Conquest: Le Monde

[Drbretto]

Not a proper title. Le Monde is the name of the map we're playing on. Conquest Reforged is the primary resource pack. Both are worth clicking, I really think this is as pretty as Minecraft gets, at least for a heavy modpack.

I've been narrowing this pack down for years, and indeed nothing is ever perfect or finished. However, I think this is by far the closest to my vision that I've gotten to yet. It's a culmination of basically everything I've learned about the modpack making and server-running all rolled into one. Hopefully, the long-term experience that I've been chasing for years. We've got 5 of us this time around, too! Likely to have a few more on the way. I've never hosted this many before, so I'm adding people in slowly.

The idea isn't to wrack your brain trying to get through the next modpack in a big open room full of machines, though of course there are all the machines you're expect to have. This pack is all about thriving in the face of Minecraft nature, in style. Building for a purpose, and making it look good at the same time. For this reason, it uses the typical mods you may already be familiar with so the focus becomes how you use those tools to go beyond surviving in this gorgeous landscape. And of course, every possible building tool you can can think of. This is the pack for builders. And for those who need a vacation.

(There's no need for sound for any of these, btw, they're made for sneaking on your phone or at work.)

This one is just some raw random footage of me checking out the landscape. All this is just one of 20 distinct and gorgeous hand-painted biomes. I didn't make it, I linked it at the top. I just think it's the best looking custom world available out there.

It's really beautiful. Day and night. And at this point, we haven't even built anything yet. All this work putting this all together, this is just the canvass.

I posted this one in the other thread already, but this is where the story begins. It's just a quick day in the life of early game survival. Not much to see leading up to it. My basic first week survival stuff is out of the way and nature is already beginning to fear us. But, a good place to highlight the lay of the land.

Starting off at night, mostly to make it nicer when the sun comes out. But also to check out the little floaty firefly type stuff. One of the great things about modded minecraft is that there are ways to prevent spawns without light, so darkness can be part of your palette. This will come into play later on when I start building my real castle/village later.

But first! We gotta get ourselves a solid camp. In the beginning we set up around this village at the spawn point- the only overworld village. I've set up an early game shop with dragon eggs, as I've decided the best way to thrive over nature is on the back of your own fire-breathing dragon.

Anyway, at this point, I'm working out of the little grass mound by the beach. Enough shelter to toss a handful of chests down and gather the mats needed to make the stage 2 survival hut, teased by the foundation built on the top of that little hill. That "hut" will be be a temporary foothold leading up to the real builds, but it will still be fairly elaborate. This will serve as a farm and satisfy all of my basic survival needs, as well as host my first storage system. Easy inventory management is key to building real stuff later on!

Hrro, there @ShneekeyTheLost

Which leads us to this weekend! As stated above, this pack is built as a vacation in Minecraftland, and this was Minecraftland Weekend! My first weekend where I could really just play and not be debugging and resetting and configuring all day. I mean, that never ends, it's part of the gig, but it's a lot more complete by now and a lot of the fixable bugs have been squashed out, so it's time to play.

And play, I did! As you can see. All that sprouted up in the two days, including taking some time out to learn about the Chicken poop mod and how to get chickens to poop out iron to fund my builds! Iron is in short order on this map, it seems, and I'll take all the poop iron I can get!

But anyway, this is the basic structure. I still have to "wire" everything and set up the sorting. But, I have a safe place to sleep, making sure to get that picture view of the sunset every time I wait for someone else to sleep too. I have a safe place to raise my dragons, Aylee, Puff and Comet. They're little now, I just hatched them a few hours ago. But they gon get big quick! They're already too big to be hopping up on my shoulders.

I didn't like how the roof turned out. While framing it (which I had to do THREE TIMES because it turns out you can "veinmine" trees, and entire frames of barns built out of log), I had some different visions for it, but by the end, with still no real safe flying options, eventually I was just like, ok, this is a barn. It doesn't have to be perfect. And it is totally fine. The idea is to overbuild everything, I don't have to be good at it! lol. I'll save those details for when I have an angel ring.

I can't wait to see stage three get started, but that will be a bit. I'll have to spend the next week or two making everything functional at this base. I will need a LOT of materials for the next one, and I need this place to be efficient at holding it all. But, I can't stay there for too long, or my dragons will outgrow it. So, clock's a-tickin'.


I'lll have more from other people's builds and whatnot later, especially if we get to a point where we're building infrastructure between camps, but that's all a bit down the road.

Fake edit: Bonus clip!

Other than showing off my 'leet Fling-Glider(tm) skills, Just a little blip of the sunset from my bed. Just cause it's pretty.

 

[Drbretto]

@KingTriaxx @GamerwithnoGame

 

[KingTriaxx]

Looking good so far.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

It really is a gorgeous map! I've seen the first one "Le Monde 0" and thought it was a nice introduction and scoot around the world the resource pack is stunning too!

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

It has been an interesting pack, focusing on building rather than the tech-up. I mean, yea, I've done a bit of tech-up, but mostly it's been about building.

My two minor complaints are as such:

1) Because the world was built with some kind of worldbuilder which places everything, tree's leaves will not decay, leaving 'mario blocks' of leaves behind if you don't clear them out manually. Also, because of the worldbuilder, it doesn't have several resources that spawn (such as the various Pam's gardens for obtaining crops, certain Rustic plants like Cosoh and Horsetail), and the mining dimension doesn't have all the answers (since it is always a plains biome, only Windy gardens spawn). This makes 'collecting them all' for the crops a rather painfully expensive experience.

2) Because 'sea level' was set to something like Y20ish, slimes spawn constantly in the overworld, and there's very little that can be done about it. Especially when one of those slime chunks are in the middle of your house...

Other than that, though, it's been a refreshing change of pace from my usual Minecraft play style, and I've quite enjoyed the experience.

 

[Drbretto]

Yup! Those two main things are the bigger "challenges" having to do with working off of a custom-built world. There are some roundabout solutions. For the trees, for example, any trees you plant still decay leaves like normal, so it doesn't affect tree farms, it's only an obstacle when clearing land for the first time.

And for most of the pams/rustic stuff that's supposed to generate in breakable bushes, you can get them in the mining world or in the overworld if you spread some bone meal on the ground. This is the same cause as the trees, in that this world was not generated at all, it was created in WorldPainter by someone who's good at WorldPainter, lol. But it means nothing was generated at all, it was already there.

It causes some similar problems with anything that needs to generate, so you couldn't have, say, Thaumcraft or AE2 on here because you'd never see a meteor or whatever else you'd need. For things that the world just doesn't provide, I try to spawn in something to substitute. Not ideal and breaks immersion a little bit, but it's the price you pay for beauty!

Oh, and pro-tip for everyone! Under no cicumstances should you attempt to leave 3 unsupervised fire-breathing dragonlings in a wooden barn that you leave chunkloaded overnight. I was too distraught to take screenshots, lol, but I came back, they were stage 3 and flying above the barn they destroyed half of like it was some kind of large-scale dragon cocoon! "Luckily" I was out sick yesterday so I had time to rebuild everything. But for like a brief moment I was like F this S, I'm tearing this mother down! lol

Other than that, though, it really is going quite well. I spent all day yesterday breeding chickens and I built a big ol chicken pagoda to gather my basic resources. I'm stopping the production right where I'm at now, though, to save something for later. I've got ender pearls and blaze rods and obsidian, that's enough for now. I'll still use quarrying for the next build as well, just for the millions of cobblestone/stone I'm going to need.

Also, now that I have a set of flyable dragons, I might have to take one for a spin around the world and see what's out there! I'll record that one for sure.

 

[Drbretto]

I definitely want to go around exploring other people's builds as well. I took a quick peek and everyone's building some nice bases already, I'm so proud! lol

 

[Drbretto]

Edit: This post is about the texture pack, and the following are about the shaders, you can skip these posts if you're just here to follow everyone's builds. But if you're looking for why this is the best resource/shader pack combo available, read on!



And a bit about the resource pack, as this is really one of the biggest factors in the whole thing and it deserves special mention. If you turn off everything else and only have this texture pack, it will still look amazing. It can actually take me a bit to realize I forgot to turn the shaders back on if I had to shut them off for something.

The reason it's so great is actually quite subtle. This pack is so in depth that it actually is a mod as well as a resource pack, and some of these "resources" are actual 3D models, you'll see plenty of later. But they also use connected textures, which can make even the plainest looking wall look more life-like by almost never looking like a bunch of squares next to each other. You'll see how cobblestone doesn't just repeat everywhere, there's more like an 8x8 square that repeats instead. Up close, it really fills areas in extremely well. They also very subtly work with the lighting with the shaders. They're not paralax that I am aware of (ie, not texture depth like you might see in some "realistic" packs) but they do seem to very subtly shine in accordance with the sunlight, but in a way that still looks like basic minecraft-esque pixelated format.

Most texture pack makers really like to strut their stuff. This was professionally done and subtle and makes even your most basic box of a build look nice. Different materials will have different trim and whatnot as well, so it incentivizes you to build from different types of wood or whatever.

For a good example of how the connected textures just totally make the whole thing, take a look at my barn from the first post. You'll notices that all of the logs have these random knots and whatnot in them that make them look more like a whole log rather than pieces of logs. And you'll see any panels from the oak wood have a nice automatic trim around them. That's all done by the texture pack. That whole barn is made out of oak logs and oak wood and that's it. But it looks nicer than it is because of the pack.

Just you wait until we get to proper castle building. There's so much to work with, it's incredible.

This is THE best texture pack on the planet. Bar none.

 

[Drbretto]

Also a key ingredient is the shader. And in this case, we are using Sildurs Enhanced Default, which is this perfectly little mix of performance and quality and most importantly, reliability. I never see anyone using it, but this is THE shader to use while playing the game. There are plenty of better looking effects you can make happen for better cinematics, but in terms of practicality, there is only one, true, playable shader.

So, this does the obvious things like the better lighting and shadows and reflections and godrays. It cuts out some of the more processor-heavy things like volumetric clouds. And especially important, to me at least, is that these colors aren't trying to pretend to be "real" they're meant to enhance the default look of Minecraft. This makes it far brighter and has less of that oranging at night time. It's also built for the best compatibility. There are some mods that will have some effects that just plain won't work with shaders on, but for 99% of the game, they can be left on without breaking anything. It also has a nice little color booster that really brightens the game up.

And specific to this shader only that I've seen so far is the "cell shading" effect I have on by default. This goes well with the connected textures mentioned in the previous post as it puts a little black outline of the object, making it feel whole. And at a distance, it helps create this sort of painted effect on the whole map. Now, this isn't perfect all the time. Looking at a hill with a tonof vegitation off in the distance, all you can see is those outlines, but on the whole, I really like the effect. I feel like it makes some things pop, especially up close where you can barely notice the outlines anymore, but they still subtly highlight the objects in a way that makes them pop.

 

[Drbretto]

Update time!

Just doing a quick unguided tour through everyone else's builds/plots so far, as well as an update in my own:

Lots to see this time around! First, we start off at my barn, which is now a fully automated basic starter base. You'll see my chickens I spent all day breeding, auto-collecting into vacuum hoppers into "the machine" which is all one connected unit throughout my base.

I give a quick demonstration. It's all connected to and ender chest, which is connected to my elder sack, so no mater where I am, i can dump my inventory with ease. Toss it in the sack, to gets pumped into a chest to be routed.

If there's a place for it on the wall, it goes to the wall. If not, it goes to a spillover chest for random stuff. If I pull an item from those random chests and give it a place on the walk, it will automatically send the rest of that item to it's new home. If it's an ore, it will get crushed. If it's a powderi, it will get cooked. Half of the random spillover chests are auto-sorted by mod, which is perfect for something like silent's gems.

All in all, the barn produces, processes and sorts my stuff all the time. This will make the real building much easier time did as I am no longer encumbered by having to deal with all the junk I pick up and I know where everything is.



So! Moving on, we then head over the Shneekey's farm, just past the little peak by my place. It's a real nice looking little farmhouse with an attractive set up for farms ready for his deep dive into mystical agriculture. (I can't comment as much as to what everyone else has going on at their bases because I'm just exploring them in real time here with no guide. )



Moving on, we get Tim and Rebecca's starter knoll. They're relative noobs, so they are still working on how to solve their inventory issues. I've introduced them to the wonderful world of quarries over the weekend, so they're now in a position to need to evolve their understanding of this aspect of minecrafting.

You will also notice, again, all the chickens *I* spent all day breeding. Stolen counterfeit chickens!

We also check out Rebecca's new plot. She hasn't really built on it yet, but that's definitely a great background for whatever she builds next. WellW be sure to check in on that later!


Next up, we head over to elih- eihor- elia- Justin's home. Love that nether portal! This dude is doing it right! Not to mention a really nice garden surrounded by some of the new pillars and whatnot that we have at our disposal now. Can't wait to see how this one evolves. I have no idea how he can find anything in there, though!


Unfortunately it does look like pretty much everyone's nether portals all point to the same spot in the nether, which is miles away from any nether fortresses. So, I took a waystone deep in there to give myself my own space to mine and explore without stepping on everyone's toes.

And lastly, I show the space that might turn into my bigger, more permanent space! I've flown all over the world now and while there is a ton of beautiful scenery, there actually aren't a whole ton of great places to set up a home. I still have this one listed as "mebbe" because I'm open to finding something else, but I haven't beaten this one yet.

You've got: a decently large plot, big enough to set up a minecolonies village. There's verticality, but there are several little plateaus to work off of. There's some nice background mountains on high in the back, and some great cliffs down at the bottom feeding into the ocean. I see some really good waterfall potential here, too. Can't wait to see how it goes!

 

[Drbretto]

This is my favorite part of any modpack. Flipping the switches on my quarry. I know there are better quarries. There's just something mesmerizing about the BC quarry, so I do it anyway.

It's the first thing I ever did in modded minecraft, and it's still my favorite thing.

 

[KingTriaxx]

I'm sorry, no other quarry will replace the BC one for me. The only thing that comes close at all, is a mining turtle.

 

[Drbretto]

Still rollin along. This is my plot for the minecolonies/main castle. All I've done for the castle so far is start planning out the foundation a little bit. I've got a lot of plans for that thing.

The rest of the area is the minecolonies city. Most of the buildings are level 1, they'll alll et a lot bigger soon. And I'll get in there and try to build some functioning infrastructure as I go alone. I would like to do a full castle wall around the whole thing and spawn-proof the inside.

Taking my time on this one, though. Wanna get it right.