Blood in the Olden Times

'Blood in the Olden Times' is a lightweight but content-rich mod pack, where efforts have been made to choose mods that fit together well thematically. The aim is to create a dark, eldritch, rustic, 19th-century atmosphere with vampiric overtones, role-playing elements, and a hardcore survival feel. The mod pack was created to be the basis of a let's play series featuring myself and Countess Lovelace.

To achieve our goal, we've collected together nature magic mods like 'Botania' and 'Roots', with dark magic represented by 'Blood Magic' and its addons 'Blood Arsenal' and 'Animus'. The 'Vampirism' mod was included to extend this idea, and give players the opportunity to become either an evil vampire or heroic vampire hunter! We added 'Soul Shards: The Old Ways' and 'Reliquary' for additional variety, whilst staying within the general theme.

The role-playing aspect of the modpack centres around 'Level Up!', a mod that lets you choose a character class with special abilities and attibutes, which you then get to continually enhance as you collect more and more experience. 'Minecraft Comes Alive' upgrades villages, gives their inhabitants unique names, appearances, and lives - you can even marry, have children, then send them to work the fields! Exciting adventures are available via 'Roguelike Dungeons', and there are many unique weapons to collect thanks to the 'Weapon Case Loot' mod.

To make basic survival more of a challenge, we included the 'Hunger Overhaul' and 'Tough as Nails' mods. All of a sudden basic foodstuffs aren't nearly so filling, a thirst bar and temperature gauge are added to game, and if you're playing on Hard difficulty, you start the game with only 3 hearts to your name! To increase your maximum health, you'll need to hunt down Lifeblood Crystals in nether fortresses. Your ever-gnawing hunger can be addressed via the heartier meals available thanks to the 'Pam's Harvestcraft' and 'Cooking for Blockheads' mods. But none of this will save you when the 'Bloodmoon' comes, spawning countless monsters and making sleep impossible!

Olde-worlde tech is added by 'Ender IO' [NOTE: ENDER IO HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR VERSIONS 2.0 AND ABOVE] and 'Immersive Engineering', so that even the technolgy has a fantasy/steampunk feel. 'Tinker's Construct' and its 'Tinker's Tool Levelling' addon round off this aspect of the modpack. Tech content was deliberately restricted to preserve the overall theme and atmosphere.

The Overworld and Nether terrain are transformed by the 'Biomes o' Plenty' and 'Natura' mods, and many new buildings, structures and ruins are added by 'Recurrent Complex'. Exploring the Nether is also made more profitable via the addition of 'Nether Metals'.

Finally, several quality-of-life mods were included, whilst avoiding anything too overpowered that might spoil the feel of the modpack. So you'll have access to 'Iron Chests', 'Storage Drawers', and 'Wearable Backpacks'. If you happen to meet an untimely demise (which is very likely), your items will be safeguarded until you come to collect them, thanks to the 'Gravestone Mod'. Building is made a little easier by 'Better Builders Wands'. In addition, many small improvements to the game are provided by the 'Quark' mod.

Note: If you want to make the game look the way it does in my let's play, you'll need Optifine for Minecraft 1.10.2, and the Kuda shader pack. Search "Kuda" on my Youtube channel and you'll find a video about it.

A list of included mods with credits for the individual mod-makers can be found by clicking on the link for the modpack version in the "Files" tab (e.g. "Blood in the Olden Times-1.1.zip") and scrolling down to "Related Projects". Many thanks and kudos to all contributors, without whom the creation of this modpack would have been impossible.

That's about all, peace out!