Pack Making Tools

[Not_Steve]

A question for @Eyamaz @Jadedcat and @KirinDave . What tools do you find most helpful for pack making?
The ones I'm aware of are:
Mine Tweaker: changing recipes
Mod tweaker: changing machine recipes
NEI dumps: Find ids and unlocalized names of blocks and items
Tabula Rasa: Add 16 blocks and 32k items
Rock Digger: Add infinite blocks w/really easy world gen settings
HQM: Allow for specific goals
Jaded's blood: adding BM recipes
Jaded spawn: a specific spawn point

What are some other tools that assist in making packs?

 

[Eyamaz]

@FatherToast has mobproperties and custom chest loot that I use

NBT Explorer is also a necessity for using advanced scripting in the *tweakers and mobproperties so you know the names/values of the NBT you want to modify

MCEdit is a wonderful tool for mapmaking (there is a new one with paint in the name i need to look at yet.)

 

[KirinDave]

A question for @Eyamaz @Jadedcat and @KirinDave . What tools do you find most helpful for pack making?
The ones I'm aware of are:
Mine Tweaker: changing recipes
Mod tweaker: changing machine recipes
NEI dumps: Find ids and unlocalized names of blocks and items
Tabula Rasa: Add 16 blocks and 32k items
Rock Digger: Add infinite blocks w/really easy world gen settings
HQM: Allow for specific goals
Jaded's blood: adding BM recipes
Jaded spawn: a specific spawn point

What are some other tools that assist in making packs?

We use MineTweaker and a custom opensource mod called RRUtils for recipe and item removal and revision. NEI is of course essential! We use NEI dumps and the unix diff tool (or visualizers thereof using git, the Intellij git support does a good job with NEI dumps.

When I do pack work, I make heavy use of grep and lately my preferred editor for this work has been Sublime Text (mostly because I've been working across multiple platforms, I used to use a lot of Emacs macros). A lot of my pack time is spent maintaining the private releases of the pack. Velotican does first pass and the lion's share of the public pack work for the past few months, he's a champion.

OpenEye is a really big deal for us and deserves special mention, and makes tracking bugs and judging the relative magnitude of problems a lot easier. We can tell within an hour if our process didn't catch a major bug on release, and often fix it before it hits most of our users.

Honestly, we don't use anything else besides that. Most of our work is done via testing and community review.

 

[Mevansuto]

A question for @Eyamaz @Jadedcat and @KirinDave

Coz they're the only three who make modpacks here?

COFH Core is really important to me. I love messing with the worldgen, even if I tend to just borrow ideas from TPPI.

 

[Not_Steve]

Coz they're the only three who make modpacks here?

If I had listed every mod pack maker or there the summons would have been a page and a half long. Instead I went for those who've made the most popular packs.

 

[Mevansuto]

If I had listed every mod pack maker or there the summons would have been a page and a half long. Instead I went for those who've made the most popular packs.

Where did you get these statistics? Cite your sources, goddammit.

In seriousness though, why did you have to single out any pack maker at all. Are you not still getting responses?

 

[Not_Steve]

Where did you get these statistics? Cite your sources, goddammit.

http://strawpoll.me/2117304/r
100% of people who voted agreed with me.
Boom.
Headshot.

In seriousness though, why did you have to single out any pack maker at all. Are you not still getting responses?

I thought that these mod pack makers might have some experience that they would be willing to share. They have been very forthcoming and helpful. If I hadn't pinged them they probably wouldn't have ever seen this thread. It would just be randos and filthy casuals. Like Jim. He only plays minecraft on Xbox. Scum.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I'm... not a huge fan of Minetweaker. It's absolutely necessary for when you want to seriously start messing around with recipes or particularly when removing them, but it seems particularly invasive and kinda glitchy whenever anyone starts adding or removing mods. Then again, I tend to make mod packs a LOT smaller and simpler than the aforementioned packs, and I tend to operate on a KISS principle.

My opinion on Minetweaker is: Does this recipe absolutely break your game in some fundamental way? Is there a lack of a config file to alter/remove this recipe? Does the mod providing the game-breaking recipe that doesn't have a config to alter/remove the recipe ALSO provide enough additional things to the mod pack that are not duplicated elsewhere so you can't just yank the mod in its entirety? Only if all three answers are 'yes' should Minetweaker be considered.

Agrarian Skies is a challenge map pack, so recipes had to be tweaked to keep the level of challenge desired. And the results achieved were spectacular. I prefer to make more basic packs that don't require such invasive methods to maintain balance. I would probably say that for 99% of the packs out there, Minetweaker is completely unnecessary. Even Resonant Rise uses it exceedingly sparingly, and it's got so many dang mods it was practically inevitable just to keep unintended synergies down to a minimum.

Honestly, the only real tools I use are the config files and Notepad++/gedit. I will second KirinDave's statement that grep and Emacs are also useful tools. Well, Emacs are useful if you are doing multi-platform stuff.

NEI dumps aren't as useful to me due to the lack of scale I work with, I never had config issues because I had so few mods in my pack that I could afford a fiat config system (mod x starts off at 400, the next mod starts off at 500, and continue from there). It isn't very efficient, in that it leaves a lot of white space between mods, but it was extremely robust for what I did, and was very easy to update mods with because there were generally lots of room to add in new ID's in that mod's hundreds block, so there was no problems with either splitting up ID's or worrying about reverse compatibility by shuffling ID's around. Fortunately, that entire headache is gone completely with 1.7.x, so I'm really looking forward to that.

 

[KirinDave]

My opinion on Minetweaker is: Does this recipe absolutely break your game in some fundamental way? Is there a lack of a config file to alter/remove this recipe? Does the mod providing the game-breaking recipe that doesn't have a config to alter/remove the recipe ALSO provide enough additional things to the mod pack that are not duplicated elsewhere so you can't just yank the mod in its entirety? Only if all three answers are 'yes' should Minetweaker be considered...

Even Resonant Rise uses it exceedingly sparingly, and it's got so many dang mods it was practically inevitable just to keep unintended synergies down to a minimum.

We use Minetweaker to resolve recipe conflicts when mod authors do not (or refuse to) resolve them themselves. There are VERY few cases where we don't use it that way.