Latest Shift is a Create Aeronautics pack for Minecraft 1.21.1 on NeoForge. You start on foot, work through Create's rotational machinery, and eventually assemble an airship that physically sails off with you standing on the deck. Not an elytra with extra steps: an actual ship you built, plank by plank, that moves through the world.
A quest book written for this pack walks you from your first waterwheel to a working ship. Rewards are deliberately small. You get a nudge and some materials, not a chest that skips the next hour of the game.
The world is worth the flight. Tectonic's mountains are tuned taller and meaner than default, with Terralith and Regions Unexplored filling in the biomes, and Distant Horizons rendering the horizon so you can see where you're going from the deck. BSL shaders are on out of the box. The whole thing is tested on Apple Silicon Macs, where this stack usually falls over.
It's built for playing with friends. Open Parties and Claims protects your builds while you're offline, Steam 'n' Rails links your bases together, and a custom mod called Kalendra's Bane quietly tracks how long you've been grinding alone and starts weighing on your character until you find company or log off. Backpacks, Farmer's Delight cooking, furniture, and an unreasonable number of plushies round it out.
House rules for what gets in: nothing overpowered, nothing that turns the game into a spreadsheet, and no windowless factory cubes.