Feature Request: Please change the Black Hole!

[goldrat1]

This is a long one.

Three months ago, I was in a Discord call with several of the players on my modded Minecraft server when one of them started to yell. They had broken all of their storage chests in an effort to transfer it all into an RS system. Unfortunately for them, one of these chests was dedicated to items from Forbidden and Arcanus. They were now yelling because they were watching as several double-chests worth of items, collected over the course of an entire month, were being sucked up into a Black Hole that had, from their perspective, appeared out of nowhere. There was nothing they could do but frantically attempt and fail to pick up the thousands of items that were being deleted due to no fault of their own. We now know, of course, that this was because a Corrupti Dust and some Dark Matter were ‘dropped’ in the vicinity of each other. We did not know this at the time, because there was no in-game indication or warning that this was the case, nor that storing these items near each other could lead to a breakdown of the time-space continuum. So I could only console my friend, who was now staring at his screen dumbfounded, stating that he was seriously contemplating leaving the server after this. How could I blame him? He watched a month of progress go up in smoke and there was probably nothing we could do.

Extremely fortunately for him, there was. The server’s autosave was set to ten minutes, so some quick thinking and a purposeful server crash later, I managed to rollback the server world to a point before he had broken the chests, and a valuable lesson was learned. A lesson; that if you’re going to make a mod, and you have an extremely destructive mechanic that can potentially delete massive amounts of progress from a player, you do NOT MAKE IT SO YOU CAN ACTIVATE THAT MECHANIC ON ACCIDENT.

Other people have not been as lucky as my friend. I really like the visual design and the idea of the black hole, but this is, in my opinion, an unintuitive and dangerous way of creating it. Dropping items on the ground? Useful for making Charged Certus Crystal. Not for making an item-sucking gravitational-anomaly void-bin. I have no doubt that many people have lost tens if not hundreds of hours worth of items from this.

It would be bad if it was just a dangerous mechanic, but to add insult to injury the only reason to make a black hole is to create Xpetrified Orbs. You can mine Xpetrified Orbs, by the dozens. Hundreds of you have a good amount of Fortune. It makes even less sense when you consider how rare Edelwood/Dark Matter is by comparison. Why is such a cool-looking, expensive and dangerous mechanic being used to make something that you can find sitting in the gravel under your house?

The Black Hole is still a fine feature, and I’m sure it plays a role in skyblock progression or something, but I propose that the creation of it should be very direct and as accident-proof as possible. Maybe by crafting it like you would any other item, maybe by adding tooltips to Dark Matter/Corrupti Dust to explicitly spell out the threat, maybe by making a Dark Matter Block or something and right-clicking it with Corrupti Dust like you would to make a Forge. There really ought to be a better way than this.

Love the mod, I hope to use it more for my next servers, and to be very very careful with my storage systems.

[stal111]

Hi, thanks for the feedback.

In future versions the Xpetrified Ore will be removed -> The Black Hole is going to be the only way to obtain Xpetrified Orbs.

I agree that we could change the way of creating a black hole to make it safer, but I'd like to hear more opinions on which new way of creating would be preferred. A simple crafting recipe is not possible as there is no black hole item.

[goldrat1]

Ah, makes sense for future progression.

Surely a crafting recipe is possible, no? If the black hole is a block (I don’t remember) add an item for the block, if it’s an entity then add an item to summon it like a spawn egg. In my mind it’d be combining the dust and the dark matter to make a ‘Singularity’ item or something of the sort, place that down and it’ll make a black hole. the point is really just to make so there’s no way you can accidentally make a black hole, you ought to know what you’re doing before it spawns.