Town Hall Transcript

[Feed the Beast]

A few days ago, Slowpoke and TFox from the FTB Team hosted a Townhall meeting over at Twitch, discussing upcoming changes to the FTB Beyond pack as well as Expert Mode. During that meeting they also answered some questions made by the community. You can find more details of all of this meeting at the bottom of this post.

About FTB and Vazkii in general

We've talked with Vazkii a lot about his mods, yet this comes back again and again. To make it clear: we do not have any problem with Vazkii's mods whatsoever. We actually think them to be excellent. But just because we think either a mod or a mod developer is excellent, doesn't necesarily mean we think it's fit for one pack or another.

About Beyond, community feedback and its next update
The whole team got together this afternoon prior to this stream and, based on all the feedback we've been getting regarding the pack, we're going to be making some changes [Update: these changes have been implemented in version 1.2.0]

Psi
Let's talk about this one first, since it's the easiest one to go over. We're gonna revert the recipe changes, back to the mod's original one, and that will remain like that on normal mode. This change will go live on the next public beta (1.2.0), which should release around friday. To be clear, it's not that we think anything has changed, but the argument of ComputerCraft being available like that but not Psi is completely valid (More detail on that down below). That's why we're reverting this completely.

Quark
Here we're also reverting some, but not all, of our changes. Now, tfox has noted that out of the available config changes that Quarks offers in its config, we'd disabled about 30% of that mod as it stands up until now. We're gonna go through all of those changes individually, and we'll explain our reasoning for why we made that decision at the time, and what are we going to do about it moving forward:

• Colored beds being disabled: Reverted.
  Originally, during beta testing there were some issues with Morpheus and with some recipes (only taking the vanilla bed; more details on this down below with chests and others), which came to us from our beta team. Because of that, we just disabled that functionality. We're gonna turn it back on, see if those issues were changed. I'll try to contact vazkii, see if he can add an option for also naming his beds "Bed" (as in the vanilla one), so we can actually still use Morpheus (because what Quark does breaks Morpheus). If the texture issue is fixed, and we can get the name changed, this'll be added back in.
  
• The "More Bookshelves" feature being disabled: Staying off due to overlapping.
  There are quite a few recipes where you have to take ball o mosses and click them on the bookshelves, and it would only work with vanilla or Chisel bookshelves. And there was also some overlap there, same texture and same look, so we decided to turn it off. That's something we've always done, if there's duplicate content we take one of them off.
  
• The "varied chests", "varied trapdoors" and some few more being disabled: Reverted.
  We also had some recipe issues here, because these tweaks changed the oreDictionary. And yes, we could go with a script and overwrite the oreDict, but it would cause several issues with many other mods; if other mods don't use the oreDict, it brings some issues. So, what we've decided to do now is to make all of those available, and placing one alone in a crafting grid will allow you to transform it into the vanilla variant, which will work on recipes. We could've used this as a solution two months ago, but at that time it hadn't been brought to our attention how much people would want those specific features.
  
• "Chest buttons" being disabled: Staying off due to overlapping features.
  We've disabled them due to having Inventory Tweaks, which offers shortcuts for essentially almost the same (sorting being disabled automatically on quark, without us changing anything), and because we prefer the way InvTweaks implements them. So we're not reverting that change, since we're happy with how it works right now.
  
• Arms on armor stands: This will be turned back on.
  
• Chickens shedding feathers: We're turning this back on (for now)
  We want to make some testing on that, see how this actually performs before taking a final decision.
  
• "Convert clay blocks to clay balls": This will remain disabled.
  That's purely a vanilla mechanic that we prefer to leave in, since we're happy with how it works normally. As a personal opinion [from slowpoke, later on in the stream], clay is one of the best things modpack developers can use to balance recipes: this is because it's one of those few things that are limited on how easily you can automate mining of it, which greatly helps towards balancing stuff around.
  
• "Creepers turn red as they explode": we're leaving that off since it causes issues with resource packs.
  
• "Deploy ladders downwards": Will remain off, willing to add a separate mod providing this functionality in a slightly more gated way
  We're leaving that off due to balance concerns, but we'd be glad to add a mod that puts a slightly higher cost per ladder; similar to what OpenBlock's rope ladder did on 1.7, requiring string: it's a little gate on day one, because you have to go kill some spiders or finding some string in the world, compared to just breaking a few logs for having such an assistance in stuff like exploring ravines and similar deep places with ease. Quark's recipe felt a little bit too easy.
  
• "Enderman teleporting you to them when you're on a 2-high block gap": We're leaving that disabled.
  It's a balance change, everybody in the team is happy with leaving that as it is currently.
  
• "Glass Shards": This will be turned back on.
  
• "Greener Grass" currently disabled: We'll leave this off, since it causes issues to resource packs.
  
• "Sheeps having armor while wearing wool" currently disabled: Will be kept like that.
  This will remain disabled, everybody on the team agrees in that being a balance change.
  
• "Stair crafting": We're ok with enabling it, won't do it yet though due to a dupe bug with Thermal Expansion we cannot currently solve.
  Ok, this will differ from the actual recording. We did say we were readding them, but since Thermal Expansion's Sawmill has a recipe for "1 wooden stair -> 1 wood block", which can lead to a dupe bug (6 wooden block -> 8 stairs -> 8 wooden blocks, repeat). We might reconsider it if KingLemming adds some nerf for the machine when TE and Quark with that feature enabled are together.
  
• "Better Vanilla Textures" being disabled: Will remain turned off, but you can tweak it on your client with no problem.
  Nope, it will remain as it is. If you want it, you can turn it on (it's a client side config, so you shouldn't have issues with servers!).
  
• "Panorama Maker" being disabled: Will be kept turned off.
  It will remain disabled, mostly due to it not being usable with Custom Main Menu.
  
• "Sitting on stairs" being disabled: Will be kept turned off.
  This will remain disabled, since it seems really buggy for us (we've watched many cases of players suffocating due to it, misclicking on them, etc.). Simply something we're not interested in having.
  
• "Blazes naturally spawning in the nether" and "Guardians naturally spawning in oceans" being disabled: We'll keep those off, due to balance concerns we have.
  
• "Generate clay blocks underground like dirt is" being disabled: That'll remain disabled due to my [slow's] call. I don't really like that concept.
  
• "Biotite ore" being disabled: We're re-enabling it, but it won't generate.
  Recipes have been adapted due to this: You can get a Block of Biotite from burning a Quartz Block. Then, that block can be crafted back into Ender Biotite, which now is used on some Quark stuff (weather sensor, making biotite blocks again, and converting cobblestone into basalt.
  
• "Basalt generation" being disabled: Only generation was disabled, the block is still there.
  You should be able to obtain it by using a Chisel on other variations, and also with biotite and cobblestone since that's enabled now. We use Chisel's basalt on worldgen because we like how it generates around lava lakes, that's it.
  
• "Pirate Ships" being disabled: We're bringing them back, but we're making them rarer.

Actually Additions
Black Quartz will remain as an element craftable with nether quartz and coal. There are many reasons we had for taking this decision, but the main one would be this one: we consider the ore is not needed for the progression.
It may make sense on a vanilla instance with only AA, but on a modpack with a lot of more content, it's way easier to just go to the nether and gather some Nether Quartz; you only need 3 diamonds (arguably, not even that). You don't even need flight for obtaining the ore!
You may hate it, but ultimately it's not like this is the only thing that you have to go to the nether for. There's plenty more stuff needed in there: Blaze Rods (you currently cannot obtain blaze powder from deserts like on 1.7, since Thaumcraft is not available yet), some TechReborn ores, Cobalt and Ardite from Tinkers, wither skeleton drops, and Nether Quartz itself, amongst others.
Also, we didn't want the ore to be present for expert mode.
Regarding the mod's village chests being empty, we're not sure about what happened there; we need to make some testing, since we were never reported on that before... [Note: Ellpeck replied about it]

RFTools Dimensions
The thing about RFTools Dimensions is that the way it's implemented is great, specially compared to the 1.7 iteration of it. It's pretty good, player now has the ability to delete his created dimensions, you can limit how much they can have created at the same time... It's really great for servers. The only big issue we have with it right now is Expert Mode. This is one of the differences between making Beyond and making Infinity: when we were making Infinity, we didn't have a clue that Expert Mode would eventually be a thing. We know that now, it's gonna be a thing; so we can look ahead a little bit, and make a few adjustments to the normal version of the pack. And we could, of course, throw in the mod and completely disable it for Expert Mode; that's an option as well. But there's a couple of stuff regarding Expert Mode that we will discuss below in this post, and that may allow us to include Dimensions into Beyond currently.

Dark Utilities
Both the Portal charm and Sleep Charm being disabled was an oversight on my [tfox's] part; we had some issues on early testing where people would get stuck in vanilla beds, and we tried disabling that amongst other stuff as an attempt for solving it. In the end, it didn't fix that issue, and it was never re-enabled. We'll fix this in the next update.
If there's one thing this community's great at it is picking up on the stuff that we missed out, and we can take that advice (and in so, fix it). Now, related to the bug, there's Bed Bugs... we're actually planning on testing that mod; it probably won't make it next update, but the one after that most likely will. It's on our list.

Thermal Dynamics
TD will be added to the pack; and that won't be too far away in time. Once we get it, and we can test it, it will get added to the pack.

Akashic Tome
As a note, we saw some people suggesting this small mod on reddit, that collects all instruction manuals and guides from mods in one item, and we're adding that to the pack.

About our plans for Expert Mode
We already have planned when it's getting to the beta testers, when it's getting into FTB One, and when it's getting released for the public. We cannot really commit on this since it's not entirely dependant on us only, but also on the mods themselves. What most people reading this is interested about is the public release, which we're hoping to release around mid-June. We know last time it took quite a bit more than 3 months, but now we do have more people involved on it; and so it's coming together a bit faster.
This leads to one of the bigger parts regarding this: We want to leave it clear, this is not necessarily going to happen, but it's what we want to happen. And it's dependant on certain stuff beyond our control. But we're legitimately talking about not releasing Expert Mode at all for 1.10.2; tfox is very keen to see if we can release it on 1.11.2, since there are quite a few advantages to it.

• Tfox: The main thing with this is, I do want to keep normal and expert modes as one. But if we commit to release expert on 1.11.2, we may have to lose a little bit of content compared to what we do have right now. We have a few different options: one of them being splitting the modes into two separate packs. That opens up a lot of possibilities for us: for example, changing more configs that would, as of right now, change the way normal mode is played (which we do not want to). However, this would mean losing something we introduced to the modded scene: the ability to switch between one type or the other without having to restart the game entirely. So, now we're wondering whether we want to keep that, or just go and make a separate pack for Expert Mode.

Best case scenario would be being able to port Beyond entirely as it is now to 1.11, and making expert from there. But we cannot really guarantee that, nor world stability going from one version to the other.

On Power Generation
We're in the middle of an analysis around power generation right now, and we'll be using that to make certain tuning changes when it comes to all the different power generations for Expert Mode. What we intend is that if you, for example, have 5 different generators that all burn a single piece of coal each, and all of them have the same cost for building the actual generator (which currently happens, with no need of much tweaking recipes), then each one will produce different amount of total energy at a different rate: One may produce way more power than the rest overall, but at a much slower rate, and on the other side of the spectrum you'll have one that generates power really quickly, yet being considerably inefficient at it. Then you'll have the choice on what fits better on your current scenario regarding materials, resources, etc. We still need to check how much we can change around towards achieving this, but that would mostly be the idea we have.

A little note regarding Actually Additions and Expert Mode

• Slowpoke: Actually, let me tell you this when it comes to Actually Additions. If you like AA the way it is, be prepared to get very upset; because I'm about to bust that mod completely for expert mode. So don't expect to be getting the type of power you currently get out of that mod when it comes to expert mode because you won't be getting it. Sorry, I'm breaking that mod completely. It's way outkilled almost everything else at that level as it stands right now.

(As a note, it's not really that we'll be "busting it". We're bringing it into balance with all other mods. We can give you an example: right now, in AA you can take a piece of coal, which in most generators gives 20-25kRF, and burn iton their own generator for around 80kRF; that's the stuff where it's not balanced in any way, and we intend on bringing that into line)

 

[Feed the Beast]

Some questions we answered to, from reddit and twitter:

From /u/Mikedevil: What is the design scope that lead you to make such changes in a certain handful of mods? For example, a few months ago you clarified that you don't want to make huge changes to configurations to let the player experience mods the way mod developers intended them to be (at least in non-expert mode). Now, some time later, you release a kitchen-sink pack more customized than ever. How come you claim that such design choices were made in the name of "balance" and "breaking the vanilla feel"?

• Tfox: In Beyond, most of the changes made were related to config files. And that was done with the intent of making mods work together better, and incorporating a little bit more of a "balance" as we saw fit, in what we could do through configs. We didn't really go changing recipes like we would in, for example, expert mode. We did do a lot of scripting for Ore Unification and fixing issues. But the "balance changes" that we did were very small. For example, there's the Builder Block from RFTools. It's a fairly cheap block, and also a very powerful block. So we went in and changed the amount of RF that it takes for it to run as a Quarry: simply augmenting how much energy it uses; the same thing we did with the Ranged Pumps, which by default doesn't require power at all. There were a few changes of the sort, and if we did them it was because the mod developer allowed it on its configs. If they didn't want modpack developers to adjust those settings, they wouldn't offer a config for it. At least that's the way that we looked at it. And Slowpoke gave me the OK on this, unlike how Infinity 1.7 was handled (where we tried to keep everything as default as possible).
• Slowpoke: I think the important part here is: as we moved into Beyond, both me and tfox agreed in that one of the main focus of every flagship FTB pack for each version so far has always been to stay as true as possible to what the mod developers intended their content to be, and how up until now we've done that. But we also discussed if maybe it was time to see if we could start to bring a little bit of extra balance on top of "just picking out a few mods". It may work, it may not. We won't know until we try it. But we certainly cannot just keep doing the same thing over and over again. We do have to try new ideas, experiment a little. And if it ends up not working, we can always come back to the usual "no configs" style on the next version, be it 1.11 or 1.12; as a note.
• Tfox: Also, we're taking everybody's feedback. For example, the next update of Beyond, 1.2.0 (which should go beta in a few days) will mostly have changes that we decided to make based on the reaction of the players.

If a player wants to not feel alienated by non-vanilla features, he doesn't play with mods. We're talking about a series of modpacks that in the past completely changed core mechanics, the way the world is generated, etc. I find it hard to believe that a few different coloured beds would confuse players more. Or that [Black Quartz,] an ore that is important in the early game of Actually Additions is disabled but for some reason, yet the [Electrotine, Ruby, Sapphire, Peridot] ore spam from ProjectRed remains? It almost seems like you went through the configs of some mods and blindfolded started ticking off features.

• TFox: I'll start with the biggest thing, world generation. We decided to go with vanilla worldgen because, based on our previous experiences, it's very risky to use a biomes-adding mod. It makes it hard for all the mods to work properly together, and we decided to eliminate that risk with this pack; this being because we knew this was gonna be a widely played pack, and having already had some issues with Biomes O' Plenty in the past, which remain present in 1.10, slow and I both agreed that it was way too risky to use it. We won't stop you from using it, but keep in mind that you won't receive support from us if using it. The oregen from ProjectRed is actually very useful, not only on armor and tools/weapons but heavily on TechReborn by default (and we do plan on making use of these gems and Electrotine in Expert Mode). [Here was the explanation on AA and Black Quartz we wrote above on this same post.]

I find it hypocritical to talk about balance in a pack that has such mods as Big Reactors and Draconic Evolution. The number one point people made about Infinity was how unbalanced it was, and then you say your number one concern is balance. My question is: how do you come to such convoluted conclusions all the time? Why do you consider a mod that offers "/gamemode 1" functionality at the cost of power to be less advanced than a magic mod that, if you don't want to spend time and learn about, is useless to you?

• Slowpoke: Okay, I'll let tfox to talk about this as well; but I want to put my personal opinion as well, because while designing this pack this was something reasonably important to me. So, first of all let's talk about this idea about Draconic Evolution (I presume you refer to this mod) giving creative-like functionality and being left as it is, yet something like Psi being gated behind Dragon Eggs. Now, I understand what I'm about to say is hypocritical, but: when it comes to mods like Psi and ComputerCraft/OpenComputers, in my opinion these are mods that caters to a very small percentage of our player base (in the case of ComputerCraft it's a bit bigger than that, since you can get pastebins and bring over other people's programs, and use them within the game; but in the end I'd dare to estimate that at most a 2% of our players understands Lua). Having said that, we get that some people like those mods, and that's fine; but when making decisions about what mods to put in our packs, we need to cater to a very very large audience. When it comes to FTB Beyond, our goal is to make this pack accesible to as many people as we can, because it's designed for people playing it together. So yes, we do cater to these larger audiences. This leads to the inevitable question: if that's the case, then why is ComputerCraft (or OpenComputers, in this case) available at such an early stage in the game, but Psi isn't? And I've said this before, and I'll say it again: the reasoning behind that is because CC was there at the beggining of FTB, when we started it off. It was used then, and it's used now, and to come along now and gate it after so long is something that maybe we should do, but we just haven't done at this point in time (specially having this situation now with Psi). So, we can go with one of many different ways: we can leave CC in the "easy section", we can go the way of gating them both behind "hard difficulty"... There are many different paths we can take, and when making this pack the one we chose was gating Psi. But that doesn't mean we don't listen to the people. We'll go more into that later.
• Tfox: Ok, wanna say I do understand the point on Big Reactors. I mean, modded minecraft is OP to begin with; anything is as OP as you make it. And the plan with this pack is to cater to as large of a playerbase as possible: that way if you want go tech, but your friend prefers to try magic, you guys can all play together. That is the whole idea of this pack. A mod like Extreme Reactors, which replaced Big Reactors, ca be very over powerful, but so can every mod; and it comes to a point where in normal mode, which is what is available right now, it is up to the player to be able to control those mods to an extent: if you want to jump right into it, make a 20x20x6 reactor and generate like 6 millions RF/t out of it, that's kind of your choice. We do gate it a little bit with a few config changes, but we don't heavily gate the progression of that mod. The things that we do tend to gate a bit more is tools and stuff like that, that are extremely powerful.

From /u/Masterreader747: Does platinum and iridium ores spawn? They seem to spawn at y lvl 50 ish according to JER...

• Tfox: Ok, so I did something special with CoFHCore when it was still in early alpha, and I decided to make meteors out of obsidian; and they're very very rare (they're more rare in the overworld than in the mining age, as a little hint!). But those spawn between the Y levels 40 and 60, and they'll contain a few small amounts of each ore. That's why they show up on JER.

From /u/Arugur: Was the exclusion of Malisis Doors a compatibility issue or a choice? Since Carpenter's Blocks hasn't updated to 1.10, there's no other option for making fancy doors, or doors that blend into the wall. It's cramping my style.

• Tfox: It does a lot of hacky things to doors and gates. Apparently, as I've been told, there's a way that you can disable that. Last time I tested it there wasn't any, and it messed with a lot of things; specially with Forestry doors and ones from other mods. I'm sure the mod itself works great on vanilla alone, but the problem is that it's not designed to work with any other mod that adds a door or a gate. We had a lot of issues, so it felt safer to leave it out. However, I've added it to my "recheck" list. And while I cannot promise anything, if we can confirm we can disable that part of it and offer the handful of extra doors, I agree in that it does some really neat stuff; it'd be a good fit for a pack like Beyond. Maybe we'll see it on an update soon.
• Slowpoke: If the rendering issues are solved, that is...
• Tfox: Oh, yeah! Definitely, there are also the rendering issues. Like some people just put on chat, it's a render shitshow. If that's still the case, then most certainly it won't be included.

From /u/h5h77: I've been having a great time playing FTB beyond, but I really don't get why there's no BoP or equivalent mods. Vanilla generation is still an option for people who want to play vanilla, even with BoP... So an explanation of the reasoning behind that, and if we can expect it to change in the future would be great. Great modpack otherwise so far though.

• Tfox: We started testing with Biomes O' Plenty while developing the pack; I personally like the mod, the fact that it changes things quite a bit. But one of the biggest issues we had is that we couldn't disable its own ore generation. We tried and tried, changed JSONs yet it kept reverting; even contacted the mod developer, and his reply was "Oh, didn't thought about modpack developers when making that, and it's not gonna be changed". So I said "okay then, simple enough!"; not being able to change these configs breaks our whole idea for oregen. Besides that, if we were to remove it after release, there was this problem with biomes IDs potentially changed after it, which uglified older worlds. So we felt it was safer to just not include it.
• Slowpoke: Also, it was the only one available back then. If we could find an actual terrain mod that is stable (that's the main thing), works correctly and doesn't make it so you could potentially spend hours and hours looking around for the one biome you want; then we're not opossed to use them in the future. But so far I've not seen a biome mod that doesn't have at least one major issue when it comes to running on servers.
• Tfox: I'm going to say the closest I've ever gotten to that was with ExtraBiomesXL; they implemented it really well, they didn't hack a lot of things, it didn't add ores and a whole bunch of other stuff... It was more simple, and it added some nice biomes that kind of fit well with vanilla biomes. But unfortunately that's no longer being mantained, so it's no longer an option for us. And honestly, even if we wanted to add something, we can't right now.

One thing we'd like to address is that people some times forget the point we decide to release Beyond is not the time we decide which mods go in it; that is something we already determined 6 weeks earlier, we can't just test for a week like a bunch of other people. We have to be prepared for a huge amount of people using all these mods, and for them to be very stable. And people has been talking recently about this idea that FTB's number one priority when making a pack is balance. And it is not, we can assure you that above everything else, what we most aspire to is server stability. Certain pack makers have different priorities, access to different packs of resources, and differents standards when it comes down to making their packs. And it's as simple as that: not saying we have the best standards, but we do have our standards. We don't know whether they're higher or lower than other's, because we don't come around measuring them. We do know which ones we've set for in this pack. So far, one of the things we've received almost no reports about is performance, which is great. Granted, you do need at least 4 gigs of RAM, but there's nothing we can do about that; once you pass that, you'll notice it doesn't consume much more than that. Servers don't even need that much: they can run with 2.5-3 GB in theory, although we still recommend at least 4 GB on there as well if possible. And, as a personal opinion [tfox], memory is cheaper than processing power. I'd rather have Minecraft use a little bit more RAM and not as much CPU. It's one big flop from 1.7 to 1.10, and it's been made performance considerably better.

Question by /u/Saereth: From a design standpoint, does FTB feel it was worth the trade of worldgen performance in exchange for a completely lacking, near vanilla exploration experience in the pack?

• Slowpoke: Absolutely yes. Without a doubt, and this is my personal opinion on it: When I've seen the vast majority of people playing FTB packs on YouTube, Twitch, and anywhere else, they don't explore beyond what they absolutely have to. They'll have one base, which is huge, and they'll build there; they'll explore only as far as they have to, and once they've got what they need that's it. I'm not saying people don't explore, or that none play that way. I'm just saying this is what the majority of the people do. So, when it comes to Performance vs Exploration, I'd much rather have my server stable than vastly explorable.
• Tfox: On the topic of dimensions mods, and where are they: This is one of the main themes tfox and I have had many, many conversations about. Specially player-created dimensions. Now, RFTools has solved the problem, but this is more of a general statement: in an FTB pack, you'll never see again the ability for a player to create a dimension, unless that player also has the ability to delete that dimension. We don't ever want to see a server again where the owner goes into his world folder, and has 600 dimensions that are completely abandoned, forgotten, and only take disk space and machine resources to mantain. As for Beyond itself, only stuff included is:
  • Thanks to modmuss, we have a mod that creates void worlds, fills for those players who used RFTools/Mystcraft only for making their bases on one of those.
  • Same with Aroma1997's Dimensional World, adding a mining dimension for those who only look for that.
  • Extra Utilities adds the deep dark, which with its latest updates makes even more sense to keep (specially since it's required for some end-game content in ExU2), and the Quarry Dimension, which is not even accessible (only used with the Quantum Quarry, no player interaction needed)
• Slowpoke: On Aroma's Dimension mod, I wanna clarify that I requested for the stone layer on top. I didn't expect it not to stop animal spawning at all, that was the goal with that... We'll try to contact Aroma about, see what can be done.
• Tfox: Also on a note on this, we considered some options, but most likely there won't be a mining dimension for Expert Mode: only quarry method enabled will be the Quantum Quarry (and possibly the Void Ore Miner).

Is the the lack of biome, generation or decorative additions to the exploration of the pack to be a future trend for flagship ftb packs?

• Both: I wouldn't necessarily say we can say that. I mean, every time we go to a new version things change, and we may reconsider it. We can't really predict this, we design and make the flagship pack differently every single time.

Also from /u/h5h77: What I don't get is that even actually additions and railcraft village chests seem to have been deactivated. Like, the structures still spawn but the chests are empty. Why? Or is this a bug?

• Tfox: [Reply about AA's is above, on the section about changes to Beyond], but the Railcraft chests are just not implemented yet. The 1.10 version of the mod is still a work in progress, but it added quite a bit of world gen that I wanted to get in. Also, there's a lot of content on the mod itself already, just some of the machinery is not implemented yet (but it will be over time).

From InfamousSlytale: Why did you include both Applied Energistics 2 and Refined Storage on the pack?

• Tfox: The reason was a lot of people wanted both. And this being our flagship pack, we wanted to give options. But another big reasoning is that I have a lot of significant plans for them both on Expert Mode, and I didn't want to add one or the other later on. This answer may make a bit less sense after reading what we have to announce regarding Expert Mode, but it did when we conceived the pack 2 months ago.

Some Questions from Twitter:
From someone named @pahimar: When will EE3 be done?

• Slowpoke: No clue, you may wanna ask the mod developer. Probably around the same time as XyCraft most likely.

From @Cylek: ETA of expert mode?

• Slowpoke: We're actually doing something we don't usually do! We'll be giving an approximate ETA (not an actual one, but we have a plan around that). This is not a joke, we'll go more over that later down in the post.

From @OneChipBob: So will Roots and Embers be getting updates for their 1.10 versions?

• Slowpoke: We don't know. It's up to the developer, you should ask him. [Update: it's not]

From chat during the stream: Will there be quests on Beyond at some point in time?

• Slowpoke: We're not currently planning on adding quests to expert mode. We may have some structure planned for adding, but it won't necessarily be a "give this, get that" kind of thing. We'll have something in place, we just haven't got all the details polished yet.

From @akaZahro: Plans for a Skyblock?

• Tfox: I'm looking at doing skyblock again. The one thing most requested last time was "why was there no expert mode". Simple answer at that time was "it's a whole separate pack". For this time, however, in "FTB: Skyblock", we want to offer it both in normal and expert mode. It's in my plans, I have no idea when. But it will happen in the future.

From @Vazkii: What is the download velocity of an unladen modpack?

• Slowpoke: I don't think that can be measured with equipment that's available on the market today. Nothing is that sensitive, as far as I'm aware. If somebody does find something that can do it, please let me know (cos I'd like to know that myself).

From @AndrooSmithy: What do you consider a "Gate" in this pack? ex: Obsidian is needed to access the Nether, Endereyes to the end access, dragonegg

• Tfox: That's a good question. When it comes to expert mode, we have some stuff being developed for helping with that, which we cannot cover just yet. Let's just say it'll mostly avoid us having to gate mod A behind mod B, as we had to do on 1.7 expert. We'll give more info once we can!
• Slowpoke: I think this is something we can say: Expect the death of the 9x9 crafting grid, we're not going through that road again. Doesn't mean we won't offer stuff like creative items, but we'll make the progression a bit more immersive. We have some pretty cool ideas for that, which are in progress and you'll learn about eventually.

Also from @AndrooSmithy: With the elimination of the Hardcore version, what other planned adjustments are planned for the pack?

• Slowpoke: As we've mentioned here, we're looking into other smaller mods for adding some certain functionality to Beyond. And even big mods that get released, and we consider might be a good fit, may be incorporated eventually.
• TFox: Exactly. Beyond is an evolving pack for sure, even the normal mod. It's not done, that's for sure.

From @WelsknightPlays: Any reason that Not Enough Wands isn't in Beyond?

• Tfox: There were quite a few issues while testing the mod. I know that Direwolf20 has had problems with the mod in his pack, so that was a red flag for me not to add it.

From @Gorden121: If you disable hostile mobs in the mining dimension, can you enable it in the void world?

• Tfox: Probably not gonna remove them from the mining dimension, only removing the passive ones.

From @AquaBuzzardHR: Why don't you look at some more building mods, like Earthworks or ExtraBlocks? Adding new blocks should be perfectly stable.

• Slowpoke: I love those mods. They didn't really fit on what we wanted to do on this pack though, that'd simply be it.

From @Unrealdinner: Why do we have no Fast Leave Decay in the pack?

• Tfox: I know Lumien was in here earlier, and we did test with his and the other option available. And while in my main PC there were no issues, being a pretty powerful machine, on my older 5-years laptop it is pretty laggy when the leaves are decaying; and for that little change to the game, it's not worth sacrificing performance.
• Slowpoke: Besides that, it also takes back functionality other mods in the pack add. Similar to what happened with Treecapitator in the past.

From @GearGamer24: Will you develop a harder mode for Beyond Skyblock, similar to Project Ozone 2?

• Slowpoke (reading that as anything beyond the Skyblock pack, not the "Beyond Skyblock" pack): Well, I can't talk about what's gonna happen besides the skyblock expert mode, that's as far as we got on that planned for now.

You can watch the entire presentation over at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/129115341

Credit to @starg09 for his work on the transcript

 

[Pyure]

Thx a bunch for this, team.

 

[Reddis]

+1 Thanks for all the hardwork you guys put into Minecraft for us.

 

[Yusunoha]

inb4 a new mode, the butthurt mode, a whole mode with no config changes at all, all configs are exactly as how they're shipped by the mod developers xD

 

[zBob]

inb4 a new mode, the butthurt mode, a whole mode with no config changes at all, all configs are exactly as how they're shipped by the mod developers xD

Which will soon after be known as the "This is what I asked for but not really what I wanted mode."

 

[SephirothWS]

"Convert clay blocks to clay balls": This will remain disabled.
That's purely a vanilla mechanic that we prefer to leave in, since we're happy with how it works normally. As a personal opinion [from slowpoke, later on in the stream], clay is one of the best things modpack developers can use to balance recipes: this is because it's one of those few things that are limited on how easily you can automate mining of it, which greatly helps towards balancing stuff around.

"purely a vanilla mechanic that we prefer to leave in", I disagree with this, honestly. Quark gives us the ability to shapeless craft clay blocks into clay balls, and allows us to automate this process easier than needing to set up some other convoluted system that could cause more server lag than a simple shapeless recipe could provide. "Clay is one of the best things modpack developers can use to balance recipes." .. Yeah, not really; given certain circumstances. For instance, the void resource miner can (and has) provided me with thousands of blocks of clay. If I wanted bricks for building a nice brick home, I'd need to place these blocks and then shovel them up, which is a tedious step I can bypass with being able to simply craft a clay block into 4 clay balls. If you feel this is -far too overpowered-, why not instead of disabling this outright, but suffer a "penalty" for choosing to do it this way: Have it return 3 or 2 clay balls per block shapelessly. I've grown far too used to be able to shapeless craft clay blocks into balls with pretty much every other pack that has Quark having this feature enabled.

 

[Magzie]

The Salt my god the Salt plz. Joking aside compression drawers will in fact still convert blocks of clay to clay balls and balls of clay to blocks. so disabling that off of Quarks really does not do anything at all. Also there is also no reason to complain about the change cause you can just convert with drawers. Should most likely just let this issue die cause it is pointless...rofl.

 

[SephirothWS]

The Salt my god the Salt plz. Joking aside compression drawers will in fact still convert blocks of clay to clay balls and balls of clay to blocks. so disabling that off of Quarks really does not do anything at all. Also there is also no reason to complain about the change cause you can just convert with drawers. Should most likely just let this issue die cause it is pointless...rofl.

So with that said, disabling the quark clay block -> ball recipe doesn't do anything regarding "balance" or "vanilla mechanics", .. so therefore the argument behind disabling it is moot and doesn't make sense.

 

[Magzie]

So with that said, disabling the quark clay block -> ball recipe doesn't do anything regarding "balance" or "vanilla mechanics", .. so therefore the argument behind disabling it is moot and doesn't make sense.

Yes that is what I said. Also quartz works the same as clay in compression draws I believe.

 

[Migmag789]

Please don't disable RFTools Dimension ;(