Sword and Kettle

This modpack leans heavily into Create and the new Aeronautics mod, which lets you build vehicles or mobile bases from scratch. Around that, expect combat that feels satisfyingly good, class trees to shape your character, biome and structure mods that make the world worth exploring, and tons of cozy build options for the slow evening after work. The world should feel like an actual world, and so the pack intends to create a pleasing atmosphere, with overhauled animations, sounds, and UI.

Play as an explorer, a knight, a wizard, an inventor, or whatever else you feel like. The world is yours to shape.

Create and Automation

Create is at the heart of the pack, and with 70+ related mods, it goes deep. Almost any vanilla loop can become cog powered.

Aeronautics lets you build land vehicles and airships block by block, with real physics and proper crashes
The Factory Must Grow scales industry past cobble generators into refineries and full production lines
Big Cannons puts artillery in your hands for the times when a sword won't do
Integrated Farming, Mechanical Botany, Winery, Fluid, Optical, and a long list of smaller addons to fill in the gaps.

Satisfying combat

Better Combat gives weapons animated swing arcs and weight, so fights actually feel like fights
Combat Roll might just save you from that boss attack
Pufferfish's Skills + RPG Series (Wizards, Paladins, Druids, Berserkers, Rogues and more) lets you develop your skills as opposed to just grinding gear
Ender's Cataclysm and Bosses Rise bring proper boss fights
Dynamic Difficulty raises the stakes the further you wander from spawn
and more surprises hidden in YUNG's structures, Stellarity's End overhaul, and integrated structure mods.

Cozy Living

Between automation and combat, there's plenty of mods to make life slow down a little.

The Let's Do Series covers bakery, brewery, candlelight, pottery, camping, and beach days
Farmer's Delight and its many additions make for a great field day
Starcatcher overhauls fishing
Hot Bath and Hearths give you somewhere to wash off the day and warm up after
Beer, wine, mead, and herbal brews included
And yes, there's tameable and breedable hamsters (if that's your sort of thing)

A World Worth Exploring

Biomes O' Plenty, Nature's Spirit, Wetland Whimsy, and Mystic's Biomes push the world well past vanilla
ChoiceTheorem's Overhauled Village makes villages look like the people who live there actually built something
Naturalist sets deer in the meadows and butterflies along the rivers
YUNG's Structures replace the old dungeons, mineshafts, and fortresses with places worth poking around in
Spelunk deep enough and Goblin Traders may wander through with odd things to sell, but beware of tremors...

Atmosphere

Distant Horizons stretches the view so the world feels like a world
Fresh Animations overhauls how vanilla mobs look and behave
Sound Physics Remastered, Reactive Music & AmbientSounds
Field Guide tracks every mob and item you've come across
Overhauled HUD and a long pile of QoL fixes

Requirements

The pack is quite heavy and works best with ~12GB of RAM allocated. Less works, but if you drop below 8GB i've noticed it can crash when adding or reloading resource packs via the menu.

Distant Horizons and shaders are disabled by default, but included.

Work In Progress

The cohesion and the narrative thread tying everything together are still a WIP. At this point, the mods seem to work well together, and I'll get into custom integrations where they seem needed. Feedback is genuinely welcome, the pack gets better every time someone tells me what's missing or broken.

Multiplayer

You can get the NeoForge server files via the NeoForge website, MC 1.21.1, NeoForge 21.1.228. The pack automatically disables client-sided mods when it detects it's running on a server, so you can just copy the mods, config, and kubeJs folders over from the latest modpack version, boot the server and it'll work.

There's also a public server included in the server list that you're welcome to join. It's meant for casual play, with a custom climate setup (hot biomes in the south, cold up north) and a 15k world radius to keep things tidy.