Mod Interactivity - Equivalent Exchange, Better Than Wolves

(Because who needs emotion anyway?)

So, I've been playing around with mods in Minecraft recently, because when I get a game I tend to play it vanilla for a short stretch of time, then find out what other people have done to bend the engine's arm behind its back.

Minecraft is one of the better games out there to play modded, I think, and here's why:

Mod interactivity.

Hear me out - I know a lot of mods end up being incompatible with one another due to block IDs. And I know Notch pretty much deliberately made it hell to mod the game what with the code obfuscation and the lack of an official mod API and all.

However, once you get the blocks all in the game and past the inevitable black screen of death, lots of mods play really nicely together.

Here's an example: Right now I'm derping around with Better Than Wolves and Equivalent Exchange (plus a handful of others, notably Timber! and Clay Soldiers).

With Equivalent Exchange (it's an alchemy mod, by the way), once you get your philosopher's stone, you can turn a whole bunch of things into a whole bunch of other things at relatively low resource cost. In practice this means things like 'turn flowers into pumpkins into melons so you don't have to find a death mineshaft (oh god cave spiders why) to start farming resources.

It also gives you basically unlimited redstone and/or glowstone out of sugar cane, essentially turning all resources in the game (Lava is coal + redstone + bucket + philo stone) into renewable resources. Powerful stuff.

But how does that interact with Better than Wolves?

Let me explain what Better than Wolves is if you're not interested in googling it yourself (the name is a non-indicative jab at Notch's penchant for adding random trivial content) - the mod basically aims to add an endgame made of mechanical power to minecraft. To that end, you have things like windmills and water wheels, hemp plants and ground up souls of the damned, all to make you the undisputed ruler of your world. (So you can better crush any zombie uprisings, see?)

It also adds elevators which is just damn cool, I don't care who you are.


Now, your first water wheel generally will be made with glue because slimes are difficult to find and ridiculously rare besides. That involves a trip or several to the Nether to build a hibachi, plus the understanding of how to work mechanical power (if you just installed Better than Wolves you probably don't have that understanding) to stoke a fire using a bellows.

With Equivalent Exchange, instead of doing all that, you can take a bucket of water, some normal seeds, a sapling, and some sugarcane, and grind it all up until you've made a whole mess of slimeballs.

One of the cooler features of Better than Wolves is the block dispenser, which is critical to creating companion cubes (you monster), and also most forms of automated farming. Trouble is, it requires mossy cobblestone. I've only legitimately found a handful of dungeons in my entire time playing the game. The spider dungeon challenge aside, I've never really built anything out of mossy cobble because it's so damn rare.

Equivalent Exchange has a solution for that, as well! Seeds + Cobblestone = Mossy Cobblestone.

Basically, the two mods play off of each other in fun and interesting ways, because they both use the standard items - just in new and interesting ways. Sure I can't, say, transmute normal seeds into hemp seeds - but the mods compliment each other so nicely that sometimes I actually forget that isn't possible.

Of course, somebody else is doing something more impressive than I have the patience for with this combination, that's how I discovered it and that's ultimately why I downgraded back to 1.8.1 from the 1.9 prereleases. Good job, Stormweaver.