Comment by mitander

Small clarification: I don’t mean optimizing buildcraft in the Path of Building sense, as in searching the space of possible gear/tree/support setups and finding the best upgrade.

I mean the engine-side representation problem after the player already has a concrete setup.

So the “compiler” part is closer to:

equipped skills/supports/items/statuses -> emitted modifier/behavior rows -> dirty derived caches -> runtime facts consumed by combat

The output is not “the optimal build.” The output is things like increased damage, more multipliers, pierce count, area radius delta, conversion rules, status payloads, etc.

I agree that global build optimization quickly becomes a much harder and more human-guided problem. I’m mostly interested in how to keep normal runtime resolution from becoming a giant matrix of skill/support/item/status branches.