New server FTB Pack ideas.

Since the server is breaking down due to lag.
It's probably time to officially talk about a new mod pack for the new world.

My vote so far is: FTB Horizons

I downloaded it and ran it to see what's inside.
There are a lot of cool mods in there.
A good mix between Tech and Magic. Lots of both for anyone.
It includes things like Applied Energistics as well as Thermal expansion. (No Buildcraft or MFR)
Plus new tech mods we never tried before.
The only thing I really missed in there was the ability to create your own mob spawning area.
We would be back to vanilla mob traps.
But we can live with that can't we?
Despite having Tech mods it isn't as heavy handed with it as the other packs.

Also I recommend enabling Archimedes Ships in the mod.
I tried it out, it is a lot of fun to fly your magic tree.
for those concerned about Archimedes lag:
It's easy to identify. If someone made a laggy ship everyone would know which ship and who's it was.
It would only be laggy while the person was driving it. When they dismount any potential lag would instantly disappear.
It's not the kind of problem that can persist while the player is gone.

Also by default the ships mod requires 40% of the ship to be composed of balloon blocks.
I strongly sugest that we drop that down to <10% or turn the requirement off altogether.
The balloon block recipe is 1 piece of wool and 1 string in a crafting grid.
Extremely cheap. So requiring balloon blocks simply force the player to make an ugly flying tree.
(It doesn't restrict the players capacity to make a ship, just their creativity)
Great for normal games to force people to make balloon looking ships. But we are tree spirits with magic trees.
Obviously for us to use a flying ship, your tree heart would be part of the ship. Your roots can be disconnected from the heart, only you have to remain connected.
In fact requiring balloons could raise the amount of blocks the ship contains beyond what the player wanted originally.

Anyway with a mod like that it would add a new approach to the game. Massive bases could turn into factory kits you pack up into chests before moving onto a new area.
Floating trees would allow us to meet in-game in new ways. We could make a tree city for a day, and then move on whenever we wanted.

I will have to check Horizons out. It sounds good. I am okay with it. Just get rid of the Farlanders mod. Please.

I've been playing Magic Farm as well during the last week on FooFarm.net
(to test the pack out after Mailleweaver mentioned it)

That mod pack is harder, but possible to play. Although adding Tree challenge rules to the pack would make a large jump up in difficulty.
Early game forces you to forage a lot (hard to do with limited Home tree logs). Gravel also becomes extremely valuable early game. Without Gravel you can't advance, and you need a lot of it.

My feeling so far is that it would be great to have a mod pack that brought something noticeably different. Something that changed the way we'd play.
(Although It would have been nice to program in Computercraft again)
Horizons could make us semi-nomadic and free as a bird.
Magic Farm 2 refocuses on survival and the transience of life.
Magic World 2 seems to remove everything tech related.
New World brings new recipes and mods as well as Npcs you can play with in new ways. Encouraging us to have our own Ant farms as it were. (Fun ant farms too. that mod is another mod I played with a lot on SSP)

The rest seem to Tech oriented/middle of the road in various degrees.

At any rate the most important thing is to find a pack we can all agree to play with each other on.
Otherwise we would be tempted to find other servers to satisfy us and we'd all split up.

On a somewhat side note. I have some more Server starting ideas that could help make life better for players just starting in any of the mod packs, but especially Magic Farm 2 They should make life fair without making life easy or spoiling game balance. Basically stuff to help balance the disruption you get from not playing SSP (SSP lets you start building a base 10 blocks from the World spawn point. Multiplayer is better for everyone else the further from spawn you are)

Also I'll be playing MC tonight, just not necessarily on this server.
I am however checking this forum, and if anyone else is online (and mentions it). I'll switch to this server quickly. The alternative would have been to head back to my periodically laggy tree and make more Tnt.
Okay, done now. Good night!

Edit: Almost forgot.
I'm not sure what is creepy about the farlanders mod. I encountered the Ender golems guarding the peaceful Farlanders while in survival mode, and the golems, while disturbingly hostile and dangerous. Were extremely easy to dispatch. I had a water bucket, and I emptied it in front of them. They have the same vulnerability to water that Enderman have, but they can't teleport. I killed two quite fast (without a weapon). And it was easy to dodge around a tree and get into the house they were guarding prior.
Unless there is something else I am missing?

It's the Friendly Endermen that are really creepy, otherwise I just don't understand the mod. But yeah. Lol.

lol okay, so it's not the new foe. Good to know, thank you

I've tried to play Horizons, but every time I try to get into a world or make a new one I keep getting a 'you don't have enough memory' type message. If you guys know a fix, that would be nice, otherwise I'll have to give a definite 'no' to Horizons.

It's probably the weather mod that Tropicraft is dependent on that takes up so much memory. It plays lots of extra sounds and particle effects. The sound of falling water is deafening and can't be removed from an area once it starts playing there. Game killer for me, even if I can replace that sound with an empty file. I don't want to waste resources with all that extra stuff that doesn't even do anything. No Horizons. Or not with that mod, anyway.

I'll get rid of Farlanders on whatever pack we choose. We don't need more endermen. I've never really even liked endertots.

We could just disable Tropicraft. It didn't add anything important. I wasn't even aware of it, beyond palm trees.
If it was responsible for the weather effects, I didn't find them much fun either.

Disabling Farlanders is fine with me too, It just added more trading recipes. I was just curious why it was an issue at all.

Personally I would like to request the disabling of Blood Magic if it is in any Pack we decide on.

What's wrong with blood magic?

I don't have a problem with Endermen, dragons or skeletons. But unashamed Demon summoning and blood rituals bother me.

Blood 'n' bones is a big no, it's WAY too hard to be played along with being extremely laggy on both servers and client.

Monster's quite laggy too, but stays a valid choice

As someone attracted to challenge my vote goes to magic farm 2, but i wouldn't recommend it since we also got people who just want to chill.

In the end, i'd recommend DW20, monster or horizons to have a bit of everything without missing out on the fun.

Well if Horizons falls through, I'm moving my vote to Magic Farm 2, and then New World.
Oddly enough Magic Farm 2 is a lot of fun, but I don't know yet how the late-game feel would be.

Even with adding Tree Challenge rules to the mix, it doesn't look like it will take longer than a month before your building high-end machines. Late-Game play need to be interesting since we'll be spending a lot of time there.

Anyway I look forward to playing on THIS server soon, no matter which pack we end up with.

Mergendil: Thank you for the information on Blood 'n' bones.
I barely looked at it before. It's good to be able to narrow down the choices even more.
The quicker we choose an option, the quicker we can start afresh.


To any server moderator:
I've given up on advancing my base. If someone would be kind enough to leave a nuke or 2 somewhere in-game so I can plant it and blow up my base, I would appreciate it.
I finally decided how and where I want to do it, and I'd like to take screenshots of the aftermath before it's too late.

I left you a few on top of your tree.

Thank you!

I will be building my End of the world setup tomorrow.

If anyone is interested in watching the show, there will be fireworks, food and of course a VERY big bang. The Event has a flexible schedule, the new server pack has yet to be chosen.

Okay  when testing on an SSP world with the identical Nuke setup Mailleweaver was very kind to make, I determined that the brief period of lag could be too much for anyone else online with me. So I detonated the nukes by myself.

I am going to miss Dartcraft. Check this out.

The Nukes Mailleweaver left me:


The redstone I applied to detonate them at the same time:


My main base from the outside:



After the Nukes (5) went off:


It seems that making your ceiling out of Force Brick is a very good idea. They were described as Mob Spawn resistant, and Blast resistant. An understatement as far as I'm concerned.


The roof after the blast:


The area directly underneath the nukes:

Nothing damaged, all machines, trees leaves chests etc… all intact.



Anyway despite my base still being intact, minus 2 crystal portals and some unfinished wall, it is time to leave this world in preparation for the new one..
I quickly built an escape ship made of vanilla material:

I'm impressed by the force bricks.
DartCraft is even more overpowered than I tought !

I took the liberty to round your tree a bit, and collected a sapling from one of your trees to make mine (~3-4days ago).

However I lacked motivation to continue, I'll wait for the mods to be renewed !

Maille, it's on you  

Lol. Would've loved to see that. Sadly I am now on a night shift schedule for my clinicals so I won't be very much company for the next couple of weeks.

On the other hand if we are going to do Magic Farm 2 I suggest against infernal mobs because we would have no way of escaping. And unless u can make a bed on ur first night you're probably screwed. Just saying. Watching an LP of it and doing it as a tree spirit seems tough enough. Definitely challenging and exciting though.

That's pretty funny that your tree survived 5 nukes with so little damage. Maybe we should tip off the pentagon about the cheap, fission-resistant material that would be so easy to conceal for secret bunkers and such.

I really thought you'd place the nukes in various places around your base, though. I had no idea you'd set them off where they were. The display case was just for presentation so you'd find something a bit more fun than just a pile of nukes somewhere.

I can't bring myself to work on my tree anymore, either. I expect I'll put together the new server soon, especially since the tie is now broken between MF and MW. I'm quite familiar with infernal mobs by now. They've killed me a couple of times, and would have more if I didn't run. It's pretty fun for me, but I can see how it might ruin the server for some, so I'll take them out. I'll remove Blood Magic, too. Deadly World will be staying in, though. Gotta keep some of the good stuff.

Welcome back, Grillo. I'll look forward to seeing your explosively advanced tree about 3 days after the new server launches. hehe

Personally I don't mind the tough mobs.
The Gravestone mod saves your inventory in a grave upon death, so you rarely lose anything. (If the grave can't get placed because of an odd obstruction your stuff may scatter, but thats rare. So for the most part, no item despawning problems)
But I'll bow to the majority on that.

Also for some reason it seems like every time a mob kills you, it despawns.
Things ranging from Vanilla zombies and creepers to weird and scary mobs.
They are never around when you spawn again, even if you instantly spawned nearby.
Their brethren may be around however, not sure, when I get attacked by a group, It's usually when there is finally 1 left that I get taken out.

Also which mod makes silverfish common? It's makes mining dangerous and fun.
Keeps you on your toes

I'm still enjoying Magic Farm 2. Been finding some very useful recipes.
Recipes for things like Sponges (YAY!) and even Slime balls.
I needed an extra slimeball, but couldn't find any Slimes. Then I found the recipe which involves Lime dye and leather and I was good to go.
That and snorkelling and diving gear.
Working underwater is going to be more fun, and not require something like Modular Power Suits.
3 different tiers for Water Wear, with progressively pricey ingredients. But attainable as your base grows.


Also as I think about it. We may want to consider cooperation to a degree, especially for those who aren't interested in eking out a living. Basically with all the focus on food, Vanilla seeds are rare, and finding food compatible with something simple like breeding animals like cows and sheep is not easy. I could have overlooked something of course. But there are two varieties of Barley for example, and the cows will only eat one of them. I'm waiting on the single seed of that Barley to grow again, but it doesn't seem to like the Biome i'm in (Very slow, but growing. (I've broken a LOT of grass in many different biomes. No sign of vanilla wheat.
The one untouched village I found was misgenerated. 3 houses, no gardens)
So some may want to relax the rules on trading OR live closer to someone then normal.
The Foofarm server seems to encourage players to create towns if they can't make a go of it alone.


And last but not least.
Mailleweaver:
I found these web pages, but didn't try them out yet.
Could the information help get plugins on the server?
At minimum the TPA/Home commands would make live friendlier and less stressful for players without beds.
http://clients.fragnet.net/knowledgebase/110/Can-I-use-plugins-on-my-Feed-the-Beast-server.html
http://www.planetminecraft.com/blog/how-to-install-bukkitspigot-on-ftb-server/

Of course I don't know who hosts the server for you, much less what control panel/controls you have.
So I don't know how incompatible that info is.

P.S. I originally intended to spread the nukes out, but your setup was so nice looking I left it as is.
I had no idea the Force bricks were so good. On previous games and YT videos, explosions like nukes might not destroy tough blocks but they often rattle the contents to pieces. I didn't realize that was the ultimate material.

Okay update on Hostile Mobs Despawning.
Far beneath the surface on the server that I'm playing Magic Farm 2 on, is a zombie spawner in a cave system.
Due to the increased difficulty of the Zombies, it was hard to approach it, so I had them meet me halfway and fall into a ditch where I harvest them.
(Zombie meat to be dried, XP, and upgrading Tinker swords.)
Anyway one of the new Zombie types. The FIsherman Zombie, pull me into the ditch with his fishing rod. Into the welcoming arms of a dozen zombies.

Long story short, the whole pack of them despawned, and I was able to retrieve everything that I was carrying wIthout any obstacles.

The biggest problem with dying is, unless we do something about it, the very long walk from spawn to your home, in the period before you make a bed.
If we can get bukkit working, problem solved. If not, we can rig up a system via Mystcraft books stored at spawn.

Personally I don't mind the tough mobs

Let's talk about teleporting 200 health burning creepers while you're close to your hearth log   

The big issue in this modpack, in my own opinion, is the food at the beginning : You can't farm (ie no static food income) before getting to iron age (access to lava, TC smeltry). Since you will die from starvation, I fail to see how that would work out with the challenge without some sort of "starting kit" or external help.

Any ideas ?

Perhaps the spawn area should be a shared starting tree. The grandfather spirit for all tree spirits. We all play there until we get the necessary tools to move off on our own. Then perhaps start shared trees before we finally move on towards individual?

Just an idea. I know we want a nice spawn area for newbies so perhaps not right at spawn. Or not exactly a tree right off the bat. Idk. Just throwing the idea around. We are also considering a spawn type kit. Not sure what that will entail yet, but we are leaning towards it.

At the least we are considering having saplings available of various tree types right at the start. And perhaps a sword as well. Not sure about anything else at the moment because it depends on the mod pack as well.

Mergendil wrote:

Personally I don't mind the tough mobs

Let's talk about teleporting 200 health burning creepers while you're close to your hearth log   

Starting near water is practically a requirement for this pack. So plant a tree in such a way that you can flood your home log within a few minutes of starting.

Mergendil wrote:
The big issue in this modpack, in my own opinion, is the food at the beginning : You can't farm (ie no static food income) before getting to iron age (access to lava, TC smeltry). Since you will die from starvation, I fail to see how that would work out with the challenge without some sort of "starting kit" or external help.
Any ideas ?

I've been experimenting with death, which interestingly enough bothered not only Mailleweaver but the other players on the server. (Something about frequent "Althing Starved to death" messages brings out peoples sympathy)
Starving to Death will be a reality, and unfortunately a common one for people restricted in movement by their logs reach.
Most players in the normal Magic Farm game survive their early days by foraging far and wide for plants you can eat as soon as you can find them. (A furnace on day one might easily be impossible for all but the lucky)
So after starving to death some 20 times, I've determined that dying like that is no more then temporarily inconvenience.

1. The mod pack includes mods that try to protect your stuff. 95% of the time you can recover everything you were carrying when you died. Losing valuables will be harder then ever before.

2. It seems that either any hostile mob in the region, or just the ones who have been marked as interested in you all despawn/disappear when you die. So in a scenario where your tree log is threatened, sacrificing yourself for your tree is in character and your best option. Protect your tree, and you will be back. Which brings us to #3.

3. Your not really dying. Minecraft fanfiction tries to find reasons for why your immortal, but we have a good one already.
Your player is a manifestation of your Trees Spirit and helper. You and the Tree are one.
You are the Heart log. Do not get caught up in what temporarily happens to your avatar. It doesn't actually effect you.
Your avatar can and will die, but you are eternal. Provided your avatar remembers the true focus and keeps you from burning or blowing up. Endermen should also not be left alone with you.

4. Now that starving is not the boogeyman that it seems, here is how to fight it.
There are 2 main early food sources, independent of crops.

A: A Fishing rod. Between cotton plants being easy enough to find (even if you can't replant them right away) and spiders seeking your life it's not impossible to find string. String can still be easily and cheaply turned into a fishing rod.
I can assure you that from experience with this mod pack, it can carry you to planting crops.
Especially if you ration the food for when you need to concentrate on fighting or working. (3 bars of food level will be enough to turn your healing state on if you've just eaten. Maintaining a 100% food meter is not a requirement for full health. For High tier or beginner players alike. Remember #3, when starting out food is a tool to be used wisely.

B. Zombie flesh.
Raw zombie flesh is gross and still not a recommended food item. However new mods have inserted an object called the drying rack. It's a simple recipe using 3 wooden planks. Place against a wall, hang a zombie meat off it and some time later you will have dried jerky that you can comfortably eat. It's not a very filling meal. The best meals have 3 steps and 8 ingredients, but Zombie meat is available to everyone. I suggest a killing hole.

5. Death has only 3 major stings.

A. In some freak circumstances, usually because you were standing on an odd block, the gravestone marker may fail to be laid down. In which case your stuff will dropped as normal. Thankfully though they tend to stay bunched together instead of exploding all over the place. This usually is not an issue however. (I haven't tried it, but I'd assume falling in a lava pool is still tragic)

B. You are interrupted from your work.
Guaranteed, you were in the middle of something when you were attacked. Now your dead and you have to try and safely make it back to where your stuff is waiting for you. Unfortunately this may be tricky because you were obviously carrying your best armour, weapons and tools when you died. Thankfully we have #1 and #2 to reassure us.

C. The big problem I want to get solved. Thankfully I have some ideas on how to do that.
Traveling 2000m from spawn, starting your tree, dying somehow, respawn 2000m from home.
Despite the Foofarm server having /sethome and /home commands I put up with this. (Although my first base was only around 400m away) Not only is the trip back dangerous for someone without resources, but by the time you get back you may be closer to starvation then before you died. In many cases it may be impossible for you to reach your tree without starving.
Without a solution this would mean players would be constantly borrowing swords and food from spawn.
Consideration needs to be made, or a very big chest.
Not an issue for players with Mod abilities (flight, Vanilla teleporting etc..) but normal players will find this the most awkward.

So basically I highly recommend a starting kit to keep you alive while you find and get to your starting location.
But beyond maybe keeping a fishing rod, I'd recommend you starting with nothing but a sapling.

Blazinfox555 wrote:
At the least we are considering having saplings available of various tree types right at the start. And perhaps a sword as well. Not sure about anything else at the moment because it depends on the mod pack as well.

I'll start with the swords:
I see them as a requirement for Day 0. I think they should be thrown away (on your honour) after your tree is started.
You may die, but your tree can survive without one for a while.

Blazinfox555 wrote:Perhaps the spawn area should be a shared starting tree. The grandfather spirit for all tree spirits. We all play there until we get the necessary tools to move off on our own. Then perhaps start shared trees before we finally move on towards individual?

Just an idea. I know we want a nice spawn area for newbies so perhaps not right at spawn.

While I have no problems with playing co-op with others, I will mention that a co-op tree designed to get players into higher tier before they break up for good has some aspects of it that may not be immediately obvious.

1. Working together on the same tree has the suggestion of sharing the same tree type. Unless we pretend that the saplings all came from the same father, despite indications otherwise, we eliminate the ethnic diversity/creativity of our tree choices.
Some players will want a redwood, others oak, others still bamboo. (Bamboo trees are not recommended btw)

2. A temporary co-op tree will quickly be equal to a creative mode tree for many members.
The stronger and or more frequent players will quickly fill out the place with ore and resources.
Even if you never see someone else online at the same time as you, you can quickly advance the group when you step up on what the previous players attained. Particularly if players remember to dump their tools into a chest before logging off.
Other less frequent players will find the tree advancing rapidly between visits. Before they know it they will find the place deserted with a chest full of starting supplies and a note.

3. The struggle for your first block of tilled soil is fun, and is an interesting challenge to work towards.
It's a challenge that never existed before. Within 5 minutes on most randomly generated vanilla worlds you could till the ground and plant.
To skip this goal is to lose something.


Again, I don't oppose sharing resources or trees with others. We should just be aware of things.
Personally I would be quite happy to work with someone this time around. Either on the same sapling, or with 2 sapling types that are labeled siblings. Where we can work off of each others logs. The trees could be planted next to each other or nearby. There are several different ways to organize it.

I've never worked on a minecraft project with someone before, not even shared the same mine. The closest I got to that was a brief 4 man faction on Diamcraft. But I was the sole builder, and they showed up occasionally. Then I logged in one day to find that the other members messed up, lost the faction territory and my underground courtyard and base was griefed and owned by strangers. The Faction broke up then.



Anyway I will be the first to admit that this posts reflects my opinions and not facts.
So if you feel you can and should find flaw in what I've said, go for it. It's character building to be shown as wrong

I still like flying trees btw. (Horizons)

P.S. If your tempted to complain about how long it took to read this post, think about how long it took to write it.
Plus I proofread it twice. It probably needs a third to follow up the changes but I'm going to bed now.

Okay here is how i see that going on :

1. You are in "spirit form" when you spawn. No inventory.

2. Wander the lands looking for a tree to bless or obtain a sapling of the desired species. While wandering, you should be granted creative mod (if not, ignore the no inventory rule and do everything you want untill the next step)

3. Once the tree has been choosen/spawned, empty your inventory and start the challenge.

4. Survival :
Forget about zombie meat, since you'd need to punch them to death, consuming more hunger in the process that you could hope to gain.
Your best bet seems to find a tree close to water and hope that a spider comes close enough to give the strings required for a fishing rod (nice idea Althing).

5. Death :
Let's keep it vanilla, until one of us is advanced enough to make a Mystcraft portal node for everyone to use.
The walk from spawn to home doesn't seems too much of a problem to me, as I want to keep the punitive meaning of death that we kind of lost trough gravestone marker.

As for the challenge rules, it's up to you to use your own fitting variations (no diagonals allowed, can't pick up dropped items out of root range even if dropped while on roots...).

I plan to keep my genetic rule of breeding trees (a tree bred trough forestry with my blessed tree as one of the parents will be considered blessed too)

Mobs don't disappear after they kill you if you respawn near them. That is just a feature of one of the plugins that FooFarm is using. I tested this (completely on purpose) by getting myself killed by an alchemist zombie who spit webs at me. Since his webs kept my gravestone from getting placed and my stuff dropped, he was able to pick up my (Steve) head and wear it and kill me again with my own sword when I went /back.

I'm going through the bother of getting this pack to work with bukkit this time. As a result:

• We'll have /sethome and /back to get us home when we die. (I'm considering getting rid of /back because it might make it too easy after death.)
  
• We'll be in a "limbo" state when we start where we can /fly, /heal, and /feed ourselves (but not be able to build) until we find our tree. This'll require a moderator to move you to the member group before you can start the challenge, though, so post your coords on the tree register if one is not on and one of us can do it later. It's a minor inconvenience to start your tree, but we can go back to a greylist this way.
  
• We can get rid of the whitelist and go back to a greylist. Meaning people who first join can fly around and chat, but can't interact with anything.
  

I'm also going to set a rule about tree breeding. It's difficult to follow, and impossible to enforce, but it matches the original challenge. I followed this myself in Unleashed. If you're breeding trees, only the saplings that drop from the leaves of your direct descendents can be considered your true direct descendents.
So, you may go: Grandfather tree -> sapling -> tree (mutated leaves) -> sapling -> repeat (x) times -> expand your grandfather tree.
But not: Grandfather tree -> sapling -> tree (leaves) -> pollen carried by bees/butterflies/players -> some other tree (mutated leaves) -> sapling -> expand your grandfather tree.
Only the mutated leaves of your direct descendents can produce your descendents. All other mutated leaves/trees are just for standard slave labor or mutation agents for your true descendents.

I'm almost done with the basic setup. I expect I'll be able to get it online sometime tomorrow evening.