Hoopingblocks is designed to enhance the core interactive gameplay of mining, farming, crafting, and adventuring. It's deeper than a Vanilla+ pack, but is still a lightweight pack based on a "less is more" philosophy. I've selected mods that either 1) do one small thing cleanly or 2) enhances the entire arc of gameplay from early to late game. I've avoided the kinds of mods that add a banana but come with a gorilla attached. Redundancy and overlap have been avoided.
The ideal audience is a friends & family server for a group of people with diverse but complementary interests. It's built with four basic player archetypes in mind (although most people will probably wear multiple hats.)
1.) The adventurer. Roots 2 has a variety of mechanics, many of them pertaining to combat. Twilight Forest, with its progression of zones and bosses, will be the biggest draw for the daring sort. The nether is also enhanced with new mobs and mechanics from NetherEx. The Beneath has less narrative, but plenty of monsters and valuable ore. And of course, there's the End (only minimally modified in this pack.) The overworld however is mostly peaceful, so the following archetypes can pursue their interests with minimal interference.
2.) The farmer. Pam's Harvestcraft adds a huge number of recipes, which can provide long-term goals. The Spice of Life encourages eating diverse food items, so everyone will want to befriend a farmer. (The settings however have been tuned to be much less punishing than the Spice of Life defaults.) Unique Crops and Thaumic Potatoes add a lot of whimsical and varied activities outside the norm. Forestry bees offer an alternative path to most any resource, for the patient breeder. Engineering the perfect specimens with Binnie's Genetics can be an end in itself.
3.) The builder. Immersive Engineering is the core industrial mod, being the most visually appealing implementation of standard facilities like ore grinding, alloy smelting, autocrafting, etc. Immersive Petroleum is included. Horse Power is used in the very early game. Applied Llamagistics is supplied for late-game logistics management. RFTools adds a variety of interesting RF consumers. Endergenic Generators and Deep Resonance are the intended end-game power generators, as these depend not so much on accumulating vast quantities of fuel so much as on building intelligent control logic. Minecoprocessors and TIS-3D are included to this end.
4.) The miner. Usually this overlaps with the builder or adventurer, but for some people the finding of rare resources is its own reward. Ore distribution varies with chunk and biome to reward setting up operations in a variety of locales. Staple resources occur everywhere in at least small amounts, though. Valuable things can generate above Y=64, so people who enjoy strip mining will not be wasting their time. Certain ores favor cave walls, if spelunking is more your style. The Beneath dimension is the ultimate mining destination, though you may want to bring an adventuring friend along. You're likely to be eaten by a grue.
Rounding out the pack are Astral Sorcery, which is hard to pin to a particular playstyle, and Portal Guns, which are offered as an ultimate end-game recipe.
The Hoopingblocks Team
