The enchanting system right now is mostly fine, bar the obvious potato exploit, and even the wood cauldron recipes in general. Before I continue I'd like to say that at first, while I was a bit critical of RealisticBiomes, I've since changed my opinion (although I do retain some of my original criticisms--that's not important). It's been an extremely fun 2.5 weeks with everyone I've played with, and part of that fun is RealisticBiomes, it adds a layer of cooperation that was previously missing from Civcraft.

Regarding the XP debate, I personally think that it should be near impossible to gear up a dozen, or more players with Prot 4. It should take the cooperation of 30-40 people working hard over weeks, and possibly months. Wasn't that the original idea behind FactoryMod? Someone who has been toiling away for months at a time should have an advantage over someone who just came to the server. Not to mention, the biome component adds a massive logistical component to Civcraft. Logistics is integral to the brick and mortar economy, and it makes sense that it has a place in the virtual one, as well.

So, if we want to balance XP, we must first look at the problems plaguing the system currently in use.

• A single person can match the XP output of a massive city.

This is obviously a huge lack of oversight and should be fixed immediately.

• The quantitative valuations of different resources in the current configuration are extremely off.

Take wheat or potatoes for example, they have persistent growth, and the clay investment is only a minor increase in efficiency, given the amount of land that is in a biome. Carson's extreme hills biome that currently houses our auto-harvest potato farm is maybe 200x200 blocks. If I really wanted to, I could flatten the entire area, and plant a farm without clay underneath it, and the amount of work I've saved by increasing the scale of the farm FAR outweighs the hassle of finding clay, digging out the area under the crops, and placing the clay under each block. The only investment in the non-clay approach, is an initial investment in time, a few dozen picks/shovels/hoes, a water bucket or two, and seeds. The fact that persistent farms can be increased in scale to counterbalance the capital investment of clayed crops lends yet another advantage to a single player over a coordinated group of players. In other words, claying crops is a luxury, but for a single player, the opportunity cost is way too high.

Solution: Crops that have persistent growth should be valued far less than those that have strict upper limits due to game mechanics. This also serves as a solution to the opportunity cost issues in regards to hermit XP producers.

• Current XP recipes don't account for the intrinsic utility of each biome.

Some resources are extremely over-utilized in the XP recipes, given their subjective difficulty. For example, Carson has a mega AFK-Cactus farm. It has literally pushed the limit of production because of how chunk loading works. In the desert biome, cactus is pretty much the only thing that can be grown efficiently there, and for some reason the XP recipe wants twice as much cactus as bread, which is a persistently growing crop that scales basically infinitely. That makes no sense. Crops that have obvious limitations, like cactus, should have a less prominent role in XP recipes, and resources from biomes that provide high utility (Jungle/Plains) should be featured more prominently. It's entirely overpowered that so much stuff can be grown in a jungle biome, literally 90% of Carson's utility (In regards to XP) comes from two biomes--biomes in which nearly all the ingredients grown are persistent.

There should be obvious benefits to civilizations that are able to maintain a presence on every biome, and effectively instate a logistics network between each. Currently, the XP recipes favor a tiny handful of massively overvalued biomes.

Solution: Resources from biomes that provide a lot of benefit (Jungles/Plains) should be valued way less than they currently are, and resources from biomes that only provide niche benefits (Deserts/Hell) should be buffed.

• Metrics, like how long it takes to cook resources in a factory don't matter.

Let's be serious here, the amount of time spent cooking food in a bakery doesn't matter.

Solution: Normalize cooking times across all factories, and make this a non-issue.

I've gotta run, and I forgot a few things, but in general, that's the gist of it. I'd also add that we need some way to recover our diamond investment in armor that inevitably gets crappy enchants, but the major issue really is the valuation of different resources/biomes.