Minecraft Mods: Botania
stargrace 
The beginning of my little botania set up wasn’t much, it has changed a lot since the screenshot above, but that’s what I started with. Botania is neat, it’s a mod that doesn’t add a lot to the world (to begin with) so you end up making most of the components. What it does add, is 16 types of mystical flowers that you can harvest in the Overworld and then when you plop those into your crafting window they refine into petals. Then you take those petals and make neat stuff with them. I found a few guides online and that’s what I followed for the first portions. Unlike a lot of mods that require me to be some sort of engineer, this one was simple and straightforward. Those mods are really the best for me, I like complexity but I don’t like things that are so complex they make my play session stressful.
The mods I stumbled into are this one in text, and then this series on youtube (finally, a broadcaster I can stand to listen to). First I harvested a whole lot of mystical flowers. Then I turned those into petals. I set up an outdoor greenhouse with a good amount of space and surrounded it in glass. Stuck a few chests out there, and I was ready to begin. I already had the lexica botania (book that shows you all the recipes) but I can’t remember where I got it from. In any case, you can craft it if you want.
The first thing I made was a petal apothecary. Very simple, it’s just stones and a petal. Filled it with water, and then used white petals and seeds to create a pure daisy. When you plant these and surround them by stone or wood (not cobblestone, not planks) the wood / stone changes into livingwood / livingstone. I collected a bunch of this before moving on.
Then I made a bunch of dayblooms, those are the flowers pictured above. They generate mana when it’s daytime. I found these flowers died off WAY too fast to be worth the effort. Once I had a method of creating a tiny bit of mana, I created two distilled mana pools, and a mana spreader. The mana spreader takes the mana from the flowers and shoots it towards something (like the mana pool). Once the distiller stuffed enough mana in the pool, I dropped the second pool into it, and created a regular mana pool. They store a lot more mana than the distilled ones. Once I had TWO mana pools and enough mana, I created an endoflame and got rid of the dayblooms. The endoflame turns things like blocks of coals and blaze torches into mana. So now I have endoflames shooting mana into a mana spreader, and the mana spreader shoot that mana over to a mana distributor. This block basically just takes the mana and splits it between any pools that are next to it. I wanted one pool dedicated to alchemy, and another pool dedicated to runes. I stuck an alchemy catalyst under one of the pools, and now when I drop things in there from this list it will transform them at a cost of mana. The other thing I created was a runic altar. This one is a bit different, in this one you take things that you have enchanted (like iron ingots, and flower petals) and combine them into runes. Then those runes can be used in combines over at the petal apothecary. That’s where the fun really starts.
I created a set of manasteel armor, some rings (one stores mana, the other one slowly creates mana), and a weapon. I would create tools, but unfortunately because of the weapon leveling mod I have, base tools are not ‘useable’ tools, they’re only used to craft the next tier. It sucks, but I really like leveling my tools up so I don’t want to get rid of that mod quite yet. I also made a sash that lets me walk up 1 block steps, and created a flower that will create more mystical flowers so I don’t have to hunt all over the place. Finally I created a flower that will fuel my forges that are nearby, and improves the efficiency. Oh, and I made a rod that uses a small amount of mana and creates dirt blocks, and another rod that creates water blocks. Just handy little things like that. It’s not game breaking, and I like that I’ve been able to (somewhat easily) explore the mod and not feel completely overwhelmed.
This is just one of MANY mods included in FeedTheBeastInfinity which is the mod I’m currently playing. I’ll probably make a few more posts explaining the other mods I’ve played with so far, but well there’s that whole “trying to find time” thing that keeps sneaking up. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!