Hi everyone. In this thread, I intend to document my progress through the modpack "Ascension of the Technomancer".
AotT is a challenging modpack with an interesting backstory and lots of cross-mod interaction. It may be an odd choice for someone like me - I've often said I dislike fighting, and AotT includes many boss fights as part of its story - but it is the only modpack I could find that's kept current with Reika's mods in it, and it turns out that the mods in the pack - add so much new content I never knew that I'm actually looking forward to it in spite of that. There's also a backstory that appeals to me: you have been exiled from your home for dabbling in "forbidden knowledge" and must survive on your own now. Of course, you'll continue to "challenge the gods" (some special events and messages you get make this appear as more than superstition, and Advent of Ascension apparently lets you visit "the outer realms" at some point) and acquire more personal power through both magic and technology. It is a theme I am quite fond of.
My main goal in this game is to play through as much of the Advent of Ascension content as I can - I'm not sure I'll manage to get to the very end - and acquiring most of the achievements in AotT's achievement book, while also doing a very comprehensive playthrough of ChromatiCraft. Which means that I'll use everything in CrC that appears useful to me in preference to the same functionality from other mods, though I will not delay to acquire that functionality if CrC offers it later (flight comes to mind). To that end, I have found I'll have to progress in several different mods.
It should be noted that GregTech (v5 experimental) is a very notable presence in this pack, which is quite annoying in the early game. When I started, I thought I'd minimize my involvement with GT (which according to the guide, is possible once you passed the bronze age), but since my dissatisfaction with GT comes mostly from its lack of good power generation options and Immersive Engineering's wires can transform RF to EU, we'll see. Perhaps I'll do more with GT.
So, I am up to the challenge, but in spite of that there are a few things I changed in the pack:
(1) I disabled Random Things' Blood Moon.
There are enough adverse events that I don't need that as well. I may re-enable it if I find that the events are easy to deal with, but at the very least I'll enable sleeping. There's no point in waiting in your house for a Minecraft day. The pack author even recommends you should attempt to sleep through adverse events as long as you don't have really good gear.
(2) I set Agricraft to not let weed destroy plants and cropsticks.
I can deal with the presence of weed, but I don't want to babysit my crops all the time, that's just boring.
(3) I set ChromatiCraft's "Allow Danger in Rainbow Forests" to false.
As it turned out that wasn't necessary since quite contrary to the guide, rainbow forests and not plains or forests are the safest biomes by far even without that setting (I forgot to set the parameter when I re-installed the pack after a problem), but it fits the theme. The CrC progression achievement about rainbow forests even mentions that it's supposed to be a place safe from evil. Not that you're completely safe - *nowhere* is safe in this pack - but you can build there with much less interference than anywhere else.
(4) I set Thaumcraft's "taint spread" parameter to 0.
Taint can easily destroy the world if you play for long enough, and is almost impossible to contain once there is a large-scale infestation. Also, it makes you hurry through Thaumcraft progression, and that's just not possible in this pack.
(5) I shortened the length of "Spice of Life"'s food diary from 144 to 72.
(6) I updated Reika's mods to v19. The version in the pack is v18, and I think Lazerous42 will eventually make the update officially - after all v19 is just a month old - but I thought I'd try on my own. I just hope the many damaged pylons I find aren't a side effect of that. I don't recall if you can repair pylons, but if not, making a lumen network will cost significantly more resources. Updating Reika's mods made it necessary to deal with a biome ID conflict between Fossil Archaeology and ChromatiCraft and an enchantment ID conflict between WitchingGadgets and ChromatiCraft. Fortunately, the pack author has included a mod named "AntiIDConflict", which among other things, creates lists of free IDs in its config folder.
(6) I added Reika's ElectriCraft (disabling its oregen to keep that aspect of the pack unchanged).
I like my auroral batteries. Not that I'll have one of those any time soon, but should I decide to build another fusion reactor, I consider EC's cables, conversion motors and batteries indispensable.
(7) Finally, I added MoCreatures as recommended by the author. It can't be distributed with the pack since the mod creator doesn't allow that.
The New World
All right, it's time to start the game. The pack author officially recommends being choosy in your starting location, creating new worlds where needed and looking around in creative mood to find a good starting location with veins of some important ores nearby. So I did just that. You can detect Tin, Tetrahedrite (copper) and coal veins easily on mountain slopes where stone is exposed. There is a spattering of traditional oregen in the pack so that you're not completely screwed if you can't find a GT vein, but it's not enough for mass production of metals.
The world I finally used was my very first one. It has a beautiful biome distribution, and I found a good starting spot in a rainbow forest about 2.5km north of my spawn point (to which I reset the spawn point as recommended in the guide). If anyone's interested, the seed is "IeldrasAscension", and if you don't change any biome weights, you'll get the same world. There is also a very good chance you'll have a CrC ocean temple about 200m north-north-east of your spawnpoint. Here's the map of my starting location:
As you can see, there is a lot of rainbow forest around me,there's highland with a good chance of more GT copper, tin, bauxite, magnetite and coal veins to the NW, and the forest behind that is CrC's Ender Forest which will also be very useful. There's TC Magical Forest which is also unexpectedly safe in comparison, and a village not too near, but also not too far where I go to raid chests.
I also read the guide as recommended in the achievement book. Really, RFTM if you play this pack. The information in there is important. Also, there's an annoying bug mentioned in the guide: the first time in any game session you look up a recipe in NEI, there might be a delay of several minutes before it appears. The same applies to using the "U" function, but apparently there's always a chance of that happening. This is explained in the guide and it's nothing the pack author can do anything about. Blame some GT / CrC interaction. Also,it has to be said that the pack load times are absolutely horrible. I haven't measured it, but it expect it to be about 10-15 minutes.
The First Days
This nice little house is given to you courtesy of Minecraft Comes Alive, which adds a lot of NPCs, the ability to create a three-question personal description of your game avatar, and finally gives you a house. You invoke that by using a crystal ball you start with, and you should be in a reasonably flat location that's clear of anything you don't want to destroy. The style of the house may not be to everyone's taste, but I have grown fond of it.
(Hmm....I recall the abbreviation "MCA" from a long time ago, when a mod named "Morrowind Comes Alive" did basically the same thing to that game. I wonder if there's some connection)
It even comes with a little fenced garden where you can grow your first crops:
BTW, the resourcepack I'm using is "Soartex Invictus Modded Universal", with the water textures copied over from the ChigoCraft resource pack.
Exploring the world, I find there are a lot of structures, which can be abandoned, inhabited by people or inhabited by monsters. This makes the world feel really alive. These little abandoned gardens I found just a few steps away from my house.
Some way south of my house is fortified village. I didn't find any gravel near my house in spite of the water, and I'll need quite a bit of flint for my first tools, so this patch of gravel is convenient:
Raiding the smithy, this is quite the haul: Never mind the metals and weapons, which are already quite nice, the most valuable thing in here is the 12 (!!!) pieces of epic beacon. Every one of them will last several MC days as long as I don't do too much fighting or mining.
On my way back home, I have a short look into a cave to find....another tin vein, just a few steps from my house! That's f***** amazing, now I don't need to climb over the dangerous highlands for my tin. No, the blocks on the left are not diamond ore.
Now that I have flint tools that last longer than a minute, I can do more exploration...
Don't think I'm stupid, people, there are other ways to this chest than to step on these pressure plates. There are a lot of trapped structures like that. Of course everyone knows what not do to, but there's always a chance you get careless in a hurry, right? The other structure has zombie spawners - recall I said you aren't safe even here - and I found to my annoyance that I can't break them with my flint tools.
Hmm....seeing this Nila pylon, I recall I must get really close to one at least once for a progression achievement, and they do considerable damage. Death is quite possible.
So I put all my stuff away and run into the centre of the pylon, jump up once facing the sky and run away as fast as I can. And yay, I survived (look at the health bar...2.5 hearts left. One more discharge and I wouldn've been dead. Phew) and got two CrC progression achievements.
Another CrC achievement in a cave right across from my house. Unfortunately, I find I can't break the crystal with my flint tools either. Grrr...
The Great Sheep Hunt
Next order of business: make a sleeping bag. This is 100% indispensable for exploration in this pack. You do NOT want to be caught away from home at night. This proved to be unexpectedly and terrifyingly hard. Because, well, there are mods in this pack that add a lot of passive mobs, so the standard ones spawn with a much lower chance than usual. After several days, I'm still short three wool, and I didn't have the metals and tools to even make a shear (damn you, GregTech) so I killed the sheep before knowing exactly how rare they would prove to be.
Well, I need to get into AgriCraft anyway, and string can be made from Industrial Hemp. This needs more wood, which makes it necessary to make some GT tools to avoid wasting a lot of wood. This requires iron, and I haven't found any yet, but my flint tools aren't really good for a lot of mining. So I decided to explore more of the world beyond my forest in spite of the danger. I raided quite a few chests, and finally, nearby yet another fortified town, I found this:
Uh, perhaps I should've thought of this being a little *too* convenient or be suspicious of the slight block update delay after mining one of those iron ore blocks (couldn't mine the redstone yet), because after mining a few blocks, suddenly there spawned a number of dangerous-looking stone golems around this ore pillar. I hightailed it out of there ASAP, killing one minor mob on the way which dropped a "winter gift" - some AoA item I could open. On the way back, I found two more sheep - and I'm still short one wool.
A Dangerous Gift
Well, that "winter gift" proved to be a poisoned chalice. I opened it - and a demon appeared who killed me in two hits. Great. Now the demon was in my house on the ground floor and I had respawned in my bed upstairs. I hurried down and picked up my stuff and went out the door ASAP, and since the demon was too big to fit through the door it was trapped in the house and I could kill it with relative ease. I should mention you should remove the stone slabs adjacent to your bed since otherwise there is a good chance of your bed being blocked for respawn.
Oh, and the demon had dropped another "winter gift". I decided to test if things always go like that, only not in my house this time. They do, and I backed up into my doorway to kill yet another demon.
It's All Peanuts
OK, with the sleeping bag still not made, I decided if things take too long, I'll need food. The guide recommends breaking HarvestCraft gardens until you find a peanut seed - apparently you can make many different foods from peanut butter and jam sandwiches or suchlike. I had broken several gardens without finding a peanut seed, and the gardens were sparse to begin with, so no luck there. However, in one of the chests I raided - really, there are a lot of structures - I had picked up a HarvestCraft Market, and I also had 11 emeralds (and no iron again, this is a really strange pack) so I could just buy a peanut seed.
So much for the first session in this pack. It has proven exciting in some parts, annoyingly grindy (thanks a lot, GT) in others. I am in the very odd situation of being, among other things, the owner of 10 emeralds, 8 ender lily seeds (and there's a structure formerly inhabited by a "farlander" around the corner which is made from Endstone), 8 gold and 6 thaumium ingots, an "Ender" Sword and dark steel boots, but no iron or copper ore. I'll now spend some time breeding AgriCraft stuff. There will be no screenshots of that. And then, well, I'll admit I'm very much prepared to cheat with finding GT veins (which takes a little more work than you'd expect but is still way less annoying than mining kilometres of rock and bypassing what you need by two metres), but Chalcopyrite veins have iron as well as copper, and they're usually much more common than limonite veins (GT's main source of iron), so I'll do some core sampling before going elsewhere. Also there is a mod called "GTVeinLocator" in the pack. I'll have to see what that can do for me.
I'll also need to watch a spotlight of Advent of Ascension.
AotT is a challenging modpack with an interesting backstory and lots of cross-mod interaction. It may be an odd choice for someone like me - I've often said I dislike fighting, and AotT includes many boss fights as part of its story - but it is the only modpack I could find that's kept current with Reika's mods in it, and it turns out that the mods in the pack - add so much new content I never knew that I'm actually looking forward to it in spite of that. There's also a backstory that appeals to me: you have been exiled from your home for dabbling in "forbidden knowledge" and must survive on your own now. Of course, you'll continue to "challenge the gods" (some special events and messages you get make this appear as more than superstition, and Advent of Ascension apparently lets you visit "the outer realms" at some point) and acquire more personal power through both magic and technology. It is a theme I am quite fond of.
My main goal in this game is to play through as much of the Advent of Ascension content as I can - I'm not sure I'll manage to get to the very end - and acquiring most of the achievements in AotT's achievement book, while also doing a very comprehensive playthrough of ChromatiCraft. Which means that I'll use everything in CrC that appears useful to me in preference to the same functionality from other mods, though I will not delay to acquire that functionality if CrC offers it later (flight comes to mind). To that end, I have found I'll have to progress in several different mods.
It should be noted that GregTech (v5 experimental) is a very notable presence in this pack, which is quite annoying in the early game. When I started, I thought I'd minimize my involvement with GT (which according to the guide, is possible once you passed the bronze age), but since my dissatisfaction with GT comes mostly from its lack of good power generation options and Immersive Engineering's wires can transform RF to EU, we'll see. Perhaps I'll do more with GT.
So, I am up to the challenge, but in spite of that there are a few things I changed in the pack:
(1) I disabled Random Things' Blood Moon.
There are enough adverse events that I don't need that as well. I may re-enable it if I find that the events are easy to deal with, but at the very least I'll enable sleeping. There's no point in waiting in your house for a Minecraft day. The pack author even recommends you should attempt to sleep through adverse events as long as you don't have really good gear.
(2) I set Agricraft to not let weed destroy plants and cropsticks.
I can deal with the presence of weed, but I don't want to babysit my crops all the time, that's just boring.
(3) I set ChromatiCraft's "Allow Danger in Rainbow Forests" to false.
As it turned out that wasn't necessary since quite contrary to the guide, rainbow forests and not plains or forests are the safest biomes by far even without that setting (I forgot to set the parameter when I re-installed the pack after a problem), but it fits the theme. The CrC progression achievement about rainbow forests even mentions that it's supposed to be a place safe from evil. Not that you're completely safe - *nowhere* is safe in this pack - but you can build there with much less interference than anywhere else.
(4) I set Thaumcraft's "taint spread" parameter to 0.
Taint can easily destroy the world if you play for long enough, and is almost impossible to contain once there is a large-scale infestation. Also, it makes you hurry through Thaumcraft progression, and that's just not possible in this pack.
(5) I shortened the length of "Spice of Life"'s food diary from 144 to 72.
(6) I updated Reika's mods to v19. The version in the pack is v18, and I think Lazerous42 will eventually make the update officially - after all v19 is just a month old - but I thought I'd try on my own. I just hope the many damaged pylons I find aren't a side effect of that. I don't recall if you can repair pylons, but if not, making a lumen network will cost significantly more resources. Updating Reika's mods made it necessary to deal with a biome ID conflict between Fossil Archaeology and ChromatiCraft and an enchantment ID conflict between WitchingGadgets and ChromatiCraft. Fortunately, the pack author has included a mod named "AntiIDConflict", which among other things, creates lists of free IDs in its config folder.
(6) I added Reika's ElectriCraft (disabling its oregen to keep that aspect of the pack unchanged).
I like my auroral batteries. Not that I'll have one of those any time soon, but should I decide to build another fusion reactor, I consider EC's cables, conversion motors and batteries indispensable.
(7) Finally, I added MoCreatures as recommended by the author. It can't be distributed with the pack since the mod creator doesn't allow that.
The New World
All right, it's time to start the game. The pack author officially recommends being choosy in your starting location, creating new worlds where needed and looking around in creative mood to find a good starting location with veins of some important ores nearby. So I did just that. You can detect Tin, Tetrahedrite (copper) and coal veins easily on mountain slopes where stone is exposed. There is a spattering of traditional oregen in the pack so that you're not completely screwed if you can't find a GT vein, but it's not enough for mass production of metals.
The world I finally used was my very first one. It has a beautiful biome distribution, and I found a good starting spot in a rainbow forest about 2.5km north of my spawn point (to which I reset the spawn point as recommended in the guide). If anyone's interested, the seed is "IeldrasAscension", and if you don't change any biome weights, you'll get the same world. There is also a very good chance you'll have a CrC ocean temple about 200m north-north-east of your spawnpoint. Here's the map of my starting location:
As you can see, there is a lot of rainbow forest around me,there's highland with a good chance of more GT copper, tin, bauxite, magnetite and coal veins to the NW, and the forest behind that is CrC's Ender Forest which will also be very useful. There's TC Magical Forest which is also unexpectedly safe in comparison, and a village not too near, but also not too far where I go to raid chests.
I also read the guide as recommended in the achievement book. Really, RFTM if you play this pack. The information in there is important. Also, there's an annoying bug mentioned in the guide: the first time in any game session you look up a recipe in NEI, there might be a delay of several minutes before it appears. The same applies to using the "U" function, but apparently there's always a chance of that happening. This is explained in the guide and it's nothing the pack author can do anything about. Blame some GT / CrC interaction. Also,it has to be said that the pack load times are absolutely horrible. I haven't measured it, but it expect it to be about 10-15 minutes.
The First Days
This nice little house is given to you courtesy of Minecraft Comes Alive, which adds a lot of NPCs, the ability to create a three-question personal description of your game avatar, and finally gives you a house. You invoke that by using a crystal ball you start with, and you should be in a reasonably flat location that's clear of anything you don't want to destroy. The style of the house may not be to everyone's taste, but I have grown fond of it.
(Hmm....I recall the abbreviation "MCA" from a long time ago, when a mod named "Morrowind Comes Alive" did basically the same thing to that game. I wonder if there's some connection)
It even comes with a little fenced garden where you can grow your first crops:
BTW, the resourcepack I'm using is "Soartex Invictus Modded Universal", with the water textures copied over from the ChigoCraft resource pack.
Exploring the world, I find there are a lot of structures, which can be abandoned, inhabited by people or inhabited by monsters. This makes the world feel really alive. These little abandoned gardens I found just a few steps away from my house.
Some way south of my house is fortified village. I didn't find any gravel near my house in spite of the water, and I'll need quite a bit of flint for my first tools, so this patch of gravel is convenient:
Raiding the smithy, this is quite the haul: Never mind the metals and weapons, which are already quite nice, the most valuable thing in here is the 12 (!!!) pieces of epic beacon. Every one of them will last several MC days as long as I don't do too much fighting or mining.
On my way back home, I have a short look into a cave to find....another tin vein, just a few steps from my house! That's f***** amazing, now I don't need to climb over the dangerous highlands for my tin. No, the blocks on the left are not diamond ore.
Now that I have flint tools that last longer than a minute, I can do more exploration...
Don't think I'm stupid, people, there are other ways to this chest than to step on these pressure plates. There are a lot of trapped structures like that. Of course everyone knows what not do to, but there's always a chance you get careless in a hurry, right? The other structure has zombie spawners - recall I said you aren't safe even here - and I found to my annoyance that I can't break them with my flint tools.
Hmm....seeing this Nila pylon, I recall I must get really close to one at least once for a progression achievement, and they do considerable damage. Death is quite possible.
So I put all my stuff away and run into the centre of the pylon, jump up once facing the sky and run away as fast as I can. And yay, I survived (look at the health bar...2.5 hearts left. One more discharge and I wouldn've been dead. Phew) and got two CrC progression achievements.
Another CrC achievement in a cave right across from my house. Unfortunately, I find I can't break the crystal with my flint tools either. Grrr...
The Great Sheep Hunt
Next order of business: make a sleeping bag. This is 100% indispensable for exploration in this pack. You do NOT want to be caught away from home at night. This proved to be unexpectedly and terrifyingly hard. Because, well, there are mods in this pack that add a lot of passive mobs, so the standard ones spawn with a much lower chance than usual. After several days, I'm still short three wool, and I didn't have the metals and tools to even make a shear (damn you, GregTech) so I killed the sheep before knowing exactly how rare they would prove to be.
Well, I need to get into AgriCraft anyway, and string can be made from Industrial Hemp. This needs more wood, which makes it necessary to make some GT tools to avoid wasting a lot of wood. This requires iron, and I haven't found any yet, but my flint tools aren't really good for a lot of mining. So I decided to explore more of the world beyond my forest in spite of the danger. I raided quite a few chests, and finally, nearby yet another fortified town, I found this:
Uh, perhaps I should've thought of this being a little *too* convenient or be suspicious of the slight block update delay after mining one of those iron ore blocks (couldn't mine the redstone yet), because after mining a few blocks, suddenly there spawned a number of dangerous-looking stone golems around this ore pillar. I hightailed it out of there ASAP, killing one minor mob on the way which dropped a "winter gift" - some AoA item I could open. On the way back, I found two more sheep - and I'm still short one wool.
A Dangerous Gift
Well, that "winter gift" proved to be a poisoned chalice. I opened it - and a demon appeared who killed me in two hits. Great. Now the demon was in my house on the ground floor and I had respawned in my bed upstairs. I hurried down and picked up my stuff and went out the door ASAP, and since the demon was too big to fit through the door it was trapped in the house and I could kill it with relative ease. I should mention you should remove the stone slabs adjacent to your bed since otherwise there is a good chance of your bed being blocked for respawn.
Oh, and the demon had dropped another "winter gift". I decided to test if things always go like that, only not in my house this time. They do, and I backed up into my doorway to kill yet another demon.
It's All Peanuts
OK, with the sleeping bag still not made, I decided if things take too long, I'll need food. The guide recommends breaking HarvestCraft gardens until you find a peanut seed - apparently you can make many different foods from peanut butter and jam sandwiches or suchlike. I had broken several gardens without finding a peanut seed, and the gardens were sparse to begin with, so no luck there. However, in one of the chests I raided - really, there are a lot of structures - I had picked up a HarvestCraft Market, and I also had 11 emeralds (and no iron again, this is a really strange pack) so I could just buy a peanut seed.
So much for the first session in this pack. It has proven exciting in some parts, annoyingly grindy (thanks a lot, GT) in others. I am in the very odd situation of being, among other things, the owner of 10 emeralds, 8 ender lily seeds (and there's a structure formerly inhabited by a "farlander" around the corner which is made from Endstone), 8 gold and 6 thaumium ingots, an "Ender" Sword and dark steel boots, but no iron or copper ore. I'll now spend some time breeding AgriCraft stuff. There will be no screenshots of that. And then, well, I'll admit I'm very much prepared to cheat with finding GT veins (which takes a little more work than you'd expect but is still way less annoying than mining kilometres of rock and bypassing what you need by two metres), but Chalcopyrite veins have iron as well as copper, and they're usually much more common than limonite veins (GT's main source of iron), so I'll do some core sampling before going elsewhere. Also there is a mod called "GTVeinLocator" in the pack. I'll have to see what that can do for me.
I'll also need to watch a spotlight of Advent of Ascension.
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