Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
I'm just gonna poke at this one piece. So, it sounds to me like the A->B->C->D chain was supposed to represent no significant Agency, but I have a question: What if A, B, C, and D are ends in and of themselves, not just means? Even if that's the only possible build structure (or the only build choices ever made), I feel there's Agency in choosing to use B, vs crafting it into C. Like if Mithral Ore can be smelted into Mithral Bars, which are turned into Mithral Rings, which you can used to craft Mithral Chain... and people can place Mithral Ore blocks to build stuff, and stack Mithral bars to make pretty displays, and wear Mithral Rings as jewelry (OK, Minecraft doesn't really support this) in addition to making Mithral Chain, and people do all of these, that sounds like a choice. Or are you saying that those would be represented differently, as [A, A->B, A->B->C, A->B->C->D], rather than all lumped together as A->B->C->D?
If they're ends in themselves that's one thing, but in the case of the actual examples I'm thinking of (from mods like Immersive Engineering and the like) there are lots of these things that are just inventory entities that you can't even place in the world. So like, once you've made a 'bucket of creosote' or 'a pile of iron dust', it doesn't actually do anything until you do two specific following steps. You have to wash the iron dust to get refined iron dust, then melt the refined iron dust into iron nuggets, then smelt the iron nuggets into iron bars. There's no branch points and the intermediates don't show up in any other crafting recipes and can't be placed in the world, so you've basically said 'my goal is to have iron bars' and the mod just expands that production pathway into extra steps. That first choice to make the iron dust is the only agentic choice in that process (because otherwise maybe you could have placed the iron ore as a decoration, or smelted it directly, or something like that).

There are agentic choices enabled by the existence of that process, namely, do you build all of those machines to get 3 iron bars from 1 ore, or do you just use the base game smelter to get 1 for 1? But that choice happens once, whereas this production pathway you're doing over and over (though to be fair, the kinds of mods that have these things are intended to all be automated).

So this way you could see that 'ah, the choice to make iron dust tells me about the player and their context, but the choice to wash the iron dust doesn't actually provide me any additional information. Maybe I can add some other recipe that uses the iron dust to go some other direction, like alloy it with coal dust to make steel?'

Actually now that I think about it, at least one of this family of mods does let you diverge iron dust into a recipe for steel, so huzzah for that! There are a lot of these kinds of mods and honestly they all blend together for me by now (last time I played modded Minecraft, there were like three separate 'copper ore' entities that you had to get a separate mod to make them interchangeable...).