Sadly it pretty much kills any interest in playing survival. I don't like creative mode. Sure it's fine for testing things or if you're a master builder but for me I like the struggle. Striking a rich motherlode should be exhilarating, not boring. It's disheartening when you have researched mese and as you mine you come upon some and realize I don't need this. The world becomes a bland place.
(This is version 3 of my review - hopefully the final revision!)
I'm sorry it was a bit disappointing for you. The main idea behind Researcher is that it puts an upper limit on how much you'll ever need to farm/grind for any item in the world. Building is a good example of an endeavor where you'll need tons of material and even though the building materials may be common, Researcher will grant you a truly limitless supply of building materials for you to build as much as you want as long as you do the research first. This is also true of rare materials that you may only ever find in small quantities; once you find enough of something, you'll never have to hunt for it ever again.
A random chance for greater gains might be a fun idea, like a burst of inspiration that would randomly give larger gains in research. There are already research discounts for items that are known to be more limited (i.e., not found in mapgen, not craftable, or smaller max stack size), but that doesn't really cover items that meet that criteria but are still relatively rare (e.g., diamonds or mese).
I may circle back on this at some point but for the most part I feel that it achieves its goal of encouraging exploration and rewarding players who focus on researching specific items. Feel free to tinker with the mod settings in the meantime as different settings can dramatically change how much research you need to do for each item. It's hard to please everyone with the default settings. In fact, someone in another review thinks that the starting values should be 10x what they currently are! I encourage everyone to tweak settings to make the values as comfortable as they can be for them.
In any case, thank you for taking the time to review this mod! Every review helps me understand how people feel about my works and I always appreciate it!
Sadly it pretty much kills any interest in playing survival. I don't like creative mode. Sure it's fine for testing things or if you're a master builder but for me I like the struggle. Striking a rich motherlode should be exhilarating, not boring. It's disheartening when you have researched mese and as you mine you come upon some and realize I don't need this. The world becomes a bland place.
(This is version 3 of my review - hopefully the final revision!)
I'm sorry it was a bit disappointing for you. The main idea behind Researcher is that it puts an upper limit on how much you'll ever need to farm/grind for any item in the world. Building is a good example of an endeavor where you'll need tons of material and even though the building materials may be common, Researcher will grant you a truly limitless supply of building materials for you to build as much as you want as long as you do the research first. This is also true of rare materials that you may only ever find in small quantities; once you find enough of something, you'll never have to hunt for it ever again.
A random chance for greater gains might be a fun idea, like a burst of inspiration that would randomly give larger gains in research. There are already research discounts for items that are known to be more limited (i.e., not found in mapgen, not craftable, or smaller max stack size), but that doesn't really cover items that meet that criteria but are still relatively rare (e.g., diamonds or mese).
I may circle back on this at some point but for the most part I feel that it achieves its goal of encouraging exploration and rewarding players who focus on researching specific items. Feel free to tinker with the mod settings in the meantime as different settings can dramatically change how much research you need to do for each item. It's hard to please everyone with the default settings. In fact, someone in another review thinks that the starting values should be 10x what they currently are! I encourage everyone to tweak settings to make the values as comfortable as they can be for them.
In any case, thank you for taking the time to review this mod! Every review helps me understand how people feel about my works and I always appreciate it!