Data Center in the Sky 1.1.0

The first update since launch, and a large one: the Data Center mod itself has moved from 1.2.0 to 1.5.0, six mods have joined the pack, and the quest book has grown by three chapters.

If you are updating an existing world, nothing has to be rebuilt. Two numbers behave differently and are worth knowing about: hardware now costs its real launch price rather than an internal curve, and a graphics card enchanted with Efficiency no longer produces more on its own — it now buys overclock headroom instead. Everything else is additive.

The site can now go wrong on its own

Five things break at real rates, and none of them ever destroys a component — an incident costs you uptime, income and reputation until you deal with it.

• The grid goes out. 1.3 interruptions a customer a year, the real US average. Nothing to repair; this one asks whether you built for it, and a UPS is the answer.
• A fan seizes, and the machine moves no air at all until someone frees it.
• A coolant loop leaks — a hydro ASIC has no fans and trips within seconds.
• A power supply trips in one bay. A bay with a second supply that can carry the load keeps running, which is the first time N+1 redundancy pays for itself.
• A DDoS cuts hosting income to a quarter while it runs. A Backbone Switch absorbs half of it.

The new Alarm Panel lists every open fault on the site with coordinates and what to do about it, and beeps until you look. Machine faults double in frequency for every 10 °C hotter the room runs, so cooling is now a maintenance budget as well as a comfort.

You can hire someone to deal with it

Buy a Workstation, put it in a room, and a technician in a hi-vis vest arrives and takes the post. He works the room the bench stands in, services machines from the front, and is slower than you at everything — the point is that you do not have to.

Thirteen courses at his own terminal, each bought once and paid for in wages forever. Every course he already has makes the next one weigh more, so a raw technician is cheap enough that one rack carries him and a man who can do everything costs twenty times that. His vest reads his standing across a hall: yellow new, orange trained, grey the old hand.

Wages are the first standing cost this pack has besides electricity.

Overclocking, as a dial you turn

Every Rack, Mining Rig and Hosting Rack has an overclock dial: ten steps of 5%, up to +50%. Output rises with the clock, power rises far faster — +50% compute for 2.4x the power, and all of it lands in your room as heat.

Every part takes +10% on its own, and Efficiency now buys headroom rather than output, eight points a level. Past its own line a processor can burn out — quadratic in how far past, doubled for every 10 °C. Inside the line the dial carries no risk at all; it just costs power, heat, and possibly your Tier II certification.

A world that makes itself

A new world type, Data Center in the Sky, now sits in the World Type button: all three dimensions empty, and a starting island built for you on first login — a slab, a run of Server Room Panels, soil and a sapling for the Log Buyer, a water basin.

With the End empty too, the new End Simulation is the only route to end stone, chorus, shulker shells and, very rarely, an elytra. Every recipe in the pack was checked before committing to that: no progression chain anywhere needs an End-only item.

Everything from 1.3.0, for anyone coming from 1.2.0

Certification Tier I–IV auditing a sealed room against sixteen criteria · the hardware lifecycle, with defective parts, the Salvage Bench and refurbishing · hosting reputation and customer classes · the Hall of Fame and Mining Records, eighteen real supercomputers and fourteen moments of the real Bitcoin network to climb toward · real launch prices with depreciation and a second-hand market · a Trading Terminal and a Bank · the Grid Connection billing real kWh · ten real hardware shortages · warranty and RMA · solo and pool mining with real transaction fees · water cooling and the Mining Container multiblock · eleven datacenter accelerators · per-player wallets with FTB Teams support · and every component in the mod redrawn with its own texture.

New in the pack itself

• Patchouli — the in-game handbook the mod ships needs it
• Industrial Foregoing and Titanium
• AE2 Things and ME Requester
• Just Enough Mekanism Multiblocks

The quest book

Three new chapters, 62 new contracts: Operations Audit (20), Hall of Fame (18) and Mining Records (24). 290 quests in 19 chapters in total.

Also

A search box and sortable columns in the Shop, remembered across restarts. Racks pass power down so a column can be fed by one cable at the top. Four new config values let a server change the pace of the whole game: economy.priceMultiplier, economy.miningIncomeMultiplier, machines.heatEnabled and machines.dustEnabled.

The pack no longer ships a pre-made SkyBlock world. It does not need one: the new world type builds the island for you when you create the world, which is rather the point of it. Pick Data Center in the Sky in the World Type button and start.

Note: the Rethinking Voxels shaderpack is no longer bundled — its current file has been awaiting CurseForge approval since July. Install it yourself if you want it; the pack does not need it.