I am planning on making a botania-centric pack eventually, but what I'm doing now is just a config. I don't like magical crops because it's too dang easy. Set up an automatic farm with essence seeds, you'll be able to make whatever you want very quickly. The object is to make the player get far into botania. Seeds that grow resources are really powerful. Have you seen a setup farming oreberries? 9 bushes gives you more than you'll ever need, and magical crops is so much faster. That's the issue with plant-based resource generation. It's plant and forget. You can make a 9x9 automated essence crop farm and just get ridiculous amounts of essence. At that point, an automatic crafter is all you need to get high-level seeds. Using botania, you actually have to work to get seeds. Low-level seeds are still rather easy to get, you can use an early-game daybloom system just fine, but high-level stuff requires more advanced mana generation. It sure beats magical crops' own sorry excuse for a progression system.
And what you said about starting a new mod to advance? I don't quite get it. Magical crops has always been an optional sort of thing. You can spend the entire game not doing a single thing with magical crops. It won't hinder your growth at all, or limit what you can do. The only thing magical crops does is supply powerful equipment and resource generation. That's it. I won't be expanding a mekanism base and realise that oh darn, I need magical crops to make this machine. Better get botania started! These configs supply a more balanced progression, while still keeping magical crops completely optional. Oh, and I'm gonna make an enchiridion book if I figure out how.
If the styling or something should be changed just let me know and I can fix it up.
