The Goal
To create a modpack for mid to long term gameplay. We play in “survival” mode, so let’s make it about survival again. Mobs will live longer, hit harder and be a lot more frequent. Nights will be dangerous and it won’t be advised to leave the comforts of your base until dawn. Ore will not be bountiful, but will be a bit more realistic and will only be found in larger veins with greater distance between them.
Traveling will also require planning and caution, the world will be full of deadly traps and a lot more mob spawners hidden in caves, mines and throughout the landscape. Mini bosses will be present, and while rare enough, expect to encounter them when traveling and be prepared for their special attacks and advanced AI.
How do we plan to achieve longer gameplay?
Mining will no longer be about traveling through caves and mines to find pocket after pocket of ore, but will require more exploration and traveling greater distances. With survival being more of a concern for early to mid-stages of the game and ore being more difficult to come by, combined with some modded recipes, you can expect it to take much longer to acquire the resources needed to make more complicated items.
Events
Not only will you have the day-to-day complications to deal with when surviving, but there will also be a host of events that will happens throughout. Some of these will be scheduled, such as blood moons which cause hordes of zombies to appear, to more random events like hauntings and increased spawn rates of mini-bosses.
What primary mods should we expect to see to help us progress?
The modpack will include a mix of magic and tech, it was hard to limit it to one or the other, so we’re trying to implement a healthy balance of both to suit the needs of multiple different styles of gameplay, while still offering the same challenges for each so that one doesn’t have any major advantages over another and that all gameplay will be fair.
Restrictions
What we plan to introduce is a restriction system that is either time based, or achievement based, to restrict certain areas of gameplay to those who have worked to get to them. This will help prevent players from simply buying/stealing/trading items of higher quality to skip the early stages and go straight to mid and end game content. Restrictions haven’t been set in stone yet, however we expect to see restrictions placed on dimensions such as The Nether, The End, etc., requiring a certain amount of time played or certain achievements acquired in order to use the portals. Creating dimensions will be a possibility, but don’t expect to be able to do so until much later in the game. Restrictions to certain mods such as RFTools will be in place, to help extend gameplay a bit further.
Suggestions
The main reason I made this post. I have a very good idea in what direction I want this modpack to go and what challenges I want to include, however I’m always open to suggestions and ideas that I may not have thought of or knew existed. I want to make this a pack between “Hard Core” and Normal, something that offers a much more complex survival aspect, while still giving a fun experience to those who play. If anyone has any thoughts, suggestions or ideas for things to change, add or integrate, I would love to hear them.
Once I have the base of the pack finalized and all the mods chosen, I will announce it in this post and possibly add a link to a private server for anyone who would want to test the pack with me, help find bugs, irregularities and problems as well as give it a basic stress test to see how it holds up under pressure. That’s still at least a week or 2 away at best but figured I would mention it now for those who are curious in what stage the build is at.
Thanks to everyone for reading and I'll post updates/progress as the pack continues to evolve.