Credenza

Meant to be a beginner-friendly modpack, Credenza focuses on exploration and depth within a limited number of core gameplay mods rather than a wide variety. It also slowly introduces danger, allowing new Minecraft players to learn controls and mechanics before being overwhelmed by enemies.

This pack is my first, and it is really just built for my own server, so consider stability and maintenance as high-risk if you try this pack. You may find the design of the pack interesting though, so feel free to try, replicate, or fork for your own purposes.

World Progression

Age 0 - Creation

"In the beginning there was the Block, and the Block was Punched, and the Block was Wood" - Steve 1:1

The start is nearly Peaceful, with hostile mobs' natural spawns limited but increasing over time. There is a safe zone that starts covering the whole playable area above Y=0, but every 70 in-game days the safe zone shrinks and the spawn rate of hostile mobs in the unsafe zone increases. Players can venture out to seek danger, but they may want to build up safe shelter while they can. After all, mobs don't like spawning in Civilized areas.

Do note, though, that mobs may still be forced to spawn by spawners, structures, and even phantom insomnia!

This Age ends when the newest players feel comfortable enough to take on new challenges. Shelters should be built and the safe zone may or may not be gone.

Server managers please read the details.

Age 1 - Exploration

"Journey before Destination" - The Stormlight Archive, Third Statement of the First Ideal

The world expands, go out and explore! The terrain can be difficult to traverse, though, maybe look into building some vehicles with plenty of trunk space for all the loot you want to bring home.

This Age ends when all of the Overworld and Nether within the world borders are completely mapped.

Server managers please read the details.

Age 2 - Domination

"Justice will prevail, you say? But of course it will! Whoever wins this war becomes Justice!" - Donquixote Doflamingo, One Piece

Seen enough of the world yet? Find it lacking? Dominate it through automation, building, and combat! The End is now open to you!

This Age ends when you have a Town Hall of tier 4+, you have met the Queen Bee, and defeated 10 unique bosses including the Wither and the End Dragon.

Server managers please read the details.

Expansion Ages

Not included in this modpack (yet) are content expansion in case the players want to keep going with new experiences in this same world. Consider the following examples:

Age of Cobblemon Sate the Pokemon addiction by adding a suite of Cobblemon mods, expand the Overworld by tripling the radius and the Nether tenfold to allow structures from those mods to be generated. End goals may be to Catch 'em All, level 100 teams, or to beat the Cobblemon Battle Tower at floor 41.

Age of Twilight Fresh exploration adventure with The Twilight Forest. You may need to ban overpowered items from your prior adventures to balance the game. The end goal is to beat the final boss of the Twilight Forest.

Age of Placeholder Adventures Consider other adventure dimensions like Aether, Astral Dimension, that swamp biome thing with the Wights, etc.

Configs, Details, and Commands

Age 0 Details

This modpack does not use any grave mods to contain items on death, instead is uses the Keep Inventory gamerule and KubeJS scripting to keep half and drop half of the player's experience on death, as well as applying Weakness III and Glowing to the player upon respawning for 2 minutes. This should hopefully discourage abusing respawns without making death too frustrating or disheartening for new players.

The In Control! mod is configured with a series of safe zone cylinders and a global region. The largest cylinder has a 1600 block radius around the origin in the Overworld, and every 70 in-game days the cylinder shrinks its radius by 100 blocks. Globally, hostile mob spawn rates start at 0% and increase by 5% every 70 days until reaching 100%.

Set the day to 0 when players actually hop on for the first time, and check the current day with the following commands:

/incontrol days set 0
/incontrol days

The playable region is handled by Chunky and Chunky Border. When setting up the server, run the following series of commands. Note that this will be very resource-intensive and take a long time, so don't expect to be playing immediately.

# Pre-generate Overworld
/chunky world the_overworld
/chunky center 0 0
/chunky shape circle
/chunky radius 10000
/chunky start

# Create a small border for the Overworld
/chunky radius 1600
/chunky border add
/chunky border wrap radial

# Pre-generate Nether
/chunky world the_nether
/chunky center 0 0
/chunky shape circle
/chunky radius 2000
/chunky start

# Create a small border for the Nether
/chunky radius 200
/chunky border add
/chunky border wrap radial

# Pre-generate End
# Note: End should be disabled at the start, but might as well generate now
/chunky world the_end
/chunky center 0 0
/chunky shape circle
/chunky radius 10000
/chunky start

# Pre-generate Bumblezone
/chunky world the_bumblezone
/chunky center 0 0
/chunky radius 5000
/chunky start

MineColonies raids have been reduced to the lowest allowable frequency (but not lower difficulty). You may choose to disable them entirely for this first Age.

Also recommend to your new players to disable the Toast Control mod. It prevents the tutorial popups which may actually be useful to them.

Age 1 Details

# Increase Overworld border radius from 1600 to 8000
/chunky world the_overworld
/chunky center 0 0
/chunky shape circle
/chunky radius 8000
/chunky border add

# Increase Nether border radius from 200 to 1000
/chunky world the_nether
/chunky center 0 0
/chunky shape circle
/chunky radius 1000
/chunky border add

Age 2 Details

Players are restricted from using the End Portal until they have obtained the currently-unobtainable Ender Staff. When this age starts, run the following command to artificially unlock it.

/give @a grapplemod:ender_staff 1

Core Mod Groups

Create

For automation and mechanical experiments, Create and its addons act as the primary Tech mods. You can automate resource production and build factories, but the novel experience for veteran modded Minecraft players is Create Aeronautics - airships, ornithopters, jets, vessels, rovers, or maybe all-in-one with your base inside!

MineColonies

For aesthetics and logistics, MineColonies and its addons provides players with a way to design a complicated settlement and learn building and decorating techniques. Colonists' constant requests and nagging about quality of life and safety provides a certain gameplay loop, rewarded with watching the settlement grow and change.

Food and Farming

Farmer's Delight is integrated with Create and MineColonies for those crazy cooks out there. And variety is the Spice of Life (CE) for you and your colonists!

World Generation

Beyond world generation infrastructure like Chunky, this pack includes a wide variety of structure packs and uses Terralith as the terrain generator.

Seeds

I wanted to make sure an Ancient City exists near the origin, so here are a few candidate seeds that have Cherry Grove-like biomes nearby. I haven't validated them all, but take a look if you're interested.

Performance Tuning

As with many PC games, Minecraft does not automatically tune for performance based on the platform's hardware, available resources, etc. This section mentions a few of the knobs specific to this modpack you should play with to make your game run smoothly. Of course, explore the video settings for yourself and try tweaking things based on your own preferences.

Distant Horizons

The Distant Horizons mod renders distant terrain with a lower level of detail (LOD). This is usually used to extend viewdistances on top of the normal terrain rendering, so you might have normal rendering for 8 chunks and then LOD rendering for 32 beyond that, allowing the player to see 40 chunks away. The lower LOD is much cheaper to render, but it isn't free. If you run into memory issues, consider reducing the distance or resolution of Distant Horizons. Alternatively, if you run into GPU issues, consider reducing the normal chunk rendering and then use Distant Horizons to fill in. You could, for example, have a 4 chunk radius of normal rendering and 4 more chunk radius of LOD rendering, giving you 8 chunks of viewdistance for much less strain on the GPU.

Shaders

A Complementary shaderpack is included in the modpack distribution but is not enabled by default. If you have a high performance machine, consider enabling it and just check that the performance hit is acceptable.