I’ve more or less finalised my Minecraft build for the promised videos. It took a little poking and prodding of config files to get everything working together properly, but it wasn’t terribly difficult. I needed to wait for a few vital pieces to update to Minecraft 1.5.1. That happy event has now occurred, though some are pre-release versions, meaning there’ll be no shortage of bugs to discover as we go.
I should note that I have not dipped into many of these mods yet. I have only made sure that they are loading up correctly with no conflicts or errors in the log files, and that the world is generating to my liking with no shenanigans, with everything present and correct. As such, I don’t have any in-depth knowledge about them. I’ll be exploring them for the first time during the playthrough. As a result, the descriptions below are quite simplistic.
As new versions are released I’ll be updating my build with them, provided it doesn’t break anything important. Many backups shall be made!
Updated as of 15th May, 2013. Please note that this is a 1.5.1 build. Some mods may have more recent 1.5.2-only versions.
Worldgen
Extra Biomes XL 3.13.0 : A wide range of additional biome types to explore, as well as some new plants. I have all of the biomes disabled right now, so that my initial area will be base biomes.
Biomes O’ Plenty 0.5.2 : Another biome mod. Once again, the biomes are disabled in the main overworld, meaning I’ll only have vanilla biomes. However, when I start journeying the multiverse with Mystcraft, any biome from EBXL or BOP could make an appearance.
Metallurgy 3.0.0.0.9.3 : Adds a wide range of additional metals, and ores. It’ll be dealing with most of the ore generating in worldgen, apart from a few from Tinker’s Construct that it doesn’t include. I’ve turned the rarity of ore up from its default settings which seem rather too generous to me.
Dungeon Pack 1.5.2 v1 : Adds a variety of structures to the land of minecraft. I have a lot of mods which add structures, so I’ve made these pretty rare. I’ve also disabled quite a few structures that I didn’t like the look of, particularly ones that float in the sky. I like my sky clear!
Ruins : More structures added to the world. Once again I’ve turned the rarity right up.
Natura 2.0.21 : Some new trees, and a variety of berry bushes. I particularly like the Eucalyptus tree.
Quality of Life
Not Enough Items 1.5.2.10 : This adds a recipe search system, which becomes increasingly vital the more mods you’re using. It also has quite a few cheat options, but I shall not be using those unless its needed to recover from a serious bug. NEI requires CodeChickenCore, available from the same page. Its tooltip option interacts badly with certain objects from other mods I’m using, so I’ll be keeping that off most of the time.
Rei’s Minimap 3.304: Adds a minimap and full-sized map. I’ll generally be keeping this turned off, but it might sometimes be useful during videos to help viewers visualise what’s going on.
Taigore’s Inventory Saver 2.22: One of the more annoying things about Vanilla Minecraft is that dropped items will vanish after five minutes. That’s useful for keeping things tidy, but rather devastating if you happened to die 6 minutes away, and doesn’t really make any sense. There are some mods that simply allow you to keep your items on you when you die, but that’s a bit too cheap for my liking. Taigore’s Inventory Saver places your gear in a sack where you died, preventing it from despawning.
Travelling House v1.0 : This is a rather ingenious mod that allows to build a device which can be used to scoop up a bit of the world, and plant it down somewhere else. While the suggested use is to always have your home with you as you travel, I think it might be quite interesting to use it to kidnap NPC villagers and buildings, and bring them back to my home area to build my own village.
Enhanced Portals 2.1.2 : A late addition, this mod changes how how portals usually work, allowing you to use any shape, for aesthetic purposes, and more practically, allows you to connect one portal to another. This might come in very handy if I need to connect one base to another.
New Worlds!
Dimension mods can almost be total conversions, with their own creatures, resources, and recipes.
The Twilight Forest 1.18.0 : A dimly lit dimension filled with wonders. This looks pretty huge, and is very well thought of. I’m looking forward to visiting.
The Lion King Mod 1.11.1 : The mod allows you to travel to the Pridelands, a dimension filled with, I assume, amusing meerkat and warthog double-acts, where good and evil do battle in leonine form. Actually I have no idea, but it seems well made and will be fun to visit at some point.
The Lord of the Rings Mod beta 5 : Still very much a work in progress, this mod allows you to journey to a strange dimension of hobbits, orcs, and far too many rings to keep track of.
Mystcraft 10.3 : If you ever played the Myst games, you’ll remember how you travelled from world to world via magical books. A skilled writer could create a new world by describing it in such a book. Mystcraft allows you to do this, allowing you to create a limitless number of dimensions to explore. This is a far from easy process, involving learning the symbols for various aspects of a world, and it is all too easy to create an unstable world at the brink of its own destruction. Exploring infinite realities is not for the faint-hearted!
Furniture
Enhanced Books 1.5.1 : Bookshelves!
Bibliocraft 1.2.0 : More bookshelves! Also armour stands, and some other nice storage furniture.
Mr Crayfish’s Furniture Mod 2.8.2 : A variety of nice chairs, couches, and other furniture.
Beasties!
Given how often I managed to die to ordinary skeletons in the original series, I’m going to have to up my game to survive this lot.
Grimoire of Gaia 1.3.0 : A variety of unpleasant creatures who will be trying to kill me.
Farlanders 0.8a : A range of Endermen variants, some of whom may be friendly. Isolated Farlander buildings may sometimes be found. I ran into one of these during one of my test sessions. It ended badly for me.
Lava Monsters 2.2 : Beings of lava may be encountered deep within the bowels of the earth.
Special Monsters 2.4.2 : Original Minecraft monsters have a small chance of spawning as an even less pleasant variant.
Primitive Mobs 1.3.5 : Some new opponents, but also a few new friendly faces in the form of additional villagers.
Project Zulu 1.0.3.6 : A fine range of extra animals and monsters, along with a number of extra world structures.
Rancraft Penguins : Because Penguins!!!
Mo Creatures Dev 5.2.0 : The latest version of Dr Zhark’s Mo Creatures is far more compatible than previous versions were. It requires some config-fiddling, but I’ve now got it working well enough to include. A good thing, as the rich variety of animals and monsters that it adds would have been tough to miss out on.
Magic!
Thaumcraft 3.04c : This is the mod I was waiting for before I began this playthrough, as it contains worldgen components. Thaumcraft has a rich magic system based upon magical nodes which occur in the world. There are 50 types of magical aspect (such as life, death, fire, and so on), and everything in the world can be broken down into some combination of them, and used to fuel magical effects.
Ars Magica 5.50.010 : Adds a complete magic system, strange beasts, and mysterious structures to explore.
And more!
Buildcraft 3.5.0 : This adds a variety of building and power additions. Pipes can be used to channel resource from one machine to another. Its energy system is a pre-req for many other mods, so it’s pretty much a must-have, even for somebody not known for their building such as myself. Largely, I need it for:
Forestry 2.2.2.2: This adds a variety of automated and manual farms, powered by Buildcraft energy. But I don’t care about automated farms. I care about the BEES!!!! Forestry adds an entire sub-game of bee-breeding, and once you have your bees, you can cross-pollinate your trees to create new species. Both bees and trees use a Mendelian genetics model that I am going to have a great deal of fun with! The bees and trees produce fruit and honey, alongside somewhat more surprising products.
Extra Bees 1.6 prerelease 6: Adds further genetic diversity to our buzzing friends, along with some more machinery.
Thaumic Bees 1.4.7 : Magic bees! This is a crossover mod between Thaumcraft, Ars Magica and Forestry, adding bee-lines which can produce Thaumcraft and Ars Magica ingredients.
Tinker’s Construct 1.3.3.13 : Introduces an alternate crafting and enchanting system. This is additional, rather than replacing the vanilla one, and an item cannot be enchanted by both systems, so hopefully it’s pretty balanced. I’ve turned off most of its ore changes, preferring to let Metallurgy deal with it, but it will add Aluminium, Cobalt, and Ardite.
Ropes+ : This caught my eye as it adds recipes to create grappling hooks, allowing me to get my Batman on. Expect many falling deaths.
Sophisticated Wolves 2.1.2 : Improves the AI of tamed wolves, and changes how you breed them.
Household Gods 5.13.2013 : A new addition to my build. Statues of gods appear in the world, composed of a random selection of a leg, torso, and head piece. Together, those pieces form a language of sorts, and the magical effect the statue will have depends upon the combination. With 4096 possible combinations, pretty much anything could happen. You can also disassemble the statues and make your own out of the parts you’ve discovered. With this mod’s capacity for extremely powerful effects, both good and bad, I’ve made the statues very rare.
On My Shelf
Mods I’ve pulled out of my build for now, for a variety of reasons, but they’re good.
Mob Spawn Controls : This is quite a handy bit of kit for anyone using Minecraft mods. It allows you to add custom creatures to the spawn tables of custom biomes in the case that they don’t have built-in intercompatability.
On Conspicuous Absences
There are other mods I would have liked to use, but for various reasons it has turned out to be a bad idea this time around.
Millenaire, a complex mod which adds villages of different cultures to the world, is incredibly laggy on my machine, and would make for a poor video experience.
Recent Comments