IntPiPoMo 2017 – 7/50
stargrace 
Minecraft! One of my favourite games.
FTB Infinity Evolved Skyblock & Texture Packs
I’ve been wandering through different FTB (Feed the Beast) mod packs trying to find the perfect one for me. The only mod pack that I played for any length of time was FTB Infinity Evolved, a kitchen sink mod pack with a crazy amount of things to do. It just so happens that FTB also published a skyblocks pack back on April 1st, considered to be ‘hardcore’. Recipes are harder than normal, some are even changed around to involve more components. Some people like these challenges, they can add a lot to your game if you’ve played through regular versions.
I also decided to play around with texture packs, something I’ve never bothered with in the past. There’s some absolutely beautiful packs out there that can completely change what your game looks like. I’m currently using JSTR and love the way everything looks.
I flagged myself as an admin for the server and created 5 different islands for people to start on in case others join in. Then I removed admin (it’s op name and deop name for those commands) and went back to normal play, heading to one of the islands with a friend. Unlike other skyblock mods I’ve played that had me start on a single dirt, this one let me spawn on a 3×3 of dirt. I also got a neat chest filled with a few handy items including a water tile and a lava tile.
We spent some time doing nothing but growing trees, one of the most boring parts of skyblock mods, but once we had a good selection of wood (and sprouts) we were able to move on to better things like generating cobblestone and compressed things. Dirt is now readily available, and I’ve got a little farm set up with a pair of cows, chickens, pigs, and sheep. Of course there was a moment where the lava tile was placed too close to a tree that suddenly erupted into flames, and so did part of our base, and then another moment where a creeper spawned on top of a silkworm infested tree and exploded a good portion of the base when it fell off, but aside from those incidents things have been fairly quiet.
I’ve always preferred the creation side of this game which is a lot harder to get into when you’re first starting out in skyblock. Once things are situated and resources are not quite so rare, it gets a lot easier.
I’ve died once so far and lost a handful of items and tools. I was placing the fencing for the farm when I forgot to shift and ended up walking right off the ledge. Oops. On the plus side I wasn’t carrying anything that couldn’t be replaced. There’s an unwritten rule to stuff everything into a chest if you’re not immediately using it now. I’m not sure how long I’ll stick with this mod pack, but so far it’s fun, and since it’s new people are still exploring it quite a bit. There’s a good number of youtube videos on getting started, as well as a guide in game if you get stuck. Over all, I’m excited to see how far I can get.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.
Skyfactory 2.5 – A Skyblocks Mod Pack
Minecraft is one of those games that’s very easy to customize based on the person who is playing. Enjoy going after achievements? There’s a mod pack for that. Enjoy creative mode? Another mod pack. Enjoy exploring magic? Tinkering in tech? Want a challenge? There are mods for all of those.
That’s how I stumbled into something called “Skyblock” – but this mod pack is much more than just skyblock. It’s called Skyfactory 2.5, and it’s on the ATLauncher I was talking about in my previous minecraft post.
Skyblock is a challenge pack where there’s no actual world created. You spawn on top of a single tree that rests on a single square of dirt. Your challenge is to create a base and survive. There are optimal ways of doing this – take my platform pictured above. It’s done with half thickness planks instead of blocks. Why? Because monsters won’t spawn on them. It also gives me 6, so I can expand rapidly.
Once I made a crook and harvested a few saplings it was time to make a barrel that would let me compost my spare saplings and turn that into dirt. More dirt means I can plant more trees which of course means more wood.
Saplings need light at night in order to grow so to speed the process up a bit (they still take forever) I placed some torches. That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. The pack is created custom so that you’re still able to create things like dirt and ore in a world where there’s no actual ground beneath you. Creating them is not easy, but eventually once you do the slow part you should be able to automate it. One of my first goals will be to have an automatic tree farm.
Since death means you lose everything ideally you want to leave your items in chests at your base and not carry them around with you. That way if you die you don’t have to give up and start the world over. I watched a hilarious youtube video last night of a group who happened upon a chance cube. Chance cubes are awesome, but they’re also random. The cube blew up most of their base, stranding two players on a single block of dirt in the middle of nowhere while their buddy was left with whatever remained of their base. It was hilarious. It’s these moments in minecraft that make me laugh the most, the unsuspecting trials and tribulations that you come up against (like that tornado that swept me away last time, that was hilarious). I’m looking forward to seeing what trouble I can get myself into this time.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
Exploring #Minecraft Mod Pack Launchers
To this day, Minecraft remains one of my best game purchases. I bought it before it was mainstream for a total of $5 and it has since provided thousands of hours of entertainment – largely due to the mod community. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of different mods out there, and with them, different mod packs.
These days most mod packs require a specific launcher in order to use them. The three popular ones that I’ve made use of in the past include the Curse Client, Technic, and FeedTheBeast. I recently started using another one called ATLauncher. My issue with some of the others is the method in which they organize (or don’t organize) the list of packs available. It can make searching for the perfect one to try incredibly difficult. ATLauncher is amazingly simple, installation is even more simple, and going from downloading a server to playing on said server is something I didn’t have to struggle with at all.
One of the first packs I checked out was called Divergence. This is a heavy quest mod pack, with dungeons and a progression system. A really fantastic pack – except it doesn’t suit my play style at all. I don’t like progression type mods, and I don’t like having to follow a more difficult crafting path just unlock achievements and progress the quests. I quickly moved on to Revenge of the C-Team which was another fantastic pack with tons of mods and it was very unique in what it offered. To start off, there was weather going on and I’m not talking about your typical rain or storms, but a huge tornado type storm was forming overhead. Lightning and thunder was going off everywhere and it was amazing to watch.
Then I found this gigantic tower in the sky. I climbed to the top and started mining my way down. Each floor had 2 creature spawners along with a chest of treasures. There must have been at least 20 floors in all and when you got to the 2nd last chest it spawned a boss underneath that started fighting me through the floor (which is completely not fair by the way!). I eventually defeated him, placed enough torches in the tower so that creatures wouldn’t spawn, and took the place over as my first base. It was awesome.
Because of the ease in setting up servers with the ATLauncher, I decided to try one more. This one was called Resonant Rise Mainline. It includes a TON of mod packs, and of course when I logged in to my newly created world I found myself in a vast empire of.. taint. It was growing everywhere, out of control before I even got into the world.
One of my favourite new (to me) mods that most of these packs have is the ability for me to open a web browser with a live map of my game as I play. That means I can close down the mini-map in game (freeing up valuable screen space) and simply track it from my 2nd monitor. Plus I can take screenshots, and that’s awesome.
All in all I’m incredibly impressed with the scope of mod packs available on ATLauncher, and their creativity. They do include a few mods that I’m overly familiar with by now, but most of them are brand new to me, and that makes for some exciting game time.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
Playing Games with No Set Goals
I spent a lot of my gaming time playing games that don’t have goals set out for you (also called sandbox games). You choose how you spend your time and progression isn’t typically linear. I’m still running my Infinity Evolved server for Minecraft and last night I spent most of it creating items from decocraft, a mod that allows you to use dyed clay to create modern items. Pictured in the screenshot is the office area. I also made a bedroom and a kitchen (with fully functional taps). I could spend hours creating items like this and designing ‘modern’ looking homes. It’s just one aspect of gameplay that I find enjoyable.
I tried to go through some of the minecraft achievements yesterday, but I find them a pretty lackluster bunch. I also learned a bunch about Endermen that I never knew by playing the Telltale game of it on steam. I had no idea what made them aggressive! With my new knowledge, I can pretty much always avoid them (by the way, that was a fantastic game, highly suggest you play it if you haven’t yet).
In minecraft the top floor of the base I’ve created is dedicated to resources and a few ‘pretty’ rooms. This is a drastic change from the room below, which is filled with computers and machinery. The bottom floor houses my tinkerer’s construct. Outside I’ve got a farm growing crops, and I’ve set up some animal pens. I’ve ventured into the Nether but haven’t gotten anything fancy set up there. I’ve also started working my way through Twilight Forest, but I’m feeling a bit lack luster about it because that’s where I spent most of my time in the previous rendition of my server.
There are still a lot of mod packs that I haven’t delved too far into, like Blood Magic. Once I get the ‘house’ looking the way I want, it will be time to pick another mod pack to figure out. Normally I just go with whatever my mood decides, but maybe this time I’ll take a look at the over all list of mods and work my way through them or something. I haven’t decided yet.
In any case, even though Minecraft isn’t an MMO and there’s no progression set out for me, I’m still having a blast playing and creating. Sometimes it’s just exactly what I need.
As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!