Project Ascension (alpha)

Space is not fast travel. It is something you build your way into.

You start on a primitive Earth with a stripped-down Overworld, no Nether portal and no End portal. You end up flying a ship of your own building past the sky, breathing from tanks you filled yourself, landing on worlds that want you gone, and waking an ancient network of gates that someone built long before you. Project Ascension is a handcrafted campaign, built on mods we wrote ourselves and a carefully chosen set of other people's, for solo play or a small team.

This is an alpha. It is released so that people can break it. Much of it has been checked by machine and not yet played by anyone but its author. Read "Known issues" before you start, and please report what you find.

The idea

• Space is progression, not a menu. You never click a portal to leave Earth. You build a ship, and the ship takes you.
• Every world is its own problem. One has no air, one rots you slowly, one is a field of floating stone with a dragon in it.
• Nothing is required. Go where you like and in any order. Worlds reward you; they never lock the next one.
• Bosses open doors. Beat a world's boss and you can light its gate, for good.
• Co-op first, solo works. A team shares its progress and its fast travel, and cannot hurt each other.

The road (what you can play today)

• Earth. Survive, build, and learn the book (press J). Vanilla's Nether and End portals are dead: those worlds are planets now.
• Ships. A Create Aeronautics airship that climbs past the top of the sky is carried into space with its crew. A ship that reaches a planet in space comes down onto it. Rockets are ships too: Create: Simulated Thrusters, burning helium.
• The Moon. A pale world with no air and its own dust storms. A buried archive of tablets, and a boss at the end of a citadel.
• The Nether. The real Nether with its roof taken off, open to the sky and reached by ship. Something in the air harms you: wear gold. Fortresses, blaze spawners and netherite are all where you left them.
• The End. An asteroid belt: a flat ring of tumbling rock you can see from space, ruins on its islands, the Ender Dragon, and the Elytra waiting on the outer islands. Fall out of the bottom and you drift back into space.
• Gates. Build the Earth gate by hand and wake it with a key made from the Deep Dark's materials. Beat a world's boss and you can light its gate: instant travel between lit gates, for good.

Breathing in the void

Air is a resource you make, carry and spend.

• Lungs and tanks. You hold your breath for 20 seconds; oxygen tanks come after. Open a tank's valve (a short pressurise delay), and only an open tank feeds you.
• Helium tanks hold twice as much. Your lungs and two tanks last about 620 seconds; two helium tanks last about 1,220.
• Make your own. An Air Compressor, powered by Create, turns power into liquid air and fills your tanks. An Air Dispenser takes air from pipes and keeps a sealed room breathable. Build a base, a ship cabin or an airlock and live in it.
• Water counts too. Under water you are on the same clock: your lungs, then your tanks.

Fighting

• Twenty-six legendary items, each with a build path across worlds: components from many places, and for the strongest, a boss's heart. They have tooltips, abilities, sound and a light beam when dropped. Z uses the one you wear.
• Runes. Forty-five runes arranged on pages in an orrery screen (R), opening as your team clears bosses and lights gates.
• Growth. A web of fifty-six nodes fed by skill points (K). Points come only from bosses, lit gates and the notable places you find first, so every one is earned.
• Two kinds of damage. Every hit is physical (cut by Armor) or magic (cut by Magic Resist), decided by the attack, not the mob. A Warden's fist is physical and its sonic boom is magic.
• Six bosses with their own Armor, Magic Resist, health and damage on each world difficulty, and mobs that scale with it. Cataclysm's bosses (such as the Ender Golem and the Ender Guardian) are rebalanced to fit.
• Better Combat with dual wielding for the items that suit it, and enchantments rebuilt to feed the same stat system.

Together

• Teams. Party up with FTB Teams. Bosses and quest progress belong to the party; a solo player is a party of one. Friendly fire is off.
• Everyone gets loot. Lootr gives each player their own chest contents.
• Storage that scales. Sophisticated Storage, Sophisticated Backpacks and Tom's Simple Storage.
• Waystones. Fast travel inside a world. Travel between worlds is refused: that is what ships and gates are for.
• Claims and a map. FTB Chunks protects your base, and M opens the map.

A quest book that teaches

Press J. Thirteen pages and roughly 150 quests teach the whole road: first days on Earth, building the gate, four pages teaching Create and Aeronautics from nothing, the Moon, the rot, gear and growth, the End, and a page for playing together. A star chart of the worlds shows where you are, even in space. It says what and where. It never blocks you.

A game you can read

Vanilla's hearts, armour, food and XP bars are replaced by a new HUD: one health bar with level and hunger badges, your air, and your worn abilities at a glance. Press B to see every key on screen. Jade, Immersive Damage Indicators, JEI and Just Enough Resources are in; Ok Zoomer, Mouse Tweaks, Controlling and Keybind Atlas are in to make the controls bearable.

What is in the pack

• Our own mods: atmosphere (air, tanks, sealed rooms), worlds (planets, gates, space), combat (items, stats, runes, growth, enchantments), HUD, and compatibility jars that tie the rest together.
• Ships and tech: Create, Create Aeronautics, Create: Simulated Thrusters, Sable.
• Combat and bosses: L_Ender's Cataclysm, Better Combat, Enderman Overhaul, Caelus API and Icarus for the Elytra.
• Quests and teams: FTB Quests, FTB Teams, FTB Chunks, FTB Library.
• Storage and travel: Sophisticated Storage, Backpacks and Core, Tom's Simple Storage, Lootr, Waystones, Curios API.
• Information and interface: JEI, Just Enough Resources, Jade, Immersive Damage Indicators, Controlling, Keybind Atlas, Mouse Tweaks, Ok Zoomer, Default Options, Iris.
• Performance: Sodium, Lithium, FerriteCore, ModernFix, ImmediatelyFast, Alternate Current, BadOptimizations, Entity Culling, MoreCulling, Distant Horizons, Chunky, spark.
• Libraries: Architectury, Balm, Cloth Config, Common Network, Forgified Fabric API, GeckoLib, Immersive Messages API, Lionfish API, playerAnimator, Resourceful Config and Lib, Searchables, Sparkweave Engine, TxniLib.

What is coming

Everything below is planned, not promised: the order and the details can change as we learn from the alpha.

Next, from the alpha itself

• Ships that hold air, proven. The Air Dispenser works on the ground; aboard a moving ship it is built and unseen.
• Two players at once, properly tested. Parties, sharing air and late joiners are built and unproven.
• Shaders that work in space. The clouds that shaders draw where there should be none, and the toothed planet edges.
• Curios slots. One for your oxygen tank, one for Zonia's Hourglass or Sterak's Harness instead of the off hand, one for your backpack.
• A starter ship you can copy, so the first flight is less of a puzzle.
• The End's own sky, and a proper look at its haze.
• Cataclysm's weapons brought into the same balance as ours, and more boss tuning from your fights.
• A team list on the HUD, and a server we run: how to join will be posted on this page.

The next worlds

Planets are data, not code, so new ones are mostly authoring: terrain, a survival problem, a boss and a gate. The plan for the next three:

• Planet 5: a world of predators. Something hunts you here. New armour materials, deliberately short of their full potential.
• Planet 6: an ancient megastructure. A dormant forge waits to be powered on. Wake it and the armour reaches its full potential.
• Planet 7: a war machine world. Industrial machines are the threat, and firearms are the prize. We plan to bring in a gun mod (TacZ is the likely candidate) as a real change in how you fight, without making melee, utility weapons or bosses pointless.
• Planet 8 and beyond. Advanced suit modules, ancient energy, and whatever the gate network was really for.

Along the way

• Optional side destinations: space stations, wrecks and meteor fields with curated rewards.
• Gravity that differs per world.
• More late-game bosses that punish one-note strategies.

Keys

| J quest book |H character sheet | | K skill tree |R rune page | | Z use a worn item's ability |M map | | B every key, on screen |N Cataclysm helmet ability |

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.1, NeoForge 21.1.249, Java 21 (the CurseForge app supplies it). Give the game 6 GB or more, 8 GB if you can; we have not measured the least that works. Start a new world: a world keeps the dimensions it was made with, so an old world will not have the roofless Nether or the End as a planet.

Known issues, in short

Shaders are not supported in space yet. Ships holding air are not proven. Two players at once are not proven. The Curios slots are not built, so Zonia's Hourglass and Sterak's Harness work in the off hand for now. The full list, and what to do about each, is in KNOWN_ISSUES.md.

Reporting a bug

Say what you did, what you expected and what happened. Attach logs/latest.log and, if the game crashed, the newest file in crash-reports/. Post it in the comments on this page; a proper issue tracker will follow.

Credits

Every mod in the pack belongs to its authors; the list is the pack's file list. Thank you to all of them. The art in our own mods is original and was generated by our own scripts.

Licence

Our own mods and the pack's configuration are MIT licensed. Every other mod keeps its own licence.