Novistra Homestead

Novistra Homestead was originally built as a personal project for my family, designed around low-tech survival, deep exploration, and meaningful homesteading. As the world came together, it turned into something we felt was too good not to share with anyone else looking for a grounded, immersive playthrough.

Slow down and take your time

This pack is explicitly designed to be played slowly.

We wanted to capture and extend that early-game Minecraft feeling where every resource matters, building a house takes real effort, and preparing for a trip actually requires planning. We got tired of modern kitchen-sink modpacks that rush you into infinite automated resources within a few hours, completely stripping away the survival aspect. In Novistra Homestead, progression takes time, resource gathering is deliberate, and late-game abundance is something you truly earn.

Real survival and custom tweaks

Survival here requires actual preparation. Between managing temperature and weather with Cold Sweat and Serene Seasons, and staying hydrated with Thirst Was Taken, staying alive takes more than just keeping a food bar full.

To make everything feel like a cohesive, single game rather than a bunch of random mods mashed together, we wrote a ton of custom KubeJS scripts:

Integrated Food and Thirst: Food and drink items across mods like Farmer's Delight (and its many add-ons), Brewin' and Chewin', and Aquaculture have been manually configured. If you brew a custom beverage or prepare a complex dish, it accurately restores thirst and grants proper nutritional benefits.
Unified Progression: Custom items and tweaked recipes bind the building, farming, and tech mods together so every craftable item has a distinct place in your settlement.

No magic one-block solutions

Our core philosophy for automation and tech is simple: no magic single-block machines. You won't find magic boxes that sit in a corner and output infinite piles of ores out of thin air. Instead, almost every processing and production line requires actual physical space and multiblock setups:

Kinetic Machinery: Mechanical setups from Create and its expansion suite (like TFMG, Create Diesel Generators, and Create Central Kitchen) allow you to process raw materials, generate power, and automate crop harvesting without turning your base into a futuristic industrial eyesore.
Hands-on Automation: You have to lay down the conveyers, set up the mechanical presses, and build the physical logistics yourself.

A massive world built for travel

If you like exploring, world generation has been overhauled to feel huge:

Custom Tectonic Settings: Terrain settings for Tectonic and Terralith have been tuned to create massive continent-scale landmasses, towering mountain ranges, and enormous oceans.
Long-Haul Travel: Because distances between biomes and points of interest are so big, traveling on foot gets old fast. To cross these vast distances, you will need to rely on actual long-haul transport—whether that means building flying airships with Create Aeronautics, riding Hexerei brooms, or laying down extensive rail networks.
Reasons to Explore: Dense ruin sets from When Dungeons Arise, Integrated Dungeons and Structures, Explorify, and YUNG's structure overhauls, along with deep cave biomes from Alex's Caves, give you plenty of reasons to pack up and head out.

Building a home and a town

When you finally settle down, the focus turns to building a home and establishing a community:

Town Building: Expand from a small farm into a full, populated settlement using MineColonies. Oversee citizens, set up work districts, and hire guards from Guard Villagers to keep the town safe.
Cosy Decoration: Massive suites of building blocks, custom furniture (Handcrafted, Macaw's collections, Chipped), dynamic lighting, and detailed decor let you build out every corner of your home—right down to hanging up actual photos you take with Exposure.

Note: This pack is currently in EARLY ALPHA. We are actively tweaking balance, writing new KubeJS scripts, and building out the progression. Expect frequent updates, fixes, and changes as development continues!

TO BE ADDED:

An 'Exposure' mod quest line where you must take pictures of all the creatures!
Heat functionality to all create engines where it makes sense, I.e. Diesel Generators