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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4129 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.

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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.

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