FTB Skies 2: Aero

Minecraft 1.21.1 · NeoForge

Aero is a skyblock built to enable enhanced aeronautics play while proving a tailored progression experience without the grind. Everyone spawns into a shared lobby and picks a starting base, including two airship you can fly off in from the first minute if you choose. Beyond the lobby is a single overworld generated as an archipelago of floating islands and scattered hand crafted islands spaced far enough apart that crossing between them becomes an engineering problem you solve with a ship.

It keeps what worked in FTB Skies 2: the quest book with major visual and instructional overhauls tailored to this new experience, the tech and magic trees, and the automation depth underneath both. What changes is the world around them. Everyone plays in one overworld rather than a private void dimension meaning you can fly over and visit your friend right from the start. A lobby sits at spawn with shops to buy from as you progress, and FTB Team Bases places your team's island out from it. The sky between islands is mostly empty, which is the whole reason you'll want to fly.

Mods that unlock each other

Most packs let you pick a lane and stay in it. Aero wires the lanes together on purpose, so progress in one mod pays off in the others and a bottleneck in one system usually has an answer somewhere else.

• Create pressing and cutting produce Modern Industrialization plates, rods, and wires
• Make plates and other subcomponents with mekanism directly
• Mekanism crushing and compressing feed MI's dust and alloy chains
• MI adds additional options to build Create Nuclear graphite and uranium rods
• Create, MI and Productive Metalworks both nearly all alloys
• Replication will print an intermediate outright once you've scanned one making things like circuits much more accessible

Finding the cheap route through a problem is a legitimate way to play here. If a mod's own path to a component is the tedious one, take somebody else's.

Modern Industrialization, rebuilt

MI is one of the deepest tech mods available and one of the slowest to get moving. Aero keeps the depth and drops the friction.

Machines run at full efficiency from the moment you place them. There's no warm-up curve to sit through, no penalty for shutting a line down overnight, and no reason to leave a multiblock idling just to protect its efficiency. Voltage and energy draw are shown directly on the energy bar, so you can see what a machine costs before it browns out your base.

The quest chapter walks the tiers in order and explains what each one is for. And because MI's materials are wired into Create, Mekanism, and Replication, you can route around any individual step you don't enjoy.

Choose your path

Tech, magic, and automation are each a complete route through the pack, and most players end up running more than one.

• Tech: Create, Modern Industrialization, Mekanism, Immersive Engineering, EnderIO, Oritech, PneumaticCraft, Powah
• Magic: Ars Nouveau, Malum, Roots, Iron's Spellbooks
• Automation & resources: Mystical Agriculture, Productive Bees, sieves, sluices, and sifters, scaling into AE2, Refined Storage, and Flux Networks

The routes intersect constantly, and the endgame expects you to have walked all of them.

The world

One shared overworld, generated as an archipelago of floating islands over open air. New players arrive in a communal lobby at spawn. FTB Team Bases allocates your team its own region out from there and builds whichever start you chose:

• Minimalist Island: a tiny island for skyblock purists
• Compact Skies: endless possibilities, itty bitty living space
• Ole Classic: up and away on the classic airship
• Void Boat: a ship with no flight, voyaging the void

Islands are widely spaced. Structures, bosses, and loot are scattered across them, and reaching the better ones takes a ship. Air scoops, seives, tempered jars and sifters remain a full resource route for players who prefer them.

Questing and the world around it

Several hundred quests across tech, magic, exploration, and automation, written to teach the mods and to tell you where to go next when you stall. Rewards feed a Magic Coins economy with an FTB Shop attached, so surplus stays worth something.

Around the edges you'll find Cataclysm and Apothic bosses, Soaring Structures, Tempad, Farmer's Delight, Farming for Blockheads, Geores, some lesser known and a custom event system that brings encounters to you while you play.

Piña Colada Craft

The finale from FTB Skies Expert returns as Aero's endgame, and it's the reason the rest of the pack is shaped the way it is.

The premise is a joke that takes the entire modpack to land: it's a real cocktail. Pineapple juice, cream of coconut, white rum, ice, and something worth serving it in. Every one of those is gated behind a different mod's deep end, and none of them are where you'd expect to find them.

No single tech tree carries you to the end. The chain reaches across the pack's late-game systems, magic and tech alike, and every one of them has to be built and running before the last step resolves. It's the pack's final exam, and it assumes you've mastered the whole syllabus.

Finish it and you earn the Piña colada. It's a cocktail, and it costs you the entire modpack. Sit in a lawn chair and have a sip at 5pm to be transported to the Tropics as a fitting end to your adventure.

Mod highlights

Flight & Create: Create, Create: Aeronautics, Aeroworks, Aero Copycats, Aeronautics Covers, Create Sifter, Create Nuclear, Hang Glider

Tech: Modern Industrialization, Mekanism, Immersive Engineering, EnderIO, Oritech, PneumaticCraft, Powah, Industrial Foregoing, Productive Metalworks, RFTools, Flux Networks

Magic: Ars Nouveau (+ Elemental, Ocultas, Delight), NeoVitae, Malum, Roots, Iron's Spellbooks

Storage: Applied Energistics 2 (+ Advanced AE, Extended AE, ExtraStorage), Refined Storage, Sophisticated Storage, Functional Storage and more

Resources & farming: Mystical Agriculture (+ Agradditions), Productive Bees, Replication, Farmer's Delight, Farming for Blockheads, FTB Stuff sluices & meshes and our custom Aero Scoop

Aero is difficult at the top and generous everywhere below it. Most problems have several solutions and the pack is happy for you to take the cheapest one you can find. The cocktail is the part that will bring all of your mastery together.

Grab a team or go alone, build the ship, and set sail for the skies!

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