site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4128 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 9, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I've been in modded Minecraft a good bit. The modded Fabric multiplayer server I'd been working with kinda fell apart while I was offline for work reasons, not that far from the typical start-of-school-season life cycle for those things, so starting from scratch.

Mostly been running a single-player 1.12 Forge Sky2Void instance. It's rough in a few ways, both boring ones like typos, and some less polished broader balance problems, but the central loop of finding new materials and equipment as you break through challenges is fun.

A month back I set up a server to try out the in-development Valhelsia 5 pack. After years of not playing MC it was hard to tell what was modded. Whether the core 1.19 or the mods, a lot of the systems that were skeletal when last I played have gotten rich, robust progression and mechanics.

I almost want to set up a lighter modpack that keeps the gear and loot and worldgen, but only a few of the tech mods. Some of the more 1800s ones really fit the vanilla Minecraft aesthetic better than others. Also, Create is an absolute miracle of a mod.

But delving into modpack assembly...feels like much more than I want to commit at the moment. That way lies madness.

Modpack assembly's less bad now than in the 1.7 or 1.6 days, from a technical side. There's inevitably some dependency-hunting that the launcher should be more able to help resolve, but once that's done you're almost always going to get a loading game with a valid world (at least in Forge/Fabric).

From a design side, and picking the right mods for what you're interested in sticking with... that can be a deep rabbit hole.

Vanilla's gotten better, and it avoids a lot of the 'big empty world of nothing' feeling that earlier generations often had if you weren't so much into building megastructures. Admittedly, to have other different incomplete systems bolted on instead, but at least the useless fletching-table and near-useless copper are. There's been some controversy, but the villager, map, and dye colors rework alone make going back to older versions a lot harder than I expect every time.

Valhelsia's not bad as kitchen-sink packs go, but it's very crowded feeling and always feels a little unpolished to me. But if you're an explorer, they're one of the better options in terms of giant modded-structures outside of Yet Another Twilight Forest Run.

Create's amazing. Most vanilla-like mods tends to be pretty subtle, even if they've got a ton of content (eg, Quark), while most major new system mods can feel glued-on poorly-at-best (ThermalExpansion) to outright disruptive (AppliedEnergistics has a lot of sins to answer for). The closest serious competitors I can remember are ThaumCraft 4 and Immersive Engineering, but Create's at a whole different level. I wouldn't recommend it for your first modded playthrough for a few different reasons (not least of all that it's built around an old version now), but Create:Above and Beyond does some really interesting things that are worth seeing if you enjoy the automation ecosystem.

Afraid I don't have too many not-obvious recs for 1.18 or 1.19 right now. Of the big names, Create Flavored doesn't really look polished enough for me to be comfortable reccing it for someone's first pack. Bliss is fantastic if you add Create in, (and doing so is just dropping Create and Flywheel), but it's also a very specific sort of play that you can probably guess in a glance (and the worldgen is a little boring). The custom 1.18 pack (h/t to KirinDave) I'd given some code on from the last server probably count or be close (arguably can also drop Requiem/HexCraft/Yttr), but it's Fabric, a little more multiplayer oriented, and overworld worldgen was pretty intentionally left alone.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats