Date Fri 01 April 2016

This time last year, we released the first beta of BuildCraft 7.0, marking a sharp turn in BuildCraft's visual and aesthetic direction. Today, we're proud to announce something that has been in the works for quite a while: BuildCraft 8.0.

For BuildCraft 8.0, we decided to take a look at the game design of BuildCraft - something that, to us, has been stuck sometime in 2012. Let's look at some of the new changes! This list is not comprehensive, as BC8 is still in the works - we were supposed to announce it at BTM16, but IC2's early announcement meant we had to rush our own to not stay in the dust.

Transport

Ah, yes - the original BuildCraft module, the icon of the mod. While the pipes were largely optimized throughout recent years, they haven't seen any improvements in behaviour. This is now changing.









Item pipes do not drop items anymore. A clogging mechanism has been added, not unlike Charset's pipes. This means that they will no longer lag your server, be much easier to debug and queue on their own, instead of requiring complex and convoluted timing setups. In addition, certain other changes have been introduced:

The amount of pipes has been reduced. Some redundant pipes have been removed, others will get more varied replacements.

Instead of Cobblestone and Quartz pipes, we now have Diorite, Andesite and Granite pipes. Unlike the previous ones, they are now equivalent, bar not connecting to each other.

Items now always prefer to go straight in a pipe, giving a sense of order and allowing pipe crossing. (Filters are, however, still "magnetic"/prioritizing)

The speed of fluids in fluid pipes now depends on their viscosity and not just on the pipe's type.

With Minecraft 1.9, we hope to support MCMultiPart with BuildCraft pipes and possibly other objects. (Laser Tables?)

A new type of pipe has been introduced: the Glass Pipe. More on that one below.









Kinesis pipes have gotten some of the biggest changes. We're proud to announce that, in cooperation with the IndustrialCraft 2 development team, we have completely overhauled the energy system in line with its move to RF.

The pipes and their RF/t limits have been completely overhauled.

Diamond Kinesis Pipes now perform the limiting function of the Iron Kinesis Pipe.

Glass Pipes have been added, which (for a price!) let you achieve minimum losses at maximum RF bandwidth. They also remove all item drag (for items) and allow transfers of 250 mB/t (for fluids).

Pipes will now explode if you exceed their RF/t limit.

Pipes now lose some RF (a constant value, dependent on pipe type) on every block passed. We considered making this a config option, but learning from Vazkii's experiences, we have decided not to.

To solve the above two problems, we have added Transformers to BuildCraft. Yes!









Transformers add a way to create large RF pulses, which let you massively lower the amount of energy lost via transport. In addition, they let you scale energy down from generators to a safe amount. They work very well in practice and I'm sure you'll like them.

Gates are also getting improvements:

The Redstone Fader has been overhauled to let you compare analog redstone signals (less than, equal, greater to).

The Clock Timer is going to get improvements such as more variable interval and State Cell-like functionality.

Gates should allow you to pick the target block to read information from, instead of just picking a seemingly random one for triggers and actions.

The gate materials will also be overhauled. No details on that one yet, however.

We're glad that IC2's RF move and our energy system overhaul will let the two mods focus on what they do best. While recipe/balance changes between the two mods were not discussed due to the already mentioned communication issues, we hope to try and unify the two mods further in the future.

If you're curious to see the energy changes, Direwolf20 should have a spotlight out today!

Silicon

Not many changes here - we mostly plan to polish the tables, getting rid of the various inconsistencies between their automtation, as well as improve some GUIs.

Robotics

Still secret! No spoilers!

Factory

AlexIIL is working on a new refining tree, which will include many more fuel types, complex oil reactions and various outputs with new uses, such as Plastic Sheets. This has been a long-requested feature and should hopefully add some long-missing content to BuildCraft.

Energy

We wish to finish the energy overhaul in the Transport module before we look at the engines, however Combustion Engines and Stirling Engines should both see some interesting changes.

Builders

Not much is planned here, however we can share the following news:

Quarries will get a balance overhaul - large quarries will use more power than small quarries, to make the playfield even between one large quarry and multiple small quarries.

Builders will get a JSON-based API for modders to very easily add support for their own blocks. You can see our progress in the "schematic-json-7.2" branch.

If you hope for things like Silk Touch support and larger landmark areas, we can't promise anything, but they're being put under consideration!

Download

Sorry - no download yet! IC2's announcement forced us to rush everything, and so we hope that the screenshots will satisfy you for the time being.

Personally, I'm very glad that the two big mods of Tekkit days are once again working together to try and improve the gameplay experience of all modded Minecraft players worldwide. Please stay tuned for what's coming next.

EDIT: Updated the post.