Curious what people would change about botania

quat

Botania is one of the oldest still-actively-developed mods, which is weird to think about. Often times i see the sentiment that botania is basically the same mod it was several years ago and nothing new has been added in a while. A couple other mods have also reinvented themselves during this time period (thinking about Create, Thermal, Quark, etc) but botania has been more or less the same.

Now i dont think that's inherently a bad thing, botania already adds a well rounded set of things, you can look at guides written for older versions of the mod and they'll work just fine. And it's historical at this point. But it's true that botania has been mostly the same mod as it was in ≈1.10, some might even say it's been the same since ≈late 1.7, and if you didn't like Botania then you certainly won't like Botania now.

(Sometimes people say botania doesn't engage well with post-1.9 vanilla content, but im not sure adding a flower here and there will provide the design overhaul people sound like they're interested in? people are still gonna use endoflames and stuff.)

So, im curious what people actually want to shake up the formula. What if there was a Botania 2️⃣ that rebalanced shit and redid the earlygame, or whatever else youre thinking of.

williewillus

quat Often times i see the sentiment that botania is basically the same mod it was several years ago and nothing new has been added in a while

I think the problem is that maintenance isn't valued. There's been a ton of QoL tweaks and extra new integrations with vanilla since the 1.7/1.12 days but they aren't flashy enough to be noticed.

williewillus

quat What if there was a Botania 2️⃣ that rebalanced shit and redid the earlygame, or whatever else youre thinking of.

Vaz has some messages from Discord about this iirc you could probably dredge some of them up.
There's a bunch of fluff that would probably go like all the equipment, maybe more endgame creative mode-ish stuff.
Also the whole "typed mana" thing that was floated multiple times.

adarsh

quat It's a minor change but I've always wished breaking Botania flowers would directly give the petals, and for the flower pouch to be changed to the petal pouch. It'd just make collecting 'em simpler and less of a hassle to juggle different flowers and their remainders when using the apothecary. (regular flowers would need shears/silk because they're mystical and delicate ig)

GameGuruGreenGryphon

In my eyes, Botania would have to introduce new problems for you to solve so you're rewarded handsomely for overcoming them, rather than only adding automation problems and automating those be the reward.

Manasteel tools had right-click functionality before offhand tools even existed. Now they're not so helpful.
Manasteel everything repairs itself, now we have Mending.
The Flugel Tiara probably used to be your go-to tool for getting around the world. Now we have the Elytra. Tiara is still very nice for precision redstone building, though, but we have scaffolding now.
There used to be a crown that saved your life on death, now we have the Totem of Undying.
We still have the piece of cloth that removes enchantments from items.

The best reason to automate things in Botania is for the sake of automation, which doesn't appeal to everyone, because a lot of the features that made Botania awesome back in the day are now vanilla.

vazkii

I think I've voiced my concerns about this a billion times now, but botania has two fundamental problems that need to be addressed should one want to overhaul it.

All mana is essentially fungible, so there's no need to explore more than one or two generation options, which means a lot of the content in the mod is essentially dead weight.
There is a defined "end". You can realistically "beat botania" by getting all six relic drops, which is incredibly antithetical to its design.

We've talked a lot about the "brand" system, where you'd essentially have to use mana from multiple different flowers to progress. I think if an overhaul of botania ever happened, something among those lines would be the first thing that would be implemented.

As for a potential remake, I toyed around with the idea of a closed system energy system at some point when I was playing around with Worldblood, being the rough idea that you could never create or destroy energy, just change it. The equivalent to mana bursts in that mod were atomic, and if you wanted to use them, you'd first have to infuse them with whatever power you wanted at the time, which could not be stored.

This is definitely not something that would fit the current design of Botania, but it's an interesting thought that has been on my head for at least 4 years now.

cookiegd

vazkii I think this would be interesting to see in a sort of hard-mode of botania or in some kind of modpack based on this idea

gonzo2735

I'll just put my ideas in bullets since they're more like anthologies (Botania BUT...) and I have not considered having every change batched into one piece. Additionally I will preface by saying Botania is an insanely great mod- I have been fighting my friends to include it in every modpack we play on simply because without it I would feel so creatively restricted by what vanilla has to offer alone:

I wish it was more aesthetically pleasing to make Botania contraptions. They're very fun to make and have a lot of potential but most of the time they look like an assortment of random colors centered around a couple mana pools. Mods like Create have shown it can be done excellently, and while Botania is NOT Create I feel as if some concepts may not have been the most visually appealing way to go about them. 1.7 is a long time ago tho so I do not blame Vazkii for what tools were available at the time.
I want to see concrete numbers/gains/losses for mana. While 'numerical mana' has been thrown around as a joke since "not everything has to have numbers behind them," I will say it feels REALLY awful to reference an old (and very dated) FTB wiki to see how many mana points are consumed for each item I toss in a mana pool and just pray the numbers have not changed. The mana system still relies on numbers, even if you do not make that number system easily accessible. People are going to experiment on their own time and find the numbers anyway. It just becomes a nuisance to my and others time having to either keep the numbers up on a webpage nearby or search the GitHub for answers. I understand the intent behind it but it's like fighting to bucket water out of a leaky boat. Just let my dang monocle look at funny numbers.
Recipes for some items/blocks should be reduced, preferably heavily. Some of the recipes for certain items and blocks feel pretty expensive. While that is totally fine to have (slows down progression, resources in recipes are pretty obtainable once automated, etc.) I feel it has unintentionally repelled players away from some of the more interesting devices accessible in the late game- specifically Corporea and Red String. I've seen some changes to Corp. Sparks having a greater yield per craft which is a good step forward but the big issue with these devices is that they already require a lot of engineering and thought to implement effectively. When they also require an ender pearl which has been dipped in mana, then subsequently tossed in an elf portal, then put together with a bottle of Ender air and a spark which also demands things like blaze powder... it's a LOT. Most people at this stage of the game (and most likely are playing in larger modpacks) will already have RS or AE2 running throughout their base. They won't want or need Corporea to benefit their antics. Red String is unique and complicated, which most players will just pass by for the simple fact that it would cost them a lot of man power to craft (and potentially automate), learn, and use. And you know what? That sucks, because these two devices are by far the coolest and my favorite things I have ever used in a mod. They should be the big incentive to get to elven trade. They are the big toys you get to have now that you have beaten the part of the mod that gets you to use your brain to make mana. I feel that lowering the costs of certain recipes for these certain aspects of the game would help players- especially new ones- feel more capable of trying out new things and experimentation.

TL;DR (Because I just realized how much I wrote):

Make Botania look good
Make Botania a tech mod (add numbered mana)
Make Botania cheaper

Amygdala

gonzo2735 in fact you can use the "/data" command to view mana in creative mode

artemis

I somewhat like that idea. I do also find it annoying to have to store both flowers and petals. I'll think a bit on it

quat

thats an interesting idea. I do like the flowers myself but it would make things much simpler ...

hi529

Personally, the only thing I can think to change is to loosen those annoying anti-automation barriers on the Gaia Guardian. I've got absolutely nothing against it being un-automatable with Botania itself, but interfering with other mods' functionality to prevent it- not even just make it more difficult, but trying to make it outright impossible- without some option to disable leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

StrawberryBalloons

Here's my Christmas list

I'd like to see an expansion on the early game progression / content, I like the early game but it's easy to skip past

some way to teleport mobs that has nothing to do with luminizers (my soul dies a little whenever I use a luminizer)

An elytra tiara, I want both elytra and tiara style flight on the same thing, would be cool with the wings

And a more serious suggestion, some way to divide the flowers. People are correct that not using them is to miss out on part of the mod but I think gatekeeping content behind certain flowers would be the wrong way to go about it, I would rather see something like a block you can put flowers on that measures the rate of mana over time for an additional or increased effect, similar to beacon pyramid (bubbel twice as large if its consumes 20k mana a second or Narslimmus making every block in a radius act like slime blocks at 100k/s generated for example)
If the mana used is consumed on the functional rather than stored in a buffer I think it would be a great way to keep up with the mana ramp and reduce the need for hundreds of flowers. something could also be done to keep worse flowers relevant but I like them the way they are, I find them useful in a variety of situations even if I have practically infinite mana

fish

buff the fluxfield because generators from other mods are boring

Kartabass

I have a whole laundry list of ideas in my head, mostly around emphasizing Botania's uniqueness, making it more engaging, or updating its presentation to the current "standards" of big minecraft mods. The issue is that these go waaaaayyy beyond the scope of maintenance, and as a person with little spare time myself, i can't expect others to invest theirs, just to indulge my lofty whims.

I adore :Botania, but one of the core issues I see is that it's very (potentially) powerful. So much so, that probably one of the design principles was "You could automate anything from Vanilla or Botania with this alone."
For the sake of that ability, there are a few mechanisms I'd consider "OP", because the solutions they provide are very simple, powerful, and repetitive. F.e. atm Alchemical Catalysts and Conjuration Catalysts act as a "catch-all", kinda boring solution for a bunch of different automation problems, all of which could pose their own challenges.
Another example would be how so many different Farms/contraptions boil down to some variation on [Hopperhock + Rannuncarpus + Bore Lens], which speaks volumes of the disproportionate power of these components.

If the intention is to get players engaged with a broader selection of the content Botania has to offer, adressing these incentive structures seems to be the only way i.m.o.

An example for an easy feature/fix though: Spider Eyes need to be able to be automated
They're needed for the Autumn rune. Why would this be one of the very few manual components, when one of the official challenges is literally to automate everything around a Runic Altar?
A quick solution could be to change the Heisei Dream, so mobs killed by other mobs drop player drops.
Would solve the same issue with Blaze Rods/Powder, if the player isn't on GoG

Wormbo

Kartabass I agree that the conjuration/alchemy catalysts in most parts, make certain things way too easy:

The flower cycle replaces exploration for plains/swamp/flower forest/cherry groves. Flower farms aren't particularly difficult to build, and with Botania you technically don't even need them for dyes, since you can produce mystical flowers instead.
The sapling cycle means you can get all tree types just by having access to a single sapling at some point. (The logs cycle is fine, though. It would be more powerful if the sapling cycle didn't exist.) It completely eliminates exploration, which vanilla allows you to skip if you wait for the wandering trader instead.
IMHO the sapling cycle should be made way more expensive. Currently it's the same mana cost as converting three logs, and duplicating a single leaves block is over 16x that cost. It should be treated as an important single-use recipe with a cost, maybe somewhere in the range of 10-50x its current cost (similar to the crops cycle), because it opens cheap access to a new decorative resource. That way converting logs also makes sense, since it's relatively cheap and allows players to opt for a single type of tree farm with subsequent mana use to change the look of the farmed product.
The 1.8 and 1.17 stone cycles feel a bit clumsy, with the 1.8 cycle essentially replacing the need for nether quartz, but the 1.17 cycle (deepslate, tuff, calcite) makes tuff and calcite renewable in the first place, and obtainable at all in GoG.
Maybe it would have been better to add tuff to the 1.8 cycle (it's roughly the same type of stone, even if the game generates it in a different area of the world), while calcite could be alchemized from bone blocks or something like that. (Deepslate itself already has a renewable way to obtain it by purifying endstone, which can be created from overworld stones via ender air.)
All the conjuration recipes that fight with piglin bartering over which is the better source of the corresponding material. Quartz, gravel, soul sand, and nether brick (instead of duping and smelting netherrack) can be bartered, and maybe Botania should be aiding that process somehow.
There's a snowball conjuration recipe. Considering you can generate snow in any place that supports water, and keep snow golems alive in any non-hot biomes, making snow balls should probably be a matter of breaking snow blocks without silktouch, or allowing horn/drum of the gathering to produce them as they break snow layers.
There is a recipe for conjuring coal (probably to make coal blocks renewable for the Rune of Fire). That would probably have been more interesting as an alchemy recipe to convert charcoal into coal.

As far as the player kill loot issue is concerned, spider eyes are technically already obtainable with Botania by running a witch farm or raid farm, but I guess those require player presence or even involvement. Botania doesn't make any guarantees that its automation doesn't need a player nearby, such as with the Life Imbuer or Loonium, which currently still let the mobs despawn instantly. (There has been a suggestion how to amend their functionality to work around that issue, and I will look into that after finishing the Loonium makeover.)

There was also a suggestion to have the Livingwood Avatar's kills with a Rod of the Unstable Reservoir count as player kills, and this should potentially extend to the Rod of the Hells as well. But maybe instead of making that a rod-specific thing, there could be a separate Dreamwood Avatar that does that, and potentially uses he other rods in slightly more efficient ways in exchange for a somewhat higher mana usage. That way you'd get to choose.

artemis

I like that heisei dream idea