Hmm. I'd have to play to see how I feel. The thing is, at a sufficient point in the tech curve you cover ground so fast it's hardly troublesome...
But isn't that the whole reason it IS troublesome, though? I'm usually either in the overworld, the nether, my storage age, my animal age, my spawner age, my buddy's bee age, one of the few other ages that our other people have set up for personal area (usually void, crazy kids!), or on an adventure in a new age or somewhere else in the overworld. Oh, or the twilight forest, or the end.
In ANY of those places, I can use my handy dandy
notebook remote orderer and brown purple blue pouch to get things sent directly to me from any of my main chests, and barrels. This means I no longer have to run around, back and forth, to get materials when I need to do something. And I'm making stacks of UU matter every day, so it isn't as if I'm not nearing the endgame, but I'd say that that level of functionality should cost at least a stack of diamonds/eight iridium.
Eventually I had something like this before we gave up on that world. Ender chests and pouches are expensive at first. The Nether is a hostile place for someone rocking less than 16 points of armor and some significant healing. Doubly so if you cannot easily run.
Interesting side story: When I first set up my server, I had Mo Creatures installed. In the nether, Mo Creatures makes the Thaumcraft firebats spawn like MAD! The nether, with Mo Creatures, was the HARDEST place I had EVER been, because you would be swarmed by dozens of firebats. It was great for getting gunpowder, and we did finally get used to it, but I am still amazed how much easier the nether is sans Mo Creatures.
That aside, yeah, ender chests and pouches are near the end of the start of the game. I'd say the middle starts whenever you start getting a good influx of materials either through quarrying/IC2 mining/frame quarry/bores/etc, and the end starts when you start getting high end materials such as iridium in decent amounts.
I'm thinking of starting a world with a cross of DW20 and Mindcrack w/ AE and a few other things added in. I will never start another world without TE, BC, TC, XR, FR and MPS ever again.
Agreed, mixing and matching to make our own ultimate is the way to go!
But I won't lie to you, I've already lost players from our old vanilla server. They just don't like even the IDEA of added complexity in minecraft. The fact that they could build a workshop feels too much like work and they've disengaged.
I run a vanilla server as well, which will often get a dozen people or so when MineCraft gets a major update. But after the first two weeks of that, it is empty.
FTB adds SO much more content that I'd say those people are being irrationally unreasonable, and if given the chance, they'd understand as much, and be assimilated into the collective.
Their beautiful and clever vanilla-build towers and rail lines sit quietly under an uncaring, simulated sky. The torches in their abandoned mineshafts flutter endlessly. Fuel and resources sit quietly in forgotten branch mines. Virtual wind sings a melancholy dirge that celebrates the victory of entropy over even the most basic of human endeavor.
*Slow clap*
It is frightening how stupid people can be at times.
I cannot bare to go back to our first world spawn... even virtual ruins make me depressed. I've considered op-moding in dozens of endermen spawners just to reinforce that point.
I'd say wither spawners, assuming vanilla supports those. Nothing is worse than having four withers spawn right on top of you, except maybe having five withers do the same.
