Feed the Beast

I just wanted to put up a quick update with regards to the very latest news of the upcoming pack releases. Please note that from this point on all of these posts come with the following disclaimer.

* This outlined timeline is our current estimated time for release. No promises are given or guarantees offered. These are the timelines we hope to achieve, however sometimes unforeseen events prevent us from achieving these goals.*

Having said that, the final versions of 1.4.7 Ultimate, Direwolf20 and Mindcrack packs are in final testing right now. Essentially these contain several mod updates to their final 1.4.7 versions and in the case of the Mindcrack pack the mod Bibliocraft will be added in. Unless something critical comes from somewhere, the next updates to any of these packs isn't expected until several weeks after the release of 1.6 at the earliest. These updates should be on the launcher for open testing in the next 24 hours and pushed to recommended a couple of days...

For several weeks there has been a lot of speculation as to what is going to happen in 1.5 with regards to mods packs and mods. Most of the speculation has again revolved around Redpower 2 and whether or not it will be included. The reason that comments have been kept to a minimum is because essentially we didn't know and at that time we had not yet reached a point where the decision had to be made. However that time has passed and we are now at a point where a decision has to be made.

Over the last couple of weeks I have had many conversations with various people from members of the FTB team to mod developers and just watching threads to get a general feel for how the community feels. So today I want to end the speculation. For right now we will be staying on 1.4.7 as our recommended builds. This is as things stand likely to continue on till probably the 1.6 update from Mojang. We will be releasing a 1.5.x pack, although this pack will be added as a Private pack so people...

FTB, Pax and Future Conventions.

Sometime in October last year I was approached by a member of the team working at Pax East with the idea of putting on a FTB server and live tournament at their convention. After discussions with various people, we ended up putting on the tournament and at the same time managed to have our first ever get together. Around 12 people attended this with many others joining along the way. I think it is safe to say an awesome weekend was had by everyone that came along and the chance to meet so many people was brilliant. However, we were there to put on a tournament first and foremost and despite everything it ended up being a huge success. On the day we had to turn away over 70 people just because there was no room. We were also fortunate to have been given a few prizes from Razer in the form of a keyboard, mouse and mouse pad. For that I would just like to take a second to say thank you again. Based on the success of the event, the possibility was...

Hello, this is just a quick update for everyone going to pax (or anyone else) that wants to play the FTB pax east challenge map. The modpack for pax is now available for download on the launcher just open up the launcher as normal, select the pax modpack and click launch, the modpack will then download and you will be able to go into single player and play the map. We advice going into the $FTBinstall/PaxChallenge/minecraft/saves and making a backup of the world before playing to avoid having to redownload, if you forget you can navigate to the maps tab and redownload the map to try again, hope you all enjoy the map and we hope to see some of you at pax.

So for the past few weeks we have been working on the new launcher but we are still undecided on what design we should use for the UI so we thought there is no one better to ask than the people that use it!

We are looking for any ideas or suggestions you may have for the new launcher design we will then be using a combination of all of them to decide the final launcher design, we know that a people don't like change but things are going to change, hopefully for the better in the new launcher but don't worry our current plan is to keep the old design as well and just make the launcher default to the new one.

The whole backend of the launcher is being rewritten to use a more streamlined system which will make using FTB more accessible and run faster. Please feel free to post your designs below, wire frame is fine but it might be easier to understand if you add a bit of content so we can fully understand what you mean, we already have some internal designs but we would love to see...