Is it worth it to upgrade from a 1.6.4 pack to 1.7.10?

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Bigpak

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Jul 29, 2019
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I have a server currently that I run for myself, it has 246 mods in it for 1.6.4, and some of them aren't at 1.7.10 or may never be, and plus I would have to put in a lot of effort to build a pack for 1.7.10, but what I am wonder is it worth it? What changes are there from some of the larger mods like buildcraft, IC2, thermal expansion, rotarycraft, etc? Is there anything that warrants that much work to put together a pack?
 

malicious_bloke

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Jul 28, 2013
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1.6.4 packs must be showing their age a bit by now.

In terms of the mods you listed:
- Buildcraft is much as it was previously, there's a new mechanic with another table similar to the assembly table but that's it apart from the move to RF.
- IC2e is as it was in 1.6.4 (my memory is old and bent, but I believe the move to IC2e was between 1.5 and 1.6?).
- The main change in TE between 1.6.4 and 1.7.10 is that the machines are now upgradeable (sexily). Also lumium and signalum and stuff. Lovely.
- Rotarycraft, if you're still on 1.6.4 you are looking at TONS of new features. This is one mod it's best to keep up to date regularly.

Other things:
- Tinkers construct, in the newish versions for 1.7.10 you can make a smeltery other shapes than a 3x3 base. And you can put pyrotheum in the tank replacing the lava for faster smelting. This maybe has been around a while but it's fairly new to me <3
- Forestry (and Extra bees), moved over to using RF rather than using legacy support for MJ which is apparently no longer a thing. Also the bee genetic modification mechanic from ExB has changed a lot, but it's so much more of a faff than Gendustry no one uses it.
- Draconic Evolution!!!!!(one!)! If you like powergaming and endgamey content that old farts grumble about because it's apparently OP, then this is something worth upgrading to 1.7.10 for.

That's about it afaik.
 
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Bigpak

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What exactly are the changes with extra bees, and what do you mean by faff?
 

malicious_bloke

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Well, instead of just grinding up bees for liquid DNA, then having four machines and that being about it...

You now have to go through this whole process of making bacterial cultures, yeast and stuff. It just makes everything take longer and require more different consumables.

I gave it a try but there's so many more stages than Gendustry to achieve the same result it's just not worth it.
 

Bigpak

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Jul 29, 2019
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If there was one thing I could wish for modded minecraft to have/change, it would be mojang to stop screwing over mod developers, whenever they update it separates the community, and then, mod developers have to do a complete overhaul most of the time which causes them to get discouraged/quit/stay on one version. I wish either we as a modding community stay on one version or they make it less destructive to update to newer versions of minecraft.

I remember in 1.2.5 we were there for a while and look at all the things we as a community achieved.

I appreciate the response on what has changed, I just wanted a quick update, to get an idea of what has changed, and in the future I plan to go and see what mods have updated, and read the change logs, last time I made the pack for 1.6.4, it took me weeks to get it working the way I wanted it to, and to get it stable, or as stable as it can be with 246 mods.

Anyways, I do plan to update at some point, but I also wish I had the knowledge to port mods from older versions to newer ones, but alas I do not and do not think I would ever be able to.
 
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sgbros1

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Most of the magic mods had huge overhauls, and one didn't exist in 1.6.4 (I'm referring to Botania, but it does have a 1.6.4 version, just very unpolished.)
 

asiekierka

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BuildCraft actually has had quite a lot of subtle new features added in 6.x and 7.x, including a complete graphical overhaul, Lenses, Filters, stained glass pipes, built-in Insertion Pipes and Gate Copiers, fluid sorting, massive optimizations, bugfixes, the move to RF, Builders were brought back, sided Gates, Robots... etc.
 
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Azzanine

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Jul 29, 2019
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You do know we are pretty much up to 1.9 right. The official current version is 1.7.10 sure, but that's not going to be the case for very long. 1.6 is positivly ancient.

Is it worth it? That's only a question you can answer OP, by actually playing it.
Play an already established pack. Infinity Evolution seems like a good start.
If you don't like it just stick with 1.6.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk
 

SevenMass

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Jan 2, 2013
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I don't think upgrading existing modded worlds to new Minecraft versions is ever worth it. There are to many differences.

If you are still enjoying you current world, than just keep playing it the way it is.
If you are looking for a new world (e.a. start by punching wood) then by all means, choose a current mod pack. If you are going to restart anyway, then there is no reason not to.
 

Inaeo

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Jul 29, 2019
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As someone who recently put together a pack for some friends to play around with, I understand the hesitation to put in the effort while unsure of your enjoyment factor for the output. I was introduced to modded MC via FTB Monster, and I had enough fun with that pack that I strongly considered not moving forward as versions did. However, in the end, the glaring bugs that were no longer being addressed (as Devs moved on to newer versions and stopped updating the old) became too much for us to handle.

Since playing 1.7, I've experienced a massive selection of new mods as well as the "core" mods that updated, and some cases vastly expanded. That selection of mods has been impressively stable, compared to my 1.6 experience. I've found tweaking a pack to my specifications to be a fair bit easier than my feeble 1.6 experiment, though having the Curse repository may be directly responsible for that.

My opinion, play what you like. Tinker on the side. If you ask yourself this question again in two months, you'll be one step closer to seeing what all the fuss is about.
 

Bigpak

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Jul 29, 2019
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I don't think upgrading existing modded worlds to new Minecraft versions is ever worth it. There are to many differences.

If you are still enjoying you current world, than just keep playing it the way it is.
If you are looking for a new world (e.a. start by punching wood) then by all means, choose a current mod pack. If you are going to restart anyway, then there is no reason not to.

It would be a brand new world and whatnot, but what I am questioning is if it is worth it to upgrade and put all of the effort into building a pack, and then deal with the loss of some mods and functionality but also gain new ones. Who knows, I guess the only way would be to build a pack and test it or test an already built one.
 
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Hambeau

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Jul 24, 2013
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As someone who recently put together a pack for some friends to play around with, I understand the hesitation to put in the effort while unsure of your enjoyment factor for the output. I was introduced to modded MC via FTB Monster, and I had enough fun with that pack that I strongly considered not moving forward as versions did. However, in the end, the glaring bugs that were no longer being addressed (as Devs moved on to newer versions and stopped updating the old) became too much for us to handle.

Since playing 1.7, I've experienced a massive selection of new mods as well as the "core" mods that updated, and some cases vastly expanded. That selection of mods has been impressively stable, compared to my 1.6 experience. I've found tweaking a pack to my specifications to be a fair bit easier than my feeble 1.6 experiment, though having the Curse repository may be directly responsible for that.

My opinion, play what you like. Tinker on the side. If you ask yourself this question again in two months, you'll be one step closer to seeing what all the fuss is about.

Wasn't one of the main differences between 1.6 and 1.7 the changeover to dynamic Block IDs? I believe adding a new mod to a 1.6 pack resulted in a traumatic cluster of duplicate IDs to have to sort out. Adding a new mod to a 1.7.10 pack may still cause 99 problems, but Block IDs ain't one of them.

Or was that change introduced in 1.6? Well, they say memory is the second thing to go with age... I forget the first. :D
 

Inaeo

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Yes, pack making is MUCH simpler for 1.7 than 1.6. In fact, I've actually enjoyed making and testing the pack we have. With just a small amount of Minetweaking to correct recipe conflicts, the process actually felt rewarding as I progressed. Learning to control ore spawning with COFHcore was the icing on the cake, even if it was actually the foundation of the pack. The tools available to pack development are simply amazing now, and getting better with every update.

Edit: Thank God that block IDs went away. That was a very welcome change.
 
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SevenMass

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Jan 2, 2013
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It would be a brand new world and whatnot, but what I am questioning is if it is worth it to upgrade and put all of the effort into building a pack, and then deal with the loss of some mods and functionality but also gain new ones. Who knows, I guess the only way would be to build a pack and test it or test an already built one.

In 1.7.10 ... it is possible, to just dump a bunch of mod .jar files into the mods directory, launch the game, and call it a pack.
Mind, such a pack would be a kind of ugly,and it is well worth the effort to make it a bit more streamlined, but the game would function and you could just start playing.

Though this requires a bit of luck, because biome ID conflicts do still happen, rarely. In extremely rare situations dimension ID conflicts can happen. And there is the occasional conflicting crafting recipe, but the MineTweaker mod makes short work of that. I suspect that solving these technical issues is about half an hour of work at most.
And if you don't solve them, most of the time it only creates an ugly world and you can still play.

What I mean by "streamlined" is: if multiple mods have copper ore, they will all spawn their own copper ore, and it is worth it to disable the ore spawning in all but one of the mods, or just let a specialized ore gen mod take care of it. It would also be a good idea to disable compatibility modules you are not using, for example, so the mods don't register features, items and crafting recipes for interaction with mods you don't have in your pack. Such tweaks make the pack run smoother and prevents confusion.
 
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Inaeo

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To expand on the above, Dimension ID conflicts are pretty rare, and usually only happen when you have multiple mods that add a number of planned dimensions (GalactiCraft, for instance).

Biome ID conflicts are a bit more common, but usually happen when you have a world gen mod (Biomes O'Plenty) and another mod that adds it's own biomes (Twilight Forest). This occasionally leads to biomes generating where they shouldn't (in this example, TF biomes spawning in the Overworld).

Ore spawning can be controlled via combination of configs and COFHcore. You can achieve some crazy things if you set your mind to it.

Recipe conflicts can be bypassed with mods like NoMoreRecipeConflicts and once discovered can be mended with simple Minetweaker scripts.

Yes, life is much easier for pack makers now, indeed.
 

Hambeau

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Yes, pack making is MUCH simpler for 1.7 than 1.6. In fact, I've actually enjoyed making and testing the pack we have. With just a small amount of Minetweaking to correct recipe conflicts, the process actually felt rewarding as I progressed. Learning to control ore spawning with COFHcore was the icing on the cake, even if it was actually the foundation of the pack. The tools available to pack development are simply amazing now, and getting better with every update.

Edit: Thank God that block IDs went away. That was a very welcome change.

You couldn't tell at the time, when almost everyone having an opinion without a clue was waving it around in public :D

Having worked with computers and networks since each device had to have it's IP address and domain name (if used) hand-assigned, I immediately saw a direct comparison between the new system and DNS/DHCP... "DNS" for Block Names, "DHCP" to link to internal BlockIDs as available based on load order and a saved table.
 

Inaeo

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You couldn't tell at the time, when almost everyone having an opinion without a clue was waving it around in public :D

Having worked with computers and networks since each device had to have it's IP address and domain name (if used) hand-assigned, I immediately saw a direct comparison between the new system and DNS/DHCP... "DNS" for Block Names, "DHCP" to link to internal BlockIDs as available based on load order and a saved table.

Yeah, when it first became a thing, most people saw only that it would require more work for Devs to update to the new version, and thus hated the idea because it would delay things slightly. Now that we're on the other side, we can look back and agree that this was a major step forward.