Guide book?
Issue: Guide Book Recipe
I don't get Cyclic
I dig Cyclic...mostly.
I like the anvil that can repair items. The charms (of course). The inexpensive & simple "push mobs away" thing. In one of the Stoneblocks it was the only "pipe" I could use to get lava out of crucibles (making using lava to generate RF a piece of cake and easy to scale). There's probably a 2-7 more items in that mod that are "This is great! How could I play without it?".
But at the same time I think it needs a touch of tweaking. You are right, it's a bit chaotic. The drops are a touch too common. Some things are a bit too overpowered.
I recall making a modpack recently and purposefully excluding it - then realizing how much I missed some of the things it does - then added it and felt a little, and this is too strong a word but, dirty.
More on reddit.comHow to power cyclic mod items?
Alternatively, use the magma anvil from cyclic instead. Repairs items with lava instead of energy.
More on reddit.comVideos
I have not yet had a deep dive into Cyclic, but what little I've seen seems a scattershot of random tools and buffs, that are all just a little bit janky. It feels unpolished on first encounter, with a cake that makes me grow an extra inventory that's inconvenient to access, or something that looks like a scythe head strapped to a blaze rod.
I obviously don't get it, and I don't want to just dislike or dismiss it out of turn, indeed some lavish praise on the Charms. What is it about Cyclic, what's it for, and what do you think of it?
I dig Cyclic...mostly.
I like the anvil that can repair items. The charms (of course). The inexpensive & simple "push mobs away" thing. In one of the Stoneblocks it was the only "pipe" I could use to get lava out of crucibles (making using lava to generate RF a piece of cake and easy to scale). There's probably a 2-7 more items in that mod that are "This is great! How could I play without it?".
But at the same time I think it needs a touch of tweaking. You are right, it's a bit chaotic. The drops are a touch too common. Some things are a bit too overpowered.
I recall making a modpack recently and purposefully excluding it - then realizing how much I missed some of the things it does - then added it and felt a little, and this is too strong a word but, dirty.
Cyclic has a lot of cool functionality, often for quite a bit cheaper than other mods. I used the Ender Book for cheap teleportation, the Igniter/Firestarter to automate Grains of Infinity, and the Powered Anvil to repair stuff for cheap. I also played around with the building scepter some time ago, and it's pretty nifty.
But there's something about it that bothers me as well and I'm not sure what it is. It might be that Cyclic doesn't really have an identity of its own beyond "that mod with cool toys". Contrast with Quark, which is Vanilla+, or EU, which has Grid Power and automation options. It's close to Random Things in that regard.
There are a lot of cool toys like the staffs that shoot various projectiles, but they're not gated behind anything beyond their recipes. In this modding ecosystem, with stuff like Thaumcraft, BM, or Astral Sorcery with their tier systems, that might stand out moreso than if they were released in, for example, Beta 1.7.3.
The art might benefit from some polish, since it draws so heavily from vanilla textures but uses them in a way that's just different enough from vanilla. It feels like programmer art, which to be fair it probably is. The RF battery is implemented weirdly in that last I checked there isn't a way to control the I/O except from within the GUI. Finally, the whole "right-click on the item in your inventory" is a mechanic that just doesn't exist in other mods. It might just be a weirdness overload to have all these things at once especially since there's no gating system to ease you into it, and people don't put Cyclic chapters in their quest books.
So I think Cyclic has this feel of being both weird and familiar at the same time, and so most people overlook how powerful it is when making packs. I'm not going to stop using it anytime soon. I wouldn't mind an art update, but that's secondary to it working well.