Overgrowth - building a modpack
Blog note: I got way behind posting my weird progress reports on here, so I figured I should jump ahead a bit to where it starts to get more interesting. I did create a VeeTech modpack on the Technic platform abotu a year ago, but then with the switch from FTB to Curse to Twitch, I started to tinker with the Twitch platform for building a pair of new modpacks. My plan was to have one called Overgrowth for a medium-tech world with maximum crops, plants, foods, blocks and minerals. And then to pull together the high-tech descendant of my VeeTech modpack. I targeted Minecraft v1.10.2 for both of them, becuase that looks like a widely used, stable version that was getting an extensive mod library.
So, without further ado, let's jump into building and testing and playing a new modpack ... Overgrowth.
8/1/2017 Overgrowth
It was a scattered week, but I think I got this modpack in optimal shape for what I envisioned. I swapped out Better Agriculture for Animania, which does a better job of handling livestock variations without filling the world with slate. Also ditched Hatchery, since it made chickens really annoying -- poop and eggs and such. i prefer just breeding the chickens by hand, or just leaving them in the wild and not bringing any home with me. Really only need a few of each, but since there are 5 whole dimensions to explore (Cavern) mod, I don't think resources are going to be an issue. I may remove the chickens altogether.
Darn it, I accidentally removed Harvestcraft (instead of Hatchery) and loaded my world, so all those crops are gone but the poop was still there! Well, I'm not really playing this world, just testing it. When I fixed it, oddly, all the harvestcraft stuff in unopened chests was still there, but the planted crops were gone.
I managed to get to some of the cavern dimensions. To do so, make portal frames out of mossy cobblestone, rclick them with an emerald (Caveworld with lots of ores), an aquamarine (for the underwater world where air is hard to find), and a sapling (a world of dirt caves). A ton of exploring to do, and setting up bases in each dimension would be a challenge. Not sure how to find the other two dimensions, I especially want to find the RuinsCavern, but even after reading their code on Github it's not clear.
Those cave worlds are quite fun to explore. The water one is an extra challenge, constantly getting flooded or nearly drowned, even with Water Breathing and Aqua Affinity on my helmet. At one point a skeleton spawned on my stairwell and shot a volley of 5 or 6 arrows at once. Surprise. I so wished I had some dynamite so I could say "Oh, a wiseguy? catch this." And throw it down the stairs. On the dirt cave world, there IS some stone at the very bottom, maybe the last 5 layers above bedrock, but there are also some oddities. The lowest surface level had a vertical-sided river with some of those weird sea temple guardians in it.
The mining drills from ActuallyAdditions are overpowered, my new best friend in the mining biz. With a speed upgrade and a 3x3 upgrade I can hack out tunnels about as fast as I can walk, and the charge lasts long enough to fill maybe 3 chests with blocks. it's nuts. Also great for hollowing out hillsides to make bases.
Really need to find a good mod that can suggest in-game goals. Quests of some kind. Otherwise, I am unlikely to ever make some of these things on my own. Just nice to have a little nudge and purpose instead of just running around like a nut r-clicking crops and loot bags.
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8/4 Overgrowth world
I added Prefab, which lets you craft entire buildings out of compressed materials. Very clever, rclick in the world, choose design and orientation, and get very well designed buildings. One fun one is the Villager Houses, which you can use 10 times to make little village-style houses. I just had fun going into the dirt cave dimension, dropped down 4 houses and walled off the area, then climbed all over the crazy cave walls to get to harvestcraft fruit trees I have not seen anywhere else (fig, banana, durian, dragonfruit). Oh darn, now you need 3 fruits and any sapling to make a fruit tree sapling. Used to be one fruit and a specific sapling ... well, this makes more sense, but I only brought home 2 of each!
Another super building from Prefab is the Lab Tower. Big roomy, roughly 15x15 with paper lanterns for light and even a powered rail with trigger button to get up and down from the roof. This modder knows his stuff.
I wanted to stay under the 100 mod mark, but I have 107. A few are really tiny mods (Birds Nests, Glass Shards, Torchmaster and Randomite Ore) which add just one useful item. Other tiny mods, less than 30 items and very little actual code: Cubic Villager, Rustic, Missing Pieces, Loot Bags, Edible Bugs, Notes, Signpost, Bagelsmore (one cool custom desk). It still needs 5 gigs to run, though.
Just added Better Questing. Want to see about setting up a bunch of mod-specific learning trees to get players to try all the cool things the modders worked so hard on. Some like Cylcic have no specific progression, but it has so many neat baubles players probably don't know about. Others, like Calculator, definitely go in a certain order, leading up to the big payoff of the hunger and health calculators.
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8/5 Overgrowth
The Better Questing mod had quite a detailed UI for editing quests in-game. Nicely done. I don't want to make this modpack a 100% craft-and-dump world like Project Ozone. Instead, I want these quests to introduce players to the less common mods and simulate some economics. I checked to see that some mods like AA, Botania, EbonArts do have a full spread of achievements. But I never liked the built-in achievements area. Not sure I've looked at that popup more than once a year of gaming. In any case, custom quests let me add my own text, funny hints, smart-ass comments, custom rewards. It really feels like the way to go with this.
I worked up quests for the Edible Bugs as an example: quest name "This may bug you". Start with "dirt bugs" (Trade in 4 of each dirt bug). This unlocks: "sand crawlers" (4 of each sand bug), "wood and bark things" (4 of each wood bug), "grass dwellers" (4 of each grass bug), then "fry em up" (make a fryer, with a helpful tip on how to use it). Need to add something about termite mounds, and how you can generate energy from bugs. Hopefully, a certain % of players will then see the usefulness and enjoy the weirdness of that mod.
I makes more sense ot use quests for things like trading in furniture sets for a choice of rewards, as opposed to making strict crafting recipes like table + 4 chairs = 2 emeralds. Must more configurable, and again, a chance to write text to make it more interesting.
A bit unfortunate that the quest database is in JSON. I really like JSON for its readabililty and fast data transfer, especially for AJAX-based web apps where it's essentially the native syntax. Here, it means the JSON file is going to get really huge. I was hoping I could setup a bunch of smaller quest files, to publish a bunch of quests for Animania, for example. But it's just one huge lump, no way from looking at the code to know which quests are part of which branch, or sort them in a meaningful way. Also, the JSON file is in the world saves folder, not stored at the modpack level. Not sure how I can include a full set of quests in the modpack itself. Will fiddle with it more.
##
So, without further ado, let's jump into building and testing and playing a new modpack ... Overgrowth.
8/1/2017 Overgrowth
It was a scattered week, but I think I got this modpack in optimal shape for what I envisioned. I swapped out Better Agriculture for Animania, which does a better job of handling livestock variations without filling the world with slate. Also ditched Hatchery, since it made chickens really annoying -- poop and eggs and such. i prefer just breeding the chickens by hand, or just leaving them in the wild and not bringing any home with me. Really only need a few of each, but since there are 5 whole dimensions to explore (Cavern) mod, I don't think resources are going to be an issue. I may remove the chickens altogether.
Darn it, I accidentally removed Harvestcraft (instead of Hatchery) and loaded my world, so all those crops are gone but the poop was still there! Well, I'm not really playing this world, just testing it. When I fixed it, oddly, all the harvestcraft stuff in unopened chests was still there, but the planted crops were gone.
I managed to get to some of the cavern dimensions. To do so, make portal frames out of mossy cobblestone, rclick them with an emerald (Caveworld with lots of ores), an aquamarine (for the underwater world where air is hard to find), and a sapling (a world of dirt caves). A ton of exploring to do, and setting up bases in each dimension would be a challenge. Not sure how to find the other two dimensions, I especially want to find the RuinsCavern, but even after reading their code on Github it's not clear.
Those cave worlds are quite fun to explore. The water one is an extra challenge, constantly getting flooded or nearly drowned, even with Water Breathing and Aqua Affinity on my helmet. At one point a skeleton spawned on my stairwell and shot a volley of 5 or 6 arrows at once. Surprise. I so wished I had some dynamite so I could say "Oh, a wiseguy? catch this." And throw it down the stairs. On the dirt cave world, there IS some stone at the very bottom, maybe the last 5 layers above bedrock, but there are also some oddities. The lowest surface level had a vertical-sided river with some of those weird sea temple guardians in it.
The mining drills from ActuallyAdditions are overpowered, my new best friend in the mining biz. With a speed upgrade and a 3x3 upgrade I can hack out tunnels about as fast as I can walk, and the charge lasts long enough to fill maybe 3 chests with blocks. it's nuts. Also great for hollowing out hillsides to make bases.
Really need to find a good mod that can suggest in-game goals. Quests of some kind. Otherwise, I am unlikely to ever make some of these things on my own. Just nice to have a little nudge and purpose instead of just running around like a nut r-clicking crops and loot bags.
##
8/4 Overgrowth world
I added Prefab, which lets you craft entire buildings out of compressed materials. Very clever, rclick in the world, choose design and orientation, and get very well designed buildings. One fun one is the Villager Houses, which you can use 10 times to make little village-style houses. I just had fun going into the dirt cave dimension, dropped down 4 houses and walled off the area, then climbed all over the crazy cave walls to get to harvestcraft fruit trees I have not seen anywhere else (fig, banana, durian, dragonfruit). Oh darn, now you need 3 fruits and any sapling to make a fruit tree sapling. Used to be one fruit and a specific sapling ... well, this makes more sense, but I only brought home 2 of each!
Another super building from Prefab is the Lab Tower. Big roomy, roughly 15x15 with paper lanterns for light and even a powered rail with trigger button to get up and down from the roof. This modder knows his stuff.
I wanted to stay under the 100 mod mark, but I have 107. A few are really tiny mods (Birds Nests, Glass Shards, Torchmaster and Randomite Ore) which add just one useful item. Other tiny mods, less than 30 items and very little actual code: Cubic Villager, Rustic, Missing Pieces, Loot Bags, Edible Bugs, Notes, Signpost, Bagelsmore (one cool custom desk). It still needs 5 gigs to run, though.
Just added Better Questing. Want to see about setting up a bunch of mod-specific learning trees to get players to try all the cool things the modders worked so hard on. Some like Cylcic have no specific progression, but it has so many neat baubles players probably don't know about. Others, like Calculator, definitely go in a certain order, leading up to the big payoff of the hunger and health calculators.
##
8/5 Overgrowth
The Better Questing mod had quite a detailed UI for editing quests in-game. Nicely done. I don't want to make this modpack a 100% craft-and-dump world like Project Ozone. Instead, I want these quests to introduce players to the less common mods and simulate some economics. I checked to see that some mods like AA, Botania, EbonArts do have a full spread of achievements. But I never liked the built-in achievements area. Not sure I've looked at that popup more than once a year of gaming. In any case, custom quests let me add my own text, funny hints, smart-ass comments, custom rewards. It really feels like the way to go with this.
I worked up quests for the Edible Bugs as an example: quest name "This may bug you". Start with "dirt bugs" (Trade in 4 of each dirt bug). This unlocks: "sand crawlers" (4 of each sand bug), "wood and bark things" (4 of each wood bug), "grass dwellers" (4 of each grass bug), then "fry em up" (make a fryer, with a helpful tip on how to use it). Need to add something about termite mounds, and how you can generate energy from bugs. Hopefully, a certain % of players will then see the usefulness and enjoy the weirdness of that mod.
I makes more sense ot use quests for things like trading in furniture sets for a choice of rewards, as opposed to making strict crafting recipes like table + 4 chairs = 2 emeralds. Must more configurable, and again, a chance to write text to make it more interesting.
A bit unfortunate that the quest database is in JSON. I really like JSON for its readabililty and fast data transfer, especially for AJAX-based web apps where it's essentially the native syntax. Here, it means the JSON file is going to get really huge. I was hoping I could setup a bunch of smaller quest files, to publish a bunch of quests for Animania, for example. But it's just one huge lump, no way from looking at the code to know which quests are part of which branch, or sort them in a meaningful way. Also, the JSON file is in the world saves folder, not stored at the modpack level. Not sure how I can include a full set of quests in the modpack itself. Will fiddle with it more.
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