Astralbound 0.9.6

Astralbound 0.9.6 expands the pack’s transportation, cosmic exploration, time manipulation, disaster systems, and world-threatening sandbox content while also making several important balance and configuration improvements.

The goal of this release remains the same:

Make the world stranger, more magical, and more spectacular without forcing every catastrophe to happen automatically.

✨ Major Additions

🌌 Stargate Journey

Stargate Journey has joined Astralbound, adding a major new form of ancient and cosmic exploration.

Functional Stargates and DHDs

Travel to worlds such as Abydos, Chulak, Lantea, Athos, and more

Transport Rings

Naquadah technology

ZPMs

Stargate shields and irises

Ancient structures and Stargate discoveries

Ad Astra integration

Astralbound’s Sparse Structures configuration has also been adjusted so Stargate Journey structures can use their intended generation behavior rather than being distorted by the pack-wide structure spacing multiplier.

🌀 Wormhole Portals

Wormhole is now Astralbound’s primary player-built point-to-point portal system.

Players can create permanent links between chosen locations, including destinations across dimensions.

Wormhole
Practical player-built portals between exact locations

Stargate Journey
Ancient and cosmic transportation

Dimensional Doors
Unstable, bizarre, and dangerous dimensional travel

Waystones
Simple convenience fast travel

Ad Astra
Physical planetary and space exploration

⏳ Time Stop Clock

Time manipulation has arrived.

Complete time stopping

Slow motion

Accelerated time

Bullet-time-style tick manipulation

Localized time fields

Reversed time fields

Time Freeze magic

Time Anchor equipment

Time Stop Clock also includes integrations with major Astralbound magic systems such as Ars Nouveau and Iron’s Spells ’n Spellbooks.

☄️ Apocalypse: Countdown

A new controlled apocalypse system has been added.

Apocalyptic events can now be deliberately initiated rather than automatically beginning in every fresh world.

Possible scenarios include meteor catastrophes, Wither Storm events, and solar apocalypse conditions.

Astralbound continues to favor player-triggered catastrophes over unavoidable fresh-world destruction.

🚗 Expanded Transportation

Astralbound’s travel options have received a major expansion.

✈️ Immersive Aircraft

Take to the skies with fantasy-compatible aircraft and aerial transportation.

⛵ Small Ships

Larger functional ships provide a much better way to explore Astralbound’s increasingly important oceans.

🪂 Paragliders

Paragliders add lightweight aerial traversal and long-distance exploration.

🐎 AstikorCarts Redux

Horse-drawn carts and wagons expand grounded fantasy transportation.

🐉 Dragon Mounts: Legacy Tweaked

Dragons can now become a genuine form of transportation and adventure.

🧞 Magic Carpets

Because a giant magical modpack should absolutely allow you to fly around on a carpet.

🌪️ Weather2 — Tornadoes Are Now Much More Dangerous

Astralbound’s tornado configuration has been substantially upgraded.

Tornadoes can now tear apart far more terrain.

Dirt, grass, sand, logs, and other vulnerable blocks can be ripped from the landscape.

Tornadoes can carry significantly more debris.

Blocks can be removed much faster during severe storms.

Maximum storm size has been increased.

Severe tornadoes can occur more readily.

Tornadoes are more aggressive toward nearby players.

Flying debris remains capable of hurting entities.

Maximum storm radius has increased from 300 to 450 blocks.

Storm severity has also been substantially increased across F0 through F5 tornadoes.

Astralbound tornadoes are intended to feel like genuine natural disasters rather than decorative weather events.

☁️ Weather2 Visual Cleanup

Weather2’s separate cloud layer has been disabled.

Storms remain enabled.

Tornadoes remain enabled.

Weather simulation remains enabled.

Wind effects remain enabled.

This allows Astralbound’s shader system to handle the atmosphere without Weather2 adding an unwanted second cloud layer.

🍄 Infnexus / Spore Balance Change

Automatic Apocalypse Disabled

Infnexus will no longer automatically begin approximately five minutes into every fresh world.

The infection system remains fully available and can still become extraordinarily destructive once deliberately activated.

This allows new worlds to develop normally before players choose to unleash the apocalypse.

☄️ Meteor System Adjustments

Skyfall meteor activity has received additional tuning.

Meteor spawn chance increased.

Meteor impact strength increased.

Meteor shower activity increased.

Meteor showers are delayed to approximately 2–4 hours rather than immediately threatening fresh worlds.

Lightweight particle handling is enabled for improved performance.

Fire Behavior

Immediate Fire remains disabled.

Meteor impacts can still be extremely destructive without automatically coating the surrounding impact area in instant fire.

Falling Meteors Reimagined also retains Astralbound’s heavily destructive impact settings.

🕳️ Catastrophic Content Remains Intentionally Ridiculous

Astralbound continues to include several extremely destructive systems.

☢️ NukeCoreCraft

Current extreme settings remain intact.

Nuke blast radius: 500 blocks

Block destruction throughput: 5,000 blocks per tick

Particle budget: 250,000

Black hole pull radius: 900 blocks

Black hole destruction rate: 3,500 blocks per pull tick

Maximum floating blocks: 40,000

These settings are intentional.

Use them in disposable worlds unless you genuinely want the landscape erased.

🌀 Singularity Rifts

Singularity Rifts remain available for localized gravitational destruction, entity pulling, terrain tearing, and implosive devastation.

🌩️ Cracker’s Wither Storm

The Wither Storm remains available but does not automatically spawn.

It remains a deliberately triggered world-ending event.

💀 Sculk Horde

Automatic Ancient Node activation remains disabled.

The Horde remains dangerous without automatically beginning its takeover in every new world.

🩶 Grey Goo

Grey Goo remains part of Astralbound’s world-threatening sandbox content.

It is intentionally retained despite its destructive nature.

🌈 New Default Shader — AstraLex

AstraLex is now Astralbound’s intended default shader.

It has become the preferred visual style for the pack and replaces Complementary Unbound as the default selection.

The full shader wardrobe remains available.

AstraLex

Complementary Unbound

Complementary Reimagined

Bliss

Insanity

Sildur’s Vibrant

Players remain free to switch between them.

⚡ Performance & Rendering

Astralbound’s carefully selected optimization foundation remains intact.

Embeddium 0.3.31

Oculus 1.8.0

Chloride 1.8.1

Radium Reforged 0.12.4

ImmediatelyFast 1.5.5

ModernFix

FerriteCore

EntityCulling

All The Leaks

Structure Layout Optimizer

Structure Essentials

Canary remains intentionally absent.

Radium remains the selected TPS optimization solution.

ImmediatelyFast Compatibility Adjustment

map_atlas_generation is now disabled to reduce known map and shader compatibility concerns.

hud_batching remains enabled.

This preserves the targeted compatibility fix without unnecessarily sacrificing unrelated performance optimizations.

🏰 Structure & Exploration Improvements

Astralbound continues to use a large structure ecosystem while attempting to preserve meaningful travel between discoveries.

Sparse Structures remains configured with a modest global spacing increase rather than aggressively suppressing structures.

Stargate Journey structures have explicit exemptions so their intended generation behavior is preserved.

The world-generation goal remains:

Wilderness

↓

Meaningful travel

↓

Memorable discovery

↓

Wilderness

Astralbound should feel rich, not like every 100 blocks contains another enormous structure.

🧙 Character Creation Remains Intact

Astralbound continues to use its dedicated three-part character-start system.

Race / Species

Origins RPG

Origin Selection Interface

Alternate Origin GUI

Separate Class / Profession

Gods & Heroes RPG Classes

Standard Origins Forge remains intentionally absent.

Origins: Classes remains intentionally absent.

This keeps race and profession as separate systems.

🎒 Curios Layout

Astralbound retains its custom 18-slot Curios layout.

Ring: 4

Necklace: 2

Charm: 2

Bracelet: 2

Belt: 1

Back: 1

Hands: 2

Body: 1

Head: 1

Curio: 2

Exactly one Back slot remains configured.

🚫 Removed / Retired Systems

Astralbound continues moving away from portal and black-hole systems that did not meet usability or design expectations.

Elemental Portals
Removed

Universal Portals
Removed

Soul’s Black Holes
Removed

Wormhole has become the preferred general-purpose custom portal solution.

🧹 Configuration & Stability Work

Several previously identified configuration issues have been corrected or verified in this release.

Infnexus automatic fresh-world spawning is disabled.

Stargate Journey structure exemptions are preserved.

Weather2 destructive tornado configuration is preserved.

Weather2’s unwanted separate cloud layer is disabled.

ImmediatelyFast map-atlas compatibility mitigation is enabled.

Canary remains absent.

Radium remains installed.

Wither Storm automatic spawning remains disabled.

Sculk Horde automatic catastrophe behavior remains disabled.

Deep Void / Voidscape routing remains intentionally configured.

No accidental duplicate Origins framework has been introduced.

📊 Build Information

Astralbound 0.9.6

Minecraft: 1.20.1

Forge: 47.4.10

Recommended memory: 8 GB

Managed CurseForge entries: 172

Duplicate managed project IDs: None

Duplicate managed file IDs: None

Bundled saves: None

Bundled crash reports: None

Bundled logs: None

Bundled JourneyMap world data: None

usercache.json: Not included

servers.dat: Not included

🌠 Astralbound 0.9.6 Philosophy

Astralbound 0.9.6 pushes the pack further toward its intended identity:

A beautiful magical fantasy world filled with strange races, classes, monsters, bosses, enormous structures, cosmic mysteries, alternate dimensions, magical transportation, flying dragons, airships, Stargates, and spectacular shaders.

A world where you can peacefully explore an enchanted landscape, discover a forgotten portal, fly across the ocean on a dragon, walk through a Stargate to another world, stop time during a magical battle...

...and occasionally watch a gigantic tornado tear apart a forest, a meteor excavate the landscape, an infection consume civilization, a gravitational singularity shred the terrain, or somebody decide that a 500-block-radius nuclear explosion sounds like a perfectly reasonable afternoon activity.

Add weirdness aggressively.

Tune frequency conservatively.