GM Modpack Ideas

As soon as I've got all the mods in, set up correctly and not instantly crashing I'll start up a server in order to more rigorously test the modpack (I may want some help with this). Then, once that's done, the server will go up and established members (plus any extra whitelisted members) will be given access.

Current TODO list:
I'll probably do one more poll/post either later today or tomorrow which will cover the few magic mods I'm not sure about (there are quite a few less magic than tech mods and most are obvious inclusions), the 'utility' mods (morph, computercraft/opencomputers and more) and Draconic Evolution (as it only got 1 vote in the tech mods poll).
Then I need to add the mods I've not yet added (I've mostly worked on the ore generation today). I usually add the mods ~5 at a time, load up the game to make sure it doesn't crash instantly and then add more mods.
Then I have to:
add microblock support to some blocks,
add Thaumcraft aspects to some mobs added by other mods,
hide most microblocks, pipe covers, cable facades, underground biomes ores and no doubt more stuff from NEI so you don't have to go through pages and pages of items all the time,
change config files so that you don't get a ton of messages every time you log in/books when you log in for the first time
and I need to set up the controls as there are a ton of keys being used for multiple things at the moment.
I'm sure there's something I've forgotten.

 

Wow, I was expecting a reaction more like 3 weeks.

 

I can help test if need be. Am fairly good at breaking things

I really like the tech bias. Not a fan of magical mods much at all!

As I was the only person to vote for Draconic Evolution, let me explain my reasoning: If it is programmed well, it looks like a neat set of items. There are options for early game power gen, it has some nicely OP armour/weps and tell me you wouldn't want to build one of these for looks alone. It also adds a whitelistable player detector (something I have wanted for some time: imagine how powerful this could be linked with computercraft) as well as a cheap to run weather modifier block.

 

Well, the tech bias is really only the result of there being less well known magic mods. I'm throwing in pretty much every decent addon for thaumcraft into the pack, I had to shuffle research around because all of them together introduced more tabs than the thaumonomicon could handle.

When it comes to Draconic evolution I mainly don't like it due to just how OP its stuff is, even if getting enough of the ore it introduces is a colossal pain. The spawner can spawn a bunch of mobs every second when fully upgraded and the machine for killing mobs will kill a wither instantly. The best armour it provides supposedly allows you to stand in the minefactory reloaded laser drill's laser for a short while. And the Open Peripherals Sensor already allows detecting of nearby players, amongst other things, when hooked up to a computer.

 

Didnt we want op stuff?

 

Didn't have any luck with the player detector in openperipherals back in older versions. Have to confess, not tried such a new version of it. My basic LUA knowledge means I prefer things that emit redstone, then deal with that signal as I see fit :3 Rather than programming a peripheral.
Maybe consider disabling some of the most OP parts, in particular the top tier armour and weps? As they can be a bit 'too easy'. But, excess can be kinda fun, remember the tekkit days with EE condensers, the possibilities for automating them were great fun.

I'm perfectly fine if its not included, though

 

What was going to happen was that I wasn't going to do any balancing. So Mekanism and its digital miner will go untouched and if we do add Draconic Evolution, I won't balance any of that either. The lack of balancing also means I can get the pack finished considerably earlier.

I'm not sure about the radar peripheral, I've definitely used it before whilst messing around with computercraft though.

As above, if we add the mod to the pack, I won't bother disabling any of the OP things, as we've established that we're happy to play the modpack on the basis that there will be OP stuff in the pack and that it'll be down to us to individually decide as to whether or not we'll use OP things and which ones.

On a separate note, mystcraft is currently crashing the modpack, I'd not noticed beforehand as it was only occurring quite a few minutes after loading a world, hopefully I'll be able to get it sorted soon, either work out what mod is interfering and causing the crash or potentially removing mystcraft. The problem is that I think mystcraft is just highlighting a bug that can occur naturally.

I'll also be heading back to uni next weekend so progress will likely stall around that time.

 

Ok, results from the core 'tech' mods poll at the time of posting

For a status update the mods in bold have already been added to the pack and had their configs adjusted accordingly (so they actually work together and don't all try and generate their own ores).

Tech Mods
This means that for core 'tech' mods, we'll have Big Reactors, Factorization, Mekanism, IC2, Electrical Age, RotaryCraft, Thermal Expansion/Dynamics, Minefactory Reloaded, Buildcraft, Railcraft, Matter Overdrive, Ender IO, Minechem, Immersive Engineering, Forestry and possibly Draconic Evolution depending on the results of the next poll.

Aside from these, the other tech mods planned for inclusion are: RFTools, Applied Energistics 2, Advanced Genetics, LanteaCraft (Need to try adding UBC support for Naquadah/Trinium), Simply Jetpacks, Tinkers' Construct, Redstone Arsenal, Redstone Armoury, Logistics Pipes and various cross mod compatibility mods. I'll probably add Gravitation Suite and Nuclear Control to go along with IC2.

I'm not sure whether we should include Solar Expansion, Gendustry and Mariculture. And I'm not sure which out of Modular Armour and MachineMuse' Modular Powersuits we should have (or we could have both or neither).

Magic Mods
There are considerably less of these when not counting addons, though there are a couple that I wanted to ask if we should include. Currently we have Thaumcraft (+addons, see below), Blood Magic, Ars Magica 2 and Witchery.

I've also added Clockwork Phase, Xeno's Reliquary and Aura Cascade and I'm not sure about EssentialCraft 3 (would probably include the Thaumcraft addon too) and Chromaticraft. I also recently discovered Evilcraft, I've barely looked at it so don't know much about it.
Edit: Forgot to include in this post, that I'm not sure about Equivalent Exchange 3 and Project E (EE2 Rewrite).

Ok, thaumcraft addons (note that some of these integrate with other mods as well): Forbidden Magic, Arcane Arteries, Tainted Magic, Thaumic Tinkerer, Thaumic Horizons, Thaumic Mob Aspects, Thaumic Infusion, Automagy, Witching Gadgets, Thaumic Exploration, Thaumic Energistics, Technomancy.

Aside from thaumcraft, we have Sanguimancy and Blood Arsenal for Blood Magic.

 

T-T-T-Triple post (sue me), it took me all day to find that the crashing was a conflict between Biomes O' Plenty and Underground Biomes Constructs that was being highlighted by Mystcraft. It sure was lots of fun when disabling half of the mods didn't cause a crash (I thought surely, the crashing mod must therefore be one of the ones I disabled) and then running the modpack with only the mods I'd disabled previously also didn't cause a crash.

Fortunately, the developer of UBC has released a test build that should fix most of the ore dictionary problems for custom added ores (I had been fixing these manually with minetweaker) that also happens to fix the crash I was getting.

Back to actually working on adding mods to the modpack

 

Ok, new poll time, it's all about mods I'm not sure about adding, if you don't care about whether a particular mod is included, select neither of the options for that mod, I'll work out the "don't care" votes by comparing the number of votes either way to the number of people who voted on the poll.

• Obsidiplates
  • Adds obsidian (players only) and mossy cobblestone (npcs only) pressure plates that can be made silent and/or near invisible
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • Carpenter's blocks adds disguisable pressure plates
    • Ender IO adds player only pressure plates that can be painted (painting with clear class turns them invisible) and made silent
    • Tinkers' Construct landmines (when containing redstone dust rather than tnt/potions/fireworks) can function as pressure plates for all entities+redstone, npcs, players or redstone only and can be disguised as any non-transparent block
• Morph
  • Upon killing mobs/players, gain the ability to morph into them, gaining their abilities/effects such as fire immunity, flight or burning in sunlight
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • Matter Overdrive allows you to turn yourself into an android with various abilities
    • Advanced Genetics allows you to gain various abilities from mobs already, doesn't cost anything once available (such as losing health in order to fly as a bat with morph) though has a bigger start up cost and is definitely a tech themed mod requiring RF for its machines
    • Thaumic Horizons(?) has the ability to infuse your body with essentia later down the line, granting you various superhuman abilities
• Cyano's Lootable Bodies
  • Adds skeletons of players after they die, holding onto their inventory so that they can come back and collect it later. I quite liked this mod from the FTB Departed modpack, I certainly like it a lot more than OpenBlock's gravestones (they would need to be disabled if this mod was included)
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • The only modpack we've played containing it was FTB departed
    • Maybe people like gravestones more?
      
    • 2Spooky
• Portal Gun
  • Adds portal guns, long fall boots and a few other portal themed items
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • Only a limited number of portal guns available, there can only be one of each coloured portal per dimension
    • We already have Mystcraft, RF Tools, IC2(?), Thaumic Infusions(I think) that provide teleportation
• Gravity Gun
  • Similar in functionality to the Portal Gun, but without the portals and with more punting stuff around
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • Really just down to preference
• Sync
  • If you've not seen Corridor Digital's webseries Sync, with this, you can build surrogate bodies for yourself which you can teleport your consciousness between and can use like a spawn point, note that each 'shell' has a separate inventory
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • Down to preference
• Chromaticraft
  • https://sites.google.com/site/reikasminecraft/chromaticraft
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • Looks fairly interest/cool and adds more 'magic' stuff to the pack, but I've barely looked at it
• Project E
  • Rewrite of the EE2 of old
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • Can be hilariously OP, but that's not my problem
• Nether Ores
  • Adds nether variants of a lot of ores to the nether that anger zombie pigmen when you mine them, the nether ores also have a chance of exploding when being mined
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • Various machines already get 2 ingots per ore, with more complex setups getting even more ingots. Nether ores are usually worth 2 times that of overworld ores, in effect, nether ores simply adds a ton of minable resources to the server
• Mo'Creatures
  • Adds a ton of mobs to the world, both friendly and hostile, notable for its horse breeding
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • It's a lot of mobs
    • Might need some work to get them spawning in the various biomes added by mods
• Another One Bites The Dust: Berry Bushes
  • Adds Tinkers' construct oreberry bushes for most ores
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • Adds a way to farm for ores
• Iron Backpacks
  • Adds upgradable backpacks that can have various utilities as well as additional storage space added
  • Reasons for questioning inclusion:
    • Project Red adds backpacks
    • Ender storage adds ender pouches
    • Tinkers' Construct adds a knapsack
    • One of the thaumcraft addons adds a form of portable storage
    • I may have missed other portable storage options

 

Addendum to my vote:
1. Gravity gun is handy for moving chests/barrels but I seem to remember it being buggy occasionally causing crashes if you moved the 'wrong' thing. If this is still the case, then I'm not too bothered as I guess we will have JABBA diamond dollys.
2. My vote for mo creatures is dependent upon it not being a complete pain to get working and I'd also very much not like Ogres.

 

We need ogres. We all live in trees

 

needs more backpacks XD

@Queenie you didnt select option 1
"(select this so I can easily tell how many people have voted)"
now think about what you've done!

 

I got bored of reading.

Also, I finally found one of those nether mobs we were looking for.

 

You mean like Archimede's Ships? Only mod I know of that fits that bill.

 

I'll see about it, hopefully it works better with mod blocks now, the last time I used it was years ago I think.

Though there probably won't be much progress made in the next couple of days as I'm heading back to uni.

 

I told you I would miss some mods.

Would we like:
Gendustry in the pack? (it's a tech based companion mod to go along with bee breeding and farming)
Extra Bees, Extra Trees, Botany and Genetics in the pack? (Forestry addons, more bees, more trees [with accompanying booze], flower breeding and genetically modifying bees, trees, butterflies and flowers)?

I've pretty much got all the mods into the pack now, there is one rather problematic bug that I'm waiting on being fixed, though, in the mean time, I have plenty more config options to be messing with (keybindings are a bitch), as well as adding compatibility between mods.