The whole world lies submerged underwater. Skyscrapers that once stood as proud testaments of human engineering now barely poke above the crashing waves. Islanders like yourself have spent their whole lives drifting from place to place. Scavenging, fishing, and diving for any scrap that looks useful. Some spend their whole lives on boats and rafts, while others settle on the rooftop "islands" of crumbling landmarks. With so much history and technology lost to the depths, people formed trade networks to distribute resources and knowledge, while many more resorted to piracy and pillaging to make ends meet.
In your travels, you have heard many strange stories. Some say there are untold riches on the lower levels of the city, unreachable by all but the bravest divers with the most advanced equipment. Other sailers claim that they can see lights on the ocean floor at night, a great firey rift to hell itself that glares up them and makes the bottomless depths feel even more horrifying. And even more unsettlingly, many people claim to have seen lanky shadowed figures abducting people with no warning and then vanishing in a haze of purple static...
World:
Islanders uses a custom map that is designed to give you the traditional sky block/survival island feel, while still having a large world worth exploring. So you can have all the freedom to base build in an isolated slice of the world and still have a memorable journey when you get tired of all the resource grinding. We use a blend of adventure mode and survival mode to create a sandbox "home base" and still give a challenge to diving into the ruins of the world. You can't just build an air pocket as you go, you have to bring equipment and plan out your routes to get the most out of your dives.
In addition to the flooded overworld ruins, there are a number of peaceful settlements (and hostile ones) with NPCs, side quests, shops, and unique crafting stations. And for the most daring delvers, the mysterious Nether and End dimensions hold even more relics of the old world and NPCs to interact with. Since the player is in adventure mode outside of their settlements, many locations are able to house CommandComputers to further customize the player experience. Devious underwater traps, adaptive NPC market values, and random encounter events with pirates.
Watch our progress by viewing the live web map for our build world!
Questing:
While quest books that guide you through a play experience are all well and good, it tends to either babysit the player through super basic stuff or railroad them into only doing things one way. Minecraft is a sandbox game, not a checklist! For that reason, most quests are set up to require obtaining resources rather than crafting a specific machine. And since a lot of old-world electronics can be scavenged from the ocean, many quests can be completed without making machines mandatory.
Build your base how you want, and don't worry if you go ahead or out of order from the book, just survive in this hostile world how you want to. Go through the whole game without a settlement by raiding and trading, or finish it all from your fortified island home.
Gameplay:
Many mods have been given custom crafting recipes and custom loot tables to make Islanders feel less like a pack of mods, and more like a unified Minecraft experience. Advanced machinery requires more basic machines to build component parts first, advanced magic requires arcane research. I know we just talked about player freedom, but if everyone had nuclear reactors and energy condensers on the first night then what would be the point?
These progressions limitations can be partly skipped by buying advanced components or finding them. While it's still possible to "skip" some things this way, the custom crafting is mostly to unify mods and not force you to do things one way. It plays a lot nicer this way, and you don't get stuck with resources from the wrong mod.
For example, Equivalent Exchange has had its crafting recipes blended into Blood Magic, which now requires resources from the Nether to start, which requires some form of diving gear to reach. Machine progression starts with basic treated wood contraptions from Immersive Engineering, then metal shaping with presses, on to plastic extracting from Industrial Foregoing, and then Mekanism machines to liquify things for and Refined Storage. All this while you have a number of Farming, Fishing, Music Composing, Sieving, Trading, Sailing, and Bee...ing options to get involved with!
Shaders and OptiFine:
We use Halogen to get the game running smoothly enough to load our map. Minecraft normally only has to load surface textures for a thin layer of surface blocks and caves, but since Islanders is all water and buildings with thin walls it has to load hundreds of times more block surfaces. This exact kind of surface loading is the reason why the nether can be laggy for some people, and we are still twice that height with more surfaces.
So if you feel the need to switch to OptiFine so you can run shaders, just know that you have been warned. This pack has some uniquely challenging rendering to pull off at times. OptiFine should work about as well as Halogen on a number of systems, though Halogen has less bloat and has been tested to run slightly smoother. The real issue is the shaders. Calculating realistic lighting and water for that much surface area requires q pretty beefy card. I personally use Complementary Shaders and it tanks my fps from ~800 to ~60, and it's usually one of the more performance-friendly shaders.
But yeah if you want shaders, just remove Halogen from your load order and plonk the relevant OptiFine version in there!
Communication:
I do not respond to DMs on Curse and Discord often, monthly or seasonally at best, so please leave your comments/concerns on Curse or the Tapestry Discord:
https://discord.gg/PEJSEJuj
