WORK IN PROGRESS…

Sky Landers

A sky-island tech-progression modpack for Minecraft 1.21.1 (NeoForge).

Strand yourself on a floating island, bootstrap from a single stone pickaxe to a steam-powered factory, design an airship to cross the void between islands, and end the journey by hunting the Ender Dragon from the deck of a flying fortress armed with naval-grade artillery.

The Premise

SkyLanders drops you onto a procedurally-generated archipelago of floating islands separated by vast gulfs of empty sky. There is no ground beneath you — only the island you stand on and the distant silhouettes of others on the horizon. Every resource is earned, every machine is built by hand, and every island is reached by a flying machine of your own design.

Progression is linear and deliberately gated. The pack threads you through eight tech "ages," each unlocking a new metal, a new tier of machinery, and a new reach across the sky. You can't skip ahead: the recipes that matter are locked behind the infrastructure of the age before, all enforced through custom KubeJS scripting rather than luck or grinding. By the time you can hurt the dragon, you will have climbed the entire tech tree — that's the point.

The World

Floating archipelago (Sky Archipelago) — huge islands (hundreds of blocks across) scattered far apart across a tall vertical column of sky. The nearest neighbour is a long crossing over open void, so an airship isn't a luxury — it's how you live.
Distant rendering (Voxy, custom Sodium 0.8.12 port) — far-off islands render as level-of-detail terrain, so the sky is full of destinations instead of empty fog.
Renewable by design — no infinite quarries. Metal comes from infinite, chunk-data ore veins worked with tiered drilling rigs; even building stone, water, and slime are bootstrapped from renewable inputs so a barren starting island is never a dead end.
Meteors & distant ores — rare metals live in bounded distance bands far from spawn and in ore-bearing meteors, giving you reasons to range out across the archipelago.

Core Systems

Processing Lines

Most materials need a complicated processing lines and not just simple furnace smelting, making you actually have to create a large factory both for infrastructure and for ore processing.

Renewable ore drilling

Instead of strip-mining, ore comes from infinite per-chunk veins (Create: Ore Excavation) worked with tiered drilling rigs — a custom copper drill, then the mod's iron, diamond, and netherite drills. Rigs run on fluid upkeep at a slow base rate, so ore is steady but never free, and a prospector radar helps you find veins.

Airships & contraptions

Travel is built on Create Aeronautics, Sable sub-levels, and Simulated — assemble a contraption, glue it together, and fly it between islands. Super glue, slime, and the deployer are all re-tiered early so contraption-building starts in the zinc age, when you actually need it.

The Final Battle

The capstone is a reimagined Ender Dragon fight built around Create Big Cannons, fought from a flying warship:

The dragon is immune to everything except CBC fire and soaks several times its normal health, so it takes a mass-produced battery of cannons — not a sword.
End Crystals can only be destroyed by big-cannon shells, forcing you to field heavy artillery, not just rapid-fire autocannons.
The whole arsenal is gated to the endgame: steel cannons, naphtha-cased propellant cartridges, sulfuric-acid explosive shells, and circuit-board fuzes. Reaching the dragon means you genuinely built the entire industrial chain — it's a "preparation for a final battle," and every machine type earns its place.

Built On

A Create-centric stack, heavily extended:

Create + Aeronautics, Big Cannons, TFMG (The Factory Must Grow), Rubberworks, Ore Excavation, Propulsion/Simulated, and more
Sable sub-level physics for airships
KubeJS (the entire age-gating, custom items, fluids, and recipe rework) + fluidjs for fluid interactions
FTB Quests for the guidebook
Sky Archipelago for the floating-island worldgen
Voxy (custom port) for distant LOD rendering
skylandersmeteors — a bespoke mod written for this pack (advanced blast furnace, meteor/ore systems, the dragon crystal gate, and worldgen tweaks)

SkyLanders Create Aeronautics