new to pack creation, advice on mods to include/remove?

[Vagaprime]

The hard part with balancing a modpack is most people like myself are the only ones working on and testing the pack. So what is balanced to me might not be balanced to someone else.

 

[Arcanuo]

Yes, most pack devs select mods in a thoughtless manner. That or they simply don't care for balance and only want to provide a full toybox.

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Might release my SSP when it's finished but this isn't the place for that.

Also @Vagaprime balancing Grind itself can also be an issue.

 

[Vagaprime]

Ya it can. I mean i am still sorting out balances, and recipe conflicts as I find them but it is slow going when you have to do everything yourself.

 

[scherzare]

I've added some of the mods you guys suggested and finished unifying the oregen, so balance/recipe tweaking is most of what I have left.

One thing I'm thinking of doing is eliminating things like tesseracts/dimensional transceivers to force more "realistic"/interesting builds, but I'm not sure how far I would extend that if I did it. For example, ender chests - they definitely fit into that category, but they're so damn useful that I'm hesitant to get rid of them. Even tesseracts I'm not sure about, since it would make things like powering moving quarries extremely challenging (not entirely sure how you would even do it short of attaching a power gen system to the quarry.

I've also noticed that several mods have options to enable harder recipes built into the configs, mostly to require steel instead of iron for things (i.e. big reactor parts). I'm thinking that would probably be a good idea since it would provide some early impetus to get steel production going.

Definitely have to playtest it all first though, which is tricky since I'm new to a lot of the stuff I've included. The pack is just for personal use at the moment, but I do like the idea of polishing it as much as possible and releasing it - would be cool to (potentially) watch people try it out and see what kinds of things end up being possible.

 

[Reika]

Thought as much, the only other mod in there I believe that doesn't use RF is RotaryCraft, but my impression (haven't used it yet) is that it doesn't use RF itself, but is capable of outputting it using a certain machine.

It is capable of both generating and using RF. However, the RF->RC converter is lossy, gated and tiered, and the RC->RF converter is optionally lossy and optionally gated.

 

[Azzanine]

Actually I wonder if there are any pack makers bold enough to make a pack where flight is not present or at least severely nerfed?
I say bold as such a pack would not only be unpopular but probably incurr a lot of hate from people who will never play it.
Pair that with a no tesseract (and it's derivatives) or teleportation and youd probably have satan in modpack form.
Of course to counter this I'd probably remove the roller requirement for Railcraft rails that or boost the output of those recipes. Also hang gliders will be fine.
Problem is removeing/ tweaking all the mods with flight. A lot of the popular mods have flight in some form.

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[Arcanuo]

Actually I wonder if there are any pack makers bold enough to make a pack where flight is not present or at least severely nerfed?
I say bold as such a pack would not only be unpopular but probably incurr a lot of hate from people who will never play it.
Pair that with a no tesseract (and it's derivatives) or teleportation and youd probably have satan in modpack form.
Of course to counter this I'd probably remove the roller requirement for Railcraft rails that or boost the output of those recipes. Also hang gliders will be fine.
Problem is removeing/ tweaking all the mods with flight. A lot of the popular mods have flight in some form.

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I understand what your saying but I also feel like removing flight for the sake of making your pack unique isn't the best idea.

If your removing flight or any other perk for lack of another word you need a mechanic that affects why your doing this. For example you remove flight because your pack is based in the 1700's and they didn't have flight or teleportation.

 

[scherzare]

That's sort of the direction I'm thinking of going. I don't want to remove flight entirely, but I do want to have it make sense within a more realistic context. I've already taken out the XU angel ring. I'm planning on leaving jetpacks in, but possibly pushing them back farther in the tech tree.

At this point I'm thinking the idea will be to have the player progress through various stages of technological development, starting with wood -> stone -> very basic tech and ending in the most complex tech like ReactorCraft and Galacticraft for example. Ideally I'd like to gate off all the higher end tech initially and have a research system resembling the one in Factorio, where a research lab is used to research new tech, while requiring increasingly complex materials to progress in the tech tree as higher tech levels are attained, but I'm not quite sure how to implement this yet. I have a feeling it may require diving into a bit of modding myself to get it working the way I want.

 

[Azzanine]

I understand what your saying but I also feel like removing flight for the sake of making your pack unique isn't the best idea.

If your removing flight or any other perk for lack of another word you need a mechanic that affects why your doing this. For example you remove flight because your pack is based in the 1700's and they didn't have flight or teleportation.

The only justification I need is that IRL jetpacks are horribly inefficient and those few designs that aren't are still incredibly dangerous. A flightless mod pack would purely be for the more masochistic modded MC players anyway. Nothing about being unique. I just feel like there are a few mods out there that become obsolete due to this jetpack paradigm. Players are really reliant on jetpacks to get around. Things like carts and boats are only considered as a novelty or super early game (speaking of boats there really, rails are mid game modded or vanilla).

Maybe I wouldn't get rid of flight all together but cruiseing around in a super efficient jetpack takes something from the away from me, I hope I'm not alone here.
Maybe such a pack could utilize Archemedies airships with a tweaked recipie for the balloon block make it utilize mid/lategame materials maybe even use that mod ME 2 used quadrum to make a gated material for it that sort of makes sense. Eg make a sort of high tensile aeronautical cloth that requires rockwool, canvas from IE and glue balls from tinkers or rubber from ic2. Maybe have it crafted in a machine. So players don't just rush for the bare minimum airship on day 2. Maybe make airship speed a tad slower too.

I also wished there was a method of changeing the functions of a items mechanics. To change some of the flight giving items to do something else useful. Like make it so the Thaumostatic harness creates a ghost platform rather then give creative albeit slow flight. Or jetpacks in general give the player a really boosted jump rather then full controlable flight.

I may prototype such a pack for my self but it's probably too much of an undertaking. I'd like to one day see a server that has a well built Railcraft network that's actually useful and not just an unused novelty. Or towns with large vast airship docks. Having things freighted around by rail.

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[Celestialphoenix]

Flight is an optional luxury anyway, the game plays perfectly fine without it- go ahead an axe the lot