FAQ for Modpack Authors

This page contains important questions related to the use of Thermal Recycling in a modpack. As a former server owner and pack author I certainly understand the concern recycling conjures up in terms of exploits or an easy path to resources. I had these thoughts in mind when creating this mod and I hope that I did enough in terms of design and features to help reduce or mitigate the chances of these things occurring.

How does Thermal Recycling mitigate duping of items?

Duping in this case is enabling some sort of processing cycle between Thermal Recycling and other machines in order to produce infinite supply of resources. Thermal Recycling helps mitigate this by:

• Scanning the output resource list for a Thermal Recycler recipe to ensure that the input items is not present. You can see this by trying to recycle the Thermal Expansion Creative Energy Cell. Without this feature the Recycler would have the recipe Creative Energy Cell => Creative Energy Cell + Signalum Lock, meaning that it could be an infinite source of Signalum Locks. With this feature the recipe becomes Creative Energy Cell => Signalum Lock.
• Sometimes there are multiple recipes for items with varying quantities of output. Example, there may be two crafting recipes that can be used to produce wood planks. One recipe produces 4 planks, and the other 6 planks. During the Forge recipe scan operation the mod logic would favor the 6 plank recipe. The Thermal Recycler recipe would require 6 planks as input, and produce whatever the corresponding crafting recipe required as input.
• Some items are automatically scrubbed from recipe output. Things like buckets of water and lava need to be scrubbed because it would be a source of free iron.
• Even with the above safeguards things are not perfect. For example, ExtraTiC has gear recipes for the smelter that require 4 ingots of the applicable metal. With BuildCraft or Thermal Expansion the gear would normally require an additional metal ingot. It was possible to craft ExtraTiC gears, and then recycle them as if they were BC or TE gears thus getting an extra ingot. Specific code had to be added to the Thermal Recycling mod to detect his situation and ensure the Thermal Recycler recipe for gears used the ExtraTiC version.
• With MineTweaker recipes can be created by the modpack author to correct any duplication scenario. The wooden plank and gear scenario mentioned above could have been written as a MineTweaker script. The Thermal Recycling mod will not replace Recycler recipes created by MineTweaker scripts. Note that these scripts can be written at any time and placed on a server. (If a dupe situation does come up I want to hear about it. Create an Issue in the tracker and I will see about making direct fixes within the mod.)