Survival Industry is a sandbox challenge tech pack, meaning that it is a sandbox game (not using Hardcore Quest Mode) with technical mods that is designed to be more challenging than usual, while attempting to avoid the clichés currently in force in the modpack landscape.
Monsters are more aware, more varied, and more cooperative. They can spawn in groups, travel in groups, and work in groups.
You will need to sleep; staying awake for more than two days can take its toll on you. And sleeping doesn't prevent monsters from spawning; while you sleep, the world will continue to go on, even if at a faster rate. If you're not inside shelter, you can expect to be killed.
Hunger is more than merely a mechanic; you need to eat to survive. Food is less filling, and you need to eat more than one thing. The only hope of keeping yourself fed enough to progress is to take advantage of advanced recipes that provide significant increases to your hunger satisfaction; eating crops will suffice, but not for long.
Mining is a much bigger challenge. The mining progression has six stages, from wood to diamond, rather than the three present in vanilla. Ores are not sprinkled about, but concentrated in veins. You will have to look for them; they won't just be where you mine.
Technology is a mental challenge. This isn't a redstone flux pack; you will need to learn a simplified form of mechanical (and eventually nuclear) engineering to progress through to the endgame
However, with all these challenges, you are not without your own advantages.
You are not required to fight the monsters right away; items normally collected from mobs can be found or crafted using alternative materials collected from nature. And when you need to fight, you will have stronger weapons, as well as the ability to carry and use a shield to take hits for you. You also can take a small amount of temporary damage, which can quickly heal back up without affecting you at all.
You are given a sleeping bag to begin the game, and with several ways to collect and make wool (or its closest equivalent), you should quickly be able to make a bed for yourself. And as long as you have shelter, nothing can get to you.
Wild gardens are plentiful, and spawn all over the place. The number of crops are legion, both in farmable form, and in tree-grown form. You can mutate crops to make seeds you might not otherwise have, and can strengthen crops to always get the maximum yield. And there's a plethora of advanced recipes to keep you fed and satisfied.
Flowers spawn to indicate the location of key ores (and using bone meal can give hints to the ores' depth), and massive caves sometimes spawn in the earth that you can explore to find exposed veins of ore. Mining a single vein can result in multiple stacks of ore once you've exhausted it. And you won't be able to reach the end without actually making it to the end, as all End Portals have eroded down into cobblestone.
The engineering knowledge required is a heavily-simplified form of real-world engineering skills; if you know how to multiply and divide using a calculator, you should have all the skills necessary to learn the system. And the technology has no limits. Once you reach the minimum requirements, increasing shaft speed will always increase the speed of the machines attached to it (except in the case of heat generation, but that just requires an increase in power). There are machines that can do just about everything, from farming, to mining, to base construction, to base defense. Power ranges from the minuscule DC Electric Engine to the immense output of a nuclear fusion reactor. You can tweak your genes, or convert useless junk into priceless materials. You can automate just about anything.
And as for the End... you can now make your very own End Portal once you advance far enough. Indistinguishable from magic, indeed.
So grab your sleeping bag, make your stone tools, and begin your journey. Because you're up to the challenge. And once you get started, you're more than capable of establishing your very own Survival Industry.
This modpack operates under a number of important rules.
Maintain a good balance between hardcore and casual gameplay. "Challenge" should be an accurate description.
Provide the player with several tiers of play, as a way to encourage the player to expand their abilities and improve themselves without jumping straight to the endgame.
Provide sufficient rewards at the endgame to make the challenge worth the effort.
Limit the mods to provide one block per function. This isn't always strictly adhered to, but it is close enough to avoid the "Kitchen Sink Pack" designation.
Avoid using Redstone Flux as the primary power mechanic. This is also a hit-or-miss proposition, but unlike most modpacks, this is not your usual "Redstone Flux" pack with Thermal Expansion, EnderIO, and MineFactory Reloaded. The main tech mods are centered around RotaryCraft, and all power generation not provided by RotaryCraft is disabled for this pack.
The modpack has five tiers of play, each gated behind a specific material. Unlike most modpacks, these materials are not determined by the random number generator; they are behind your ability to build youself and your base to the point that the material can be collected and/or made.
To this end, I provide this recipe, so that other people who want to make modpacks can have an idea as to what they need to consider when designing a pack.
Prerequisites
This contains all the prerequisite mods; those mods that are needed for other mods to work. Obviously, You want to keep them separate, since they may be required for mods in more than one category. An example would be DragonAPI for RotaryCraft, ElectriCraft, and ReactorCraft (In the Industrial Age's "Shaft Power" folder, and Expanded Redstone in the "Game-Wide & Agrarian Age/Game Balance/Mitigation" folder) I won't bother listing the mods, since they can sometimes change based on who takes over what project, and whether a new companion mod is used.
Game-Wide & Agrarian Age
These mods are designed to be used from the very beginning of the game. Oftentimes, they will be used throughout the entire game, so while I can refer to them as "Agrarian Age" mods, to identify the game's stage in which they are most useful, they are going to be relevent even after moving onto other stages in the game.
Game Balance Mods
These mods are essentially split into two categories: Challenges, or mods that increase the difficulty of the game, and Mitigation, or mods that provide ways to make the challenges easier to handle. These are the key two categories, in which the game's difficulty balance is maintained.
Challenges
We begin with the challenges. These challenges are themselves split into four categories: Game mechanics, Hunger and Health, Mob Tweaks, and Mining.
Game Mechanics
Game mechanics are usually things involving the creation of a game element that the player has to handle; a change in the way the game works.
Harder Wildlife is a mod that adds a lot of things to the game. Animals will breed on their own, age, and die. Trees will eventually die, their trunks will become compost (which you can collect), which will then become grass blocks, and their saplings will auto-plant. Other non-crop plants, such as cacti and sugarcane, will self-plant if scattered about. Seasons exist in the game, and the world temperature will rise and fall as dictated by the time of the year (which is 128 minecraft days by default, with 32 days for each season). The temperature change will not be as drastic to plants and machines when indoors, so making a greenhouse can allow a somewhat more consistent crop yield.
Random Things actually provides a lot of features, but for the challenges, you can't get more challenging than the Blood Moon. This is an event that has, by default, a 5% chance of happening each night. During the blood moon, all lights take on a red tint, the sky turns completely black, the moon is red (duh), there is a black fog obscuring vision, and mobs will spawn in greater numbers, and much more closely to you (within 3 blocks if there is a spawn point)... with an increased chance of being on the attack (rather than just wandering around). In the configuration for this pack, the chances have been reduced to 2%.
By default, hostile mobs are easy to avoid with a bed. Go to sleep before it's dark enough to spawn hostile mobs, and you will skip right to the morning, without a single hostile mob in sight. With Somnia, you can still sleep through the night, but instead of jumping to morning, time just passes by much more quickly. Processes will still continue while you sleep, mobs will still spawn and roam, and if they can reach you, they will attack you in your bed. This means that you will need to make a shelter before you sleep, in order to make sure you're protected while sleeping.
Hunger & Health
In vanilla minecraft, food is little more than a speedbump. Collect a stack of steaks, and you're good for a long, long while. However, in this pack, three mods will stop this mechanic from being so easily ignored.
Hunger in Peace closes the Peaceful Mode loophole. If you go to peaceful mode, monsters will still despawn, but you will not regenerate like vanilla, and your hunger will continue to tick away until it is gone. In essence, Peaceful Mode is no longer the overpowered "panic button" it used to be, even though it's still the panic button option for dealing with hostile mobs.
Hunger Overhaul makes complex recipes more worthwhile. Simple ingredients provide only the most minimum hunger satisfaction in the game. To get more hunger and saturation with each bite, you need to combine those ingredients into larger recipes. You can survive on nothing but crops, mind you, but there will be almost no saturation, which means you'll become hungry again in short order. This mod also lengthens the crop growth time, and reduces the effectiveness of bonemeal on crop growth. When combined with harder wildlife's seasons, farming becomes a very important mechanic that you can't afford to put off, and requires more than a token effort.
The Spice of Life closes the "one-food" loophole. Each time you eat the same food, it will be less satisfying, until you reach a point where it doesn't do any good. You need to mix up your food, making different recipes in order to make sure the food is having its maximum effect. To make it easier to keep a good variety on hand, the paper lunch bag and the iron lunch box are available; they have 3 (for the bag) or 6 (for the box) slots that can hold a stack of 2 food each. Right-clicking a chest with an open bag or box will fill it with random recipes that have the most effect at that time.
Mob Tweaks
Mobs are pretty predictable, which means they're not very threatening. Zombies can be guaranteed to only hurt you when in range, and can be counted on to take the shortest safe path to reach you. Skeletons will shoot arrows. Creepers make no sound, except when they're hurt or about to blow, and that's pretty much all they do. Spiders are pretty much 1-block-high climbing zombies. They only have one effect: take damage when they hit. Witches and cave spiders are an exception to this, in that they can poison you, but that's the only variation in a pretty straightforward opposition.
And if they're not actively chasing you, they are completely random.
Four mods changes all this. Taken together, these mods provide what is known as "Emergent AI," in which the end result of all these different mods is that mobs move in ways that can seem intelligent, almost conscious, and with a much more effective end result.
Zombie Awareness is the first part of this quartet. With Zombie Awareness, several mob types (not just zombies) will wander in the direction of lights, sounds, and the smell of a wounded player (signified by splotches of blood on the ground dropped by the player). This effect only happens when the mobs are in "wander mode," in which they are not actively pursuing or targeting a player. Because of this awareness, mobs will generally congregate over time to significant areas. Can you say "horde mode?"
Special AI is the second part of this quartet. This allows mobs to spawn with various behavior patterns, beyond the same old "target player and try to hit them". Some mobs will suddenly charge at the player at high speed. Some can jump toward the player. The shaman can heal all hostile mobs in his area. The thrower can pick up other hostile mobs and throw them at you (or pick you up and throw you in the direction of a group of hostile mobs). There's even one type of mob that will wear a spawner on its head; it has a lot of hitpoints, and can spawn other mobs in the dark. Together with a shaman, these mobs can give you a very bad day... especially since they don't burn up in the sun. Sometimes, zombies will carry bows and skeletons will use their hands... or even a weapon.
Some behaviors also exist for all mobs, regardless of their individual behavior patterns. mobs that are taking damage will "call for help," attracting other mobs in the area to where they are. Some will look for a mountable creature to ride, while others are rideable. A passive griefing behavior exists, in that all hostile mobs will, when not actively targeting a player (in "wander mode"), break things like doors, beds, and light sources (and remember, they're attracted to light sources in wander mode). In the case of creepers, they'll explode next to anything they want to grief.
The behaviors do not just affect hostile mobs. Passive creatures will defend themselves and their pack when attacked, similar to the way Zombie Pigmen act. Villagers will grow to dislike players who damage their homes, and eventually attack the player if they do enough damage.
Behaviors are only one part of this. Once the mobs have wandered to where you are and actually found you, they can sometimes have other effects beyond just hitting, thanks to the Special Mobs mod. Hungry mobs will take items from your inventory. Flaming mobs can set you on fire, and do not burn in the sun (although they take damage from water). Plague mobs can poison you (in the case of archers, from a distance). Tough mobs can take a lot of damage, and brutal mobs do a lot of damage. Creepers in particular come in various flavors, including fire, lightning, dirt, gravel, ender, gravity, and even doom and death varieties.
If that's not enough, creepers also have a new mechanic of their own: they stalk. With the Stalker Creepers mod, creepers will follow you until you turn enough for them to be seen on the screen. It is then when they'll actually explode. If you think this is a good thing, let me ask you: how many creepers are following you right now? NO, DON'T LOOK... oooh, better luck next time.
In the end, you have a horde of mobs that will find you based on your activity, whether it's the light of your torches or the sound of your digging. They will have different roles, including tank, healer, DPS, and even enemy control (throwers and "fishermen), which means they can work together to kill you. And when they hit, they can have different status effects, making you even less likely to survive.
Keep in mind that at this point, they're hard, but not impossible. The "call for help" behavior can be used in a trap to get all the mobs trapped (especially if the trap is a mob grinder). Mobs will randomly grief things, but this doesn't happen all the time. Staying under shelter at night means you will not likely encounter anything you can't handle.
If you're a hardcore gamer, and this isn't enough to make you happy, you can always add in "Mutant Creatures" and "Infernal Mobs" for the extra-hard mobs to face... or even mods like Mo'Creatures or Lycanite's Mobs for a real variety.
Mining
The mining is considered a challenge, because the only worldgen mod installed, Custom Ore Generation: First Revival, is designed to rearrange ore to be placed in discrete formations, rather than sprinkled everywhere. This means that ore cannot be easily found simply by digging until you see little clusters; you will have to actively look for the ore you want to mine.
In addition to this, the Survival Industry core mod, a custom mod made specifically for this modpack, is installed, which expands the mining progression by a significant amount. Instead of stone, iron, and diamond, you have to mine (and make pickaxes) in this order: stone, copper, tin (to make bronze), iron (to make steel), and diamond. So, not only do you need to find the ores, you need to mine them in a specific order before you're ready to begin making machines. This mod was created to allow the creation of an expanded mining progression in the absence of Iguana's Tinker Tweaks, due to a lack of support for the 1.7.10 version of Tinker's Construct.
Mitigation
With all this challenge, this game has almost certainly crossed the threshold into hardcore. Now, we need to make sure we cross that threshold back into the vicinity of simply "challenging." Mitigating factors come in several forms: Crafting, Farming, Mechanics, Redstone, Storage, and Worldgen.
Farming
Because hunger has been boosted in this pack, it stands to reason that there should be an expansion of what's available to eat. The default foods might be enough to keep a player going, but it would take a long while to find enough different types of food in vanilla to satisfy "Spice of Life." So having more variety would help mitigate the hunger challenge. And since food's satisfaction value is significantly less than it is by default, we will also need foods that provide a large amount of satisfaction in spite of Hunger Overhaul.
To provide the variety of food needed to survive Spice of Life, we add Pam's HarvestCraft. This mod contains a huge number of crops, and an even larger number of recipes for prepared dishes, some of which requires a large number of steps to complete. The more steps required to complete a recipe, the higher its satisfaction value. In this way, you can have a large number of highly-filling foods, even with Hunger Overhaul and Spice of Life.
Sometimes, however, it's not enough to simply have the crops available. You need to have the crops on a regular basis, which means farming.
Hunger Overhaul does actually help in this regard; the seed-collection mechanic simply requires you to use a hoe on unwatered ground. However, Pam's crops cannot be collected in this way. All throughout the world, however, you can find various "wild gardens" that contain three random crops each. With enough exploration, you can amass a good collection of food and crops to plant for your personal garden. Once you start farming the foods, you can harvest crops from farmland without breaking them by right-clicking on them
Now, the vanilla farming mechanic does provide a good yield, but it's slow and inefficient. Because of Hunger Overhaul, crops take 4 times as long to mature, and bone meal and other fertilizers are less effective than in vanilla. It sure would be nice to have a means of speeding up the harvest, right? And what do you do if a specific recipe calls for a crop you were not able to find up to this point?
Enter AgriCraft. AgriCraft is a mod that allows crop mutation, which can improve the growth speed, strength (resistance to weeds), and yield of crops. A fully-developed seed can grow very quickly, and always provides a yield of 4.
The other main feature of AgriCraft is "crossbreeding." By crossbreeding two crops (putting two crops on each side of a "crosscrop" in the middle with the right soil), you can end up with a third crop. With the right pair of crops, you can have the seed to crops you hadn't been able to locate yet. This can help you finish filling out your garden.
There is also the weed mechanic. However, weeds are a mechanic that can be irritating, and so are turned off in this modpack. Additionally, irrigation is turned off because it can override the growth of vanilla crops, removing the challenges provided by Hunger Overhaul.
Crafting
Several mods include various craftable items that can help mitigate the risk.
OpenBlocks is a grab bag of items that can make things easier. XP drains and showers allow you to store your experience somewhere where you won't lose it when you die. This can be valuable when dealing with death. There is a sleeping bag, which is an important early-game tool to have to keep your fatigue from going too far. And a multiblock portable tank can be useful in storing fluids you will occasionally need to dip into with a bucket from time to time.
OpenBlocks also removes the risk of your items being lost on your death if you are not able to get back to them in time. OpenBlocks provides a grave where all your items are stored. Once you break the grave (in essence, "robbing your own grave), all your items are dropped.
Small Boats provides three alternatives to the basic rowboat you can make as part of the basic vanilla gameplay. The first level is the punt, which is a larger rowboat with a single sail, the second is a whitehall, which is more along the lines of a full sailboat, and a Hoy is a much larger boat that can optionally carry cannon. These boats allow the player to explore the world without worrying about the boat falling apart the moment it hits a squid or lily pad.
Once you get into the game, you'll find that there are a lot of highly-complex crafting projects that provide the maximum benefit; this is especially the case in the early game where food is concerned. Often, a recipe will have one or two sub-recipes required before you can take advantage of the main recipe itself. Ewy's Workshop (a continuation of Steve's Workshop, which seems to be completely abandoned) provides a work table that can have up to four modules, whether they're crafting tables or furnaces. It also extends the efficiency of coal, as the fuel use is twice the time of a vanilla furnace. Once you have the ability to use a friction heater, this table will no longer be as useful for smelting, but with four crafting tables, you can make some pretty complex things without losing place in parent recipes.
The Vegan Option is a way of limiting your interaction with mobs. It provides alternatives to just about every mob drop, short of the dragon egg or the nether star, using vanilla worldgen. You will need to explore the world for this to be useful, but it can be valuable if you don't want to face the hordes at night.
Because of the expanded mining progression, iron will not be available before you need to farm, and farming is the first thing you need to do after establishing your sleeping space. To mitigate this issue, the wooden buckets mod has been added to the pack. This mod allows you to use a wooden bucket to carry water where you want to place it.
Speaking of the mining progression, there is a singular lack of mention of an alloying mechanic so far, which is important for making bronze, which is required before machines can be made. Metallurgy adds the crusher, and Another One Bites the Dust allows all ores to be dusted for alloying. However, there are two more options that are custom-made for this pack.
Part of the Survival Industry core mod is a mechanic called "Backyard Metalcasting," in which ores are smelted and alloyed in the vanilla furnace using a clay crucible. Crucibles are made using a block of clay and a block of sand, and then the formed crucible is fired in the furnace to make a finished crucible. A crucible can hold two ingots of different metals for alloying, or one block of ore for smelting (smelting ore directly in the furnace has been disabled). Once the filled crucible has been smelted, you then craft the glowing-hot crucible with a sand ingot mold (crafted using simply one block of sand) to make either one (in the case of ore smelting) or two (in the case of alloying) ingots of metal. The sand mold is turned back into sand (broken to reveal the cooled ingots), and the crucible is not lost, so this mechanic is infinitely repeatable without the need for more materials (aside from the metals or ores). However, keep in mind that crucibles cannot stack, so this alloying mechanic is mainly for early-game; anyone wanting larger-scale alloying should look elsewhere.
"Elsewhere," in this case being the RotaryCraft blast furnace, which can also alloy ores without the need for the crucible (a feature provided by the Survival Industry core mod); in this case, you can alloy ores in bulk, and in the case of steel, smelting iron with coal coke (without the sand or gunpowder) will produce low-grade (think "Railcraft" or "Metallurgy") steel ingots, and with gunpowder and at a higher temperature (but still no sand),there is a chance of bonus ingots per batch. Add the sand, and you end up with RotaryCraft's High-grade (HSLA) steel.
Mechanics
With all the difficulties provided, it might help to have some game mechanics to counterbalance them, right? Otherwise, we'll just have a hardcore pack.
By default, you do not have a way to sleep. Sheep will mob you if you hurt one. Starting Inventory mitigates the first night by providing you a sleeping bag from OpenBlocks to sleep. This sleeping bag won't change your spawn, nor will it show the somnia GUI and wake you up at the appropriate time, so making a bed will still be important to long-term survival, but the sleeping bag is a way to reset the fatigue timer.
Harvesting trees can be a hassle. So, Treecapitator has been added to the pack to simplify the tree cutting mechanic. However, it would then make the early-game too easy, since wood is an important item. Thus, Treecapitator is configured to only work with higher-level axes, meaning that you will have to advance to steel before you're ready to chop down whole trees.
The crafting table mechanic is pretty basic. Nine slots to craft things in. However, it would be nice to have a way to rotate the recipe in the table (perhaps you put things in the wrong way), or balance the materials on the table (make it so all placed materials are rearranged to have even amounts), or maybe just a quick way to clear the table without leaving it and dropping everything on the ground. Crafting Tweaks adds three buttons that do just the above, making the crafting table just a little easier to work with.
Originally, this modpack had been designed with Tinker's Construct. However, due to its makers no longer supporting it for Minecraft 1.7.10, the mod and all its addons have been removed from this pack. This meant, however, that features like area of effect weapon strikes and 3x3 mining would no longer be available. To help resolve this, ToolUtilities has been added to the modpack; this mod features upgrades to tools applied through the anvil; with experience and the appropriate ingredient, swords can have area of effect attacks, and pickaxes, shovels, and axes can have 3x1 and 3x3 mining.
Speaking of mining, there is also the fact that anything interrupting your effort to mine something will mean you have to start all over again. Against cobblestone, this isn't a big deal, but what about obsidian? There you are, mining a block of obsidian, and you get accosted by a group of mods. You dispatch them quickly and return to your task, but it's too late... you need to start all over. MultiMine is a mod that mitigates this problem, by making a block wait before slowly repairing itself when left alone. That way, the busy player can defend themselves, and then pick up where they left off once they're back to that block of obsidian. And if more than one player mines the block, it will mine faster!
Finally, you're going to be taking a lot of damage over the course of the game, it would be nice if you can be forgiven for stupid stuff, right? This is where we turn to Natural Absorption. This mod provides an absorption health bar of two hearts (four damage) that will regenerate if you don't take any more damage, similar to how shields in games like Halo and Borderlands work. It won't block anything major, but it is enough to keep you alive if you're down to half a heart in your main bar, and you fall one block too far, or you accidentally bump into a cactus.
Later on, you can enchant your armor, providing an increased number of hearts to your absorption modifier, allowing you to tank hits from entire hordes of mobs... for a time. Trust me, however, even with three full rows of absorption, you won't survive a sustained assault (if you've played games like Halo, then you know what I mean), so make sure you don't do something that will have you in the thick of a mob, especially if you're dealing with pigmen or mobs that affect status (like cave spiders or witches).
The Random Things mod also has mechanics and items that can fit in the mitigations category. There is an increased leaf decay and the ability to use spectre materials to make various things, including spectre glass which you can walk on, but mobs fall through, and the spectre key, which creates a 1-chunk-large personal dimension for you to set up a base, a portal nexus, or just a panic room to recover in.
Redstone
While technology is reserved for the industrial stage, there's no reason that crude machines can't be used in the agrarian age; in the real world, basic wooden machines existed well before the invention of self-powering devices. So, we add redstone technology to the Agrarian age.
First, there's a lot of logic that takes up way too much space by default. For example, a simple toggle takes a 6x6x3 area. Also, redstone paths are nothing more than sprinkling poweder onto the ground in paths. Is this really what we want to use as a signal mechanic? No, not really. Not when Project:Red does it better. Project:Red includes a large collection of logic gates that can be used in place of massive redstone-and-smoothstone structures. It also provides redstone wires that can be placed on the ground, along walls, or even along the ceiling.
Expanded Redstone is also in the pack, mainly as a way to expand world interaction. Block placers, block breakers, configurable redstone clocks, several sensors, line-of-sight wireless redstone, and redstone math devices are a part of what this mod offers, and it expands what redstone can do in the physical world.
Due to the removal of Tinker's Construct, all of its addons had to be removed as well. One player had requested a replacement for the Tinker's Mechworks igniter, so it has been added.
Storage
The lowly chest can be useful, but sometimes, it can be a hassle to deal with. It won't open if the lid is obstructed. It can't be placed next to a double-chest. This can make some unpleasant space issues in storage rooms, since you'll have a lot of empty space with nothing to put in it. And chests can hold a limited number of stacks of items, which can be frustrating if all those stacks are the same item. To sort this whole mess out, we're gonna need a few things.
First of all, larger chests would be nice. And then, it would be nice if they opened in a different direction than just up. And having a cheap storage multiblock would also help. Better Storage provides all this.
With reinforced chests, you can apply other materials to a recipe to make the chest larger on the inside, still able to be doubled, and as a bonus, resistant to explosions. Additionally, the reinforced chests can be locked against player entry, with enchantments that can make the locks harder to pick (or keys more effective against unrelated locks).
Then there's the chest's vertical brother, the locker. With lockers, the door is on the front, rather than the top, and they can be doubled and reinforced as well. And, unlike the vanilla chest, the base locker can be placed immediately next to, and above or below, a double-tall locker, and even embossed into a wall, allowing you to maximize your storage space, and your walkspace as well.
The crate is the randomized multiblock version of the chest. Each crate holds a small amount of stacks, but they are cheap, and can be made into a larger multiblock, meaning their storage spaces are added together. Unlike chests, however, the crate's placement of items in the slots are randomized every time you look inside the crate. There are also no pages to look through; if you don't see something in the UI, then you need to close the UI, right-click the multiblock again, and hope that your intended item is present. As such, the crate is best when used in small sizes.
Sometimes, when dealing with a single item in large amounts (e.g. Cobblestone), you want to have a single storage space that is larger than one stack, without all the extra slots to waste your time. Factorization introduced the barrel, but I really don't want all the extra stuff that mod provides. As such, I chose to use ProfMobius's JABBA mod (Just Another Better Barrel Attempt). This mod provides a barrel that can hold 64 stacks of any material, but only holds that one material. This makes storage and filtering so much easier.
However, the barrel takes a whole block of space for just one item. And while this is justified for the likes of cobblestone, it does not work for smaller-ticket items like rotten flesh, bonemeal, or sand, and eventually, ingots and blocks of metal. Additionally, the barrel requires quite a bit of wood, including a wood slab, a chest, and seven log blocks. This is a lot of wood (just over a half-stack of planks for just one barrel), and can be rather difficult to come by in the early game before automated wood collection, or treecapitator-enabled axes become available.
So, in addition to JABBA, Storage Drawers are also included in the pack. These drawers provide support for multiple barrels in the same space. They don't contain as much, but they don't need to, and they're much cheaper than making barrels for things that don't need that much storage space in the first place... and they help conserve space in the starting player's likely shack-sized first base. Additionally, I've added forestry compatibility to the drawers to make use of the woods that Forestry provides. If you use other mods that provide different trees, it's possible that Storage Drawers includes addons for those mods as well.
Worldgen
I try to avoid worldgen, because Custom Ore Generation already takes up a lot of performance every time the world generates new chunks for the player. This can slow down a game significantly (especially at the beginning), so I do my best not to add new worldgen unless it adds something very specific.
There is one example that I do include, mainly because it's relatively simple, and it mitigates the problem of finding ores. This mod is the Ore Flowers mod, and its sole purpose is to coordinate with Custom Ore Generation to spawn flowers within approximately 30 blocks (horizontally) of an ore vein. This can help the prospecting player to find the desired ores without just randomly casting about with a tunnel.
Another additional feature added to the game to assist in finding ores are caverns. This is actually a configuration for the Custom Ore Generation mod, but what it does is make massive caverns that can be explored to find ore veins; vanilla caves are generally small, and can easily miss veins. Ravines are larger, but narrow enough that they can also miss veins. Caverns, on the other hand, are much larger than caves and wider than ravines, and can intercept veins much more frequently. It does require some casting about to find such a cavern, but once in a while, one can break the surface, allowing a player to enter without having to dig one block. Keep in mind that a lot of torches will be required to light these caverns, however; they easily will require multiple torches just to light everything from one side to the other.
Ore Mods
While Custom Ore Generation is used to place ores, it doesn't actually add any to the game. While ElectriCraft provides copper and tin, it does not provide bronze, nor provide the tools, weapon, and armor that is needed to complete the mining progression.
To this end, Metallurgy is employed. Metallurgy includes the ores, metals, and alloys that can complete the mining progression, and provide armor and tools for each of the metals it supports.
Also, for those players who can make it to the end, Nether Ores can provide additional resources to a player; ores mined in the Nether tend to be more dense, and therefore, yield more ingots than the overworld ores can manage. This is especially the case if the ores are first processed using the grinder or extractor.
Meta Mods
Several mods are included for the sake of the pack itself, and does not neatly fit into any one or two categories.
Default Options is a mod that allows a modpack to be updated without changing a player's settings. This can be a boon for players who have personalized their minecraft experience, whether it's the light level of the game or the fact that they use tab for the inventory screen instead of E. At the same time, if the settings have not been set yet (meaning that the pack is being installed for the first time), the pack will install with the settings custom-tuned to the pack itself.
Java 8 Checker simply causes the game to crash if the player is not playing the game with Java 8; there is simply no reason for using an insecure, unpatched version of Java. And since most launchers will allow you to choose which version of Java to run, this should not hinder people who need an older version of Java for different reasons.
MineTweaker and Mod Tweaker are responsible for most of the melding of the mods, as well as the use of gating materials to prevent early use of the "Mad Science" and "Ender Tech" mods. It alters WAILA Harvestability to show the mining level of ores, it is responsible for the chisel-based overhaul of ztones. It is also what prevents non-RotaryCraft generators from being craftable, or even visible in NEI. Simply put, these two mods are just as important to the pack's cohesion as the Survival Industry core mod is.
Speaking of which, the Survival Industry core mod is another key mod; it controls material and block properties, it has the ability to create custom materials, tools, items, and blocks, and includes a new alloying mechanic that does not even require machines or special ore processing. It also has some interaction with DragonAPI, so that RotaryCraft-based packs can assign alloying recipes to the blast furnace. This mod is currently custom-made for Survival Industry, but JeffPeng plans to make it more generalized for others to use. This is the foundation of the mining progression and the early-game alloying processes.
By default, zombies can sometimes drop iron ingots and redstone, and everyone knows that zombie pigmen can drop gold nuggets. These can short-circuit the progression, so the Mob Properties mod was included to prevent those materials from being dropped.
Finally, the game is not always stable; crashes do happen. So, when they do happen, it's useful to have a good log of the game's events prior to the breakdown. For this reason, OpenEye was included in the pack; if the game crashes while you're playing, then the next time the game loads up, it will report the conditions of the crash, and the events leading up to it, to a server, with plenty of information to identify the mod that's responsible, which mods are included in the issue, and what all mods are installed at the time of the crash.
Cosmetic Mods
These mods are mostly cosmetic, although some provide additional mechanics that can be useful. But, for the most part, these mods are here because they allow a player to decorate their base to be as garish or as tasteful as they desire.
This is basically the sole purpose of the DecoCraft mod; this mod makes a decobench that, when fed clay and colored dyes (rose red, cactus green, and lapis lazuli), it will allow the player to make anything they want, from clocks and chairs to chandeliers and a grand piano. These objects do not need to be placed based on block borders, either. They can be placed in several angles for the best view. And things like the beds and light sources actually perform their intended purposes as well.
Garden Stuff is another strictly-decorative mod. It provides ways to plant multiple flowers in a single block, thereby allowing more decoration in less space. Additionally, full-size flowerpots can be made that can have multiple flowers planted within.
Chisel is another pure decorative mod designed to give blocks fancy carvings that might not otherwise be possible. From bricks, to tiles, to a multiblock tile pattern that can expand to the size of an entire wall, this mod can expand the decoration options immensely. A custom mod adds an additional chisel; a weak one (64 uses) made from flint. This will allow chiseling at an early-game stage, before iron is available.
And then there's Ztones. The blocks it provides are very fancy, and can be used in many ways to really pull of a desired look, whether you're looking to make a pretty castle or a dark fortress of dooooooom. I usually include a mod to make Ztones chiselable, so that I won't need to worry about the more expensive ztone blocks; they will all be made the same way. My preference is Chizzle Z-Tizzle, a script for Minetweaker, which can ensure that I don't need to add another mod, as I already have MineTweaker.
The other mods in this category leave the "strictly decorative" definition, and also include useful items, blocks, or mechanics.
BiblioCraft is one such mod. It can form bookcases that can store any mod manuals you've crafted, reading desks that can also store books in a readable form, and also provides an atlas item, which can hold any number of vanilla maps, and selects between them as appropriate for the location you're in. Additionally, custom books can be formed, including a "redstone book" which can be used in a bookcase to provide a redstone signal, and a working clock with chimes can be fashioned to keep you aware of the time of day. The addition of BiblioWoods can allow BiblioCraft to make use of woods provided by non-vanilla wood mods, such as Forestry.
MrCrayfish's Furniture Mod is a grab-bag of furniture and appliances. The furniture is mostly decorative, but the appliances are definitely functional, including a fire alarm, an oven for cooking, a refrigerator for storing food, and a computer with a printer that can copy enchanted books.
Carpenter's Blocks completely spans the gap between design and function. Carpenter's blocks can be formed into any slope in any direction, and also contain options for doors, torches, safes, buttons, panels, and so on. What really makes this mod functional is that all those items and blocks can have a block applied to them, and they adopt the properties of that block, such as blast resistance, lighting ability, and hardness. Additionally, if using chiseled blocks, these blocks and items can adopt the chiseled textures.
User Interface Mods
The big two interface mods included are pretty much something everyone uses.
Not Enough Items is a combination item list, recipe book, cheating tool, and world information system. This mod is in just about every modpack, and for good reason; people use this to have access to recipes of various blocks, and to see what blocks are available when not in Creative mode. This mod includes its two addons: NEI Addons, and NEI Integration, also for good reason.
WAILA (What am I looking at?) is another major mod that few can afford to not use. This is the mod that produces the tooltip at the top of the player's HUD that shows relevent information, such as a block name, what mod the item is from, or a mob's remaining hitpoints (among many, many other things). Included with WAILA is Waila Plugins and Waila Harvestability.
Another major mod for information purposes is JourneyMap. This is a real-time mapping UI that shows a minimap on the main screen, and has a more detailed view that you can access in-game. This mod can even export the map to a web browser, allowing you to track the known world using a web browser while you play. There is also a server mod that allows servers to limit what information the players will see in their Journeymaps, so there is no risk of players acting on forbidden knowledge.
Dynamic Lights is another example of an information mod, although it might not seem so at first. With this mod, a player can hold a torch and walk around. As long as the torch is in their hand, or even on the ground, the area around the torch (and by extension, the player) will light up as if the torch was placed. This guarantees that the player will be able to navigate through caves using their last torch. It won't however, stop mobs from spawning, though, so be careful. This feature is not limited to torches; custom configurations have been made to add support to almost all blocks that glow when put down, although due to configuration limits, microblocks and openblocks tanks filled with glowing liquid are not supported by this mod.
Not all information is presented on the screen; sound is an often-overlooked source of information for the savvy player. Two mods provide audio cues that help the player track things in the game.
The lighter sound mod is called "Sound Filters." This mod simply adds two filters: an amplification filter that reduces the sound's amplitude and quality with distance (or blocks between the source and the player), and a reverberation simulator that makes caves sound like actual caves.
The larger sound mod is called "MAtmos." This mod has a huge collection of detectors to determine what plays, including the ability to detect the time of day, what blocks are in the player's vicinity, what the weather is like, whether the player is high in the air, at ground level, whether the player is near an ocean biome, whether the player is near a source of laval, and whether the player is indoors, outdoors, or close enough to not matter. All this is factored into the sounds that MAtmos plays, in order to set an atmosphere. For the best results, I've been using three sound resource packs in this order from top down: Rhapsodia, Snowsong, and msi_conversion
All this sound can influence the player without them realizing it; if the player hears lava; they're going to be more careful about digging. If they hear crickets in the daytime, they know that night is coming, and it's time to set up a place to sleep, or return to the cabin. If the player uses a bed other than the vanilla one, it's likely they won't get the Somnia GUI or wake up at the correct time; in this case, listening to the atmosphere will provide aural cues that morning has come, and that they should probably get out of bed. If they hear water dripping indoors or underground, then they're either near a lake, or else it's a subtle sign that it's raining outside. There's a lot of things a player can gather from using their ears, and this mod gives them that extra dimension of information to work with.
Outside of information display, there is also mods that change the user interface for gameplay purposes.
Inventory Tweaks is the most minor, but it is far from the least important change. This mod allows the player to automatically sort what's in their inventory, or in whatever chest they have open at the moment.
Not Enough Keys is an expansion on the controls configuration; it allows the player to export their keybindings, so that if something changes their settings, they can restore them exactly the way the player had them. This also provides the ability to use keybinding modifiers (CTRL/Shift/Alt+key) to expand the keyboard capabilities.
Right-click placement was an issue previously, just after removing Tinker's Construct from the recipe. Two mods were chosen to fill in the holes left by that loss.
The first mod, Mine & Blade: Battlegear 2, provides a dual-wielding mechanic that can allow a player to have a pickaxe in one hand, and a torch in the other... and the player won't even need to keep their main slots occupied for this. The mod also adds shields, a quiver to hold up to four stacks of arrows, and different types of ammunition to give the player some level of control over the amount and kind of damage they do. Just be aware that archery-capable mobs will also be able to use custom arrows as well.
One thing to keep in mind is that Inventory Tweaks auto-replacement needs to be disabled if using Battlegear. Otherwise, the moment it tries to autoreplace a broken tool in a MB slot, the game will crash.
The other mod, a way to replace the need for Battlegear, or the requirement to spend experience to gain right-click placement (through ToolUtilities), is TorchTools, which gives the mechanic by default, exactly the same way that Tinker's Construct provides it.
Server vs. Client
The mods in here can be split into "Client" and "Server." This is because some mods will be using code that only works in a client; servers calling this code will crash. I'll leave the decision of which mods to place in what folder an exercise to the modpacker.
Industrial Age
Once you have the ability to mine and process iron, the self-powered machine becomes a reality. Well, there are redstone devices, but this makes them look like block and tackle by comparison.
Shaft Power
As the central tech mod in this modpack, RotaryCraft contains automation tools for just about every possible task in the game, from mining, to processing, to farming, to forestry, and on and on. This mod also allows for longer-distance power transmission using chain drives and chain links. RotaryCraft (and ReactorCraft, described later) are the only mods in the game with their power generation enabled; every other mod has their engines/generators/etc. disabled. Considering the comparison of power levels, this really isn't a loss. The main challenge with these mods is intellectual; the mechanics to the mods are semi-realistic. You won't need to know any in-depth engineering calculations, but some basic understanding of multiplication and division will be necessary to make use of the energy system's three values (speed*torque=power) in this mod.
In addition to the shaft power provided by RotaryCraft, a means of electrical storage and transmission is available in the form of ElectriCraft. In the same way that RotaryCraft handles shaft power (semi-realistically), electricraft handles its energy (current*force=power) in an identical way. In fact, in the conversion, speed becomes current (rad/s -> amps), while torque becomes force (newton-meters -> volts). In both cases, the power is measured in Watts.
These mods all come with a handbook, explaining the way the power works. Additionally, players who get the hang of the mods realizes one incredible fact: if the torque is enough to power a machine, then adding shaft speed will always make the machine faster. Just to make sure you understand this: There is no upper limit to RotaryCraft machine speeds! Soon enough, the machine's output will be measured in units per second, rather than seconds per unit. The exception is in heat-based machines, where the torque and speed should be identical for the best results... in which case, it's simply more power that increases performance.
Now, in those cases where Redstone Flux is needed (and there are still quite a few machines that use it; see the next few sections), RotaryCraft has converters for those mods. It even has converters to provide RailCraft steam, so there's no need to make Railcraft boilers for Railcraft steam.
Railway
Ah, the self-powered, rail-directed transport system. By far, the cheapest long-distance transport mechanic for the player with a mining operation in one biome, a forestry operation in another biome, a fishery in a third, and several farms providing food in a forth. With RailCraft, the vanilla minecart system is expanded into a full-on train set, with locomotives that can carry a long line of linked minecarts to collect and distribute materials to various locations, and even have extensive detection and control systems to allow complex routing assignments.
Another useful feature to Railcraft is the tank. It has the ability to make enormous tanks that can store liquids for later use. The capacity of a Railcraft tank is twice the capacity of a similarly-sized OpenBlocks tank, but half that of similar-sized RotaryCraft reservoirs (although this tank looks so much better than the reservoirs).
Redstone Flux
RotaryCraft can cover an enormous ground where features are concerned. However, it does not have everything there is. For those things that it does not duplicate, mods have been added to compensate for that lack. Even so, unlike shaft power, Redstone Flux machines do have a maximum speed limit, so be prepared to wait for some batch operations to complete; throwing more power at the machine won't help.
BuildCraft has two major purposes in this modpack. The first purpose is for construction; the filler, builder, and architect table have been enabled for the player's use. Base construction has never been faster.
The other purpose for Buildcraft is to handle the production of fossil fuels. Buildcraft spawns oil fields all over the world, and provides the pump and refinery to convert all that oil into buildcraft fuel, which is essentially gasoline. You can then use that fuel in the RotaryCraft Fuel-powered engine to provide power, or save it and use it in a Fuel Enhancer with some other ingredients to turn buildcraft fuel into jet fuel. Needless to say, the jet fuel's more powerful.
For the bee people out there, Forestry is also included in the pack. In order to keep RotaryCraft relevant, the farming module is disabled. However, the factory module is still active. In this way, bees and their products can still be processed.
Redstone tech can provide a good level of automation, but there are limits to what it can do on a small scale, even with Project Red miniaturizations. And it can only send one signal per line (a 16-value scale, admittedly, but still, just one signal). OpenComputers provides a much higher level of control to automation, with the ability to sense the states of machines, and send redstone signals where the player needs them to go, using lua as a full-on programming language.
Miscellaneous
JourneyMap is a heavy program. Some peoples' computers simply cannot handle it. For this reason, Antique Atlas has been included. While BiblioCraft includes an atlas, it uses vanilla maps, which are localized. Antique Atlas produces a larger-scaled map that includes multi-chunk biome identification and the ability to mark points of interest.
Another tool used in the aim of mitigating the no-longer-present Tinker's Construct is Enchanting Plus. This mod is used as a way to replace the TiC modifiers. By default, enchanting is a hit-or-miss proposition, whereas modifiers allowed a player to put a specific ability on their tool at the desired level. Enchanting Plus allows a player to pick the type and degree of enchantments that can be put on their tool in the same way, thereby replacing the effect of modifiers.
Sorting through inventories can be a frustrating exercise; Inventory Tweaks provides in-chest sorting, but what if multiple chests have the same item? How does one sort everything in a whole room of chests? Refined Relocation can be used as a way to filter a group of chests, so that placing items in any of them will allow them to be moved to the correct chest automatically.
Mad Science
The name is mainly to be funny, but ultimately, this stage is the "high science" game... just the sort of thing that a soon-to-be world ruler will need.
To begin with, no mad scientist is ever going to operate using safe power generation. Not when the nuclear option is on the table. ReactorCraft is an expansion on the RotaryCraft mod, which includes high-temperature gas reactors, fission reactors, and the fusion reactor, the single-greatest source of energy in all of Minecraft. These will be required to advance through the other mad science disciplines, as the machines will require enormous amounts of energy to operate correctly.
Onto genetics. What is mad science without the genetic abominations? Advanced Genetics allows a player to analyze the genetics of various creatures, isolate the genes that provide the creatures' powers, and then insert it into other creatures... or even themselves!
So far, there is a time-consuming need to breed bees and hope they produce a specific strain. With Gendustry, the player can control the bees. The bees can produce what the scientist needs, or they can be melted down for their genetic material.
Next, any respectable mad scientist will have ways of storing things that keeps them out of the way until they're needed, and the more techy, the better. Why not keep everything as energy? Applied Energistics and Extra Cells provides a sufficiently sciency way of storing things in large quantities without the need for bulky containers or complex sorting systems! And with AE2 Stuff, there's no longer a need to keep water pits around the base to grow pure crystals.
Speaking of storing stuff, some things are just useless. So, what mad scientist would pass up an opportunity to break those things down into their constituent atoms or molecules, and just make what they need, right? Mad chemistry comes alive with the Minechem mod.
By now, you might have noticed veins of fossilized bones and plants. This is because no real mad scientist would be complete without a dinosaur army to rule the world with. With the Fossils and Archaeology Revival mod, you can get one!
Finally, at the far end of mad science, there's the power to control time and space. While viable time control isn't really in the pack at this time, the option is reserved for future updates. However, space is already handled in two forms.
First, there is the Enhanced Portals mod. This mod's purpose is to allow instantaneous transport between two points in space. ANY space. Any dimension. With this mod, you can make a portal to the Nether or the End that can be controlled by you. You can also use these portals to transmit items and fluids between locations as well.
Redstone Flux can be transmitted as well, but not shaft power; this is one of the few times where the use of rotational dynamos and magnetostatics will need to be used to transport shaft power using the portal, and even then, power loss can be expected in the process, due to the loss of power using Magnetostatics.
The mod that provides the ultimate control over space and time is RFTools. This mod adds a lot of features that control how redstone flux networks operate, but its most powerful feature is the ability to create universes. What mad scientist in his right mind (ahem) would miss out on being able to make his own universe, and preside over it like unto a god?
It just makes you want to laugh. Wildly.
Clarification
I use "Mad Science" as a schtick, because the "scientific" mods over-simplify the sciences they are designed to emulate. Matter/Energy conversion is nowhere near as cheap a process as Applied Energistics attempts to demonstrate. Genetic sequencing is far more complex than simply pulling some skin cells, analyzing the cells, and giving a person an injection to allow them the power of flight, or teleportation. Chemistry requires a lot of math, because you can only convert molecules in groups, so as to allow the atoms to re-bond to different structures (and in some cases, you need a catalyst to even get the process rolling in the first place). De-extinction is, in fact, a thing, but so far, nobody's been able to de-extinct a species enough for it to become self-supporting yet. And teleportation pretty much has the same problem as matter/energy conversion; it is not cheap to perform, power-wise.
Ender Tech
Beyond mad science, there is Alien Science, or, in this game, Ender Tech. In short, this is where technology is dependent on the alien materials from the Ender dimension that appear in this world through its agents: the endermen. In this pack, ender tech has been altered (using MineTweaker scripts) to require plutonium-infused ender pearls, known as the "Cherenkov Singularity," to craft ender tech.
I can probably provide some form of technobabble to explain the mystery behind the Cherenkov Singularity; perhaps the plutonium gives the pearl a way to interface with newtonian particles, so that the pearl can be used inside of machines, instead of being completely isolated from reality. Maybe the radiation released by the plutonium is warped enough by the pearl that the resulting energy can allow technology to replicate the effects of the pearl. Maybe the pearl exists in a stable quantum indeterminate state, and the energy released by the plutonium produces a continuously-collapsing state that allows for constant entanglement between items.
Regardless of what explanation makes the most sense to you, the idea is that plutonium infusion allows machines to use the ender pearl in a way that is controllable without destroying the pearl itself, or requiring the interaction of a living being. And a couple mods provide ways to construct machines that use ender power in their functions.
While it provides a major grab-bag of non-ender machines for the discerning player (which the player does not need to wait for ender-tech to use), Extra Utilities includes a good number of components that are clearly ender-tech, for example, the Ender-Thermic Pump and the Ender Quarry. These machines use the inherent teleportation mechanic of ender pearls to make things happen.
There is a major problem with the default configuration for this mod, however, and that is the QED; some things are enforced to use the QED to be made, and the QED is gated behind blocks that are gated behind the singularity. I could have recreated the recipes in Minetweaker, and removed them from the QED, but I don't see the point to it in the first place, so it was simply disabled.
Another mod that makes use of Ender tech is the Ender Utilities mod. Not quite as extensive as Extra Utilities, Ender Utilities creates tools and basic machines that make use of ender power, such as the ender workbench and the ender table... or the reusable ender pearl.
The End
At this point, you have a lot of power, but you've yet to manage the ultimate task: going to wherever the alie... er... endermen come from. After all, they get all this magical technolocy from their home realm, so why can't you go there and get your own materials to make this ender tech completely for yourself?
The first thing the player needs to do is research dimensional rifts. This is a highly-risky proposition, because mucking about with the fabric of reality can cause all kinds of extra-dimensional abominations to appear and ruin one's day. And in this case, making an interdimensional nexus will allow new breeds of hostile mob to cross over into this dimension. This is caused by the Invasion mod. Yes, I know the mod is meant to simply trigger an invasion, but why not add a little explanatory story behind it that paves the way for the ultimate dimension hop?
Finally, getting to the end. For this to happen, I wanted to make sure that the End was gated behind both ReactorCraft and Invasion, so the first thing that was done was the removal of End Portal Stones using Custom Ore Generation. The second task was to make a recipe for an End Portal stone for the player to make and place on their own. This recipe includes 8 Cherenkov Singularities (it's not cheap), as well as one rift flux in the center (the player gets one rift flux for each invasion successfully fended off). Once the player has 96 Cherenkov Singularities and 12 rift flux, they can make the 12 end portal stones needed to actually make an end portal, and visit the End to fight the dragon.
Simply put, you don't get to end the game until you get to the end of the game.
Conclusion
Well, here's the full measure of the modpack. The reasons and intents, as well as what the mods do. I'm aware it's a little thin in places, so anyone who has questions can feel free to ask, and I will update the recipe as I can. This recipe is current as of version 1.4.0.
UPDATES:
2015/07/08 - Rebalanced oregen. Changes have been applied to the configuration.
2015/07/18 - Added RFTools to the Logistics section; for now, it seems to provide unique benefits with relatively little redundancy.
In the configuration zipfile, removed AgriCraft Irrigation because it was making the Rotarycraft fertilizer and sprinkler redundant. Removed weeds from Agricraft because the mod's main benefit (strengthening crop yields) comes with a major disadvantage (cannot be automated using RotaryCraft fans); it's better off just being used as a (relatively slow) way to get unavailable seeds (especially since bonemeal used on the crosscrop won't force a mutation). As such, there's no need to make the new crop development cycle longer than it already is.
2015/07/21 - Added Fossils and Archaeology mod to the "Mad Science" section. What mad scientist is complete without his dinosaur army?
2015/07/29 - Added a configuration in the custom ore generation mod for the Fossils mod. Also added sections for "Thorite" ore in ReactorCraft, and Copper, Tin, Silver, and "Electrotine" in Project:Red. Also enabled vanilla hoes to make the early-game farming easier.
2015/08/02 - Added Ore Flowers, Harder Wildlife, and Repose, as well as prerequisites. Also discovered that Somnia has a GUI, but only for vanilla beds. Also updated the configuration zip; the flowers showed me just how horribly I flooded the world with copper. :-/
2015/08/04 - Updated configuration for railcraft and rotarycraft; ingots and blocks for iron and both types of steel, as well as iron and HSLA steel scrap, no longer appear in dungeon loot.
2015/08/05 - Went through all the configurations for mods with oregens, and disabled all ore generation. This way, the Custom Ore Generation mod will have less work to do, so we end up with quicker worldgen. The downside (if you really want to call it that) is that Custom Ore Generation is now required for this modpack to work; disable it, and there will be precious little ore to mine.
Also went through the loot tables, and, in the MineTweaker 3 script, disabled all loot that could circumvent the progression. So, no redstone, iron, steel (HSLA or otherwise), gold, diamonds, or emeralds in chests. I also removed all disabled tools, since they can't be used (freeing up chest space for more useful loot). I left all the combat gear, though, so you should still be able to sport an early-game set of iron or steel armor or sword if you come across a chest or two in your spelunking. You're welcome.
Finally, I added a recommendation for the SnowSong resource pack; this replaces a lot of sound effects, as well as both game and disc music with better-sounding alternatives.
2015/08/06 - Moved script and configurations to GitHub; this should allow a central repository from which people can download or even fork the configurations for this modpack as they wish. Rebalanced redstone and lapis lazuli to make them more abundant.
2015/08/07 - Temporarily Removed Repose from the list of mods. Two rather large issues have surfaced with this mod that prevents it from being kept in this recipe. First, animals tend to suffocate when next to a ledge with granular material as tall as their heads. This means that animals in the wilderness will die for no apparent reason, removing the need to kill them for their drops. The second, and larger problem, is that the granular mechanics seem to affect the rotting wood of Harder Wildlife, preventing the wood from composting and becoming grass.
2015/08/09 - Added Buildcraft to the list of mods for this pack.
2015/08/10 - Removed Shaders mod; shaders look nice and all, but do not work with RotaryCraft's red and green ghost blocks, Random Things' Blood Moon (the screen just goes black), and the nightvision effect (nothing happens).
2015/08/20 - Vanilla and Applied Energistics oregen configurations for Custom Ore Generation have been overhauled. Iron and redstone are no longer as hard to locate as they were, and the mining of diamonds and emeralds are now every bit as dangerous as they should be (diamonds and emeralds are now sprinkled around the surfaces of solid veins of hazardous blocks... lava sources for diamonds (making a "kimberlite pipe"), silverfish spawners for emeralds. You can find both INI files and XML files for the oregens in the SIC GitHub. Keep watching this space for more updates, as I continue to overhaul the oregens, one mod at a time.
2015/08/21 - Chisel 2 and Reika's mods' oregen configurations have been updated. Now, fluorite ores should not be so spammy, and everything else has been rebalanced to fit the mod's expectations.
2015/08/23 - Just about all the ore generation configurations have been massively overhauled. Now ore rarity should be completely consistent with vanilla oregen levels; what was originally hard-to-find is still hard-to-find, while those things that should be relatively plentiful are just as plentiful as one would expect.
2015/08/30 - Tweaked the clay generation; clay was spawning in mostly invalid locations, and in single blocks. Readjusted clay spawn locations, and increased spawn amount significantly.
2015/08/31 - Removed JourneyMap and JourneyMap server from the recipe (and marked it as "optional") due to its tendency to be a crutch against the need for pathfinding strategies. Restored some similar functionality using Antique Atlas, although its crafting recipe makes it a midgame item, it does not show mobs, and it can be lost. Also added "Lava Boats" mod, which adds sturdier boats than the vanilla version.
2015/09/01 - Ore generation has been rebalanced; some distributions have been tweaked for more appropriate scaling.
2015/09/02 - Minetweaker recipes were added to make aluminum blocks from electricraft aluminum ingots (using TiC aluminum blocks), and to make dyes from ore flowers (making them useful beyond identifying an area's likely ore content).
2015/09/05 - Man, I can't believe I added the prerequisite for Dynamic Lights, but forgot to actually add that mod! Yeah, Dynamic Lights was supposed to be in the User Interface section. This horrible oversight has been corrected, thanks to gerb82 who drew my attention to it.
2015/09/07 - Thanks to the Herculean efforts of gerb82, Survival Industry is now a public modpack on Feed the Beast! If you've been wanting to try this out, use the code found on this FTB forum post, and off you go!
2015/12/28 - The recipe has been overhauled to match up with the current version of the modpack, as provided through th Feed the Beast launcher. In addition to the new logo, this should provide a clearer picture of the mod's intent and design decisions.
2016/01/02 - This page will now double as the main page for the modpack. A new logo has been made in preparation for release of version 1.4.0
Wow! Nice idea you got there. Never seen a modpack "recipe" before, I'm going to add lots of those mods to my single player world. One thing i really liked was the one block per function style, never tried playing without the thermal expansion/buildcraft/MFR combo and it looks very hard hehe. My first contraption in single player is always a mfr tree farm to power my base so a RotaryCraft only pack would force me to find other ways to power and process stuff early on (Grinder + Steam engine probably lol). I think more people should know RotaryCraft and its amazing realistic tech tree, and stop using that ridiculous GregTech and saying it's "complicated". One thing i have to complain is that Tinker's Construct doesn't fit at all in a "tech progression" scenario, as it has the most overpowered tools ever and makes early mid and even late game so much easier. My aproach is always the vanilla tool progression: stone-iron-diamond-enchanted as it makes more sense and there is nothing like bragging about your fully enchanted diamond armor and tools :P.
Anyway, amazing job designing this "modpack" and writing this HUGE recipe, gave me lots of cool ideas
PS: Sorry for my bad English, not my native language hehe
Wow! Nice idea you got there. Never seen a modpack "recipe" before, I'm going to add lots of those mods to my single player world. One thing i really liked was the one block per function style, never tried playing without the thermal expansion/buildcraft/MFR combo and it looks very hard hehe. My first contraption in single player is always a mfr tree farm to power my base so a RotaryCraft only pack would force me to find other ways to power and process stuff early on (Grinder + Steam engine probably lol). I think more people should know RotaryCraft and its amazing realistic tech tree, and stop using that ridiculous GregTech and saying it's "complicated".
The grinder will work with one steam engine only if you build a gearbox. Without lubricant, you'll probably want to build a worm gear to allow the engine to work with the grinder... it'll be slow but functional.
Keep in mind that a way to help with the load balancing is to use ElectriCraft in conjunction with RotaryCraft; this will handle the even split of energy into multiple machines, although power can be lost over a distance.
As for a farmable energy source here's my method: I use 1 DC engine to power a pump for bringing water to everything. Then two DC engines to power two fermenters. Then a steam engine to power a friction heater (which removes the charcoal requirement for the furnace). A steam engine and a worm gear will power a grinder. 1 steam engine + 1 fan powers a 22-block, single-row potato farm, with another steam engine and item vacuum at the end. A diamond-level Expanded Redstone block breaker (with a chest attached to the back) set to a tick-speed timer will collect from a 12-block, single-row sugarcane farm (although 12 stone block breakers can be used in place of the diamond breaker). And, finally, a gasoline engine (and possibly a rotational dynamo) will provide the base's power.
The garden grows potatoes, while the sugarcane farm provides the sugarcane. The grinder will convert 1 sugarcane into 3 sugar. Dirt and sugar goes into one fermenter to make yeast, while the resulting yeast and potatoes go into the other fermenter to make sludge (make sure both fermenters have water being supplied). The sludge formed from the second fermenter is piped to the furnace to form ethanol crystals. Put these crystals into a gasoline engine, and you have a renewable source of energy for your base. Granted, over time, you'll need more power (and fuel), but as you can probably tell, the farm can be expanded as needed, and the gasoline engine is pretty efficient overall.
Aside from this, I highly recommend three (horizontally-aimed) floodlights powered by DC engines. These suckers provide bright lighting for a distance of 128 blocks (I mean this literally. for 128 blocks, the beam of light stays at a light level of 15, with the usual dropoff on each side). If each floodlight is kept 3 blocks from its neighbors, and placed at least 3 blocks over the ground, and their beams are kept clear of obstacles, you can easily keep a 12x12 room brightly lit without placing torches or other blocks everywhere.
One thing i have to complain is that Tinker's Construct doesn't fit at all in a "tech progression" scenario, as it has the most overpowered tools ever and makes early mid and even late game so much easier. My aproach is always the vanilla tool progression: stone-iron-diamond-enchanted as it makes more sense and there is nothing like bragging about your fully enchanted diamond armor and tools :P.
By itself, you may be right, but keep in mind three things:
"Iguana's Tinker Tweaks" makes the use of Tinker's construct much harder, partially because the minimum required material is flint (wood and stone are useless for tools), and partially because you need to "level up" your pickaxe's mining ability before it can mine the next-level material. In other words, you'll have to mine a lot of stone using the flint pickaxe before you can mine coal or copper in order to forge the next pickaxe (which then needs to be leveled up before you'll be able to collect iron... and so on.)
Vanilla makes it much too easy to progress to diamond gear. With TiC using Tinker tweaks, you will be playing a while before you will have the ability to collect diamonds, and you have to progress from flint, to copper (at this point, you need to make a smeltery first), to iron, to bronze. Once you have a bronze pickaxe, you will still need to level it up to mine at "redstone" level, which includes the ability to mine diamonds. Then, and ONLY then, will you be able to apply the diamond on the pickaxe to make it capable of mining obsidian.
Add to this the difficulty in finding the appropriate ores (Custom Ore Gen with my custom configuration means you'll have a lot of looking to do before you can mine the copper, iron, and tin needed to progress your pickaxe to the highest level) and the constant need to keep yourself fed and a steady food source producing, and you end up with a very challenging earlygame to master before you're rewarded with the ability to automate everything.
Once you reach the ability to make machinery, the power of the Tinker's Construct gear is overshadowed by the Boring Machine, and that is nothing compared to the sheer overpoweredness of bedrock tools, weapons, and armor!
Keep in mind that technology isn't just in automation. The stone/bonze/iron ages each had hand-held technology, which each saw improvements to their previous designs It's no different here; you have to work hard to master the basics, and then you're rewarded with a new progression to master... First, you master survival (food, tools, and home protection), then you master resource collection (mining your way up to, and beyond, diamond), then you move on to automation, and eventually, you reach the point where you're a living god... at which point, you can make the invasion nexus and start seeing just how OP you're not! Shortcuts exist, but they are very hard to find, and most are ridiculously risky, considering the changes in hostile mob spawning and behavior. But, from that first pickaxe to the endgame machinery, it's all technology.
And let's face it: there's no point bragging that you did something that simply requires staircasing down to level 8-12 and just digging a tunnel until you have diamonds. Now, getting to diamond level after looking for ores, making the infrastructure to upgrade your tool, and working hard to level it up to move to the next step to get there, while keeping yourself alive in the process, AND avoiding the lava source block that has a 25-50% chance of spawning next to each and every diamond ore block? THAT's something to boast about.
This is a very intriguing concept, and I always like Reika's mods, I feel they are overlooked.
Thanks! And I agree, which was the reason I made this modpack... at least for myself. I played Monster once upon a time, but after that, I didn't really see any good modpacks, particularly nothing through FTB, that included Reika's mods, and I didn't want to be stuck at 1.6.4 forever. So I made one for myself. Over the last two years, I've refined it until it became what you see here now.
This honestly is the single best concept for a modpack I've read so far. And funny enough, with a few diversions what we got on our little server mostly, except the whole survival thing, but that's quite intriguing.
Thanks for the good words.
Especially that you try to avoid duplication of functionalities is great. Half the stuff in FTB you never get to use anyways.
I dislike "kitchen sink packs" mainly because they usually end up with the bulk of players using their "tried and true" methods of accomplishing goals, and ignoring other mods' possible improvements, simply because the player doesn't really know about them, and is reinforced by other players using the same "tired and rote" methods. Getting hungry? Kill a cow and have some steak. Want good tools? Dig down to y=12 and just mine around until you can collect diamonds. Want to avoid mobs? Plop a bed down, even in the middle of a field, and sleep. Need a farm? Minefactory reloaded. Need a mine? Buildcraft quarry. Want a lot of power? Big Reactors. Want alternate dimensions? MystCraft. Want more complex machines? IC2. Want the game to be more challenging? Gregtech. It's like listening to an echo chamber stuck on the same chord... I just wanted something that would break players from the "same old" mold.
I like the progression arc across several mods. Many people don't realise that progression and challenge is what makes game (or anything in life) compelling and fun. Things that are achieved to easy just get boring real quick.
The main diversion we have is having none of the CoFH mods, mostly because we run Realistic Fluids Overhaul, which I just can't get to work with the CoFH stuff even after spending days tinkering with the source code. Instead, BC remained, mostly for the pump and the pipes for early transport. The quarry is disabled since I want auto-mining to be privilege of RoC. Also, I decicded against RF tools for basically the reasons you pointed out.
I saved RF for the higher-end stuff... I added the "Mad Science" stuff as a way to reward oneself for reaching the end by having a way to have fun with the absurd levels of power one would get from having immortality, invincibility, easy access to any material, and a rampaging dinosaur army of doom... as well as an even tougher enemy to unleash it against.
Having water as a somewhat limited resource adds some nice challenge into the game. All of a sudden you start setting up Dew Point Aggregators to generate water and have reservoirs on the roof to catch rain. Later (our map just started getting into Jet Fuel) reclaiming steam will become pretty critical in operating even early reactors.
Having limited water seems to enter into the realm of hardcore, which really doesn't appeal to me. I wanted more difficulty, but not quite that much.
One thing: I tried to try (eh eh eh) Somnia. It just won't go with Railcraft. How did you fix that?
Aside from a GUI issue when sleeping on a non-vanilla bed (sleeping bag or carpenter's bed), I've not noticed any problems with Somnia and Railcraft. What kind of problems were you having? Did you download the latest 1.7.10 version from Jenkins (rather than the 1.8 version)?
I've got 1.4.1.23 of somnia. I just realised, that there are higher version out there. Codeheist tho is down (temporarily?). Do you have an alternative link to a more recent version?
And yes, it's pretty hardcore with the water at the start. But once you manage to compensate with the above mentioned approaches, it becomes less daunting, and is actually pretty fun to play around with. It just bothers me to hell that water appears out of thin air ;-)
Keep in mind that in reality, water is a closed system; sooner or later, all water returns to either the water table, or evaporates and becomes rain. Therefore, 'infinite' water is actually more realistic.
As for Somnia, you might be able to download the source, along with python and a JDK, and run build.py to make a working Somnia until Jenkins comes back up. Never mind, that's the 1.8 code. I'm afraid all I can suggest is to wait for now.
Survival: Early- to mid-game stage. Collect food, build a shelter, and establish a farm to survive.
May I strongly recommend adding Reasonable Realism, at least "Harder Ores" and "Expanded Industry", possibly "Harder Wildlife"?
Harder ores builds on top of COG, and provides you with rarer, larger vein systems (based off the SMP strategic vein ideas that were present but unused in the configs), along with prospecting systems (including indicator plants mostly based off real-world plants) and limonite (bog iron, found in beaches/rivers/swamps, as a starting source of iron).
Harder Wildlife slows crop growth, gives you seasons, and may make it desirable to make a greenhouse or indoor growing environment to protect against bad weather. (It also gives farm animals and trees a natural birth and death cycle).
Expanded industry adds to vanilla rail and hopper mechanics. It adds improvements without trying to replace anything.
(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
The grinder will work with one steam engine only if you build a gearbox. Without lubricant, you'll probably want to build a worm gear to allow the engine to work with the grinder... it'll be slow but functional.
...A steam engine and a worm gear will power a grinder.
Wooden gears do not require lubricant anymore. Steam engine and wood gear will power a grinder.
(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
May I strongly recommend adding Reasonable Realism, at least "Harder Ores" and "Expanded Industry", possibly "Harder Wildlife"?
Has that mod been released? The last time I checked, it was still in development.
Harder ores builds on top of COG, and provides you with rarer, larger vein systems (based off the SMP strategic vein ideas that were present but unused in the configs), along with prospecting systems (including indicator plants mostly based off real-world plants) and limonite (bog iron, found in beaches/rivers/swamps, as a starting source of iron).
Considering that the second mining level will be copper (iron is third), surface iron may be redundant, but then, this pack IS based off of Rotarycraft. Iron sources will always be in demand, and those indicator plants would be all kinds of useful. The thing that worries me, however, is this: I want iron to be something a player works up to, something they won't be ready for until they're ready to move to stage 2. I'll have to check for a way to keep limonite from being mined before the player has made the smelter, and upgraded their tools to copper.
Harder Wildlife slows crop growth, gives you seasons, and may make it desirable to make a greenhouse or indoor growing environment to protect against bad weather. (It also gives farm animals and trees a natural birth and death cycle).
Considering that I already have Hunger Overhaul and Spice Of Life, this would place the game into "hardcore" territory. I do want the game to be harder, but I don't want it to be impossible for an average player to play.
Expanded industry adds to vanilla rail and hopper mechanics. It adds improvements without trying to replace anything.
Considering the presence of Railcraft, the minecart expansion would be redundant. As for the hopper mechanics... it could be useful, as long as I can disable the minecart expansion.
Wooden gears do not require lubricant anymore. Steam engine and wood gear will power a grinder.
Right now, limonite can be mined with a shovel. If you can't make a shovel with wood or stone -- if the first shovel head you can make is with copper -- then you are fine. But that might wreck farms -- mattocks need a shovel head if I recall correctly. Vanilla hoes will work if you still have them enabled.
(NB: Last time I tried using a flint mattock, it was as strong of a weapon as a sword! Mattocks are horribly over powered early game.)
And, underground iron is hard to find. Not impossible, and the indicator plants help, but it is rare. Rare enough that you'll have to look for it, and you'll want to find a few nuggets worth of iron along the way while looking for it.
Understand: Limonite will give you somewhere around 25-45 nuggets per deposit. I have seen deposits that entirely missed the shore and were 100% in the water (only visibly in COG's debugging mode) -- that means ZERO.
Food: As I understand it: Spice of life: that's the "you have to eat different foods" mod. Hunger overhaul is the "food gives you less hunger per item, and crop growth is slowed down".
If that's correct, then Hunger Overhaul can be dropped down. The current version of HO can be configured to only have the features that you want (it can even be configured now to have no effect, so you can pick and choose which features you want to use). (Past versions could NOT be so configured, and I did not like some of the forced options, so I have not used it in my packs/plays. My experience with it is solely due to Jaded's ... "gifts" to the community.)
Railcraft/Expanded Industry:
EI gives you the ability to detect which cart is on a track (by a comparator output); it gives you single-block minecart loading and unloading stations. I don't think railcraft does either of those.
The hopper side includes a distributor (a hopper that outputs to all 4 sides, in a cycle), and a wooden hopper (only outputs down, cannot fill side inputs, but does not require iron). And, an item filter hopper.
(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
Right now, limonite can be mined with a shovel. If you can't make a shovel with wood or stone -- if the first shovel head you can make is with copper -- then you are fine. But that might wreck farms -- mattocks need a shovel head if I recall correctly. Vanilla hoes will work if you still have them enabled.
The first shovel is actually the vanilla wood shovel... I un-disabled vanilla wood tools for the purpose of first-day materials collection. The flint tools are the next step, as all other vanilla tools (and most modded "vanilla" tools) have been kept disabled. By default, the flint shovel can collect copper ore.
(NB: Last time I tried using a flint mattock, it was as strong of a weapon as a sword! Mattocks are horribly over powered early game.)
In this case, the mattock is necessary; Hunger Overhaul disabled the vanilla hoes, and even if it didn't, Iguana's Tweaks would have. Since your first goal is to make a farm to keep fed, it's kinda important to have a way to do that. On a side note, my Sprocket-generated vanilla ore config also includes a modified clay spawn; would that be preserved with the harder ores?
And, underground iron is hard to find. Not impossible, and the indicator plants help, but it is rare. Rare enough that you'll have to look for it, and you'll want to find a few nuggets worth of iron along the way while looking for it.
Which is why I said that the indicator flowers would be all kinds of useful. Also: the reason for all the hindrance to progression is to make the player slow down and find ways to be efficient at the stone-age level before graduating to the next stage. It's going to take a while to find copper, and then another while before iron becomes available, so settle down... get comfortable. Establish as much infrastructure as you can to prepare for the next step. Make the most with what you have, so when the opportunity arises, you'll be more than ready to capitalize on it.
Understand: Limonite will give you somewhere around 25-45 nuggets per deposit. I have seen deposits that entirely missed the shore and were 100% in the water (only visibly in COG's debugging mode) -- that means ZERO.
As long as it requires at least a copper shovel (in Iguana's tweaks) to mine, then we're still good. Otherwise, what happens is that once a player has 9 nuggets, they can smelt them into one iron pickaxe head... boom, instant copper-mining-level bypass.
ood: As I understand it: Spice of life: that's the "you have to eat different foods" mod. Hunger overhaul is the "food gives you less hunger per item, and crop growth is slowed down".
If that's correct, then Hunger Overhaul can be dropped down. The current version of HO can be configured to only have the features that you want (it can even be configured now to have no effect, so you can pick and choose which features you want to use). (Past versions could NOT be so configured, and I did not like some of the forced options, so I have not used it in my packs/plays. My experience with it is solely due to Jaded's ... "gifts" to the community.)
Hunger Overhaul is also "right-click on a crop to collect it without breaking the crop," "the yield of a crop can be crafted into the crop's seed," and "breaking grass no longer produces seeds; a mattock raking unwatered ground is required." Either way, it's the "seasons" and especially the "natural life cycle" that would put the mod into hardcore territory. The other mods would make the game hard enough without worrying about preserving seeds to replant crops that died off... never mind the natural deaths of animals you spent time herding.
Like I said, there is a balance I'm trying to maintain; challenging, but not overwhelming. You won't die from a lack of iron or copper. But if you don't have enough food during that critical first week, you'll be dying pretty regularly... or pretty quickly if you are ballsy enough to go into hardcore difficulty.
ailcraft/Expanded Industry:
EI gives you the ability to detect which cart is on a track (by a comparator output); it gives you single-block minecart loading and unloading stations. I don't think railcraft does either of those.
Are you sure? Granted, it's not single-block, but considering that loaders and unloaders are likely going to be in different locations to begin with (loaders used at mining/logging/pumping sites, unloaders at processing plants/factories/refineries), it doesn't really need to be a one-block thing. And the loaders are not just limited to items. As for detectors? There are a few options available... Once again, there's no all-in-one solution, but once again, you're not going to need to detect everything at once, just what's relevant for the location. And that's not counting the additional types of track, the signaling apparatus, and the locomotive engines themselves... much less the additional carts. Heck, among the carts is a way to ensure the trains stay on time.
All the same, the detector might be useful, but I'd rather not add the loader/unloader block, as it would just be redundant.
The hopper side includes a distributor (a hopper that outputs to all 4 sides, in a cycle), and a wooden hopper (only outputs down, cannot fill side inputs, but does not require iron). And, an item filter hopper.
Like I said, this is definitely something to look into.
Now that I've read the wiki, I've decided the following.
Early Tech is absolutely out... it would allow a bypass of the Iguana's Tinker Tweaks progression... a sluice would be able to get just enough copper and tin to pretty much skip to tin (and redstone) mining, bypassing the early game progression completely.
The hoppers, distributor, and detector rail will be in, but the loader is not only redundant, but more expensive than just using the Railcraft loaders... and they are limited to items.
The increased drops by the animals don't really begin to offset the reduced breeding and life cycle of the animals, especially for animals that provide resources without dying (cows, sheep, chickens).
I'm kinda on the fence regarding crop growth mechanics. Now that I've read the wiki, I kinda like where the season mechanic is going, and it's not quite as bad as I was afraid it would be (I am guessing that the game will always begin at the start of the spring/summer cycle?) I would probably want to change the default crop growth to match HO's default, though, if I am to disable HO's changes to crop growth speed.
Harder underground is out. The changes to the AI of (the much more varied) hostile mobs are enough to deal with.
I will still have to play the game with the added mods in order to get a feel for the difficulty of the various changes, though, before I add anything to the first post.
If you want people making early farms/mattocks, why eliminate the vanilla hoe? Other than Iguana's "disable all vanilla tools because TIC RULES!" view, why? I understand the whole view that a strict 8-layer tech tree is superior to vanilla's 4 layer, but ... there's mining, and then there's shovel/hoe.
The other mods would make the game hard enough without worrying about preserving seeds to replant crops that died off... never mind the natural deaths of animals you spent time herding.
Crops don't die. ... well ...
You will get weeds in farmland that is not covered or growing crops. That can be removed easily with hoes.
Trees will die, drop saplings, the saplings will plant and grow.
Animals will breed, get born, live, and die, on their own. So yes, your adult cow will become old, and then ancient, and then dead. If you have several cows in the pen, they will have babies and stay just fine. The default configs actually make a stable heard of about 12 animals in a pen, ... provided you have enough grass for the herbavores to eat. I do hope you have a really big pen, I'd hate to see them run out of food and starve. (5 or 6 to start with will grow into a large herd. 3 will die off. 4 ... depends on whether you get births or deaths first)
Seasons are nice because it gives you different crops that grow at different times of the year, as well as a sense of a good time for growing, and a not-so-good time for growing. And, there is "Winter Wheat" (apparently, it's a real crop) that actually like the cold weather. Not to mention the piles of deep snow in the really cold biomes.
"breaking grass no longer produces seeds; a mattock raking unwatered ground is required."
... and you're complaining that Harder Wildlife is too hard-core?
So let me see if I get this right (by the way, this is news to me -- last time I used HO I still got seeds from grass) -- minecraft beta had you hoeing normal grass blocks to get seeds. This mod has you hoeing grass blocks to get seeds. But instead of a normal, easy hoe, you now need to make a smeltery and reach the copper age, which means you have to have gotten flint for a flint pick, found copper, found enough sand, gravel, and clay, cooked a bunch of grout, made a bunch of seared bricks, gotten lava -- ohh, no iron, so you have to spend clay on buckets to get your lava in, plus the aluminum brass to make those patterns, all before your first seeds can be planted!??!'
... I'll search for a village, thank you.
You did leave the village farms up and running, right?
On a side note, my Sprocket-generated vanilla ore config also includes a modified clay spawn; would that be preserved with the harder ores?
Should not be affected. Harder Underground changes the normal ore layout, only, and does not affect anything else.
===
Alright, so railcraft does have the same loader/unloader/cart type detectors. As you linked, it has many more types of cart detectors (RailC can detect based on what's in the cart; EI cannot).
(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
If you want people making early farms/mattocks, why eliminate the vanilla hoe? Other than Iguana's "disable all vanilla tools because TIC RULES!" view, why? I understand the whole view that a strict 8-layer tech tree is superior to vanilla's 4 layer, but ... there's mining, and then there's shovel/hoe.
Actually, that's a good question. It makes sense, so I've just fixed it, and added the updated Hunger Overhaul configuration to the config zipfile in the first post.
Animals will breed, get born, live, and die, on their own. So yes, your adult cow will become old, and then ancient, and then dead. If you have several cows in the pen, they will have babies and stay just fine. The default configs actually make a stable heard of about 12 animals in a pen, ... provided you have enough grass for the herbavores to eat. I do hope you have a really big pen, I'd hate to see them run out of food and starve. (5 or 6 to start with will grow into a large herd. 3 will die off. 4 ... depends on whether you get births or deaths first)
Grass or grass blocks? If grass, does RR also add faster respawn of grass? Lord knows, if real grass grows fast enough for me to mow the stuff each week, I should expect nothing less from RR.
So let me see if I get this right (by the way, this is news to me -- last time I used HO I still got seeds from grass) -- minecraft beta had you hoeing normal grass blocks to get seeds. This mod has you hoeing grass blocks to get seeds. But instead of a normal, easy hoe, you now need to make a smeltery and reach the copper age, which means you have to have gotten flint for a flint pick, found copper, found enough sand, gravel, and clay, cooked a bunch of grout, made a bunch of seared bricks, gotten lava -- ohh, no iron, so you have to spend clay on buckets to get your lava in, plus the aluminum brass to make those patterns, all before your first seeds can be planted!??!'
Not quite. The first-level tools of Iguana's Tinker Tweaks are flint tools. These do not need the smeltery, as the parts can be made using the basic parts builder, and the wooden tool station (flint for the heads, wood for the other parts). And flint is craftable using a shapeless recipe of three gravel (ITT disables random flint drops). As such, you need the basic tinker's construct tables, a flint mattock, 2 flint (for repairing said mattock), and and one clay bucket to get farming. Aside from this, the missing hoes have been re-enabled.
So, all-in-all, to have a full set of tools (mattock, pickaxe, axe, and shovel), you'd need to collect 15 gravel, which will make 5 flint (1 pickaxe head, 2 shovel heads, and 2 axe heads) and 5 sticks (1 tool binding, 4 handles).
This means that flint tools are meant to be the player's constant companions during the first stage of the game...particularly since they're faster than wood tools.
You did leave the village farms up and running, right?
I did. There is something of a caveat on that, however...or more a "theoretical but unproven possibility."
Part of "Special AI" is that village mobs won't like their stuff being broken. Break too many blocks in the village, and the villagers will actually attack you. Usually, blocks that can increase their dislike for you will show a "fiery breaking" animation when you break it (the kind usually associated with auto-smelt on a pickaxe). That being said, I believe (I am not sure, but so far, it seems the case) that the "right-click harvest" of Hunger Overhaul doesn't count as damaging village property, so you may be able to harvest the food safely. And the village farms include Pam's crops. If collecting food does risk hostility from villagers, killing hostile mobs (zombies, skeletons, etc.) in the village will make villagers better-disposed to you, so it evens out.
Harder Underground changes the normal ore layout, only, and does not affect anything else.
So it does not replace the COG configurations I'm using at all. That's a relief.
As for the Harder Underground, I rejected Enviromine for this reason: adding additional hazards (Falling stone and gas hazards) to the already increased hostile mob threat (horde mode that's attracted to sound, light, and damaged players in various AIs, sizes, and abilities) seems a little too much risk for cave exploration. If the environmental hazards can be disabled, then I can probably go with it.
Alright, so railcraft does have the same loader/unloader/cart type detectors. As you linked, it has many more types of cart detectors (RailC can detect based on what's in the cart; EI cannot).
Oh? Okay, from the way you described it, I thought EI's detector could detect based on the cart type, and return a different level of redstone signal for each type. If that's not the case, then I guess I won't be needing it.
Animals eat grass blocks; I'm not sure about tall grass.
If you have Gany's Surface, then animals will drop poop, which will act as bonemeal if they are on grass blocks, which in turn will grow tall grass.
Animals will also eat nearby leaf blocks (not sure if it's all herbavores, or only some); mountain goats will eat dry/dead bushes as well.
(Goats: added to mesa biomes, and a couple of others, where sheep normally do not spawn. They give you wool and food, just like sheep do. This is to make some biomes more survivable than before. These same biomes also spawn hostile animals in the daytime -- monitor lizards -- that seek out hot light during the night. Monitor lizards drop leather on death.)
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Special AI: If I take a clay bucket, and grab water from the pool in the farm, and use that to "wash" the crops out of the farm, will the villagers complain? It gives me the food and seeds, and then I have farmland to place crops on.
Of course, if you are restoring the vanilla hoe, that's less of a concern.
Or do I actually need the mattock to get the seeds?
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Falling rock:
1. Rock dust can be disabled in the released version, as I understand it.
2. You can disable falling rock in a dimension with a COG substitution -- turn stone:0 into stone:1, and it works just fine. I had to do this for Twilight Forest (it uses a lot of large, open, underground structures).
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EI's detector can detect, I think, 8 types of carts per detector. Basically, each detector will check two places for signs (one above it, I think two blocks above; one below it, I think directly below), and each line has a pair of cart types and a redstone strength number.
Railcraft's detector has you open up a GUI to configure it, according to that webpage you linked. It doesn't describe the GUI, so I don't know what it can/cannot detect. But railcraft has all sorts of "content" detectors. ... I like how Etho did "content" detection with vanilla mechanics.
(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
The Harder Underground stuff can be individually disabled one way or another. There's the per-dimension rules, the COG rules (various, including the gas, all of which feature a "none" option), the global stone replacement config option (or replacing with stone:1), the sideways falling of sand and gravel, etc (note that the config applies to the unstable cobble as well).
As for grass regrowing (re: animals) it isn't any faster, but it takes A LOT of active animals to really cause a problem. I think Keybounce had something like 20 sheep and they still had enough grass on the edges of their search radius to not starve (sheep eat more grass than the others, due to the vanilla mechanic and my own overlapping). So while there was a dead patch inside their pen, it was regrowing about as fast as they were eating it. I'll have to check on the tallgrass. I don't think they do ATM, but when I get around to making their block nom-noms a searchable list instead of "this or this or this" I'll be able to add it easily. And if you have 20 animals all in one place, they're going to age faster from over-crowding anyway.
Limonite: you could straight up disable its distribution, or I could try and make some config options just for you that would up the harvest tool level.
Expanded Industry: I think you can do without it.
Sluice: The sluice is configurable, you can individually disable what can be found with it. Without expanded industry (no wooden hopper), even leaving its configs at default, would require a lot of player micro-managing to get enough iron to do anything with it. Seriously, even with a couple of wooden hoppers it takes me longer to harvest sand/gravel than it takes for it to be used up and I need to make ten trips to get very much iron anything. Unless you're sitting on top of the motherload it takes a good hour and several hundred (if not a few thousand) sand/gravel. That said...I'm going to insert a config option for how long its processing cycle is. It's kind of ironic how bad it is. XD I think I'm going to have to look over the mechanic and make it better, allow regular dirt, and then reduce the processing time.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Apparently I'm a complete and utter jerk and come to this forum just like to make fun of people, be confrontational, and make your personal life miserable. If you think this is the case, JUST REPORT ME. Otherwise you're just going to get reported when you reply to my posts and point it out, because odds are, I was trying to be nice.
As for grass regrowing (re: animals) it isn't any faster, but it takes A LOT of active animals to really cause a problem. I think Keybounce had something like 20 sheep and they still had enough grass on the edges of their search radius to not starve (sheep eat more grass than the others, due to the vanilla mechanic and my own overlapping). So while there was a dead patch inside their pen, it was regrowing about as fast as they were eating it. I'll have to check on the tallgrass. I don't think they do ATM, but when I get around to making their block nom-noms a searchable list instead of "this or this or this" I'll be able to add it easily. And if you have 20 animals all in one place, they're going to age faster from over-crowding anyway.
Keep in mind: I was testing 16x16 pens, both chunk-aligned, and "4 chunk corner" aligned.
What I did find: When I was not around, and the animals stopped wandering, they died off very quickly :-). (I think it was a few hours). When I was around, and animals moved, they found enough grass to live, and the eating was spread around enough that things didn't die completely.
... If I recall correctly, the chunk-aligned pen recovered the edges faster (9 active chunks spreading), but not the insides. Since vanilla mechanics wanted to put the animals in one corner, this worked better anyways.
EDIT: Tall grass regrowth in testing was entirely dependent on gany's surface and poop/bonemeal. If there's grass blocks around the poop, there will be either tall grass or indicator flowers. In mineral rich areas, it became all indicator flowers. .... But then, that test run had something like 2,000 sheep. They were supposed to die off from overcrowding, but in truth ...
(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
Animals eat grass blocks; I'm not sure about tall grass.
So essentially, they're like vanilla sheep; they eat the surface of a grass block, which becomes dirt until the grass spreads to it, then? That sounds okay. I might just give it a gander.
Special AI: If I take a clay bucket, and grab water from the pool in the farm, and use that to "wash" the crops out of the farm, will the villagers complain? It gives me the food and seeds, and then I have farmland to place crops on.
As far as I know, you have to actually harvest blocks for them to dislike, and eventually attack you. I've not put village crop collection methods to the test, but I am guessing that "washing" their items away wouldn't count as an intention "block breaking" action. You might want to check with FatherToast.
f course, if you are restoring the vanilla hoe, that's less of a concern.Or do I actually need the mattock to get the seeds?
The mattock is treated as a hoe as far as Hunger Overhaul is concerned. You can use the hoes for seed collection.
Survival Industry is a sandbox challenge tech pack, meaning that it is a sandbox game (not using Hardcore Quest Mode) with technical mods that is designed to be more challenging than usual, while attempting to avoid the clichés currently in force in the modpack landscape.
However, with all these challenges, you are not without your own advantages.
So grab your sleeping bag, make your stone tools, and begin your journey. Because you're up to the challenge. And once you get started, you're more than capable of establishing your very own Survival Industry.
To Play Survival Industry
The modpack is currently available through Feed the Beast and ATLauncher.
Modpack Design
This modpack operates under a number of important rules.
The modpack has five tiers of play, each gated behind a specific material. Unlike most modpacks, these materials are not determined by the random number generator; they are behind your ability to build youself and your base to the point that the material can be collected and/or made.
To this end, I provide this recipe, so that other people who want to make modpacks can have an idea as to what they need to consider when designing a pack.
Prerequisites
This contains all the prerequisite mods; those mods that are needed for other mods to work. Obviously, You want to keep them separate, since they may be required for mods in more than one category. An example would be DragonAPI for RotaryCraft, ElectriCraft, and ReactorCraft (In the Industrial Age's "Shaft Power" folder, and Expanded Redstone in the "Game-Wide & Agrarian Age/Game Balance/Mitigation" folder) I won't bother listing the mods, since they can sometimes change based on who takes over what project, and whether a new companion mod is used.
Game-Wide & Agrarian Age
These mods are designed to be used from the very beginning of the game. Oftentimes, they will be used throughout the entire game, so while I can refer to them as "Agrarian Age" mods, to identify the game's stage in which they are most useful, they are going to be relevent even after moving onto other stages in the game.
Game Balance Mods
These mods are essentially split into two categories: Challenges, or mods that increase the difficulty of the game, and Mitigation, or mods that provide ways to make the challenges easier to handle. These are the key two categories, in which the game's difficulty balance is maintained.
Challenges
We begin with the challenges. These challenges are themselves split into four categories: Game mechanics, Hunger and Health, Mob Tweaks, and Mining.
Game Mechanics
Game mechanics are usually things involving the creation of a game element that the player has to handle; a change in the way the game works.
Harder Wildlife is a mod that adds a lot of things to the game. Animals will breed on their own, age, and die. Trees will eventually die, their trunks will become compost (which you can collect), which will then become grass blocks, and their saplings will auto-plant. Other non-crop plants, such as cacti and sugarcane, will self-plant if scattered about. Seasons exist in the game, and the world temperature will rise and fall as dictated by the time of the year (which is 128 minecraft days by default, with 32 days for each season). The temperature change will not be as drastic to plants and machines when indoors, so making a greenhouse can allow a somewhat more consistent crop yield.
Random Things actually provides a lot of features, but for the challenges, you can't get more challenging than the Blood Moon. This is an event that has, by default, a 5% chance of happening each night. During the blood moon, all lights take on a red tint, the sky turns completely black, the moon is red (duh), there is a black fog obscuring vision, and mobs will spawn in greater numbers, and much more closely to you (within 3 blocks if there is a spawn point)... with an increased chance of being on the attack (rather than just wandering around). In the configuration for this pack, the chances have been reduced to 2%.
By default, hostile mobs are easy to avoid with a bed. Go to sleep before it's dark enough to spawn hostile mobs, and you will skip right to the morning, without a single hostile mob in sight. With Somnia, you can still sleep through the night, but instead of jumping to morning, time just passes by much more quickly. Processes will still continue while you sleep, mobs will still spawn and roam, and if they can reach you, they will attack you in your bed. This means that you will need to make a shelter before you sleep, in order to make sure you're protected while sleeping.
Hunger & Health
In vanilla minecraft, food is little more than a speedbump. Collect a stack of steaks, and you're good for a long, long while. However, in this pack, three mods will stop this mechanic from being so easily ignored.
Hunger in Peace closes the Peaceful Mode loophole. If you go to peaceful mode, monsters will still despawn, but you will not regenerate like vanilla, and your hunger will continue to tick away until it is gone. In essence, Peaceful Mode is no longer the overpowered "panic button" it used to be, even though it's still the panic button option for dealing with hostile mobs.
Hunger Overhaul makes complex recipes more worthwhile. Simple ingredients provide only the most minimum hunger satisfaction in the game. To get more hunger and saturation with each bite, you need to combine those ingredients into larger recipes. You can survive on nothing but crops, mind you, but there will be almost no saturation, which means you'll become hungry again in short order. This mod also lengthens the crop growth time, and reduces the effectiveness of bonemeal on crop growth. When combined with harder wildlife's seasons, farming becomes a very important mechanic that you can't afford to put off, and requires more than a token effort.
The Spice of Life closes the "one-food" loophole. Each time you eat the same food, it will be less satisfying, until you reach a point where it doesn't do any good. You need to mix up your food, making different recipes in order to make sure the food is having its maximum effect. To make it easier to keep a good variety on hand, the paper lunch bag and the iron lunch box are available; they have 3 (for the bag) or 6 (for the box) slots that can hold a stack of 2 food each. Right-clicking a chest with an open bag or box will fill it with random recipes that have the most effect at that time.
Mob Tweaks
Mobs are pretty predictable, which means they're not very threatening. Zombies can be guaranteed to only hurt you when in range, and can be counted on to take the shortest safe path to reach you. Skeletons will shoot arrows. Creepers make no sound, except when they're hurt or about to blow, and that's pretty much all they do. Spiders are pretty much 1-block-high climbing zombies. They only have one effect: take damage when they hit. Witches and cave spiders are an exception to this, in that they can poison you, but that's the only variation in a pretty straightforward opposition.
And if they're not actively chasing you, they are completely random.
Four mods changes all this. Taken together, these mods provide what is known as "Emergent AI," in which the end result of all these different mods is that mobs move in ways that can seem intelligent, almost conscious, and with a much more effective end result.
Zombie Awareness is the first part of this quartet. With Zombie Awareness, several mob types (not just zombies) will wander in the direction of lights, sounds, and the smell of a wounded player (signified by splotches of blood on the ground dropped by the player). This effect only happens when the mobs are in "wander mode," in which they are not actively pursuing or targeting a player. Because of this awareness, mobs will generally congregate over time to significant areas. Can you say "horde mode?"
Special AI is the second part of this quartet. This allows mobs to spawn with various behavior patterns, beyond the same old "target player and try to hit them". Some mobs will suddenly charge at the player at high speed. Some can jump toward the player. The shaman can heal all hostile mobs in his area. The thrower can pick up other hostile mobs and throw them at you (or pick you up and throw you in the direction of a group of hostile mobs). There's even one type of mob that will wear a spawner on its head; it has a lot of hitpoints, and can spawn other mobs in the dark. Together with a shaman, these mobs can give you a very bad day... especially since they don't burn up in the sun. Sometimes, zombies will carry bows and skeletons will use their hands... or even a weapon.
Some behaviors also exist for all mobs, regardless of their individual behavior patterns. mobs that are taking damage will "call for help," attracting other mobs in the area to where they are. Some will look for a mountable creature to ride, while others are rideable. A passive griefing behavior exists, in that all hostile mobs will, when not actively targeting a player (in "wander mode"), break things like doors, beds, and light sources (and remember, they're attracted to light sources in wander mode). In the case of creepers, they'll explode next to anything they want to grief.
The behaviors do not just affect hostile mobs. Passive creatures will defend themselves and their pack when attacked, similar to the way Zombie Pigmen act. Villagers will grow to dislike players who damage their homes, and eventually attack the player if they do enough damage.
Behaviors are only one part of this. Once the mobs have wandered to where you are and actually found you, they can sometimes have other effects beyond just hitting, thanks to the Special Mobs mod. Hungry mobs will take items from your inventory. Flaming mobs can set you on fire, and do not burn in the sun (although they take damage from water). Plague mobs can poison you (in the case of archers, from a distance). Tough mobs can take a lot of damage, and brutal mobs do a lot of damage. Creepers in particular come in various flavors, including fire, lightning, dirt, gravel, ender, gravity, and even doom and death varieties.
If that's not enough, creepers also have a new mechanic of their own: they stalk. With the Stalker Creepers mod, creepers will follow you until you turn enough for them to be seen on the screen. It is then when they'll actually explode. If you think this is a good thing, let me ask you: how many creepers are following you right now? NO, DON'T LOOK... oooh, better luck next time.
In the end, you have a horde of mobs that will find you based on your activity, whether it's the light of your torches or the sound of your digging. They will have different roles, including tank, healer, DPS, and even enemy control (throwers and "fishermen), which means they can work together to kill you. And when they hit, they can have different status effects, making you even less likely to survive.
Keep in mind that at this point, they're hard, but not impossible. The "call for help" behavior can be used in a trap to get all the mobs trapped (especially if the trap is a mob grinder). Mobs will randomly grief things, but this doesn't happen all the time. Staying under shelter at night means you will not likely encounter anything you can't handle.
If you're a hardcore gamer, and this isn't enough to make you happy, you can always add in "Mutant Creatures" and "Infernal Mobs" for the extra-hard mobs to face... or even mods like Mo'Creatures or Lycanite's Mobs for a real variety.
Mining
The mining is considered a challenge, because the only worldgen mod installed, Custom Ore Generation: First Revival, is designed to rearrange ore to be placed in discrete formations, rather than sprinkled everywhere. This means that ore cannot be easily found simply by digging until you see little clusters; you will have to actively look for the ore you want to mine.
In addition to this, the Survival Industry core mod, a custom mod made specifically for this modpack, is installed, which expands the mining progression by a significant amount. Instead of stone, iron, and diamond, you have to mine (and make pickaxes) in this order: stone, copper, tin (to make bronze), iron (to make steel), and diamond. So, not only do you need to find the ores, you need to mine them in a specific order before you're ready to begin making machines. This mod was created to allow the creation of an expanded mining progression in the absence of Iguana's Tinker Tweaks, due to a lack of support for the 1.7.10 version of Tinker's Construct.
Mitigation
With all this challenge, this game has almost certainly crossed the threshold into hardcore. Now, we need to make sure we cross that threshold back into the vicinity of simply "challenging." Mitigating factors come in several forms: Crafting, Farming, Mechanics, Redstone, Storage, and Worldgen.
Farming
Because hunger has been boosted in this pack, it stands to reason that there should be an expansion of what's available to eat. The default foods might be enough to keep a player going, but it would take a long while to find enough different types of food in vanilla to satisfy "Spice of Life." So having more variety would help mitigate the hunger challenge. And since food's satisfaction value is significantly less than it is by default, we will also need foods that provide a large amount of satisfaction in spite of Hunger Overhaul.
To provide the variety of food needed to survive Spice of Life, we add Pam's HarvestCraft. This mod contains a huge number of crops, and an even larger number of recipes for prepared dishes, some of which requires a large number of steps to complete. The more steps required to complete a recipe, the higher its satisfaction value. In this way, you can have a large number of highly-filling foods, even with Hunger Overhaul and Spice of Life.
Sometimes, however, it's not enough to simply have the crops available. You need to have the crops on a regular basis, which means farming.
Hunger Overhaul does actually help in this regard; the seed-collection mechanic simply requires you to use a hoe on unwatered ground. However, Pam's crops cannot be collected in this way. All throughout the world, however, you can find various "wild gardens" that contain three random crops each. With enough exploration, you can amass a good collection of food and crops to plant for your personal garden. Once you start farming the foods, you can harvest crops from farmland without breaking them by right-clicking on them
Now, the vanilla farming mechanic does provide a good yield, but it's slow and inefficient. Because of Hunger Overhaul, crops take 4 times as long to mature, and bone meal and other fertilizers are less effective than in vanilla. It sure would be nice to have a means of speeding up the harvest, right? And what do you do if a specific recipe calls for a crop you were not able to find up to this point?
Enter AgriCraft. AgriCraft is a mod that allows crop mutation, which can improve the growth speed, strength (resistance to weeds), and yield of crops. A fully-developed seed can grow very quickly, and always provides a yield of 4.
The other main feature of AgriCraft is "crossbreeding." By crossbreeding two crops (putting two crops on each side of a "crosscrop" in the middle with the right soil), you can end up with a third crop. With the right pair of crops, you can have the seed to crops you hadn't been able to locate yet. This can help you finish filling out your garden.
There is also the weed mechanic. However, weeds are a mechanic that can be irritating, and so are turned off in this modpack. Additionally, irrigation is turned off because it can override the growth of vanilla crops, removing the challenges provided by Hunger Overhaul.
Crafting
Several mods include various craftable items that can help mitigate the risk.
OpenBlocks is a grab bag of items that can make things easier. XP drains and showers allow you to store your experience somewhere where you won't lose it when you die. This can be valuable when dealing with death. There is a sleeping bag, which is an important early-game tool to have to keep your fatigue from going too far. And a multiblock portable tank can be useful in storing fluids you will occasionally need to dip into with a bucket from time to time.
OpenBlocks also removes the risk of your items being lost on your death if you are not able to get back to them in time. OpenBlocks provides a grave where all your items are stored. Once you break the grave (in essence, "robbing your own grave), all your items are dropped.
Small Boats provides three alternatives to the basic rowboat you can make as part of the basic vanilla gameplay. The first level is the punt, which is a larger rowboat with a single sail, the second is a whitehall, which is more along the lines of a full sailboat, and a Hoy is a much larger boat that can optionally carry cannon. These boats allow the player to explore the world without worrying about the boat falling apart the moment it hits a squid or lily pad.
Once you get into the game, you'll find that there are a lot of highly-complex crafting projects that provide the maximum benefit; this is especially the case in the early game where food is concerned. Often, a recipe will have one or two sub-recipes required before you can take advantage of the main recipe itself. Ewy's Workshop (a continuation of Steve's Workshop, which seems to be completely abandoned) provides a work table that can have up to four modules, whether they're crafting tables or furnaces. It also extends the efficiency of coal, as the fuel use is twice the time of a vanilla furnace. Once you have the ability to use a friction heater, this table will no longer be as useful for smelting, but with four crafting tables, you can make some pretty complex things without losing place in parent recipes.
The Vegan Option is a way of limiting your interaction with mobs. It provides alternatives to just about every mob drop, short of the dragon egg or the nether star, using vanilla worldgen. You will need to explore the world for this to be useful, but it can be valuable if you don't want to face the hordes at night.
Because of the expanded mining progression, iron will not be available before you need to farm, and farming is the first thing you need to do after establishing your sleeping space. To mitigate this issue, the wooden buckets mod has been added to the pack. This mod allows you to use a wooden bucket to carry water where you want to place it.
Speaking of the mining progression, there is a singular lack of mention of an alloying mechanic so far, which is important for making bronze, which is required before machines can be made. Metallurgy adds the crusher, and Another One Bites the Dust allows all ores to be dusted for alloying. However, there are two more options that are custom-made for this pack.
Part of the Survival Industry core mod is a mechanic called "Backyard Metalcasting," in which ores are smelted and alloyed in the vanilla furnace using a clay crucible. Crucibles are made using a block of clay and a block of sand, and then the formed crucible is fired in the furnace to make a finished crucible. A crucible can hold two ingots of different metals for alloying, or one block of ore for smelting (smelting ore directly in the furnace has been disabled). Once the filled crucible has been smelted, you then craft the glowing-hot crucible with a sand ingot mold (crafted using simply one block of sand) to make either one (in the case of ore smelting) or two (in the case of alloying) ingots of metal. The sand mold is turned back into sand (broken to reveal the cooled ingots), and the crucible is not lost, so this mechanic is infinitely repeatable without the need for more materials (aside from the metals or ores). However, keep in mind that crucibles cannot stack, so this alloying mechanic is mainly for early-game; anyone wanting larger-scale alloying should look elsewhere.
"Elsewhere," in this case being the RotaryCraft blast furnace, which can also alloy ores without the need for the crucible (a feature provided by the Survival Industry core mod); in this case, you can alloy ores in bulk, and in the case of steel, smelting iron with coal coke (without the sand or gunpowder) will produce low-grade (think "Railcraft" or "Metallurgy") steel ingots, and with gunpowder and at a higher temperature (but still no sand),there is a chance of bonus ingots per batch. Add the sand, and you end up with RotaryCraft's High-grade (HSLA) steel.
Mechanics
With all the difficulties provided, it might help to have some game mechanics to counterbalance them, right? Otherwise, we'll just have a hardcore pack.
By default, you do not have a way to sleep. Sheep will mob you if you hurt one. Starting Inventory mitigates the first night by providing you a sleeping bag from OpenBlocks to sleep. This sleeping bag won't change your spawn, nor will it show the somnia GUI and wake you up at the appropriate time, so making a bed will still be important to long-term survival, but the sleeping bag is a way to reset the fatigue timer.
Harvesting trees can be a hassle. So, Treecapitator has been added to the pack to simplify the tree cutting mechanic. However, it would then make the early-game too easy, since wood is an important item. Thus, Treecapitator is configured to only work with higher-level axes, meaning that you will have to advance to steel before you're ready to chop down whole trees.
The crafting table mechanic is pretty basic. Nine slots to craft things in. However, it would be nice to have a way to rotate the recipe in the table (perhaps you put things in the wrong way), or balance the materials on the table (make it so all placed materials are rearranged to have even amounts), or maybe just a quick way to clear the table without leaving it and dropping everything on the ground. Crafting Tweaks adds three buttons that do just the above, making the crafting table just a little easier to work with.
Originally, this modpack had been designed with Tinker's Construct. However, due to its makers no longer supporting it for Minecraft 1.7.10, the mod and all its addons have been removed from this pack. This meant, however, that features like area of effect weapon strikes and 3x3 mining would no longer be available. To help resolve this, ToolUtilities has been added to the modpack; this mod features upgrades to tools applied through the anvil; with experience and the appropriate ingredient, swords can have area of effect attacks, and pickaxes, shovels, and axes can have 3x1 and 3x3 mining.
Speaking of mining, there is also the fact that anything interrupting your effort to mine something will mean you have to start all over again. Against cobblestone, this isn't a big deal, but what about obsidian? There you are, mining a block of obsidian, and you get accosted by a group of mods. You dispatch them quickly and return to your task, but it's too late... you need to start all over. MultiMine is a mod that mitigates this problem, by making a block wait before slowly repairing itself when left alone. That way, the busy player can defend themselves, and then pick up where they left off once they're back to that block of obsidian. And if more than one player mines the block, it will mine faster!
Finally, you're going to be taking a lot of damage over the course of the game, it would be nice if you can be forgiven for stupid stuff, right? This is where we turn to Natural Absorption. This mod provides an absorption health bar of two hearts (four damage) that will regenerate if you don't take any more damage, similar to how shields in games like Halo and Borderlands work. It won't block anything major, but it is enough to keep you alive if you're down to half a heart in your main bar, and you fall one block too far, or you accidentally bump into a cactus.
Later on, you can enchant your armor, providing an increased number of hearts to your absorption modifier, allowing you to tank hits from entire hordes of mobs... for a time. Trust me, however, even with three full rows of absorption, you won't survive a sustained assault (if you've played games like Halo, then you know what I mean), so make sure you don't do something that will have you in the thick of a mob, especially if you're dealing with pigmen or mobs that affect status (like cave spiders or witches).
The Random Things mod also has mechanics and items that can fit in the mitigations category. There is an increased leaf decay and the ability to use spectre materials to make various things, including spectre glass which you can walk on, but mobs fall through, and the spectre key, which creates a 1-chunk-large personal dimension for you to set up a base, a portal nexus, or just a panic room to recover in.
Redstone
While technology is reserved for the industrial stage, there's no reason that crude machines can't be used in the agrarian age; in the real world, basic wooden machines existed well before the invention of self-powering devices. So, we add redstone technology to the Agrarian age.
First, there's a lot of logic that takes up way too much space by default. For example, a simple toggle takes a 6x6x3 area. Also, redstone paths are nothing more than sprinkling poweder onto the ground in paths. Is this really what we want to use as a signal mechanic? No, not really. Not when Project:Red does it better. Project:Red includes a large collection of logic gates that can be used in place of massive redstone-and-smoothstone structures. It also provides redstone wires that can be placed on the ground, along walls, or even along the ceiling.
Expanded Redstone is also in the pack, mainly as a way to expand world interaction. Block placers, block breakers, configurable redstone clocks, several sensors, line-of-sight wireless redstone, and redstone math devices are a part of what this mod offers, and it expands what redstone can do in the physical world.
Due to the removal of Tinker's Construct, all of its addons had to be removed as well. One player had requested a replacement for the Tinker's Mechworks igniter, so it has been added.
Storage
The lowly chest can be useful, but sometimes, it can be a hassle to deal with. It won't open if the lid is obstructed. It can't be placed next to a double-chest. This can make some unpleasant space issues in storage rooms, since you'll have a lot of empty space with nothing to put in it. And chests can hold a limited number of stacks of items, which can be frustrating if all those stacks are the same item. To sort this whole mess out, we're gonna need a few things.
First of all, larger chests would be nice. And then, it would be nice if they opened in a different direction than just up. And having a cheap storage multiblock would also help. Better Storage provides all this.
With reinforced chests, you can apply other materials to a recipe to make the chest larger on the inside, still able to be doubled, and as a bonus, resistant to explosions. Additionally, the reinforced chests can be locked against player entry, with enchantments that can make the locks harder to pick (or keys more effective against unrelated locks).
Then there's the chest's vertical brother, the locker. With lockers, the door is on the front, rather than the top, and they can be doubled and reinforced as well. And, unlike the vanilla chest, the base locker can be placed immediately next to, and above or below, a double-tall locker, and even embossed into a wall, allowing you to maximize your storage space, and your walkspace as well.
The crate is the randomized multiblock version of the chest. Each crate holds a small amount of stacks, but they are cheap, and can be made into a larger multiblock, meaning their storage spaces are added together. Unlike chests, however, the crate's placement of items in the slots are randomized every time you look inside the crate. There are also no pages to look through; if you don't see something in the UI, then you need to close the UI, right-click the multiblock again, and hope that your intended item is present. As such, the crate is best when used in small sizes.
Sometimes, when dealing with a single item in large amounts (e.g. Cobblestone), you want to have a single storage space that is larger than one stack, without all the extra slots to waste your time. Factorization introduced the barrel, but I really don't want all the extra stuff that mod provides. As such, I chose to use ProfMobius's JABBA mod (Just Another Better Barrel Attempt). This mod provides a barrel that can hold 64 stacks of any material, but only holds that one material. This makes storage and filtering so much easier.
However, the barrel takes a whole block of space for just one item. And while this is justified for the likes of cobblestone, it does not work for smaller-ticket items like rotten flesh, bonemeal, or sand, and eventually, ingots and blocks of metal. Additionally, the barrel requires quite a bit of wood, including a wood slab, a chest, and seven log blocks. This is a lot of wood (just over a half-stack of planks for just one barrel), and can be rather difficult to come by in the early game before automated wood collection, or treecapitator-enabled axes become available.
So, in addition to JABBA, Storage Drawers are also included in the pack. These drawers provide support for multiple barrels in the same space. They don't contain as much, but they don't need to, and they're much cheaper than making barrels for things that don't need that much storage space in the first place... and they help conserve space in the starting player's likely shack-sized first base. Additionally, I've added forestry compatibility to the drawers to make use of the woods that Forestry provides. If you use other mods that provide different trees, it's possible that Storage Drawers includes addons for those mods as well.
Worldgen
I try to avoid worldgen, because Custom Ore Generation already takes up a lot of performance every time the world generates new chunks for the player. This can slow down a game significantly (especially at the beginning), so I do my best not to add new worldgen unless it adds something very specific.
There is one example that I do include, mainly because it's relatively simple, and it mitigates the problem of finding ores. This mod is the Ore Flowers mod, and its sole purpose is to coordinate with Custom Ore Generation to spawn flowers within approximately 30 blocks (horizontally) of an ore vein. This can help the prospecting player to find the desired ores without just randomly casting about with a tunnel.
Another additional feature added to the game to assist in finding ores are caverns. This is actually a configuration for the Custom Ore Generation mod, but what it does is make massive caverns that can be explored to find ore veins; vanilla caves are generally small, and can easily miss veins. Ravines are larger, but narrow enough that they can also miss veins. Caverns, on the other hand, are much larger than caves and wider than ravines, and can intercept veins much more frequently. It does require some casting about to find such a cavern, but once in a while, one can break the surface, allowing a player to enter without having to dig one block. Keep in mind that a lot of torches will be required to light these caverns, however; they easily will require multiple torches just to light everything from one side to the other.
Ore Mods
While Custom Ore Generation is used to place ores, it doesn't actually add any to the game. While ElectriCraft provides copper and tin, it does not provide bronze, nor provide the tools, weapon, and armor that is needed to complete the mining progression.
To this end, Metallurgy is employed. Metallurgy includes the ores, metals, and alloys that can complete the mining progression, and provide armor and tools for each of the metals it supports.
Also, for those players who can make it to the end, Nether Ores can provide additional resources to a player; ores mined in the Nether tend to be more dense, and therefore, yield more ingots than the overworld ores can manage. This is especially the case if the ores are first processed using the grinder or extractor.
Meta Mods
Several mods are included for the sake of the pack itself, and does not neatly fit into any one or two categories.
Default Options is a mod that allows a modpack to be updated without changing a player's settings. This can be a boon for players who have personalized their minecraft experience, whether it's the light level of the game or the fact that they use tab for the inventory screen instead of E. At the same time, if the settings have not been set yet (meaning that the pack is being installed for the first time), the pack will install with the settings custom-tuned to the pack itself.
Java 8 Checker simply causes the game to crash if the player is not playing the game with Java 8; there is simply no reason for using an insecure, unpatched version of Java. And since most launchers will allow you to choose which version of Java to run, this should not hinder people who need an older version of Java for different reasons.
MineTweaker and Mod Tweaker are responsible for most of the melding of the mods, as well as the use of gating materials to prevent early use of the "Mad Science" and "Ender Tech" mods. It alters WAILA Harvestability to show the mining level of ores, it is responsible for the chisel-based overhaul of ztones. It is also what prevents non-RotaryCraft generators from being craftable, or even visible in NEI. Simply put, these two mods are just as important to the pack's cohesion as the Survival Industry core mod is.
Speaking of which, the Survival Industry core mod is another key mod; it controls material and block properties, it has the ability to create custom materials, tools, items, and blocks, and includes a new alloying mechanic that does not even require machines or special ore processing. It also has some interaction with DragonAPI, so that RotaryCraft-based packs can assign alloying recipes to the blast furnace. This mod is currently custom-made for Survival Industry, but JeffPeng plans to make it more generalized for others to use. This is the foundation of the mining progression and the early-game alloying processes.
By default, zombies can sometimes drop iron ingots and redstone, and everyone knows that zombie pigmen can drop gold nuggets. These can short-circuit the progression, so the Mob Properties mod was included to prevent those materials from being dropped.
Finally, the game is not always stable; crashes do happen. So, when they do happen, it's useful to have a good log of the game's events prior to the breakdown. For this reason, OpenEye was included in the pack; if the game crashes while you're playing, then the next time the game loads up, it will report the conditions of the crash, and the events leading up to it, to a server, with plenty of information to identify the mod that's responsible, which mods are included in the issue, and what all mods are installed at the time of the crash.
Cosmetic Mods
These mods are mostly cosmetic, although some provide additional mechanics that can be useful. But, for the most part, these mods are here because they allow a player to decorate their base to be as garish or as tasteful as they desire.
This is basically the sole purpose of the DecoCraft mod; this mod makes a decobench that, when fed clay and colored dyes (rose red, cactus green, and lapis lazuli), it will allow the player to make anything they want, from clocks and chairs to chandeliers and a grand piano. These objects do not need to be placed based on block borders, either. They can be placed in several angles for the best view. And things like the beds and light sources actually perform their intended purposes as well.
Garden Stuff is another strictly-decorative mod. It provides ways to plant multiple flowers in a single block, thereby allowing more decoration in less space. Additionally, full-size flowerpots can be made that can have multiple flowers planted within.
Chisel is another pure decorative mod designed to give blocks fancy carvings that might not otherwise be possible. From bricks, to tiles, to a multiblock tile pattern that can expand to the size of an entire wall, this mod can expand the decoration options immensely. A custom mod adds an additional chisel; a weak one (64 uses) made from flint. This will allow chiseling at an early-game stage, before iron is available.
And then there's Ztones. The blocks it provides are very fancy, and can be used in many ways to really pull of a desired look, whether you're looking to make a pretty castle or a dark fortress of dooooooom. I usually include a mod to make Ztones chiselable, so that I won't need to worry about the more expensive ztone blocks; they will all be made the same way. My preference is Chizzle Z-Tizzle, a script for Minetweaker, which can ensure that I don't need to add another mod, as I already have MineTweaker.
The other mods in this category leave the "strictly decorative" definition, and also include useful items, blocks, or mechanics.
BiblioCraft is one such mod. It can form bookcases that can store any mod manuals you've crafted, reading desks that can also store books in a readable form, and also provides an atlas item, which can hold any number of vanilla maps, and selects between them as appropriate for the location you're in. Additionally, custom books can be formed, including a "redstone book" which can be used in a bookcase to provide a redstone signal, and a working clock with chimes can be fashioned to keep you aware of the time of day. The addition of BiblioWoods can allow BiblioCraft to make use of woods provided by non-vanilla wood mods, such as Forestry.
MrCrayfish's Furniture Mod is a grab-bag of furniture and appliances. The furniture is mostly decorative, but the appliances are definitely functional, including a fire alarm, an oven for cooking, a refrigerator for storing food, and a computer with a printer that can copy enchanted books.
Carpenter's Blocks completely spans the gap between design and function. Carpenter's blocks can be formed into any slope in any direction, and also contain options for doors, torches, safes, buttons, panels, and so on. What really makes this mod functional is that all those items and blocks can have a block applied to them, and they adopt the properties of that block, such as blast resistance, lighting ability, and hardness. Additionally, if using chiseled blocks, these blocks and items can adopt the chiseled textures.
User Interface Mods
The big two interface mods included are pretty much something everyone uses.
Not Enough Items is a combination item list, recipe book, cheating tool, and world information system. This mod is in just about every modpack, and for good reason; people use this to have access to recipes of various blocks, and to see what blocks are available when not in Creative mode. This mod includes its two addons: NEI Addons, and NEI Integration, also for good reason.
WAILA (What am I looking at?) is another major mod that few can afford to not use. This is the mod that produces the tooltip at the top of the player's HUD that shows relevent information, such as a block name, what mod the item is from, or a mob's remaining hitpoints (among many, many other things). Included with WAILA is Waila Plugins and Waila Harvestability.
Another major mod for information purposes is JourneyMap. This is a real-time mapping UI that shows a minimap on the main screen, and has a more detailed view that you can access in-game. This mod can even export the map to a web browser, allowing you to track the known world using a web browser while you play. There is also a server mod that allows servers to limit what information the players will see in their Journeymaps, so there is no risk of players acting on forbidden knowledge.
Dynamic Lights is another example of an information mod, although it might not seem so at first. With this mod, a player can hold a torch and walk around. As long as the torch is in their hand, or even on the ground, the area around the torch (and by extension, the player) will light up as if the torch was placed. This guarantees that the player will be able to navigate through caves using their last torch. It won't however, stop mobs from spawning, though, so be careful. This feature is not limited to torches; custom configurations have been made to add support to almost all blocks that glow when put down, although due to configuration limits, microblocks and openblocks tanks filled with glowing liquid are not supported by this mod.
Not all information is presented on the screen; sound is an often-overlooked source of information for the savvy player. Two mods provide audio cues that help the player track things in the game.
The lighter sound mod is called "Sound Filters." This mod simply adds two filters: an amplification filter that reduces the sound's amplitude and quality with distance (or blocks between the source and the player), and a reverberation simulator that makes caves sound like actual caves.
The larger sound mod is called "MAtmos." This mod has a huge collection of detectors to determine what plays, including the ability to detect the time of day, what blocks are in the player's vicinity, what the weather is like, whether the player is high in the air, at ground level, whether the player is near an ocean biome, whether the player is near a source of laval, and whether the player is indoors, outdoors, or close enough to not matter. All this is factored into the sounds that MAtmos plays, in order to set an atmosphere. For the best results, I've been using three sound resource packs in this order from top down: Rhapsodia, Snowsong, and msi_conversion
All this sound can influence the player without them realizing it; if the player hears lava; they're going to be more careful about digging. If they hear crickets in the daytime, they know that night is coming, and it's time to set up a place to sleep, or return to the cabin. If the player uses a bed other than the vanilla one, it's likely they won't get the Somnia GUI or wake up at the correct time; in this case, listening to the atmosphere will provide aural cues that morning has come, and that they should probably get out of bed. If they hear water dripping indoors or underground, then they're either near a lake, or else it's a subtle sign that it's raining outside. There's a lot of things a player can gather from using their ears, and this mod gives them that extra dimension of information to work with.
Outside of information display, there is also mods that change the user interface for gameplay purposes.
Inventory Tweaks is the most minor, but it is far from the least important change. This mod allows the player to automatically sort what's in their inventory, or in whatever chest they have open at the moment.
Not Enough Keys is an expansion on the controls configuration; it allows the player to export their keybindings, so that if something changes their settings, they can restore them exactly the way the player had them. This also provides the ability to use keybinding modifiers (CTRL/Shift/Alt+key) to expand the keyboard capabilities.
Right-click placement was an issue previously, just after removing Tinker's Construct from the recipe. Two mods were chosen to fill in the holes left by that loss.
The first mod, Mine & Blade: Battlegear 2, provides a dual-wielding mechanic that can allow a player to have a pickaxe in one hand, and a torch in the other... and the player won't even need to keep their main slots occupied for this. The mod also adds shields, a quiver to hold up to four stacks of arrows, and different types of ammunition to give the player some level of control over the amount and kind of damage they do. Just be aware that archery-capable mobs will also be able to use custom arrows as well.
One thing to keep in mind is that Inventory Tweaks auto-replacement needs to be disabled if using Battlegear. Otherwise, the moment it tries to autoreplace a broken tool in a MB slot, the game will crash.
The other mod, a way to replace the need for Battlegear, or the requirement to spend experience to gain right-click placement (through ToolUtilities), is TorchTools, which gives the mechanic by default, exactly the same way that Tinker's Construct provides it.
Server vs. Client
The mods in here can be split into "Client" and "Server." This is because some mods will be using code that only works in a client; servers calling this code will crash. I'll leave the decision of which mods to place in what folder an exercise to the modpacker.
Industrial Age
Once you have the ability to mine and process iron, the self-powered machine becomes a reality. Well, there are redstone devices, but this makes them look like block and tackle by comparison.
Shaft Power
As the central tech mod in this modpack, RotaryCraft contains automation tools for just about every possible task in the game, from mining, to processing, to farming, to forestry, and on and on. This mod also allows for longer-distance power transmission using chain drives and chain links. RotaryCraft (and ReactorCraft, described later) are the only mods in the game with their power generation enabled; every other mod has their engines/generators/etc. disabled. Considering the comparison of power levels, this really isn't a loss. The main challenge with these mods is intellectual; the mechanics to the mods are semi-realistic. You won't need to know any in-depth engineering calculations, but some basic understanding of multiplication and division will be necessary to make use of the energy system's three values (speed*torque=power) in this mod.
In addition to the shaft power provided by RotaryCraft, a means of electrical storage and transmission is available in the form of ElectriCraft. In the same way that RotaryCraft handles shaft power (semi-realistically), electricraft handles its energy (current*force=power) in an identical way. In fact, in the conversion, speed becomes current (rad/s -> amps), while torque becomes force (newton-meters -> volts). In both cases, the power is measured in Watts.
These mods all come with a handbook, explaining the way the power works. Additionally, players who get the hang of the mods realizes one incredible fact: if the torque is enough to power a machine, then adding shaft speed will always make the machine faster. Just to make sure you understand this: There is no upper limit to RotaryCraft machine speeds! Soon enough, the machine's output will be measured in units per second, rather than seconds per unit. The exception is in heat-based machines, where the torque and speed should be identical for the best results... in which case, it's simply more power that increases performance.
Now, in those cases where Redstone Flux is needed (and there are still quite a few machines that use it; see the next few sections), RotaryCraft has converters for those mods. It even has converters to provide RailCraft steam, so there's no need to make Railcraft boilers for Railcraft steam.
Railway
Ah, the self-powered, rail-directed transport system. By far, the cheapest long-distance transport mechanic for the player with a mining operation in one biome, a forestry operation in another biome, a fishery in a third, and several farms providing food in a forth. With RailCraft, the vanilla minecart system is expanded into a full-on train set, with locomotives that can carry a long line of linked minecarts to collect and distribute materials to various locations, and even have extensive detection and control systems to allow complex routing assignments.
Another useful feature to Railcraft is the tank. It has the ability to make enormous tanks that can store liquids for later use. The capacity of a Railcraft tank is twice the capacity of a similarly-sized OpenBlocks tank, but half that of similar-sized RotaryCraft reservoirs (although this tank looks so much better than the reservoirs).
Redstone Flux
RotaryCraft can cover an enormous ground where features are concerned. However, it does not have everything there is. For those things that it does not duplicate, mods have been added to compensate for that lack. Even so, unlike shaft power, Redstone Flux machines do have a maximum speed limit, so be prepared to wait for some batch operations to complete; throwing more power at the machine won't help.
BuildCraft has two major purposes in this modpack. The first purpose is for construction; the filler, builder, and architect table have been enabled for the player's use. Base construction has never been faster.
The other purpose for Buildcraft is to handle the production of fossil fuels. Buildcraft spawns oil fields all over the world, and provides the pump and refinery to convert all that oil into buildcraft fuel, which is essentially gasoline. You can then use that fuel in the RotaryCraft Fuel-powered engine to provide power, or save it and use it in a Fuel Enhancer with some other ingredients to turn buildcraft fuel into jet fuel. Needless to say, the jet fuel's more powerful.
For the bee people out there, Forestry is also included in the pack. In order to keep RotaryCraft relevant, the farming module is disabled. However, the factory module is still active. In this way, bees and their products can still be processed.
Redstone tech can provide a good level of automation, but there are limits to what it can do on a small scale, even with Project Red miniaturizations. And it can only send one signal per line (a 16-value scale, admittedly, but still, just one signal). OpenComputers provides a much higher level of control to automation, with the ability to sense the states of machines, and send redstone signals where the player needs them to go, using lua as a full-on programming language.
Miscellaneous
JourneyMap is a heavy program. Some peoples' computers simply cannot handle it. For this reason, Antique Atlas has been included. While BiblioCraft includes an atlas, it uses vanilla maps, which are localized. Antique Atlas produces a larger-scaled map that includes multi-chunk biome identification and the ability to mark points of interest.
Another tool used in the aim of mitigating the no-longer-present Tinker's Construct is Enchanting Plus. This mod is used as a way to replace the TiC modifiers. By default, enchanting is a hit-or-miss proposition, whereas modifiers allowed a player to put a specific ability on their tool at the desired level. Enchanting Plus allows a player to pick the type and degree of enchantments that can be put on their tool in the same way, thereby replacing the effect of modifiers.
Sorting through inventories can be a frustrating exercise; Inventory Tweaks provides in-chest sorting, but what if multiple chests have the same item? How does one sort everything in a whole room of chests? Refined Relocation can be used as a way to filter a group of chests, so that placing items in any of them will allow them to be moved to the correct chest automatically.
Mad Science
The name is mainly to be funny, but ultimately, this stage is the "high science" game... just the sort of thing that a soon-to-be world ruler will need.
To begin with, no mad scientist is ever going to operate using safe power generation. Not when the nuclear option is on the table. ReactorCraft is an expansion on the RotaryCraft mod, which includes high-temperature gas reactors, fission reactors, and the fusion reactor, the single-greatest source of energy in all of Minecraft. These will be required to advance through the other mad science disciplines, as the machines will require enormous amounts of energy to operate correctly.
Onto genetics. What is mad science without the genetic abominations? Advanced Genetics allows a player to analyze the genetics of various creatures, isolate the genes that provide the creatures' powers, and then insert it into other creatures... or even themselves!
So far, there is a time-consuming need to breed bees and hope they produce a specific strain. With Gendustry, the player can control the bees. The bees can produce what the scientist needs, or they can be melted down for their genetic material.
Next, any respectable mad scientist will have ways of storing things that keeps them out of the way until they're needed, and the more techy, the better. Why not keep everything as energy? Applied Energistics and Extra Cells provides a sufficiently sciency way of storing things in large quantities without the need for bulky containers or complex sorting systems! And with AE2 Stuff, there's no longer a need to keep water pits around the base to grow pure crystals.
Speaking of storing stuff, some things are just useless. So, what mad scientist would pass up an opportunity to break those things down into their constituent atoms or molecules, and just make what they need, right? Mad chemistry comes alive with the Minechem mod.
By now, you might have noticed veins of fossilized bones and plants. This is because no real mad scientist would be complete without a dinosaur army to rule the world with. With the Fossils and Archaeology Revival mod, you can get one!
Finally, at the far end of mad science, there's the power to control time and space. While viable time control isn't really in the pack at this time, the option is reserved for future updates. However, space is already handled in two forms.
First, there is the Enhanced Portals mod. This mod's purpose is to allow instantaneous transport between two points in space. ANY space. Any dimension. With this mod, you can make a portal to the Nether or the End that can be controlled by you. You can also use these portals to transmit items and fluids between locations as well.
Redstone Flux can be transmitted as well, but not shaft power; this is one of the few times where the use of rotational dynamos and magnetostatics will need to be used to transport shaft power using the portal, and even then, power loss can be expected in the process, due to the loss of power using Magnetostatics.
The mod that provides the ultimate control over space and time is RFTools. This mod adds a lot of features that control how redstone flux networks operate, but its most powerful feature is the ability to create universes. What mad scientist in his right mind (ahem) would miss out on being able to make his own universe, and preside over it like unto a god?
It just makes you want to laugh. Wildly.
Clarification
I use "Mad Science" as a schtick, because the "scientific" mods over-simplify the sciences they are designed to emulate. Matter/Energy conversion is nowhere near as cheap a process as Applied Energistics attempts to demonstrate. Genetic sequencing is far more complex than simply pulling some skin cells, analyzing the cells, and giving a person an injection to allow them the power of flight, or teleportation. Chemistry requires a lot of math, because you can only convert molecules in groups, so as to allow the atoms to re-bond to different structures (and in some cases, you need a catalyst to even get the process rolling in the first place). De-extinction is, in fact, a thing, but so far, nobody's been able to de-extinct a species enough for it to become self-supporting yet. And teleportation pretty much has the same problem as matter/energy conversion; it is not cheap to perform, power-wise.
Ender Tech
Beyond mad science, there is Alien Science, or, in this game, Ender Tech. In short, this is where technology is dependent on the alien materials from the Ender dimension that appear in this world through its agents: the endermen. In this pack, ender tech has been altered (using MineTweaker scripts) to require plutonium-infused ender pearls, known as the "Cherenkov Singularity," to craft ender tech.
I can probably provide some form of technobabble to explain the mystery behind the Cherenkov Singularity; perhaps the plutonium gives the pearl a way to interface with newtonian particles, so that the pearl can be used inside of machines, instead of being completely isolated from reality. Maybe the radiation released by the plutonium is warped enough by the pearl that the resulting energy can allow technology to replicate the effects of the pearl. Maybe the pearl exists in a stable quantum indeterminate state, and the energy released by the plutonium produces a continuously-collapsing state that allows for constant entanglement between items.
Regardless of what explanation makes the most sense to you, the idea is that plutonium infusion allows machines to use the ender pearl in a way that is controllable without destroying the pearl itself, or requiring the interaction of a living being. And a couple mods provide ways to construct machines that use ender power in their functions.
While it provides a major grab-bag of non-ender machines for the discerning player (which the player does not need to wait for ender-tech to use), Extra Utilities includes a good number of components that are clearly ender-tech, for example, the Ender-Thermic Pump and the Ender Quarry. These machines use the inherent teleportation mechanic of ender pearls to make things happen.
There is a major problem with the default configuration for this mod, however, and that is the QED; some things are enforced to use the QED to be made, and the QED is gated behind blocks that are gated behind the singularity. I could have recreated the recipes in Minetweaker, and removed them from the QED, but I don't see the point to it in the first place, so it was simply disabled.
Another mod that makes use of Ender tech is the Ender Utilities mod. Not quite as extensive as Extra Utilities, Ender Utilities creates tools and basic machines that make use of ender power, such as the ender workbench and the ender table... or the reusable ender pearl.
The End
At this point, you have a lot of power, but you've yet to manage the ultimate task: going to wherever the alie... er... endermen come from. After all, they get all this magical technolocy from their home realm, so why can't you go there and get your own materials to make this ender tech completely for yourself?
The first thing the player needs to do is research dimensional rifts. This is a highly-risky proposition, because mucking about with the fabric of reality can cause all kinds of extra-dimensional abominations to appear and ruin one's day. And in this case, making an interdimensional nexus will allow new breeds of hostile mob to cross over into this dimension. This is caused by the Invasion mod. Yes, I know the mod is meant to simply trigger an invasion, but why not add a little explanatory story behind it that paves the way for the ultimate dimension hop?
Finally, getting to the end. For this to happen, I wanted to make sure that the End was gated behind both ReactorCraft and Invasion, so the first thing that was done was the removal of End Portal Stones using Custom Ore Generation. The second task was to make a recipe for an End Portal stone for the player to make and place on their own. This recipe includes 8 Cherenkov Singularities (it's not cheap), as well as one rift flux in the center (the player gets one rift flux for each invasion successfully fended off). Once the player has 96 Cherenkov Singularities and 12 rift flux, they can make the 12 end portal stones needed to actually make an end portal, and visit the End to fight the dragon.
Simply put, you don't get to end the game until you get to the end of the game.
Conclusion
Well, here's the full measure of the modpack. The reasons and intents, as well as what the mods do. I'm aware it's a little thin in places, so anyone who has questions can feel free to ask, and I will update the recipe as I can. This recipe is current as of version 1.4.0.
UPDATES:
Finally, I added a recommendation for the SnowSong resource pack; this replaces a lot of sound effects, as well as both game and disc music with better-sounding alternatives.
Wow! Nice idea you got there. Never seen a modpack "recipe" before, I'm going to add lots of those mods to my single player world. One thing i really liked was the one block per function style, never tried playing without the thermal expansion/buildcraft/MFR combo and it looks very hard hehe. My first contraption in single player is always a mfr tree farm to power my base so a RotaryCraft only pack would force me to find other ways to power and process stuff early on (Grinder + Steam engine probably lol). I think more people should know RotaryCraft and its amazing realistic tech tree, and stop using that ridiculous GregTech and saying it's "complicated". One thing i have to complain is that Tinker's Construct doesn't fit at all in a "tech progression" scenario, as it has the most overpowered tools ever and makes early mid and even late game so much easier. My aproach is always the vanilla tool progression: stone-iron-diamond-enchanted as it makes more sense and there is nothing like bragging about your fully enchanted diamond armor and tools :P.
Anyway, amazing job designing this "modpack" and writing this HUGE recipe, gave me lots of cool ideas
PS: Sorry for my bad English, not my native language hehe
The grinder will work with one steam engine only if you build a gearbox. Without lubricant, you'll probably want to build a worm gear to allow the engine to work with the grinder... it'll be slow but functional.
Keep in mind that a way to help with the load balancing is to use ElectriCraft in conjunction with RotaryCraft; this will handle the even split of energy into multiple machines, although power can be lost over a distance.
As for a farmable energy source here's my method: I use 1 DC engine to power a pump for bringing water to everything. Then two DC engines to power two fermenters. Then a steam engine to power a friction heater (which removes the charcoal requirement for the furnace). A steam engine and a worm gear will power a grinder. 1 steam engine + 1 fan powers a 22-block, single-row potato farm, with another steam engine and item vacuum at the end. A diamond-level Expanded Redstone block breaker (with a chest attached to the back) set to a tick-speed timer will collect from a 12-block, single-row sugarcane farm (although 12 stone block breakers can be used in place of the diamond breaker). And, finally, a gasoline engine (and possibly a rotational dynamo) will provide the base's power.
The garden grows potatoes, while the sugarcane farm provides the sugarcane. The grinder will convert 1 sugarcane into 3 sugar. Dirt and sugar goes into one fermenter to make yeast, while the resulting yeast and potatoes go into the other fermenter to make sludge (make sure both fermenters have water being supplied). The sludge formed from the second fermenter is piped to the furnace to form ethanol crystals. Put these crystals into a gasoline engine, and you have a renewable source of energy for your base. Granted, over time, you'll need more power (and fuel), but as you can probably tell, the farm can be expanded as needed, and the gasoline engine is pretty efficient overall.
Aside from this, I highly recommend three (horizontally-aimed) floodlights powered by DC engines. These suckers provide bright lighting for a distance of 128 blocks (I mean this literally. for 128 blocks, the beam of light stays at a light level of 15, with the usual dropoff on each side). If each floodlight is kept 3 blocks from its neighbors, and placed at least 3 blocks over the ground, and their beams are kept clear of obstacles, you can easily keep a 12x12 room brightly lit without placing torches or other blocks everywhere.
By itself, you may be right, but keep in mind three things:
Keep in mind that technology isn't just in automation. The stone/bonze/iron ages each had hand-held technology, which each saw improvements to their previous designs It's no different here; you have to work hard to master the basics, and then you're rewarded with a new progression to master... First, you master survival (food, tools, and home protection), then you master resource collection (mining your way up to, and beyond, diamond), then you move on to automation, and eventually, you reach the point where you're a living god... at which point, you can make the invasion nexus and start seeing just how OP you're not! Shortcuts exist, but they are very hard to find, and most are ridiculously risky, considering the changes in hostile mob spawning and behavior. But, from that first pickaxe to the endgame machinery, it's all technology.
And let's face it: there's no point bragging that you did something that simply requires staircasing down to level 8-12 and just digging a tunnel until you have diamonds. Now, getting to diamond level after looking for ores, making the infrastructure to upgrade your tool, and working hard to level it up to move to the next step to get there, while keeping yourself alive in the process, AND avoiding the lava source block that has a 25-50% chance of spawning next to each and every diamond ore block? THAT's something to boast about.
Thanks, and I hope your ideas work out!
This is a very intriguing concept, and I always like Reika's mods, I feel they are overlooked.
Thanks! And I agree, which was the reason I made this modpack... at least for myself. I played Monster once upon a time, but after that, I didn't really see any good modpacks, particularly nothing through FTB, that included Reika's mods, and I didn't want to be stuck at 1.6.4 forever. So I made one for myself. Over the last two years, I've refined it until it became what you see here now.
Thanks for the good words.
I dislike "kitchen sink packs" mainly because they usually end up with the bulk of players using their "tried and true" methods of accomplishing goals, and ignoring other mods' possible improvements, simply because the player doesn't really know about them, and is reinforced by other players using the same "tired and rote" methods. Getting hungry? Kill a cow and have some steak. Want good tools? Dig down to y=12 and just mine around until you can collect diamonds. Want to avoid mobs? Plop a bed down, even in the middle of a field, and sleep. Need a farm? Minefactory reloaded. Need a mine? Buildcraft quarry. Want a lot of power? Big Reactors. Want alternate dimensions? MystCraft. Want more complex machines? IC2. Want the game to be more challenging? Gregtech. It's like listening to an echo chamber stuck on the same chord... I just wanted something that would break players from the "same old" mold.
I saved RF for the higher-end stuff... I added the "Mad Science" stuff as a way to reward oneself for reaching the end by having a way to have fun with the absurd levels of power one would get from having immortality, invincibility, easy access to any material, and a rampaging dinosaur army of doom... as well as an even tougher enemy to unleash it against.
Having limited water seems to enter into the realm of hardcore, which really doesn't appeal to me. I wanted more difficulty, but not quite that much.
Aside from a GUI issue when sleeping on a non-vanilla bed (sleeping bag or carpenter's bed), I've not noticed any problems with Somnia and Railcraft. What kind of problems were you having? Did you download the latest 1.7.10 version from Jenkins (rather than the 1.8 version)?
Keep in mind that in reality, water is a closed system; sooner or later, all water returns to either the water table, or evaporates and becomes rain. Therefore, 'infinite' water is actually more realistic.
As for Somnia, you might be able to download the source, along with python and a JDK, and run build.py to make a working Somnia until Jenkins comes back up.Never mind, that's the 1.8 code. I'm afraid all I can suggest is to wait for now.Very interesting.
May I strongly recommend adding Reasonable Realism, at least "Harder Ores" and "Expanded Industry", possibly "Harder Wildlife"?
Harder ores builds on top of COG, and provides you with rarer, larger vein systems (based off the SMP strategic vein ideas that were present but unused in the configs), along with prospecting systems (including indicator plants mostly based off real-world plants) and limonite (bog iron, found in beaches/rivers/swamps, as a starting source of iron).
Harder Wildlife slows crop growth, gives you seasons, and may make it desirable to make a greenhouse or indoor growing environment to protect against bad weather. (It also gives farm animals and trees a natural birth and death cycle).
Expanded industry adds to vanilla rail and hopper mechanics. It adds improvements without trying to replace anything.
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(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
Wooden gears do not require lubricant anymore. Steam engine and wood gear will power a grinder.
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(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
Has that mod been released? The last time I checked, it was still in development.
Considering that the second mining level will be copper (iron is third), surface iron may be redundant, but then, this pack IS based off of Rotarycraft. Iron sources will always be in demand, and those indicator plants would be all kinds of useful. The thing that worries me, however, is this: I want iron to be something a player works up to, something they won't be ready for until they're ready to move to stage 2. I'll have to check for a way to keep limonite from being mined before the player has made the smelter, and upgraded their tools to copper.
Considering that I already have Hunger Overhaul and Spice Of Life, this would place the game into "hardcore" territory. I do want the game to be harder, but I don't want it to be impossible for an average player to play.
Considering the presence of Railcraft, the minecart expansion would be redundant. As for the hopper mechanics... it could be useful, as long as I can disable the minecart expansion.
My mind, sir, is officially blown.
...And there was much rejoicing.
Hmm...
Right now, limonite can be mined with a shovel. If you can't make a shovel with wood or stone -- if the first shovel head you can make is with copper -- then you are fine. But that might wreck farms -- mattocks need a shovel head if I recall correctly. Vanilla hoes will work if you still have them enabled.
(NB: Last time I tried using a flint mattock, it was as strong of a weapon as a sword! Mattocks are horribly over powered early game.)
And, underground iron is hard to find. Not impossible, and the indicator plants help, but it is rare. Rare enough that you'll have to look for it, and you'll want to find a few nuggets worth of iron along the way while looking for it.
Understand: Limonite will give you somewhere around 25-45 nuggets per deposit. I have seen deposits that entirely missed the shore and were 100% in the water (only visibly in COG's debugging mode) -- that means ZERO.
Food: As I understand it: Spice of life: that's the "you have to eat different foods" mod. Hunger overhaul is the "food gives you less hunger per item, and crop growth is slowed down".
If that's correct, then Hunger Overhaul can be dropped down. The current version of HO can be configured to only have the features that you want (it can even be configured now to have no effect, so you can pick and choose which features you want to use). (Past versions could NOT be so configured, and I did not like some of the forced options, so I have not used it in my packs/plays. My experience with it is solely due to Jaded's ... "gifts" to the community.)
Railcraft/Expanded Industry:
EI gives you the ability to detect which cart is on a track (by a comparator output); it gives you single-block minecart loading and unloading stations. I don't think railcraft does either of those.
The hopper side includes a distributor (a hopper that outputs to all 4 sides, in a cycle), and a wooden hopper (only outputs down, cannot fill side inputs, but does not require iron). And, an item filter hopper.
http://reasonable-realism.wikia.com/wiki/Expanded_Industry
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(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
The first shovel is actually the vanilla wood shovel... I un-disabled vanilla wood tools for the purpose of first-day materials collection. The flint tools are the next step, as all other vanilla tools (and most modded "vanilla" tools) have been kept disabled. By default, the flint shovel can collect copper ore.
In this case, the mattock is necessary; Hunger Overhaul disabled the vanilla hoes, and even if it didn't, Iguana's Tweaks would have. Since your first goal is to make a farm to keep fed, it's kinda important to have a way to do that. On a side note, my Sprocket-generated vanilla ore config also includes a modified clay spawn; would that be preserved with the harder ores?
Which is why I said that the indicator flowers would be all kinds of useful. Also: the reason for all the hindrance to progression is to make the player slow down and find ways to be efficient at the stone-age level before graduating to the next stage. It's going to take a while to find copper, and then another while before iron becomes available, so settle down... get comfortable. Establish as much infrastructure as you can to prepare for the next step. Make the most with what you have, so when the opportunity arises, you'll be more than ready to capitalize on it.
As long as it requires at least a copper shovel (in Iguana's tweaks) to mine, then we're still good. Otherwise, what happens is that once a player has 9 nuggets, they can smelt them into one iron pickaxe head... boom, instant copper-mining-level bypass.
Hunger Overhaul is also "right-click on a crop to collect it without breaking the crop," "the yield of a crop can be crafted into the crop's seed," and "breaking grass no longer produces seeds; a mattock raking unwatered ground is required." Either way, it's the "seasons" and especially the "natural life cycle" that would put the mod into hardcore territory. The other mods would make the game hard enough without worrying about preserving seeds to replant crops that died off... never mind the natural deaths of animals you spent time herding.
Like I said, there is a balance I'm trying to maintain; challenging, but not overwhelming. You won't die from a lack of iron or copper. But if you don't have enough food during that critical first week, you'll be dying pretty regularly... or pretty quickly if you are ballsy enough to go into hardcore difficulty.
Are you sure? Granted, it's not single-block, but considering that loaders and unloaders are likely going to be in different locations to begin with (loaders used at mining/logging/pumping sites, unloaders at processing plants/factories/refineries), it doesn't really need to be a one-block thing. And the loaders are not just limited to items. As for detectors? There are a few options available... Once again, there's no all-in-one solution, but once again, you're not going to need to detect everything at once, just what's relevant for the location. And that's not counting the additional types of track, the signaling apparatus, and the locomotive engines themselves... much less the additional carts. Heck, among the carts is a way to ensure the trains stay on time.
All the same, the detector might be useful, but I'd rather not add the loader/unloader block, as it would just be redundant.
Like I said, this is definitely something to look into.
I'll look at it as soon as I have a chance.
UPDATE:
Now that I've read the wiki, I've decided the following.
I will still have to play the game with the added mods in order to get a feel for the difficulty of the various changes, though, before I add anything to the first post.
I don't know if you can require a copper shovel head / prevent a wooden shovel from mining the limonite. Ask in the RR thread http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-mods/2451299-reasonable-realism-its-a-pack-its-a-mod-it-makes
If you want people making early farms/mattocks, why eliminate the vanilla hoe? Other than Iguana's "disable all vanilla tools because TIC RULES!" view, why? I understand the whole view that a strict 8-layer tech tree is superior to vanilla's 4 layer, but ... there's mining, and then there's shovel/hoe.
Crops don't die. ... well ...
You will get weeds in farmland that is not covered or growing crops. That can be removed easily with hoes.
Trees will die, drop saplings, the saplings will plant and grow.
Animals will breed, get born, live, and die, on their own. So yes, your adult cow will become old, and then ancient, and then dead. If you have several cows in the pen, they will have babies and stay just fine. The default configs actually make a stable heard of about 12 animals in a pen, ... provided you have enough grass for the herbavores to eat. I do hope you have a really big pen, I'd hate to see them run out of food and starve. (5 or 6 to start with will grow into a large herd. 3 will die off. 4 ... depends on whether you get births or deaths first)
Seasons are nice because it gives you different crops that grow at different times of the year, as well as a sense of a good time for growing, and a not-so-good time for growing. And, there is "Winter Wheat" (apparently, it's a real crop) that actually like the cold weather. Not to mention the piles of deep snow in the really cold biomes.
... and you're complaining that Harder Wildlife is too hard-core?
So let me see if I get this right (by the way, this is news to me -- last time I used HO I still got seeds from grass) -- minecraft beta had you hoeing normal grass blocks to get seeds. This mod has you hoeing grass blocks to get seeds. But instead of a normal, easy hoe, you now need to make a smeltery and reach the copper age, which means you have to have gotten flint for a flint pick, found copper, found enough sand, gravel, and clay, cooked a bunch of grout, made a bunch of seared bricks, gotten lava -- ohh, no iron, so you have to spend clay on buckets to get your lava in, plus the aluminum brass to make those patterns, all before your first seeds can be planted!??!'
... I'll search for a village, thank you.
You did leave the village farms up and running, right?
Should not be affected. Harder Underground changes the normal ore layout, only, and does not affect anything else.
===
Alright, so railcraft does have the same loader/unloader/cart type detectors. As you linked, it has many more types of cart detectors (RailC can detect based on what's in the cart; EI cannot).
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(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
Actually, that's a good question. It makes sense, so I've just fixed it, and added the updated Hunger Overhaul configuration to the config zipfile in the first post.
Grass or grass blocks? If grass, does RR also add faster respawn of grass? Lord knows, if real grass grows fast enough for me to mow the stuff each week, I should expect nothing less from RR.
Not quite. The first-level tools of Iguana's Tinker Tweaks are flint tools. These do not need the smeltery, as the parts can be made using the basic parts builder, and the wooden tool station (flint for the heads, wood for the other parts). And flint is craftable using a shapeless recipe of three gravel (ITT disables random flint drops). As such, you need the basic tinker's construct tables, a flint mattock, 2 flint (for repairing said mattock), and and one clay bucket to get farming. Aside from this, the missing hoes have been re-enabled.
So, all-in-all, to have a full set of tools (mattock, pickaxe, axe, and shovel), you'd need to collect 15 gravel, which will make 5 flint (1 pickaxe head, 2 shovel heads, and 2 axe heads) and 5 sticks (1 tool binding, 4 handles).
This means that flint tools are meant to be the player's constant companions during the first stage of the game...particularly since they're faster than wood tools.
I did. There is something of a caveat on that, however...or more a "theoretical but unproven possibility."
Part of "Special AI" is that village mobs won't like their stuff being broken. Break too many blocks in the village, and the villagers will actually attack you. Usually, blocks that can increase their dislike for you will show a "fiery breaking" animation when you break it (the kind usually associated with auto-smelt on a pickaxe). That being said, I believe (I am not sure, but so far, it seems the case) that the "right-click harvest" of Hunger Overhaul doesn't count as damaging village property, so you may be able to harvest the food safely. And the village farms include Pam's crops. If collecting food does risk hostility from villagers, killing hostile mobs (zombies, skeletons, etc.) in the village will make villagers better-disposed to you, so it evens out.
So it does not replace the COG configurations I'm using at all. That's a relief.
As for the Harder Underground, I rejected Enviromine for this reason: adding additional hazards (Falling stone and gas hazards) to the already increased hostile mob threat (horde mode that's attracted to sound, light, and damaged players in various AIs, sizes, and abilities) seems a little too much risk for cave exploration. If the environmental hazards can be disabled, then I can probably go with it.
Oh? Okay, from the way you described it, I thought EI's detector could detect based on the cart type, and return a different level of redstone signal for each type. If that's not the case, then I guess I won't be needing it.
Animals eat grass blocks; I'm not sure about tall grass.
If you have Gany's Surface, then animals will drop poop, which will act as bonemeal if they are on grass blocks, which in turn will grow tall grass.
Animals will also eat nearby leaf blocks (not sure if it's all herbavores, or only some); mountain goats will eat dry/dead bushes as well.
(Goats: added to mesa biomes, and a couple of others, where sheep normally do not spawn. They give you wool and food, just like sheep do. This is to make some biomes more survivable than before. These same biomes also spawn hostile animals in the daytime -- monitor lizards -- that seek out hot light during the night. Monitor lizards drop leather on death.)
===
Special AI: If I take a clay bucket, and grab water from the pool in the farm, and use that to "wash" the crops out of the farm, will the villagers complain? It gives me the food and seeds, and then I have farmland to place crops on.
Of course, if you are restoring the vanilla hoe, that's less of a concern.
Or do I actually need the mattock to get the seeds?
===
Falling rock:
1. Rock dust can be disabled in the released version, as I understand it.
2. You can disable falling rock in a dimension with a COG substitution -- turn stone:0 into stone:1, and it works just fine. I had to do this for Twilight Forest (it uses a lot of large, open, underground structures).
===
EI's detector can detect, I think, 8 types of carts per detector. Basically, each detector will check two places for signs (one above it, I think two blocks above; one below it, I think directly below), and each line has a pair of cart types and a redstone strength number.
Railcraft's detector has you open up a GUI to configure it, according to that webpage you linked. It doesn't describe the GUI, so I don't know what it can/cannot detect. But railcraft has all sorts of "content" detectors. ... I like how Etho did "content" detection with vanilla mechanics.
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(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
The Harder Underground stuff can be individually disabled one way or another. There's the per-dimension rules, the COG rules (various, including the gas, all of which feature a "none" option), the global stone replacement config option (or replacing with stone:1), the sideways falling of sand and gravel, etc (note that the config applies to the unstable cobble as well).
As for grass regrowing (re: animals) it isn't any faster, but it takes A LOT of active animals to really cause a problem. I think Keybounce had something like 20 sheep and they still had enough grass on the edges of their search radius to not starve (sheep eat more grass than the others, due to the vanilla mechanic and my own overlapping). So while there was a dead patch inside their pen, it was regrowing about as fast as they were eating it. I'll have to check on the tallgrass. I don't think they do ATM, but when I get around to making their block nom-noms a searchable list instead of "this or this or this" I'll be able to add it easily. And if you have 20 animals all in one place, they're going to age faster from over-crowding anyway.
Limonite: you could straight up disable its distribution, or I could try and make some config options just for you that would up the harvest tool level.
Expanded Industry: I think you can do without it.
Sluice: The sluice is configurable, you can individually disable what can be found with it. Without expanded industry (no wooden hopper), even leaving its configs at default, would require a lot of player micro-managing to get enough iron to do anything with it. Seriously, even with a couple of wooden hoppers it takes me longer to harvest sand/gravel than it takes for it to be used up and I need to make ten trips to get very much
ironanything. Unless you're sitting on top of the motherload it takes a good hour and several hundred (if not a few thousand) sand/gravel. That said...I'm going to insert a config option for how long its processing cycle is. It's kind of ironic how bad it is. XD I think I'm going to have to look over the mechanic and make it better, allow regular dirt, and then reduce the processing time.Keep in mind: I was testing 16x16 pens, both chunk-aligned, and "4 chunk corner" aligned.
What I did find: When I was not around, and the animals stopped wandering, they died off very quickly :-). (I think it was a few hours). When I was around, and animals moved, they found enough grass to live, and the eating was spread around enough that things didn't die completely.
... If I recall correctly, the chunk-aligned pen recovered the edges faster (9 active chunks spreading), but not the insides. Since vanilla mechanics wanted to put the animals in one corner, this worked better anyways.
EDIT: Tall grass regrowth in testing was entirely dependent on gany's surface and poop/bonemeal. If there's grass blocks around the poop, there will be either tall grass or indicator flowers. In mineral rich areas, it became all indicator flowers. .... But then, that test run had something like 2,000 sheep. They were supposed to die off from overcrowding, but in truth ...
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(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
So essentially, they're like vanilla sheep; they eat the surface of a grass block, which becomes dirt until the grass spreads to it, then? That sounds okay. I might just give it a gander.
As far as I know, you have to actually harvest blocks for them to dislike, and eventually attack you. I've not put village crop collection methods to the test, but I am guessing that "washing" their items away wouldn't count as an intention "block breaking" action. You might want to check with FatherToast.
The mattock is treated as a hoe as far as Hunger Overhaul is concerned. You can use the hoes for seed collection.