so i've been messing around with the regrowth modpack and now it's nearly to the point of playability. or at least the worldgen is nearly finalized; after that there's a lot left to do but it's most in terms of adding recipes as i realize i need them.
so regrowth is a minecraft modpack that i play a lot of, because... i think the biggest appeal of minecraft to me is the ability to take a whole wide effectively-infinite world and to pick out a little portion of it to call home: to make it safe and nice to look at and full of big complex systems that generate things you need. the ability to have a pretty sharply-defined line between "home" and "not home" also helps; this is part of why i like to build on islands.
regrowth is in the vein of agrarian skies, which is another modpack that i played a lot of (also agrarian skies 2), and its basic hook is that you start with nothing (some dirt and a tree and nothing else in the entire world, just a vast abyss of nothing that yr floating in the middle of) and using various mod tools you can go on to you everything. both of these mods use the "HQM" -- hardcore quest mode -- mod to give you a quest book that's mostly a tutorial, to show you how progression goes: "first, make a crook, like this. {quest requiring you to have a crook item here} then, break the leaves of the tree with the crook until you get a silkworm {quest requiring you to have a silkworm here} then, put the silkworm on the leaves, let it infest them, and then break the leaves to get string {quest requiring you to have string here}". regrowth very much has the same template, only it keeps world generation around, with some big differences: firstly, no ores. no coal or iron or gold or diamond or anything. nothing but rock underground. secondly, no biomes. you have oceans, fairly untouched, and then you have "wasteland", which is flat, made from dry cracked sand, and its only features are dead trees, dead grass, and slate boulders. and then, from that, you can go on to get everything.
except in default regrowth you can't! there's this real awkward transition point when you start getting to magical crops -- you need to have a starter essence to make the seeds for the crops that will produce more essence, and there's no guaranteed way to get that essence in-game (treasure chests will have them, sometimes, but it's pretty difficult to go and find them that way). instead, there's a quest: you have to hand in a bunch of various items, and in return you'll get the starter essence. these quests are superrrrr grindy and kind of terrible, and some of them you have to repeat 4x times to get enough starter essence to actually bootstrap up from there. it's the worst. so i've been wishing there were a way to, yknow, fix that, and sometimes idly reading the various config files to see how they work -- regrowth messes with its component mods a lot, to merge a half-dozen tech/magic mods together into one more-or-less coherent whole, and you can go look at all the scripts used to do that yrself.
(also i really wanted to play using a pack that featured growthcraft and immersive engineering, since they both look like really nice bucolic farming/tech mods, which is kind of what i've been going for wrt tech stuff.) (also i took issue w/ regrowth's use of agricraft, which has this really nice crossbreeding mechanic that i like a lot but that ultimately makes all crops grow in the exact same fashion, instead of e.g., having long rows of sugarcane and big cactus farms and pumpkin/melon plots that work differently than wheat plots, etc. agricraft turns everything into "plant one block of stakes" "place seeds on stakes" which is way less compelling.)
ALSO at one point somebody convinced me to play blightfall, which is an entirely different modpack based around the idea of making landfall on an island that's entirely coated in thaumcraft taint -- that's this overgrown toxic evil-magic force that spreads through weird purple goo and gross fibres -- and while i didn't like the rest of the pack that much it did convince me to mod regrowth to add tainted biomes + turn on taint spread to the fastest it could go, since that helped... give a sense that the wasteland was more of an antagonistic force, rather than just being a blank slate. like i said way up above there, it added to the delineation between home/not home, if to expand you have to do a bunch of taint control and placement of taint-fighting plants before you can actually move out there.
so that put the idea of modding regrowth to make it more MY THING into my head, and so, uh, now i've done that. mostly? i'm gonna need to TEST PLAY it a bunch to make sure it's actually possible to play, but i think i've got it down.
here's what i did: first, b/c i wanted THE TAINT to be a much more present danger even over having huge blocks of ever-expanding tainted land, i randomly scattered taint through the rest of the wasteland, in the form of buried globs of taint under the surface that would act as invisible seeds. they're small enough that if you catch them early you can root them out entirely and stop it, but if they go for a while they rapidly grow out of control. secondly, i added some extra biomes -- dead swamps, spike wastelands, and meteor fields -- along with a bunch of extra, rare ruins that provide a replacement for those starter essences, so now instead of having grindy accumulation quests you just gotta wander the blight-infesting world until you manage to find the resources you need. then i dumped in growthcraft and immersive engineering.
the IDEAL would be to figure out a way to remove agricraft and maybe magical crops entirely, but i'm not sure how else i'd then make all these resources available.
anyway once i test out the next few set of worldgen tweaks i should just be able to make a world that i can stick around in, since everything from here out is just tweaking recipes, rather than making different seed blocks available. soon i'll have a fresh apocalyptic wasteland of my own devising to wander around in and slowly make habitable!!
so regrowth is a minecraft modpack that i play a lot of, because... i think the biggest appeal of minecraft to me is the ability to take a whole wide effectively-infinite world and to pick out a little portion of it to call home: to make it safe and nice to look at and full of big complex systems that generate things you need. the ability to have a pretty sharply-defined line between "home" and "not home" also helps; this is part of why i like to build on islands.
regrowth is in the vein of agrarian skies, which is another modpack that i played a lot of (also agrarian skies 2), and its basic hook is that you start with nothing (some dirt and a tree and nothing else in the entire world, just a vast abyss of nothing that yr floating in the middle of) and using various mod tools you can go on to you everything. both of these mods use the "HQM" -- hardcore quest mode -- mod to give you a quest book that's mostly a tutorial, to show you how progression goes: "first, make a crook, like this. {quest requiring you to have a crook item here} then, break the leaves of the tree with the crook until you get a silkworm {quest requiring you to have a silkworm here} then, put the silkworm on the leaves, let it infest them, and then break the leaves to get string {quest requiring you to have string here}". regrowth very much has the same template, only it keeps world generation around, with some big differences: firstly, no ores. no coal or iron or gold or diamond or anything. nothing but rock underground. secondly, no biomes. you have oceans, fairly untouched, and then you have "wasteland", which is flat, made from dry cracked sand, and its only features are dead trees, dead grass, and slate boulders. and then, from that, you can go on to get everything.
except in default regrowth you can't! there's this real awkward transition point when you start getting to magical crops -- you need to have a starter essence to make the seeds for the crops that will produce more essence, and there's no guaranteed way to get that essence in-game (treasure chests will have them, sometimes, but it's pretty difficult to go and find them that way). instead, there's a quest: you have to hand in a bunch of various items, and in return you'll get the starter essence. these quests are superrrrr grindy and kind of terrible, and some of them you have to repeat 4x times to get enough starter essence to actually bootstrap up from there. it's the worst. so i've been wishing there were a way to, yknow, fix that, and sometimes idly reading the various config files to see how they work -- regrowth messes with its component mods a lot, to merge a half-dozen tech/magic mods together into one more-or-less coherent whole, and you can go look at all the scripts used to do that yrself.
(also i really wanted to play using a pack that featured growthcraft and immersive engineering, since they both look like really nice bucolic farming/tech mods, which is kind of what i've been going for wrt tech stuff.) (also i took issue w/ regrowth's use of agricraft, which has this really nice crossbreeding mechanic that i like a lot but that ultimately makes all crops grow in the exact same fashion, instead of e.g., having long rows of sugarcane and big cactus farms and pumpkin/melon plots that work differently than wheat plots, etc. agricraft turns everything into "plant one block of stakes" "place seeds on stakes" which is way less compelling.)
ALSO at one point somebody convinced me to play blightfall, which is an entirely different modpack based around the idea of making landfall on an island that's entirely coated in thaumcraft taint -- that's this overgrown toxic evil-magic force that spreads through weird purple goo and gross fibres -- and while i didn't like the rest of the pack that much it did convince me to mod regrowth to add tainted biomes + turn on taint spread to the fastest it could go, since that helped... give a sense that the wasteland was more of an antagonistic force, rather than just being a blank slate. like i said way up above there, it added to the delineation between home/not home, if to expand you have to do a bunch of taint control and placement of taint-fighting plants before you can actually move out there.
so that put the idea of modding regrowth to make it more MY THING into my head, and so, uh, now i've done that. mostly? i'm gonna need to TEST PLAY it a bunch to make sure it's actually possible to play, but i think i've got it down.
here's what i did: first, b/c i wanted THE TAINT to be a much more present danger even over having huge blocks of ever-expanding tainted land, i randomly scattered taint through the rest of the wasteland, in the form of buried globs of taint under the surface that would act as invisible seeds. they're small enough that if you catch them early you can root them out entirely and stop it, but if they go for a while they rapidly grow out of control. secondly, i added some extra biomes -- dead swamps, spike wastelands, and meteor fields -- along with a bunch of extra, rare ruins that provide a replacement for those starter essences, so now instead of having grindy accumulation quests you just gotta wander the blight-infesting world until you manage to find the resources you need. then i dumped in growthcraft and immersive engineering.
the IDEAL would be to figure out a way to remove agricraft and maybe magical crops entirely, but i'm not sure how else i'd then make all these resources available.
anyway once i test out the next few set of worldgen tweaks i should just be able to make a world that i can stick around in, since everything from here out is just tweaking recipes, rather than making different seed blocks available. soon i'll have a fresh apocalyptic wasteland of my own devising to wander around in and slowly make habitable!!
