Virelia

This modpack tries to stay close to the experience of playing Minecraft, while expanding upon progression without bloating it with hundreds of JEI pages for random stuff not necessary for a majority of players. Many systems are tied to Vanilla to encourage, but not outright force players to interact with some gameplay mechanics. This is done without restricting items behind gamestages, the only thing that is restricted is access to the Nether/other dimension in general. You will need to craft 6 out of the 16 available Eyes of Ender to enter them. And of course you need 12 Eyes of Ender to enter the End, though the modpack doesn't have any content after defeating the Ender Dragon for now, so I'd advise going for all 16. Overall the progression is similar, but has been stretched out to provide a longer lasting experience.

I didn't have a particular type of player in mind when creating this, but it was made for a group of people with different interests and levels of knowledge about Minecraft.

Short overview

- Difficulty that increases when completing advancements!

- Custom Perk system, also unlocked via advancements! 

- Increase your maximum health by consuming different kinds of food!

- Customise your weapons with rebalanced Tetra and Apotheosis enchanting!

- Rebalanced loot tables and Villager trades!

In-depth details 

Progression

I wanted to create an experience that doesn't change the way you play too much unless you opt into it. Well, most of it, of course you do need the Eyes and therefore will need to interact with some mods at least in some capacity. They are there to give a reason to go find and fight bosses.

I also wanted to add rewards to playstyles I felt were missing out. If you like to farm, you can now cook a variety of food and get the benefit of more maximum health for it. In multiplayer you could even cook for others if they don't feel like it. Minecolonies is a great mod if you like building cities or just seeing them grow. Iron's Spells and Spellbooks has some great effects and visuals, but is still fairly balanced. Create is in there for the people that like building contraptions, but it's not necessary for progression at all.

Last but not least I added Spyglass Zoom and Map Atlases to have features like Minimap and Zoom actually reflected in the game. They aren't hard to acquire, but since they are lost when you die it's another incentive to not be reckless. You can however find Soulbound versions of these items later on, so you won't have to worry about it at some point. As for the points above:

- Difficulty affects mob health, damage (though only slightly) and their chance to spawn with equipment. You can see the difficulty in the top left, and it increases when certain advancements are completed (mostly Vanilla ones). 

- The Perk system is powered by the Origins mod. Perks give small bonuses that can change your playstyle or just make a certain aspect of the game a bit easier. You unlock and upgrade them by completing advancements as well, encouraging you to interact with mechanics you might have ignored until now. You start with only one Perk slot, but can unlock up to two more via advancements.

- Consuming enough unique food items grants you an additional heart of health, for up to 10 extra hearts.

- Tetra has been rebalanced so that some items that require Nether access become upgrades over Overworld Materials. The same goes for Apotheosis enchanting, the progression is now Ocean -> Sculk -> Nether bookshelves.

- All Loot tables now contain less diamonds. Villagers demand diamonds for their best trades. This hopefully makes diamonds a bit more valuable again.

I should also mention that armor doesn't block damage as well as in Vanilla, and protection only gives 2,5% damage reduction. This is why difficulty scales mob damage only very slightly. This is not to make the game tedious, it's there to give players a reason to craft good equipment, for which they should need to actually go out and explore the world. If you feel like enemies are hitting too hard, let me know, the intention is to make the game more challenging, not unfairly hard.

Worldgen

Terralith, Tectonic and Arboria make for some varied, but usually not too huge biomes. I added a few structure mods, focussing on mods that fit into Minecraft, nothing like Towers of the Wild or When Dungeons Arise that tend to stick out too much. Structures also respawn! Meaning that after some time (configurable) they will refresh all blocks and loot if they haven't been modified too much. So you can clear dungeons multiple times for more rewards. Though I'd also advise against making your base in one, just in case. The mod should register big changes to a structure and not generate it, but I cannot guarantee it.

Mobs

I went with Quality over Quantity for Mobs. There aren't many new passive mobs, mostly hostile ones to mix combat up from time to time. I wanted mobs that didn't feel out of place next to the Vanilla ones with Fresh Animations, and didn't require you to magically know some weird way to defeat them. So it's mostly mobs from Graveyard, Aquamirae, Alex's Caves, Iron's Spells and Spellbooks and It takes a Pillage. And of course the bosses from Cataclysm and Bosses of Mass Destruction. No Alex's Mobs or anything like that. I am considering a few more mods for that atm, but I first need to see how the pack feels with the pack feels with current additions.

Performance

There's the usual performance mods like Embeddium, ImmediatelyFast, Oculus and more. I added Distant Horizons (enabled by default) or you can add Shaders thanks to oculus. I personally think Distant Horizons is really worth it over Shaders, but it tends to have stuttering issues, so beware of that. Do whatever you prefer, or nothing for maximum performance (but seriously, Distant Horizons is awesome).

Getting started

I'd advise hitting the "^" key (under Escape) to open the questbook to get a rough idea what you can do. The questbook isn't long, it's mainly there to give you a rough idea where to find some materials, and to give you a better overview over perks.

If someone else actually plays this I'd love feedback, no matter how small, I'm sure I missed a few things.