I've tried this as part of Asuna and I created a table, set the focus and just researched stone pickaxes. Got to level 10 and now I can make endless picks (until they become obsolete when I find metal).
The reason I give this a neutral is because in essence you can unlock infinite resources of something that you already have TONS of which seems rather pointless. If I have one rare item I'd love to be able to duplicate... well I can't since I've only got one or very few hard to come by items.
So you can dup stuff which you already have lots of. I don't see the point. If I've missed the point please let me know!
If I can suggest a makeover it would be to change it to a random chance to make a discovery (Eureka!) so that gamblers can always take a shot at winning the lottery by researching their only diamond or mese crystal. Sounds more fun than just plugging in whole string of some item until you reach the goal. It was rather a let down.
P.S. I've played with this some more on the Asuna Server and discovered that it works rather well IF you research the right things... True you still need a few hundred to be able to do it (a critical mass so to speak) but I found that better targets are basic building materials. Even cobblestone (which everyone can research unless they don't mine at all) is worth it. Still better are items such as steel ingots and sticks. Get to lvl 10 on those and you will never run out of steel tools. This can eventually of course be repeated with mese and then diamond once you have amassed enough of them. Because it rewards researching similar items it is actually wise to start out with cheap common materials like cobblestone because that node is part of the cracky and the stone groups. Start with cobble and some other rocks and then obsidian will be easier when you get enough of it.
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!
I've tried this as part of Asuna and I created a table, set the focus and just researched stone pickaxes. Got to level 10 and now I can make endless picks (until they become obsolete when I find metal). The reason I give this a neutral is because in essence you can unlock infinite resources of something that you already have TONS of which seems rather pointless. If I have one rare item I'd love to be able to duplicate... well I can't since I've only got one or very few hard to come by items. So you can dup stuff which you already have lots of. I don't see the point. If I've missed the point please let me know!
If I can suggest a makeover it would be to change it to a random chance to make a discovery (Eureka!) so that gamblers can always take a shot at winning the lottery by researching their only diamond or mese crystal. Sounds more fun than just plugging in whole string of some item until you reach the goal. It was rather a let down.
P.S. I've played with this some more on the Asuna Server and discovered that it works rather well IF you research the right things... True you still need a few hundred to be able to do it (a critical mass so to speak) but I found that better targets are basic building materials. Even cobblestone (which everyone can research unless they don't mine at all) is worth it. Still better are items such as steel ingots and sticks. Get to lvl 10 on those and you will never run out of steel tools. This can eventually of course be repeated with mese and then diamond once you have amassed enough of them. Because it rewards researching similar items it is actually wise to start out with cheap common materials like cobblestone because that node is part of the cracky and the stone groups. Start with cobble and some other rocks and then obsidian will be easier when you get enough of it.
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!