Looking to find/make a modpack

[TheGreatKamina]

I've been playing with quite a few modpacks and I'm to the point now where I have a particular play experience in mind. If there is a third party modpack around like this already, great, but I suspect I will probably have to put this together myself somehow so I'm going to phrase this post with that in mind.

The general vibe I'm trying to get is a kind of "frontier steampunk", loosely based on the industrial revolution and westward expansion that took place in North America in the 1800's. Generally this will mean things like railroads, steel, and steam power should be the the main tech of the pack, and there should be some emphasis on exploration and expanding one's empire.

Despite the tech focus, I don't want a pack that lets the player automate themselves out of playing the game (or, at least, lets them do it without a lot of cleverness and forethought) because this kills the fun of the game for me. Most of the automation should pertain more to manufacturing than resource gathering, I think.

Railroads should (somehow) be made a viable way of getting from point A to point B if possible. In addition, I generally want mods that have shallow but wide tech trees, so as players progress, they have more options available to them but don't become so advanced that the entire game seems trivial.

I don't mind a little magic so long as it doesn't become a heavy focus of game play or violate the above paragraphs.

Any mod/balance suggestions? I've got a vague idea so far:

Biomes 'o Plenty
Natura
Tinker's Construct + Tinker's Steelworks
Chisel + Carpenter's Blocks, because pretty things
Buildcraft + Railcraft (possibly... I'm not sure if this is the best way to do steam power and railroads though)
NEI and Walia, because I can never keep things straight

 

[yotus]

You could take the DW20 pack and remove/add according to you wishes

All the mods of your list except Tinker's Steelworks are in the pack.

 

[TheGreatKamina]

You could take the DW20 pack and remove/add according to you wishes

All the mods of your list except Tinker's Steelworks are in the pack.

That is probably a good way to go about setting up the pack, thanks for the suggestion!

I guess what I'm really trying to ask here is:
1) What other mods should I consider?
2) Is there a way to balance railroads to make them viable?

 

[yotus]

1) JABBA: because.. barrels
Iron chests: without AE, you're going to need storage chests
Steve's carts: if you're going rails, then why not
Pam's Harvestcraft: your guys will need food to build all those tracks, this will add diversity to farming

2) viable how ? for long distances ? I know there is a new rail in the DW20 pack, the ender rail or something like that that allows teleporting carts between locations.. not really 1800's style, but could be useful (but it maybe in EnderIO, which doesn't fit your theme that much..)

 

[b0bst3r]

Making modpacks in 1.7 has never been easier, just look in the third party modpacks forum for testimony of that. However adding themes to modpacks is not so easy and requires quite a lot of thought than just throwing a load of mods together and labelling it a pack.

Give it a go since you have in mind what you want the pack outcome to be.

Two warnings though: world gen in 1.7 sucks (even with the so called Forge fix), I'd duck out of any biome mods and if you're adding in Natura make sure to cripple the Redwood tree spawns.

 

[TheGreatKamina]

1) JABBA: because.. barrels
Iron chests: without AE, you're going to need storage chests
Steve's carts: if you're going rails, then why not
Pam's Harvestcraft: your guys will need food to build all those tracks, this will add diversity to farming

2) viable how ? for long distances ? I know there is a new rail in the DW20 pack, the ender rail or something like that that allows teleporting carts between locations.. not really 1800's style, but could be useful (but it maybe in EnderIO, which doesn't fit your theme that much..)

Good point, JABBA and Iron Chests are almost mandatory here. I did like Harvestcraft and Hunger Overhaul in Agrarian Skies, they might both be worth having. I actually haven't done much with Steve's Carts, so I think I'll give that a go.

Yeah, mostly long distance travel. The trouble is, large rail networks are outclassed by lots of things in other mods or even, arguably, vanilla horses.

Making modpacks in 1.7 has never been easier, just look in the third party modpacks forum for testimony of that. However adding themes to modpacks is not so easy and requires quite a lot of thought than just throwing a load of mods together and labelling it a pack.

Give it a go since you have in mind what you want the pack outcome to be.

Two warnings though: world gen in 1.7 sucks (even with the so called Forge fix), I'd duck out of any biome mods and if you're adding in Natura make sure to cripple the Redwood tree spawns.

What's wrong with the world gen? I haven't done a ton in 1.7 with biome mods. I'll take a look at what BOP does in Direwolf. Actually, yeah, those redwoods are annoying. Something that big should be a really rare occurence.

 

[Someone Else 37]

If you're trying to encourage use of rails, you could go about that in several ways:

1. Install RailCraft. Obviously. You could also add Steve's Carts if you like.
2. You could make the rails (or tracks, as RC calls them) cheaper, via MineTweaker, and/or add less efficient (but more convenient) recipes for rails and railbeds that don't use the rolling machine and coke oven. Whether you decide to push wooden rails or high-speed rails is up to you, although I would recommend doing this only after playtesting the pack with RC in its default state.
3. If you add Forestry, you'll be able to use the Carpenter to get somewhat more out of your creosote, at the cost of a bit more time and power. Do note that it overlaps with Steve's Carts on some things, i.e. the farming part. Not sure if that's a problem or not.
4. You might want to consider adding GregTech, and heavily tweaking the configs to buff all the first-tier stuff (which is all steam powered) while disabling the electric machines.
5. GregTech also heavily changes worldgen. Instead of little veins of ore all over the place, GregTech make ores spawn in gigantic but very rare veins, which increases the amount of stuff you'll want to transport from one specific place to your base, encouraging rails again.
6. There was recently talk in another thread about encouraging rails by reducing the stack size of ores. I believe there's an option for this in the GregTech configs yet again. If you make it so a player's inventory can only hold 36 blocks of ore, without even accounting for the space taken up by torches, picks, food, cobble, etc, they'll certainly look for other ways to transport ores to their bases. And if rails are the only efficient option, well, there you go. Do note that JABBA's dolly can pick up iron (and diamond) chests, but it gives you a slowness debuff, so players will still want to use some sort of faster transport (like rails) to and from mining areas if they try to increase the amount of ore they can carry by stuffing their inventories with chests in dollies.
7. Punishing walking long distances would also help. Things like Hunger Overhaul and special mob-type mods (like in Crash Landings) should do that.

 

[yotus]

I hesitated if I should also suggest GregTech, because yes the first tier is all about steam, so this could be cool for you. And the ore gen could be more reallistic for what you are trying to do.
But that would require a lot of tweaking, as Someone Else 37 wrote.

 

[TheGreatKamina]

So I tried some different worldgen mods, because Biomes o' Plenty seems to like spamming huge trees everywhere. I kind of liked the look of Highlands maps, so I figured I'd try building a little railway to see if the terrain works well enough for that. Generally it works fine so long as you stay out of denser forests like the autumn forest. Unfortunately, I very quickly realized that building large rail networks is kind of tedious... so I'm a bit at a loss for where to go with this idea.

 

[RJS]

Flaxbeard's Steam Power?

 

[Someone Else 37]

I was just looking through NEI in Resurrection, and found that RailCraft added a Track Layer cart at some point. While it won't take all the tedium out of laying long lines of rails, it can certainly help. You'll still want to clear/build the path beforehand (if it hits a flower, tall grass block, layer of snow, etc, it'll stop placing tracks and derail itself- fortunately, if you break the offending block and sneak some tracks underneath the derailed carts, it fixes itself) and the most efficient way to power it is probably a locomotive (note that you'll need to place the locomotive at the back of the train and the track layer at the front, which works just fine- locomotives just can't go in the middle of a train), but it certainly takes a lot of the tedium out of laying the actual tracks.

Testing shows that the track layer is a little buggy. If it goes around a corner you've already placed, it will place a track just inside that corner, which will then connect to the tracks next to it, causing the train to derail at best or get stuck in a tiny loop of track at worst. It's surprisingly difficult to untangle that- even if the locomotive at the back of the train doesn't wind up on the messed-up track and you can turn it around (either by crowbarring it or putting it into reverse using its GUI), the track layer cart (now at the end of the train) still likes to get stuck. Furthermore, breaking the track under the stuck track layer doesn't usually help, either, since it replaces them instantly, usually not in the places you want. To prevent this, put a glass block, a flower, a torch, or anything else that you can't put a track on the block just inside of any track corner that you'll be sending a track layer cart through.

Also note that Railcraft adds a Tunnel Bore that (slowly) digs a 3x3 tunnel in a straight line, places tracks, and fills in any holes it encounters with gravel or crushed obsidian. Do note that (unless this was changed since I last checked, which was in MC 1.2.5) it won't mine through any non-whitelisted mod blocks at all by default. There is a config option to allow it to mine through everything except what's on the blacklist, which I certainly recommend enabling, if it isn't enabled by default now.

Steve's Carts also adds its own variant on that- the Railer module lays tracks (although I haven't tested it running into tall grass) and the Drills, well, drill at a specified y-level. There's also a module that allows the cart to place blocks and build bridges over any holes it encounters, which looks much nicer than the gravel (or obsidian) walls that RC's tunnel bore makes.

I'm not sure if the SC railer accepts RC tracks or not. If it doesn't, and you want to make a long high-speed rail line, for instance, RC adds a Track Relayer cart that you could attach to the SC railer cart and configure to pull up the regular tracks and replace them with HS tracks.

Also note that all the RC carts except the locomotives (for come reason) will use any chest carts in the train for both input and output. That is, the the track layer, relayer, undercutter, bore, etc. will all pull tracks, fuel, drill heads, etc. from any chest carts in the train, and will dump pulled-up tracks and mined blocks into the chest carts.

And a final note: Anchor carts are mobile chunkloaders. Very helpful, since carts in trains seem to unlink themselves if they go into unloaded chunks. And I would be very surprised if they don't make use of enderpearls in attached chest carts.

 

[Azzanine]

Flaxbeard's Steam Power?

Tut tut tut people, it took till post 10 for someone to suggest this one. RJS gets 500 Kudos for that one.

Can't get more steam punk then FSP.

@TheGreatKamina I think you'll find that all you need to achieve this aesthetic is BC and it's addons (includeing Railcraft) and Flaxbeards steam power. Adding any other tech mod might sully the experience, FSP is a cool mod but sadly doesn't fair well against other tech mods that don't care to limit power.

Actually I wonder how well a build useing Railcraft and FSP would turn out.

The only issue I see with FSP is that you want rail to be more relevant and the FSP exosuit probably might render rail a bit redundant as it gives you some great mobility.

 

[TheGreatKamina]

Hmm yeah, FSP looks kind of neat, I'll try it out a bit. It's okay that it's a bit underpowered compared to other tech mods, because what I'm going for is lower powered tech mods anyway. As for rail being relevant still, it looks like the exosuit might be balanced enough that rail would still be useful.

@Someone Else 37, I took a look at the Steve's Carts track layer. Works great and pretty cheap to boot! Steve's Carts does add solar panels, but I'm okay with a small amount of anachronism (especially since they seem kind of weak). I did not get the chance to try it with other types of rails, though I guess you could always link a track-relayer right behind it as you said.

So here's what I'm looking at right now:
Highlands
FSP
Tinker's Construct
Buildcraft
Railcraft
Forestry with ExtraTrees
Steve's Carts
Project:Red
Pam's Harvestcraft
Hunger Overhaul
Chisel
Carpenter's Blocks
Bibliocraft with Bibliowoods
NEI
Walia

Things I'm on the fence about:
Extra Bees (endgame bees can produce tons of hard to get materials)
Extra Utilities (has Ender Quarries for multiplayer, but also a lot of other stuff)

Natura redwoods take a good couple minutes to generate on my poor little laptop (stalling the whole game in the process), and I realized that most of the stuff I like in Natura is redundant with Harvestcraft and Forestry.

Tinker's Steelworks is, sadly, not updated to 1.7 yet. So it's blast furnaces and 2x ores in smelteries for now. That is, unless, what do you guys think of Rotarycraft?

 

[Someone Else 37]

I actually like Rotarycraft. It's probably got the most complicated power system that I've ever encountered, so it's certainly not for those who aren't up for a good engineering challenge. It doesn't use steam (although I'm fairly sure it has a couple of Railcraft-compatibility blocks that convert steam to and from RoC's mechanical power, so you can power your Extractor with steam if you like- or go the other way around and make jet-powered FSP machines), but most of its technology isn't all that much more modern. And it uses a ridiculous amount of steel, too.

It turns out that CofH Core can control ore spawns, similar to how GregTech does, but without all the machines and Gregginess. You could configure it to make all the ores (or at least iron, copper, tin, zinc, and coal ores) spawn in very large, but very rare, veins, encouraging some sort of semi-permanent transport to and from them when found.

 

[Azzanine]

Tinker's Steelworks is, sadly, not updated to 1.7 yet. So it's blast furnaces and 2x ores in smelteries for now. That is, unless, what do you guys think of Rotarycraft?

Cough...
http://openeye.openmods.info/mod/tsteelworks
Cough...

You're welcome.

Rotary craft is great but it will clash with your Steam punk aesthetic.

 

[TheGreatKamina]

I actually like Rotarycraft. It's probably got the most complicated power system that I've ever encountered, so it's certainly not for those who aren't up for a good engineering challenge. It doesn't use steam (although I'm fairly sure it has a couple of Railcraft-compatibility blocks that convert steam to and from RoC's mechanical power, so you can power your Extractor with steam if you like- or go the other way around and make jet-powered FSP machines), but most of its technology isn't all that much more modern. And it uses a ridiculous amount of steel, too.

It turns out that CofH Core can control ore spawns, similar to how GregTech does, but without all the machines and Gregginess. You could configure it to make all the ores (or at least iron, copper, tin, zinc, and coal ores) spawn in very large, but very rare, veins, encouraging some sort of semi-permanent transport to and from them when found.

So how would CofH Core interact with Highlands? I read on the Highlands page that it changes the ore distribution so certain vanilla ores are more common in certain biomes. Sounds like it could be neat if it works, it would encourage mining in lots of different areas.

Cough...
http://openeye.openmods.info/mod/tsteelworks
Cough...

You're welcome.

Rotary craft is great but it will clash with your Steam punk aesthetic.

Oh, I guess the Minecraft Forum page is out of date, then. Thanks!

Parts of Rotarycraft are very un-steampunkish (i.e. jet fuel and light bridges), but on the other hand the power system itself kind of feels like it fits. It does have blocks that convert between steam and shaft power, so it could work with other things in theory. It's also noisy... hmm.

Speaking of light bridges, has anyone else noticed that the laboratory blocks in Chisel look like they're right out of Portal?

 

[Someone Else 37]

So how would CofH Core interact with Highlands? I read on the Highlands page that it changes the ore distribution so certain vanilla ores are more common in certain biomes. Sounds like it could be neat if it works, it would encourage mining in lots of different areas.

I have no idea. Never used Highlands.

Parts of Rotarycraft are very un-steampunkish (i.e. jet fuel and light bridges), but on the other hand the power system itself kind of feels like it fits. It does have blocks that convert between steam and shaft power, so it could work with other things in theory. It's also noisy... hmm.

Speaking of light bridges, has anyone else noticed that the laboratory blocks in Chisel look like they're right out of Portal?

Railcraft recently added its own Laser Rails. Just sayin'. The only thing in your mod list that can power them, though, is probably Railcraft's own steam turbine, which isn't exactly the cheapest thing in the world.