it was formed or last grew.
- You can grow crystals from any type of stone, any type of pure metal, any type of nugget, or any type of solid mineral. This means you can grow crystals of peridotite, obsidian, platinum, meteoric iron, malachite, ilmenite, alum, lapis lazuli, quartz, or any such things. You cannot grow any type of alloy or powdered mineral, such as bronze, molybdochalkos, salt, or saltpeter, though you can grow the required materials to make alloys, and you can grow Halite . You also cannot grow meteoric iron pieces.
- Pure metal crystals have a substantially higher yield compared to rough nuggets. This is to encourage getting into metalworking sooner.
- Half-grown crystals can be broken early for half of the yield. If a crystal is 90% grown and you break it, you'll still only get half of the yield.
- Growth times are scaled to day length. Longer days means longer growth periods.
- Different crystals grow at different speeds. Metal crystals grow the slowest, stone crystals grow the fastest.
- Metal growth chambers growing stone will grow full rock blocks instead of simply stones.
- The growth chambers will accept any item, but if a crystal doesn't appear after a few seconds, it won't grow anything.
- Hold shift and right-click on the growth chamber to remove the seed item. This can't be done if a stage 1 crystal is growing on top, so you'll have to break the crystal in order to remove the seed item, or wait until it's grown to stage 2 or 3.
- Crystals will continue to grow when broken as long as the seed item remains inside. After being broken, a new bud will appear after a few seconds.
This isn't very realistic or immersive.
Then don't use the mod.
Compatibility
Currently only for the mod Swordz, which hasn't been updated to 1.21 yet as of time of writing. If you have any compatibility requests, ask and I'll look into it.
Please send me bug reports and feature requests!
| Mod Version | For Game version | Downloads | Released | Changelog | Download | 1-click mod install* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0.4 | 258 | Sep 14th at 4:32 AM | crystalgrowth_1.0.4.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
Due to (reasonable) popular demand, added config file, allowing the configuration of growth times and chamber speed modifiers. Also reduced default growth time per stage of metal and nugget crystals from 8 to 6 days, and mineral and quartz crystals from 4 to 3 days. Rock and stone are unchanged. Fixed growth time resetting every time the crystal was unloaded or the world was restarted. Crystals should now properly grow even when the chunk is unloaded. NOTE: Crystals will only ever grow one stage at a time. If you leave a small metal crystal growing unloaded for 14 days, the next time it loads in it will be a medium crystal that needs to grow for 6 more days. | ||||||
| 1.0.3 | 115 | Sep 7th at 1:45 AM | crystalgrowth_1.0.3.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
Should now use bricks and planters from any mod, not just vanilla | ||||||
| 1.0.2 | 92 | Sep 4th at 10:30 PM | crystalgrowth_1.0.2.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
Initial Release | ||||||
CandyCaprine, idk if its doable but this mod has made my undergrounder playthrough one step easier. Do you think in the future your mod would allow the growth of "Log" Crystals? as a proud dwarf the longer i can stay underground the better and your mod seems like a really Awesome way to do that. if its not possible or youre not intrested in that direction i understand and appreciate you either way, stuff like this is above my humble smithing hands. Rock and Stone Friend.
red and gray bricks do not work so far, it doesnt even show they can be used to make it.
I'm excited to see this mod updating, It's such a cool mod!
I love the levels of incremental progression, and it integrates nicely with base Vintage Story's infanstructure as well as the proclivity to make dedicated "rooms" for dedicated tasks.
I have an idea, might be a bad one but...
What if you made a super alloy grower that cost 4 full steel growers, some metal and temporal parts, and took like 10x as long? Instead of the multi-block I was talking about earlier? Make it as expensive as you want but I think that would be a cool idea. You could even make it so that it required two or more inputs (which would probably be better with a UI) or that it even consumes the inputs for the output? (i.e. You have to sacrifice INGOTS of iron and coal to make a whole (configurable) 4 steel or something like that?)
Thanks again for adding the config file!
Awesome work Candy, I will have to update my fork as well to include these fantastic changes!
tyrOS version 1.0.3 fixes ceramic chambers not being able to be crafted with some planters and red bricks, and 1.0.4 (just released) adds a config file.
Gems would need a dedicated crystal type, because they're not treated by the game as ores or minerals, and their uses are extremely situational, so I figured I just wouldn't bother. As for clay, charcoal, and other materials; from a development standpoint, each new resource would need a dedicated type of crystal, with its own set of drops and its own lang entries, and it would just be a whole lot of work that I don't really want to put in; from a logic standpoint, these are crystal growth chambers, clay is too soft to be crystalline, charcoal is fresh organic material. As for adding items to the list of growables, as mentioned, you'd need to create new dedicated crystal blocktypes, and add lines to the config file and growth time code, and trying to figure out how to make that work is a technical nightmare.
If you want a different way to get clay, though, I've made a mod for that.
The thought behind metal chambers needing temporal gears is that they should cost a reasonably expensive resource that can't be acquired easily, but which won't require some hyper-specific rare item like gems. Temporal gears fit that niche well: they can be farmed by hunting drifters, and a lucky gear drop can kickstart a growth chamber setup out of the stone age. As for the value of the metal chambers, I do think there's too many tiers stuffed in too tight a timeframe, but I don't want to make steel chambers so blatantly overpowered compared to the others that any given tier should be skipped entirely. I think bronze is in the weakest spot simply by virtue of having such a weak multiplier bonus compared to copper.
As for your idea of a temporal chamber, I don't think that's in the cards. Part of the intention of the mod is to encourage having multiple chambers running at a time, and why spend a temporal gear to grow a single crystal when you can create a new chamber instead? The enormous crystal is an interesting idea, though, and one I might consider as part of a multiblock, once I'm in a mood to consider adding new content instead of just fixing what's broken.
Thank you for enjoying my mod!
1.0.2 (possibly fixed with 1.0.3? haven't updated yet) doesn't let me craft Ceramic Growth Chambers with pitkiln-fired planters and red bricks.
A configuration file to let us edit the speeds (or at least put a modifier on them) would be amazing. Also optionally enabling the ability to grow more things like gems (speaking of, couldn't you just treat the potentials as different minerals?), clay, charcoal, or other materials? Possibly even a way to add our own items to the list of growables? many thoughts!
I do kind of disagree with the fact that metal chambers need a temporal gear. maybe an alternative/config-enabled recipe to let us use a LOT of rusty gears instead of temporal gears? like 10-15 gears? considering that a steel chamber in a cellar takes like 2.67 days (at least in my world, and according to my math) for a single brown coal crystal stage, it seems absurd to need a temporal gear for just one of those chambers, and it encourages just forgetting about metal chambers until you have steel or at least iron, and it's pretty much useless at that point.
anyways, i like the mod.
also maybe a temporal chamber? you can wait for a full ingame week, or spend a temporal gear, to instantly grow an "enormous" crystal that gives like 5+ ingots worth of bits. still unbalanced but "balanced" because a metal chamber only gives like 3-4 ingots in a week, and this would cost more.
The idea behind this mod is awesome!
Sadly I'm encountering the same bug as Stoon with the reset of growthcycles after leaving and restarting a singleplayer world.
Another mod with working growthstages (at least in singleplayer) is Saltpeter Production by jayu. Since I have no experience in modding myself, I can't really judge if their solution could be applicable to this mod.
Please keep up the good work!
They are actually resetting it's not just a visual display, I tested it quite a bit.
Stoon The timers shouldn't be resetting, and they should stay persistent when chunks are unloaded. A large part of how the crystals work is lifted from how berry bushes grow. Are the crystals' timers actually being resetted, or is the timer on the block info just visually reset? I originally added the block info timer as a debug/testing tool, so it's not as thought-out as everything else is.
I don't want the crystals or chambers to load chunks, both because I'm not sure entirely how to do that, and because it could cause a number of issues, especially on servers. Plus, they're relatively cheap crafts, so having a cheap and easy way to load chunks feels against the spirit of the mod. These are resource growth crystals, not magical chunk loaders.
Maximuskille, no, clay can't be grown in these chambers. I do have a separate mod that allows you to make clay from dirt in a barrel, with other ways to make blue and fire clay.
I have noticed when a player logs out the crystal chambers they placed all have their timers reset... I would much prefer the crystals can keep running for players while they are offline as this is causing an issue where nobody wants to log out for fear of their crystal growths resetting (especially on the longer timers!)
Is this intended behavior? I am looking through the code to see if I can understand how this might be adjusted so that the crystal growth timers information is stored serverside.
Thanks again Candy for this awesome mod, I will do my best to help in any way I can.
EDIT: Upon inspection of the code, it looks like whenever the chunk unloads that the crystals are in, the timer is reset, which would happen if the player logs out at all in single player and if there is nobody in the same chunk as the crystal growth chambers in a multiplayer server... is it possible to keep the chunks loaded that contain crystal growth chambers, or better yet... to store the timer data persistently so it isn't lost when the chunk unloads?
i wonder, can you grow clay with these chambers as well? considering it sometimes is very hard to find it myself... would be especially handy for fire clay.
FrancisOfFilth No. Precious stones are weird, what with the "potential" and all. It would take a very careful rework of how the crystals work to make precious stones work.
I like your mod, but a config file or adding the mod "Config Lib" as dependency, would be really nice, as i would love to edit some values as for example, how fast the crystals grow, or how much input/output material is set.
Please keep going! Thanks.
Are gems such as diamonds and etc supported ?
That would be much appreciated!
Anchovy That's because the recipe only uses bricks and planters from vanilla. I can probably fix that
I can't craft the most basic one.
In the handbook it says any claybrick is fine however when klicking the claybrick
the crystal chamber does not show up in the ingredient for list.
I do have many other mods installed though
(might be bricklayers? Only mod that has to do with claybricks).
Anyways, thank you for this great mod!
CandyCaprine Forgive me for jumping the gun on the coals. I had literally downloaded the mod this morning and only got to make a basic tier. I hadn't gotten to toy with it too much. It is just such an excellent mod that I got really excited. Going to make an anthracite farm right now. Thank you for your gracious response too. I look forward to this mod being in every sever I run (like it is now).
bubbanubo that's an excellent idea, but this mod is basically held together with spit and duct tape. It'd take a lot of looking to figure out how to do that, because the function that checks for the crystal material is a bit scary.
CtrlAltSilent those are excellent ideas! I'd need to look into how to make config files, and then refactor everything to make use of them, so it'd be a lot of effort. As for a multiblock to grow alloys, that sounds very scary to try and put together. As for coal, you can already grow all three types of coals! The game treats them as minerals, and excluding them specifically would feel weird. Right now the only "mineral" that can't be grown is precious stones (diamonds, emeralds, peridots - amethysts are a type of quartz and lapis lazuli is a mineral, and thus both can be grown!) because of potential.
This is beautiful. Just waiting on my first crop of cystals. Are you planning on adding som config files in the future so that we can tweak the overall or individual growth times of certain crystals? I'd love to make steel (I mean iron and thus steel) take longer and soft metals like copper quicker. Great mod, concept, and so far, based on recipes to make the chambers, good balance.
Maybe consider a complex multiblock structure for making alloy crystals grow too?
Oh, and coal, it would be really cool if we could grow lignite and anthracite with the chambers.
I came here looking for copper and I found... crystal? Great mod, have been looking for something genuinely exactly like this! I love how you balance it too!
I wonder if there's a way to have a tooltip verifying whether the 'seed item' inputted works? I was testing it briefly, and used a Rock instead of Stone, which the Chamber took but no growth crystals appeared at all (which I understand is the expected outcome based on your explanation here and the handbook). Or maybe just have the tooltip works off of the items you already whitelisted as 'seed items', where it rejects the player's attempt to right-click on it. Alternatively, the behaviour is unchanged but a tooltip mentioning to the player that "maybe they should try something else" or anything in the same vein. However since this seems to be the intended design, feel free to ignore my suggestion!
Love what you've got here, keep it up! :]