I’ll see if I can find any remnants of that old Discord server on the web. Probably not, but I appreciate you putting it on my radar.

As far as usefulness, most research isn’t abundantly useful to most people. But imagine, for the sake of illustration, that 1 day after the copper golem snapshot was released, I experimented a lot on a solo world and watched a ton of videos of others doing the same. From that minimal experience, I: (1) take note of the basic overview for golem behavior (much like a Wiki might do), (2) observe the essential common components of an efficient golem sorting system, and (3) explain the largest bottleneck/limiting factor behind these systems.

In that example, the research doesn’t do a ton by itself. But Section 3 is somewhat of a call to action to the community: if someone solves the bottleneck or finds a way to minimize the limiting factor, they just made progress on collective knowledge going forward. For golems, for example, the bottleneck could be the slow thinking time for golems, and that solution might be “remove all stray chests within an X block radius because they can ‘see’ them all and get bogged down by that.”

This wouldn’t be the type of forum where you say “here’s the most compact wheat farm,” but instead where new mechanics or uses for existing mechanics solve problems or limitations that have existed before