Protozoa

    Have you ever played RLCraft and thought; "man, the only thing hard in here is the mobs!" Have you ever played Better Than Wolves and thought; "man, the only thing hard in here is the progression." Well, look no further, in this modpack i've decided to combine the two into an unholy abomination in an effort to make a truly grueling experience to the minecraft veteran looking for a real challenge. Inspired by Shivaxi's RLCraft and FlowerChild's Better Than Wolves, this modpack combines them and sprinkles in other hard aspects that makes the game completely unfair. "How unfair?" you may ask? let's dive in with a rundown!

    There is a lot of mods in this modpack, so i'm only going to go over the really hard corners of it and then the really helpful corners as well. The game is set up in a linier progression system using reskillable, making a lot of weapons, tools and factories only accessible when you've gained enough experience between levels 1-80, 80 being nearly godhood, while making recipes more realistic for a slower progression. Pam's Harvestcraft sets the vanilla base food amount to woefully low, and with future food balance changes, all the food will only be nourishing by a certain amount. Also, all the seeds from Pam's Harvestcraft can only be bought at it's respective market, making the sustainability of food in the early game much harder and starvation actually possible instead of a secondary thought. Tough as Nails provides dehydration and temperature effects, making the environment more hostile to the player, then Serene Seasons makes a regular rotation of the seasons to keep the environment hostile and prevents crop growth for certain plants in certain seasons. Then, there is First Aid, which gives you locational damage, headshots and body shots able to one tap you even at 80 health without proper equipment and natural healing has been severely reduced to a heart a day and half a heart while sleeping because you're going to heal a broken leg with time, not with food. Lycanites, Ice and Fire, Scaling health, Zombie Awareness, Rougher Mobs, and Infernal Mobs introduce regular hard enemies with scaling difficulty over time, making any encounter with hostile mobs deadly and sometimes in the middle of the day. Not to mention, Scaling Health gives you three hearts at the start of the game, after all you're only human, and a rock elemental hitting you will leave a gash, a super zombie punching you would break some bones. Then finally, Scape n' Run: Parasites, which adds a much harder enemy that gets harder over time, eventually making your game unplayable, that progresses significantly when you sleep in bed, eventually you won't be able to sleep, grow crops or farm mob drops. SRP: nests makes it so even as they're not spawning, random parasite structures can introduce parasites that will progress the phase if you're set up too close. Think that's wayyy too much? well, let's take a look at all the things you can do that can help you survive.

tl;dr: parasites eventually make the game unplayable, enemies are everywhere and you're starving, dehydrated, hot/cold and have three hearts.

    At the start of the game you have several mods to help you with surviving the early days. As you level up between 1-20, you'll gain access to Primal, Camping 2, and Better with mods/addons, that gives you crude tools, factories, equipment and food generation to keep you on your feet. Howling Moon adds werewolves in the game that can be a serious threat, however you can become one, offering up a leveling system as you kill things, you can become much stronger without anything on, boosting your effectiveness at night and giving you a neat regeneration buff to help you heal quicker. On that note, First Aid and Rough Tweaks add a ton of ways for you to heal, the best medkit in the game able to restore a full 80 hearts in one full use and buff you. As daunting as the parasites are, you can avoid sleeping to prevent their progression and even then you still only have 40 days before they actually start spawning, giving you plenty of leg room to prepare.

    Levels 21-40 offer up industrialization and powerful magic, giving you automation, defensive structures, better resource refinement and extra weapons at your disposal. Rustic adds brewing and elixirs that, while not as great as potions, can give you short effects, increase the duration and boost the power of buffs. Wizardy and Electroblob's Wizardry provides loot and powerful magic to boost your power, call upon aid and wreak havoc on the enemy to deal with their numbers and give you an edge as an all powerful oracle. Base defense gets a lot easier with Blood Magic, Astral Sorcery and Immersive Engineering/Intelligence, giving you stronger weapons, leveling systems and structures that will defend your base such as automated turrets and howitzer cannons that rain hell from a distance. Level up with Astral Sorcery and tune yourself with the stars to gain powerful passive abilities like life leach, chain lighting, extra armor, extra health and extra damage, or better ability to mine, move around and grow crops if that suits you better. Infuse items with blood in Blood Magic to create powerful gear that grows in power the more souls you have, transmute items into other things, and create sigils that alter the world around you. Then Immersive Engineering/Intelligence, giving you super refining multiblock structures and defensive tech like flame thrower turrets and mines, upgrade your armor using refined goods instead of magic to give you an edge, like a shield that stuns enemies with a powerful flash or armor that protects you from the deadly gas you can chuck at your enemy.

    levels 41-80 offers up extremely powerful tech and magic, giving you the ability to practically make resources out of thin air, power armor that soaks up to 95% of the damage you take with an energy shield, cloning to revive you and massive AOE spells that control the battefield. First off, with Sync, you can now die and be revived at a clone, keep in mind that it's only in the same dimension, which can help you respawn with gear, recover items and make hardcore possible... in later stages of the game. Blood Magic now offers up beacon like effects with any potion, make your home where you're at your deadliest using demon crystals, prevent hostile mob spawns with spells from Astral Sorcery, and create powerful armor and weapons with Ender.io and Mekanism. Speaking of which, streamline your factories with Compact Crafting, Ender.io and Mekanism to create compact generators and factories that can pump out goods with unmatched speed, tools that can help you teleport seemlessly, and weapons that can delete enemies and gather up the experience. Finally, Thermal Foundation offers up a new way to grow crops and gain resources, no longer will the parasites prevent crop growth, all you need is a seed, phyto grow and power to make as much food as you'd like and give you special refining abilities like infusing potions with energy to make them several times more powerful. The challenge, of course, is getting to those levels at all, will you give up?

tl:dr: sleeping is fine for 40 days, werewolves are deadly, you should be one, machines galore can protect you from swarms of parasites and grow food for you and there is tons of ways to level up.

tutorial:

    Okay, so you've just spawned into a new world in a modpack designed for your failure, what's the first step? night time is approaching, not to mention all the death around you to start, there's no time to dilly dally and find a safe place to stay, you need tools. Try to avoid danger if you can, but if you die and it's night time, look to the sky and let night pass in that comforting death screen. Your first goal is a flint hatchet, gather some gravel and get some flint from them, break some leaves to get a stick and break grass to get plant fiber, three plant fiber makes plant twine. punch any hard surface with flint, don't try to break the block, just tap it, wait for your attack meter to fill up and punch again, eventually the flint should become flaked flint. With the flaked flint, put it to the left of the twine and the twine over the stick in the crafting grid to make a hatchet. With this you can cut down trees, however, your main focus should be killing animals for food and experience, be sure to level up your building as much as possible. next, flake bones the same as flint and used the flaked bone to make a bone knife, use it on sticks to make fire sticks, then use two flaked points and a twine to make shears, shear a sheap and make woven cloth. combine a woven cloth with string/twine and a stick to make a fiber torch, use two fire sticks in both hands to start a fire and light the fiber torch in it for a light source that can keep you safe from the dark in your two block hole.

tl;dr: rush fibre torch ASAP so you can live in your two block hole in the ground.

So far the modpack uses a lot of very heavy mods that i'm looking into optimizing, might even need to ditch a couple things... your computer might need to be beefy for this! for a generally smooth gameplay, give it 12GB of ram. Optifine may also be a great option for helping it run smoothly, how it conflicts with mods, if at all, is yet to be determined.

It's super early in development! expect WAY more in the future.

If you liked this and want to see me do more then consider supporting me on My Patreon!

I'm likely to start streaming development and playtesting on My Twitch too!