Month: May 2015

..nearly the end. At least for my Minecraft server. I was plagued by problems I couldn’t seem to resolve. I spent most of this recent Memorial Day weekend troubleshooting an odd amount of CPU lag that resulted in terrible gameplay performance.

It was Mystcraft. And while I shall miss it, the adventures it was sure to provide, I won’t lose any sleep over it. The server runs much better and I’m nearly back to where I was Saturday evening when it all came apart.

For the interested I’m running these mods under Minecraft 1.7.10

Ars Magica 2
Thaumcraft 4
Bibliocraft

These mods are additive and provide an alternate course through the normal Minecraft progression. Ars Magica being focused around spells you carry with you in a spellbook and various boss monsters you can summon. Thaumcraft is more about Alchemy and Artifice and about combining elements to create new bits. Golems, enchanted lanterns and powerful staves are to be found here. Together with Bibliocraft I have things to build, discover and collect and a means to keep them. Bibliocraft on it’s own is quite enjoyable as it gives you bookcases and potion racks you can see your items stored upon.

Biomes O’Plenty for the plethora of additional terrain features. Treecapitator for a quality of life upgrade.

Thuamic Tinkerer and Forbidden Magic are addons for Thaumcraft adding some elements to the system I’d played with before and that I really liked. Chickenchunks as it lets me setup a farm that will cook over time while the server is running. If you play single-player this isn’t useful at all. Antique Atlas as it provides a classic “old-time” book you can build that is immediately better than the ingame map (and for less effort). There’s some tweaks for making it work with Biomes O’Plenty but that’s a discussion you can follow on the official minecraft forums.

I’ll finalize this with one of my more favorite mods in the collection, Butterflymania. This is pure personal interest. With over 200 butterflies of varying rarity and biome requirement it’s there as a rainy-day “Let’s just run around and do whatever” focus.

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It was delving into Tekkit around day 3 that I started to see what this was about. Some mods focus on automating tedium of mining, collecting, refining and producing. Operating within FTB’s “Magic World 2” there were so many chests in my fortress, you almost needed a map to know where things were. But it was an adventure as each little extra bit of the mods asked for another resource I hadn’t stocked up.

Tekkit added a lot of materials to build, a lot of technology to improve upon the experience. But to me, Minecraft has always been a magical journey. A world wracked by strange forces.

So I started thinking about an earlier idea. Building my own modpack.

I did it and so I once again construct a fortress of solitude. Though this time I can husband Bees and collect Butterflies.

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I decided to fire up another minecraft server. Poke around with some high-tech stuff, see how it compares to the magic I experienced in another modpack. Almost immediately I found a portal to a netherspace where I encountered a big red eye and spent 10 minutes falling through Limbo. I found my way out, but I experienced a sense of loathing and fear I hadn’t had in a long time.

Actually, the fear I hadn’t felt since my first days play Dying Light. An experience I’m not interested in revisiting.

I haven’t actually built anything tech-related yet. So far it’s “Build a house, start a farm, fend off zombies”.

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