Modded Minecraft Monday - Week 1 - Farming

Hi everybody. We're a week into the lets play, so I'd like to show you what I've been up to.

I've mostly been playing it safe and trying to set up a defensible home base with renewable food supplies before I venture out into the wilderness.

Tree-houses are super defensible! :3

Initially I collected as many different types of seeds as I could get my hands on. I quickly realised that the Moso Bamboo that grew nearby was extremely useful as building material as it can be replanted anywhere, grows quickly and can be harvested quickly as well. I used it to set up fenced fields and lit them with torches made from coal ores in a nearby mine shaft.

Quick growing crops, plentiful and useful as building materials :3

You can barely tell that's a Treehouse on the left! :D

Having established a base, I decided to explore my immediate surroundings and found a nearby village with an empty house, a Tinkers Construct Forge & Tool-house and a MystCraft vendor's house. For now I will leave this village be so it doesn't get taken over by zombies, but I might come back for that forge later. There was also a floating sky village and a floating dungeon, that could both be seen from the village on the ground, but for now they are out of my range.

It's a village.. but in the sky... :O

 There were two minor changes to the mod-pack during this first week. 

First, I found it extremely easy to locate loot bags, which seemed to drop from every second or third enemy and often contained quite powerful gear, including enchanted diamond armour and tools. This obviously unbalances the game severely, especially since the Lycanite's mobs mod was removed last week, which made surviving aggressive mobs much easier at night time. I tweaked the config file for this mod so that the chance of a loot bag being dropped by any mob is 10 times less likely.

The second change was to add the mod called Natura, which simply adds some grow-able food crops and bushes and spawns great, huge, Redwood trees into the game, which make great tree-houses.

Now that I've established a nice home base, I'll be highlighting a particular mod for a week at a time so that anyone playing along can explore all the nuances of the individual mods, that they might have missed otherwise.

If you are playing along at home, I have updated the download link below to include the extra mod changes and the map that I'm playing on, as it is now. You can use it to see what I've been up to yourself and explore all the stuff that I've been toying with. I always loved seeing how other people built their worlds in Minecraft servers online and I figure you guys would like it too :3

A word of warning though. My computer may be 5 years old now, but it has a decent graphics card, 8GB of ram and an i7 cpu. My computer plays it ok given plenty of ram and patience, however it's extremely slow and laggy when new areas are loading for the first time and it can take several minutes to start up every single time. One of the main reasons for settling in and setting up a home base was to give the rest of the game time to generate and settle so it could be played smoothly. If you have the patience (or a super-computer?) go for it! Otherwise, you might want to pass on it.

Updated Download Link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/76107282/GettinMyMinecraftOn.zip

Modded Minecraft Monday - The Modpack Contents

Hello again. I have been fairly quiet for a bit and this post explains most of the reason why. I have been assembling a collection of mods for a modded Minecraft playthrough and, as anyone who has explored minecraft mods can attest, it's pretty addicting to keep adding new mods when you come across them. I have finally settled on a list of mods that I'm happy with so it's time to start a Let's Play series of blogs.

To begin with, I'd like to state that I'm not particularly a fan of modpacks like Technic or FTB. I have enjoyed playing them in the past, but I feel like the extra machinery and pipes and wires overcomplicate and distract from the core minecraft experience. Thus I have tried to stick to mods that, whilst adding new content, accentuate or expand on the core minecraft experience without overcomplicating it.

There are a lot of new hostile mobs added which does make the game rather difficult at night time, but hopefully I've balanced it out with enough extra ore and loot mods to make your arsenal much easier to upgrade quickly. The Extra Health Enchanted mod also starts you off with only three hearts and allows you to expand your maximum health by leveling or adventuring in dungeons, thereby allowing for a much better difficulty curve. It should be really hard at first, but as you level and progress through the game it should get significantly easier to survive.

Modpack Contents:

• ExtrabiomesXL - Adds 28 new biome types to the game for added landscape variety.
• Pam's Mods - Adds tons of new  plants and a few minor tweaks. 
• Harvestcraft - New farmable crops, fruit trees, bushes and food.
• Desertcraft - New desert flora
• Random Plants - New Venus Fly-Trap plants.
• Mob Drop Crops - New rare plants that drop hostile mob items like bones and ender pearls.
• Wheee Flowers! - More flowers!
• Bonecraft - Adds fossils to terrain generation which drop bones when mined.
• Clay Spawn - Clay will now also spawn underground with the same rarity as iron ore.
• Get All The Seeds - Adds all of the available seed types to the list of drops when breaking tall grass. New seed types will drop extremely rarely. 
• Plant Megapack - Adds tons of new plants!
• Underground Biomes - Adds different types of rock that have their own biome types underground. Lots of new stone types to play with!
• Dungeon Pack - New randomly generated structures, including large underground dungeons and ships on the water!
• Mystcraft - Based on the game and book series. Allows the crafting of books that contain entire worlds based on the runes you use to define that world.
• ChickenShed - Chickens will now randomly drop feathers like they do with eggs.
• WAILA - "What Am I Looking At?" is a mod that provides a HUD at the top of the screen that describes what what you are looking at and what mod it comes from. (Needed this to keep track of all the ores and underground biomes rock types)
• Mr Crayfish's Construction Mod - Adds a block that will build a building for you. You still need to gather all the materials required and spend time punching the block to build it, so this is more a way of creating templates to rebuild a certain building than a cheat. It balances out with the recipe requirements anyway.
• Easy Crafting - Adds a new crafting table with a more expensive recipe that shows you everything you can make with the items in your inventory. You click the object you want to make and it creates it for you using the items in your inventory. Works much like the console crafting menu does.
• Fast Leaf Decay - Because I hate floating leaf blocks when I cut down a tree...
• Minecraft Graves - Instead of dropping everything, the game will spawn a gravestone containing all of your items where you died. Saves your items, but you do have to get back to where you died to retrieve them.
• Harder Peaceful - Removes the automatic player health regeneration feature from Peaceful mode and enables hunger in Peaceful mode. Food now has a purpose in Peaceful mode! :D
• Infernal Mobs - Adds rare variants of regular mobs with randomised Diablo-stlye buffs. Kind of like mini-bosses.
• Item Physics - Items will drop to the ground properly without sitting there and spinning in place.
• More health Enchanted - Start with only 3 hearts of health maximum. Leveling will add more hearts. Hearts can also be added using items crafted from heart containers, found in dungeon chests. There is no maximum quantity for hearts so it makes you more resilient as you get further into the game.
• Dual Hotbars - Adds another 8 slot hotbar that uses the top row of your inventory. I often find myself short on slots, so having 16 instead of 8 really helps :3
• Lucky Blocks - Mining this block is like pulling a slot machine. You might get killed by an unlucky Lucky Block and you might get some awesome loot from a really lucky Lucky Block.
• Roxa's Tall Doors - Adds doors that are much larger than the default doors. (2x3 and 3x4 etc)
• Carpenter's Blocks - Adds slopes to minecraft! :D
• ComputerCraft - Adds programmable computers and robotic blocks called turtles that can build, mine and farm for you if programmed correctly.
• DecoCraft - Decorative blocks and furniture.
• Greg's Lighting - Redstone floodlights that can project light down a hole or corridor.
• Horizontal glass - Glass panes that can be placed horizontally as a floor or roof.
• Luppi's Ladders - rope ladders that can hang from a ledge, strong ladders that can stand unsupported and blocks that will retract both when powered with redstone. (good for treehouses)
• Deconstruction Table - Found some loot but have no use for it? Break it down to its core components and recycle! :D
• Mr Crayfish's Furniture Mod - More decorative furniture :3
• Malisis's doors - Adds a smooth swinging animation for doors, makes double doors act together and adds new customisable door types.
• Mowzies Mobs - Currently only adds a larger, animated and far more nasty version of a Venus Fly Trap to the jungle biomes.
• Butterfly Mania - Having 202 new types of butterflies fluttering around just gives the game an extra feeling of life.
• Choco Craft - Adds tamable, breedable and ridable Chocobos!
• Mo'Creatures - Adds a large number of Animals and Peaceful mobs as well as some enemies.
• Backpacks - Adds backpacks in two sizes and multiple colors. They take up one inventory slot and when right clicked, open a chest-like inventory to store things in.
• Loot bags - Enemies have a chance to drop a bag full of loot on death. The common bags could have some seeds and a scrap of leather and legendary loot bags might have enchanted diamond armour and a rare weapon. Its all random. Added this one to balance out the difficulty of all the new hostile mobs.
• Lost books - Mostly just adds any books the player dropped and lost to a list and enemies have a chance of dropping them. Can also customise with your own unique book sets.
• Pokeball Mod - Adds a ball that a single entity can be stored in. Store enemies or friendlies by right clicking to throw it at them. Good for relocating animals and villagers.
• Xeno's Reliquary - Adds a bunch of craftable relics that have special effects.
• Tinker's Construct - A smelting and tool crafting mod.
• Balkon's Weapons - Adds a bunch of new weapon types, including a firearm.
• More Bows - Adds new craftable bow types.
• Not Enough Items - A searchable list of all items in the game. It shows the recipes and uses for each item and can be narrowed by item type or mod. Very useful.
• Bibliocraft - Usable bookcases, shelves that display their contents and more.
• Iron Chests - Upgradeable chests.
• Better Foliage - Leaves blocks now have additional leaves to break up the blockiness and grass blocks now have short grass sticking out the top.

In addition to trying to find a 64 pixel texture pack for the majority of these mods, there are also a few core mods installed, that these mods rely on, that I didn't name as well, for brevity's sake.

Example of folder structure

If you want to play along, I have packaged up the lot and stuck it on my dropbox so you guys can grab it HERE if you like. It's ready to go with all the mods already set up and a copy of the same map I'll be playing in. You will need your own Minecraft account in order to play it though, if you so choose.

Please keep in mind that the custom minecraft launcher I made, to run it in the downloaded folder instead of in the user folder, is sensitive to spaces in folder names and long file paths. 

Best to put the lot in "C:/Minecraft/" to avoid issues. You will need the two files "Minecraft.exe" and "PortableMinecraftLauncher.hta" in there as well as the "GettinMyGeekOn" folder (which contains the game + mods + the map).

Once it's set up like this, it won't affect any other modpacks you have installed. It will just run isolated in that one folder. You will have to launch "PortableMinecraftLauncher.hta" (by double clicking) instead of "Minecraft.exe" though, in order to make it run locally.

Ok, well that's about it for the contents of the modpack so I should probably go start playing now. Since the spawn area for this map is relatively close to the ocean on the beach, I might build my base on the water :3

I really hope there are no sharks around here...

See you next time! :D

*Edited Monday 1/6/15 - Added two new mods (Iron Chests & Bibliocraft) & included another mod that was not mentioned in the list (Better Foliage). Modpack on dropbox has also been updated to include the two new mods.

*Edited 5:55pm Tuesday 2/6/15 - Bugfix - Player spawn crippled, so new worlds would crash immediately. - Removed Lycanites Mobs Mod and it works just fine now. If you don't want to redownload, just go to C:/Minecraft/GettinMyGeekOn/.minecraft/mods/ and delete "LycanitesMobsComplete 1.10.13.2 [1.7.10].jar". That should fix the problem. Otherwise, the dropbox link should update within about an hour and then you can download that instead.

*Edited 6/6/15 - I have been made aware that this modpack breaks your ability to create buttons from stone and thus some specific mods (pokeball for example) will not work with the underground biomes buttons. I have added a new mod that adds in a new recipe that does the same thing. I will update the downloadable copy when I make my first Let's Play post on monday.