Barely is a Modpack that tries to recreates that feeling that made me fall in love with Minecraft so many years back .
That feeling of when I first entered a world, chopped the first tree, first visited The Nether and The End. That feeling of mild adventure, but a high sense of spatial agency.
To try to achieve that, I mixed and matched some of my favorites mods that gave me similar experiences to that of vanilla Minecraft. Not surprisingly, most mods holds a lot of thematic conflicts, so I worked on harmonizing their coexistence by mitigating their overlapping and sometimes conflicting features.
To sum up, the theme of this Modpack end up on being the avoidance of excessive obsolesce and of overwhelming availability of choices, while using that to build towards some consistent overarching flavor and atmosphere. The focus was on picking features and trimming choices, so that the mod selection could complement each other rather than the Modpack being an arena for them to compete against each other.
While I am not sure if I achieved what I was reaching out for, it was a wild and super fun ride learning for and building this Modpack.
I may or may not have been playing less and less and doing this more and more... -_-
Recommendations:
The inclusion of Unity and Unity Modded is highly recommend, as I have changed the modded ores to fit that resource pack.
I would also recommend: Authentic Shadows and Updated Engineering.
Related to performance: Barely is quite lightweight (~130 mods). You should not encounter any issue on singleplayer (once allocated 2GB~3GB), as I can run it to an usable extent [and developed it] in my ancient notebook.
Design Details:
So, you may ask, what did I do to try to emulated that feeling? Well...
General aspects:
- Check the images tabs for visuals.
- Check advancements in-game for an overall direction [although this isn't a questing focused modpack so don't expect detailed steps].
- In general, a lot of removed stuff due to balancing reasons, a lot of changed recipes, and an extensive use of mod configurations. Advancements were also edited to mirror those changes.
- Choosing the mods took into consideration how well they play and look together, and how much they overlap.
- This isn't even close to a kitchen sink pack, as I chose to follow here the idea of not letting obsolescence plague the less viable options to do "X". The focus is set on more immersive tools and roundabout ways of achieving "stuff" (and not always having an easier way of doing "it").
- The natural progression ladder expects you to deep dive most mods included here.
- If you are curious, this idea was born after I noticed that my play-style became a "fake user automation block simulator"... I had become addicted at throwing some of those at all the problems I confronted. So I tried to change my pace, and, after a long time, here is where I arrived.
Detailed aspects:
- Early game: Default crafting takes times [Botania Crafting Halo can be placed into a crate to have instantaneous crafting again, and later refined storage system]. Planks needs to be chopped. Iron can only be smelted once tinker is set up [furnace only smelts bricks type items, no food or ore processed on it].
- Main gameplay change: Sleeping pattern has been changed. Thirst and Temperature systems included. Hearts are gained from loot and food diet [starts at half health]. Food has nutrients to be sought after. Going into the nether increases difficulty [increases again once the player defeats the Ender Dragon]. It can be very dark. Be aware of the bloodmoon. Finite water.
- Tinkers' Construct: All non-essential tools were removed except for Tinkers. Well, I mean, what is really overpowered if you have nothing to compare it to? Casting is used for quite a few important custom recipes for other mods.
- Armors: There is a tier crafting ladder using the smiting table [not overly complicated].
- Storage: Druidcraft Crates -> Botania crafting halo [can be placed as a Tom's Storage Crafting Terminal] -> Refined Storage. All the blocks similar to the default chests have been removed.
- Automation: Abundance of options has been avoided, focusing and giving spotlight to less optimal set ups. Examples: Less options to transport items and fluid; No one block that farms a big area; etc.
- Food: Diet is included. Roasting is exclusively done by Campfires. Most complex recipes are done by Farmers Delight's Cooking Pot. Cakes require Arc Furnace.
- Industrial theme leads: Create, Immersive Engineering, Mekanism, Powah, Tinker Construct.
- Magical theme leads: Botania, Turtlemancy, Eidolon.
- Botania: You are expected to build a system that can generate a high volume of Mana, because the ingots needed for progression requires a lot of it (crafted on the Runic Altar). Not much was removed from the mod since this pack follows a similar philosophy.
- Mekanism: Control Circuits has been chained to an ingot progression ladder (check image tab). Some stuff has been removed, but things were mostly made way more expensive as a late-game achievement. You are required to build various tiers of ore processing, the Control Circuits requires it (up to quadruple output).
- Immersive Engineering: Main engineering blocks requires Mekanism Control Circuits. Like with Botania not much was removed since it already fits well.
- Powah: Only a few of the generators are available. Crafting high tier blocks requires Mekanism ores multiplying product and Botania ingots.
- Create: Some crafting recipes requires Tinker table/basin. A few things have been removed. Option to exchange rotation to and from RF is available [however, there is not that many forms to generate RF either].
- Water: Finite water on non-water-rich Biomes. Waterworks included (a way to pump water from 'below bedrock'). Overpowered pumps disabled. [focusing on Create fluid transport system and its requirement] .
- Water Source: All modded drinks available now satiate thirst, and some recipes changed to use purified water. [search JEI for "drinks", this mod includes a tooltip]
- Survival Overhaul: Many modded blocks and consumables configured to change player temperature [search JEI for "cooling" or "heating", tooltip added using KubeJS].
- Somnia Awoken: The default sleeping pattern is disabled, fatigue reducing drinks available, sleeping causes the world to sped up rather than simple skipping the night. Changed fatigued punishments. [search JEI for "fatigue", tooltip added using KubeJS]
- Total Darkness: Default torches breaks if in contact with entities to encourage the use of alternatives [Fragile Torches]. And it gets really dark if you don't plan ahead, so walk around with some source of light.
- Mobs: Alex's Mobs, Mowzie Mobs, Fins, Magma Monsters, Unnamed Animal Mod, and others.
- Generation: Biome O'Plenty, YUNG's Better Caves, Autumnity, Enviromental, Towers of the Wild, and others.
- Loot: Relics and Enigmatic Legacy fills chests with interesting items to be sought after.
- Nether: Portal disabled, go down into caves and look for access through generated portals [Better Portals Mod].
- The End: Default portal disabled, you will need to search for all the magical eyes to access the end [End's Remastered Mod].
- Going through the dimensions increases the game overall difficult, so be prepared [Majrusz's Progressive Difficulty].
- Note: Some smaller scopes mods are included to provide support on your endeavor, so make sure to look around in JEI. [Scannable, Nature's Compass, Watercan, etc].
- Core Progression Ladder: Wood -> Seared Brick -> Iron Ingot -> Steel Ingot -> Refined Obsidian Ingot -> Netherite Ingot -> Enderite Ingot -> Etherium Ingot.
The future:
- Play testing: I developed and tested this alone, so if you find something intolerantly difficult or maybe even actually impossible to achieve, let me know. [or broken]
- Future plans: While 1.17 is out, it is still steaming hot, so I am just keeping a close watch on the modding ecosystem. Nothing specifically planned for now
