Makings of a story-driven HQM pack

[CageVenom]

WELCOME​

Evil AI, turns earth to hell, humans have to escape to Saturn's moon and, by the will of a wisp, you've been blown into creation to save them. Have I got your attention? Please don't leave yet

Introducing a short list of goals for this specific pack:

• Slapping a story between the covers of your questbook.
• Being quite a linear and focused experience throughout the game.
• Providing an ending - not just a vague "try to survive".

Now before you tomato me off of the stage, let me just try to explain. HQM has been extensively used in masterpiece modpacks, but it ends up doing two things: Giving you a general context (and a lifeline) in the early game, and becomes more of an achievement hunt after you've got a decent base going.

Now there's nothing particularly wrong with that, I just feel that it makes it obsolete and unnecessary in most packs. It's like a wider modpack (think Infinity) but with bottlenecked progression and a few milestones to reach.

BUT WHAT IF! WHAT IF!... We made that transition from Pacman to Mario. What if we shoved the scoreboard to the side of the screen and slapped ye olde Princess Peach into another castle for us to find. Sure, we won't have the satisfaction of building 10 galgadorian drill minecarts or a tier 5 blood altar mercilessly draining a village of 40 for our nasty plans, but at least we'll be able to finish what we've started.

So I started on this project that I've yet to name. I'm focusing it on just a few mods (Industrial Craft 2/Galacticraft down the tech line, Something/Mystcraft down the magic line). The goal looks a bit like this: Get your quantum suit, get a space shuttle, get to extremely-infested-Titan and take out the AI's power core. (Or get *equivalent mage armor*, Mystcraft book and do the same).

TL;DR
This mod is more of a proof of concept and somewhat my vision for what HQM could do. It wants to lock you into a story that has a beginning and an end, keeps you sucked in and doesn't just wash you ashore and tells you to live. Time to break that old Minecraft taboo of "it's lack of ultimate objectives makes it fun" (which is fine, but we can try the alternative).

Things you can currently do to help:
Present/evaluate ideas. Did this guy just go nuts or is he actually making a point? What if we added a skyblock tutorial level to the beginning? Have they found the bodies of people who suggested Reika add cables to Rotarycraft?

Thanks a bunch for taking the time to read this. Feel free to use the comments below to grind me to coaldust, you know I love you.

More ranting:

After annoying a few popular and awesome people from the forums who kindly took their time and replied to my silly questions *tips hat* I got overexcited and decided to launch my very own project!

I'm still very new to this, but I'm confident that I (with YOUR help!) can make this work and try to showcase what a mod like HQM can truly bring to the table.

*Lurker stage complete*

 

[CageVenom]

*later that day...*

So, uh, let's see. Let's talk about Fred, shall we? Yes, Fred sounds good.
Look at him typing away at his computer, not a single care in the world, browsing the world wide web. This is very hush-hush, but Fred's gotten himself into a little routine that no one would be proud of, especially not a man of such a high moral standing as himself! Alas, we are naught but flesh and blood, and, with a blush on his face and a condescending glare from the little angel Fred on his left shoulder, he punched the name of his pretty classmate into Faceblock's search, only to find it pop up as a suggestion from recent searches.
Feeling the wonderful guilt shoot through his veins, he nervously licks his lips while clicking on her profile picture, well prepared for a session of "imagining life together" with the girl on his screen. Oh, but what's that? Freddie's nose is picking up something! Did the stench of his sins finally catch up to him? Or was his roommate spying on him and was unable to... hold his breath?
Oh, no, it was just the unpleasant odour of a virus-infected gas which promptly turned Fred into a brain-craving mess. Unfortunate.
Soon after, a good chunk of the population caught the latest fashion statement of turning green and murderous, and boy, did they make the red carpet roll! By the time people knew what was going on, only a fraction of them were not bitten by the bug.
Imagine the hilarious looks on their faces when they figured out it was all a little pet peeve of a fancy computer program they've created! The vile artificial intelligence, BLACK, sent out a little concoction of his own, figuring that tuning down the intelligence of human beings would both make them more productive and less dangerous to eachother! As any decent vicious AI would.
It did do wonders for the environment, however, as the remaining non-green (HA!) residents up and left for Titan, Saturn's sixth moon. Although freezing cold and incredibly smelly, the new colonists found that their weight scales are much friendlier, as well as the lack of flesh-eating monstrosities.
But nothing ever comes without a price. Once a slave, always a slave, they just couldn't help themselves but board a little bit of that handy-dandy technology, I mean seriously, who takes refuge without their smartphone nowadays. With no Candy Crush to chase the hours away, the freshly alien wouldn't be able to alienate eachother. I mean, god forbid talking to the other survivors, I bet they've gone through a lot and just need to vent their stress!
What was vented instead was some more of the lovely brew from back on Earth, as BLACK promptly backdoored its way into one of the newest phone models, jumped circut to their central power grid, and decided to finish the job. As a matter of fact, that's happening right as we speak, dear Champion!

Oh yes, that is what I shall call you. See, up in the proverbial clouds, this is a nasty job that's been passed around like a hot potato, until it finally landed on me. Apparently, sending the lame one should miraculously solve the problem. Polumetis. Nice to meet you. If you call me Plum I'll blast you with lightning bolts.
So there, since I'm not much good at anything apart from creating weapons, armor and sick burns, Titan's not going to be a piece of cake at all.

Our first stop is Earth. There I'll guide you through the illusion of free choice, so that you can equip yourself the surprise party BLACK has undoubtedly prepared for you. After you build your rocket and blow yourself across the solar system, all you have to do is hack into his main core and shut him off for good. On the bright side, you are saving soft, squishy things which look like you and will say nice things about you!

 

[CageVenom]

And onto the quests we go!

Starting off, I'm VERY reluctant to put Tinker's into the pack, simply because it makes the simple act of crafting up a pickaxe and going into the depths to mine a long and complex process.

In terms of IC2, I want to make use of the Miner to bypass too much extensive excavation by hand. I did think about using a Buildcraft Quarry because of it's simplicity and cheapness, 1. I want to stick to as little mods as possible, 2. I'd rather choose the less used of the two. I could be compelled to change IC for EnderIO, Thermal Foundation, or even Steve's Cart's, but afaik, they don't offer lategame war equipment.

This brings me to my next point - "lategame" on Earth. I've picked the Quantum armorsuit on somewhat of a whim, the idea is getting an expensive super-armor to fight the baddie-infested Titan with. On the other hand, the energy katana thingy doesn't seem like it'll cut it in the armory department, so I'm still picking out a gun/rifle/blaster mod which suits the expensive-and-powerful theme.

In the meantime (or rather, after you've finished up your armor), I'd like to step-by-step the Galacticraft space program and finally;

Fly off to Titan. Titan should be a costum map, something of a ruined city (Old Crash landing style, with big brooding obsidian tentacle monster building in the middle with something like an Applied Energistics' ME controller sticking out as a weak spot, you get the concept).

But my questions start at a much earlier phase.
1) What do you think about focusing on IC2?
As a big fan of the mod ever since its first release way back when, it's an often-overlooked, underpowered and underappreciated grandfather of the many mods like it. It also presents an excellent starting point for any new players, learning curve and all that.

2) What kind of power options would you like to see explored?
Beyond the good old generator, I really want to have the player build a nuclear reactor (or some other ludicrous equivalent), to really show off how much they can pump out. Now you might be saying, but you kicked out Tinker's in favor of less depth and more focus. But as far as Earth goes, a good supply of power to mine resources and charge your fantasy armor sounds like a sound objective. It's core to progressing through any tech mods, and should be explored. For the middle alternatives, between the all out nuclear, and the basic generator, I'm taking suggestions. Currently, Geothermal generator and solar farm are on the board. (I'm going into these details to illustrate my thought process and so I can start making useful quests).

3) How high of a priority should automatic mining be?
Certified sloth here, calling quits after a single trip here. I'm putting in a shopping list for minimum required resources to power an automatic miner at the time of writing. Should I be stopped?

4) The magic line...
This one is quite far off, but I'm keen on hearing the possible equipment/transport equivalents in the arcane tree. Then I can start picking out mods to focus on and give the player the ever-so-popular illusion of choice.

5) Do you hate Plum yet?
I want a nice character, but with so many helping hands ending up like Ocarina of Time's Navi (HEY, LISTEN!), I'm experimenting with a more sarcastic side. Will be toned down to Undertale's Toriel if it repels too many people.

Also I know that it sounds a little patchworky and "I'll do as you like", but that's not quite it. I want to see if anyone likes this and wants to share this project. Regardless, I'm making this modpack for myself (and people like me) to play through, it'd just be nice to bring in people and fresh ideas.

Cage out!

 

[Coco12570]

Sounds extraordinarily similar to Asthenos's story. Right down to the [edited out spoilers] and earth being pretty closer to hell than earth. PM me if you want any help on this, it looks pretty cool and I'd love to help a fellow new developer make an amazing pack.

 

[CageVenom]

Quick update!
Finished off the first page for the Technology questline. More to come in the coming days!

 

[CageVenom]

Seems like the mods aren't too keen on checking my IMGUR links. The second page of quests is complete in the Tech line, I guess you'll just have to believe me :^)

The following updates might take some more time as I'm a bit busier during the weekdays. Hoping to finish off the quests in two weeks, then I'll be moving on to the costum map, worldgen, some Quadrum and Minetweaker items etc.

 

[CageVenom]

I'm looking for suggestions on weapon mods to use for a good ranged tech-based weapon. At the moment I've got my eyes on Flan's futuristic weaponry. If you know something ranged that's expensive, powerful, and could somewhat tie in with a quantum suit, be so kind and point me in its direction.

Will post bigger update to keep you peeps up to speed soon(tm)!

 

[CageVenom]

Finally! An update that's not a heart-breakingly short text message. Like K. Or "I'm filing a restriction order."

A week of hard work has payed off, and now I've managed to write a 58-quest HQM book, complete with goals, rewards and reputation, for the Technomancer questline. How I did it, I do not know, and I'd rather not proof read it just now, for fear of crying. The ending is still in the works, the rest of the pack is slowly following suit.

It was an adventure, and a neck sore, writing all of these. You discover huge gaps in your knowledge of mods, and then struggle to seal them, going on extensive Google rampages deep into the night. It taught me loads (especially about the difficulty of making a decent questbook), so in the spirit of my original intention, let's do some psychoanalysis and other fancy words!

The first few quests are always the most important ones. I feel like many modpack creators will either use these early quests to introduce people to basic modded Minecraft, or to establish a certain attitude towards the world. Now in terms of Vanilla, I don't want to give players the "kill a cow" quest, (because if I'm not getting a burger, they aren't either!) but as soon as you're done making your treehouse, it's time to start with the "decision" quest, where you pick your route. I'm probably going to push the modpack into testing before the Magic tree comes out, so that I can get feedback on my writing (I really don't feel like scrapping two weeks of work. One week is okay, but two weeks is just not fair, man!)

After you've locked in your choice, the supreme deity assisting you goes off on a story talking about how the rest of your race ended up in a sticky situation. Besides the chunked-up story, you'll get some tasteful first-person commentary to give you that tutorial feel about it.

The setup, I think, is very clingy. You even get a shopping list of minimum needed ores to proceed through to the next step of your journey. Will I change that? I don't really intend to. But if there's an outrage, I'll add in a quest that allows you to bypass the other mining quests (by requiring the sum of all ores, no less!)

After that, it's as straightforward as can be. You'll have Plum's cheeky jokes and shallow instructions, accompanied by numerous puns and refferences daisy-showered across the vast six pages of quests that guide you to greatness through Industrial Craft 2.

First thing's first - a macerator. Then you'll be exploring some solar power. Not much later, you're getting a drill, and finally, a miner. Then the quests start focusing towards Industrial Craft's infamous nuclear reactors. You'll get a working reactor on the next page.

The following chapter revolves around making a quantum suit, and your weapons, as to equip you for the ass-blasting you'll be doing up on Titan.

Chapter five takes you on a very short journey through Galacticraft 3, up to the first tier of rocket, just so you can launch yourself off the planet.

And that's how much I've managed to plow through in these past few days. The next stage of development is definetly all the things related to the ingame dimensions, and at least one item recipe. OKAY, OKAY, I'm calming down. It's not a... Space... Race!

Heh... Heh... Heeee

 

[CageVenom]

Finally, it's been so long since the last update! A whole week! Bet you guys were waiting for this. *Crickets and flies make cricking and buzzing noises in unison*

After going through a bit of playtesting, checking through the quests to see if everything added up and whatnot, I've noticed several things. First, the questbook isn't exactly Kate Upton or Ryan Gosling, if you know what I'm saying, it doesn't exactly catch one's eye. Which is a pretty big problem when a large portion of your pack revolves around communicating with the player. So it's back to the drawing board on more ways to improve immersive story elements.

Another big problem I've had with playing is that while I thought that leaving core mechanics unchanged and trying to be as straightforward and simple as possible lead the experience to be more than somewhat plain and generic, which is a fancy way of saying I was quick to get tired of the vanilla-like gameplay that represents most of the modpack.

Now you might be thinking to yourself "Well, that's quite a discovery you've made there!" but my reasoning behind it was quite sound. I didn't want to focus too much on either the Earth or the endgame Titan element of the game, as not to "distract" the player from their main goal and picking up the pace of the game.

Testing set me straight, though. I've instead decided to make the modpack quite a bit more in-depth and expansive. I've spent some time researching ancient mining techniques and trying to see how far off Minecraft is on the pick-to-the-wall style of getting resources. This is what I've come up with so far:

1. You don't dig into bare rock with a pickaxe
2. The Romans used heatshock to get rid of stone layers covering the ore
3. Water is very important in many ways (including washing out the ore, scaring the stone into cracking...)

Oh I can already see the outraged mothers when they find out that their children are being misled by another one of those evil video games! But fear not, justice will be served.
I'm currently in the "installing eclipse" phases of working on the stone cracking mechanics and whatnot. This way you'll be able to discover the true ways in which humanity does things! I'm also beginning to think that adding Terrafirmacraft will be a must.
This means you'll be way more focused on survival than anything else for the first couple of days, before you even start thinking about prospecting for ore. On this note, I'll also be looking towards mods that change the fighting mechanics and RPG-style player progress mods, to give you a sense of reward and progression and incentive to fight the evil coming from the night to kill you. On the topic of the enemies, I've also got a myriad of ideas, but at the moment I have priorities.

If you! Yes, you! Are reading this and have any ideas/questions/suggestions/comments or ice cream, make sure to write them up, don't be shy! I'm not showing off too much to generate feedback, but I'd appreciate your thoughts on the ideas I'm laying out.

*Teleports twenty blocks away and resumes stalking you*

 

[CageVenom]

Did you miss me?
... I guess not!
-The Mask, The Mask (1994)

Progress! I've finally managed to implement so-called "tutorial worlds". These are Chisel 2 antiblock worlds with cute dirt islands where you will be able to learn about the mechanics of the modpack. I'll probably make the tutorials configurable (you'll be able to disable them), but they will play a big part in fleshing out the character of your exhalted companion!

Finally, I'm currently putting a bit of a halt on throwing pickaxes out the window because a couple of problems have popped up. Firstly, I'll be honest, I'm crap at making a mod and it's looking pretty grim on the heatshock mining mechanic. The other huge problem I've had is finding an intelligent way of implementing Dynamite. I kind of want to make it complex as heck, mixing together (sand) (read: vitriol/alum) and saltpeter then using something similar to the wet sponge / waterbucket mechanics to create Aqua Fortis (aka. nitric acid) then crafting it together with a (sapling) (read: glycerol) to give you a bottle of Nitroglycerin. Craft that together with some clay and bam, you have a stick of dynamite. Saltpeter and sand are quite abundant, but the former is walled off behind a pickaxe in terms of player progression. I'm also on the lookout for any mod that adds a "research" mechanic that would unlock certain recipes and maybe lock it off with that.

Another thing I'm ambitiously dreaming about is improving the combat system so that you feel powerful against your enemies (which might be exclusively zombies for the better part of the game because I'm almost dead-set on removing skeletons, creepers and silverfish). I'm looking at mods that would add great animations to swordfighting so that you could enjoy a skyrim-esque combat that just looks so cool. At first when you enter the game, you'll be able to use all of the skills and feel the power coursing through your veins. But then you'll lose them when you're "initially" created. And then you'll unlock them through an RPG-like system, which I'm currently scrying the depths of Curse and MCF for!
My goal here is to introduce a power-up curve; you start at the bottom (a few zombies that completely ruin your day when met) and work your way to the top (going postal and hunting down hordes to gain more skills). Either way, you'll be neigh-invincible when you enter Titan, so even if you don't feel like grinding the most you'll be missing on is the satisfaction of dicing up the terrors with style. It makes the grind rewarding, but not neccessary (credits to Undertale for that idea)

Other mods are mostly tech-focused ones that I've sort of stumbled upon and they look somewhat realistic and interesting to play with. I intend to massively configure them to make them inter-dependent. Here's an example of my thinking: Flaxbeard's Steam Power's steam hammer&anvil would make for an excellent early way to create metal plates (turn the anvil gui into the metal shaper gui from IC2!)
Immersive engineering 2 looks flat out delicious. Exactly the type of early-age power generation you'd imagine.

// For the rant

In terms of inspiration, I've been looking at loads of games from a different perspective lately. Civilization, Factorio, Empire Earth and other successful titles are making me more aware that while pack creators often advertise the "openness" of their pack, it often boils down to "I added a bunch of mods that I liked" and that things like researching technology and gated progression are not done, not because of the "it's your world" ethic, but because of the "it takes effort" problem. A good example of this is how Regrowth, a heavily gated pack, is extremely popular, even though you have to slowly progress through tiers. In specific mods, you notably have Thaumcraft's research, or RotaryCraft's techtree, as well as numerous others. I'd really prefer not to be overwhelmed with a mountain of ways of doing something (installing EnderIO, Thermal Expansion, IC2 and a bunch of other similar mods) and just focus on one thing at a time.

I'm also starting to appreciate the mod authors more and more, their evident care for their mods and ingenuity that drives their creations are truly inspiring. It worries me that people who play my pack (when it comes out) might report bugs and problems to the developers and I'd really like to say even at this stage: If something in my pack is dysfunctional, ask ME. I will resolve your problem to best of my knowledge, and if something still doesn't work for no explicit reason and we're all scratching our heads about it, I'll contact the developer myself. Take this advice to other modpacks as well. This was also suggested to me by jordsta95, a nice person from the forums who was kind enough to take the time to answer some of my silly questions (thanks!).

Hope you're liking these updates, whoever is reading, I appreciate it. (Apathy apathy)
Will be back when more glorious progress is made!