Goal

Originally created for myself and friends, Neo-politan is a highly curated vanilla+ experience with the goal of slightly enhancing and adding to existing gameplay, without invalidating vanilla mechanics. While there are a fair number of mods and resources in the pack, the vast majority are for quality of life, performance, and theming. This is a great pack for those who just want something a bit more, or those new to modded Minecraft.

The name is a simple portmanteau of "neo" (meaning "new") and "neapolitan" (specifically referring to strawberry/pistachio-vanilla-chocolate ice cream). The modpack is mostly vanilla with some extra goodness, so it seemed to make sense!

Key Features

SMP-First

There is a strong push for SMP and light-RP friendliness in this pack, with mods like Origins, Starter Kit, Chat Heads, Ender Storage, and many server performance mods being included.

Vanilla+

World Generation

World gen has been slightly enhanced with mods like Quark, Villager Names, and Geophilic to bring a bit more life to Minecraft without adding hundreds of block types or biomes. Content mods which add world generation (like Tinkers' and Create) have had most or all of their additions disabled.

Expanded Content

Mods which add content to the game provide extensions to vanilla or entirely new systems which do not invalidate the use of vanilla mechanics.

Theme

The pack aims for a cohesive audio-visual feeling that is reminiscent of vanilla's feel, but fresh enough to provide a new-feeling experience even for parts of the game which remain unaltered.

Creativity

Whether you enjoy building, exploring, tech, or magic, there is something here for you to enhance your experience. Apotheosis deepens the vanilla progression systems, Mahou Tsukai adds magic into the world in a unique way, Create and Quark let you dive deeper into new machine and redstone mechanics, while multiple mods add various unique and helpful decorative options that fit fairly well into the vanilla feel.

Quality of Life

The vast majority of mods in this pack are QoL, aesthetic, or performance mods. While things like JEI are not included (due to thoroughly breaking the vanilla feel), there are extensions to the vanilla recipe book, crafting, sorting, and searching which integrate a bit more seamlessly.

Starting Out

This plays basically the same as vanilla, but with a few extra ways to express your creativity through building, tech, magic, and RP. You'll start with some basic items so you can spend the first day traveling and looking for a nice place rather than immediately gathering food.

Tips

Gold tools have innate Fortune II and gold swords have innate Looting II, so use those early on valuable ores.
Having a compass in your hotbar will enable Xaero's Minimap so be sure to grab those if you want to navigate locally more easily. You'll need to use vanilla maps for actual mapping, however!
Immersive Aircraft and Aleki's Nifty Ships will help explore in the early and mid game prior to having Elytra and endless fireworks.
Ores (slowly) grow crystals over time that can be harvested for renewable resources (fortune does not work on them). Use this in the early game to have a slow-but-steady income before you gear up, or in the late game to make large ore farms using redstone or Create.
Right-click to harvest crops and re-plant them automatically to save yourself some time.
Some origins bring a completely new playstyle. The water boon can let you play Minecraft in a whole new way right from the start of the game.

Known Beta Issues

On joining the world for the first time after creation, the game may crash with exit code 1 and a reason that BIOMES_PALE_GARDEN is not defined. You can simply re-launch the game and re-join to get around this for now.

Changing Embeddium, Sodium, or Oculus settings can sometimes crash the game with an emissive entity shader error. Your changes will be saved and re-launching will get you back in.