This modpack was created to make the perfect long term community play environment for a group of family and friends, while giving all styles of players something fun to enjoy.

About

The main focus of this modpack is to foster community play and give every type of player something to do. Some of the games that inspired this modpack are World of Warcraft, The Legend of Zelda, Dark Souls, and Wurm. I wanted to create a game that requires work and effort, and is always challenging, but you and your friends will have a blast along the way as you build your cities, discover secrets, and level your characters. There are a few core design elements that the entire modpack was shaped around.

The first is that player travel should never be trivialized. There are only 3 ways to teleport in the game, one is on a 30 - 60 minute cooldown and can't be done during combat (homebound stones) and the other two are for you to discover, but also have limitations. This encourages players to invest in training / breeding a horse, 1 of which you can save and call to you from anywhere. There are also character movement abilities you unlock after leveling your acrobatics skills, and things like grappling hooks and deku leafs to help you move around. In the future there will be airplanes and rocket ships as well, but they will require many materials and have some limitations of their own. There will never be creative flight, and elytra like movement will be limited to special cases (a spell and a subclass).

The second is that the world should always feel dangerous. You will never be completely invincible, and unless you invest in a tank like playstyle you will have to be careful about where you go and what you do or you might not make it back. Once you level up and get higher level gear, the overworld may start to feel much safer, but if you want a challenge you can venture into the Twilight Forest or try your nerves in the revamped Nether or the End, where the mob difficulty has been scaled up.

The third and fourth are two sides of the same coin, resource gathering and resource processing. There are no quarry systems in the game, and no magic boxes that you feed energy into and they process all your materials for you instantly. If you want to mine on a larger scale you will need to design and build Create contraptions to help you, or train a miner in your minecolonies city and have him do it. There are also some benefits to mine yourself, like vein mining that can be augmented with gear and makes it much quicker to go off and do it yourself. When it comes to processing materials into others you will need to build the assembly lines in Create to do it for you, and some recipes have been made slightly more expensive so doing so with a group of people will be even faster. There is some ore and wood doubling, but currently just 2x. In the future there may be hard to build upgrades that offer 3x or 4x, but they will be balanced into the modpack and take a lot of work to get.

Community

The main point of this modpack is to create an environment that encourages playeres to work together and build a community, and increase interactions between multiple communities on bigger servers. Since travel is initially limited, the game is dangerous, and gathering resources isn't as easy as other modpacks, working together with players offers a ton of benefites. Some areas of the game will have difficult mobs and bosses, but players can specialize in different playstyles (tank, healer, damage, utility) and work together to survive. If you get downed you can have a friend get you back up, so always make sure to bring an adventuring buddy! There is a fully integrated shop and money system, so set up shop and make enough money to buy a chunk of land you can call your own. There are many new structures and locations with treasures and danger, take your close group and go see what's out there!

Character Progression

The core of character progression is built around Project MMO, where practically everything you do in the game develops your attributes (E.g. Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc) as well as skills (E.g. Mining, Marksmanship, Arcana, Acrobatics..). Raising any of these 6 attributes and many skills results in perks, like increased mining speed, more mana or mana regen, access to higher tier equipment and spells, or even new movement abilities thanks to Parcool.

There will also be ways to differentiate your playstyles. You can play as a tank and level your defense and constitution and use heavy gear to take more hits. You can play the quick but weaker archer or mage, or even a priest and heal other players. There's always the tried and true warrior, dual wielding or two handing weapons making sure you kill them before they kill you. Different gear will offer different bonuses, increasing or decreasing movement speed based on its weight and giving buffs to certain playstyles or stats based on the type of equipment it is. Weapon choice is also interesting as each weapon type, of which there are many new ones, has it's own unique bonus the others don't have, so choosing which to specialize in and which weapons to bring with you for different scenarios can be an interesting choice.

Adventure / Exploration

There are many added structures and mobs and currently 1 new dimension: Twilight Forest. Players must adventure through the Twilight Forest before they unlock the newly revamped Nether, where enemies will be much more dangerous than you remember and players will need to bring their best gear and friends to conquer. Unlock the End and then go see what has changed there. Many structures will not allow you to place or destroy blocks so you will need to solve their puzzles and challenges while fighting off baddies in order to get the treasures. In the future more dimensions will be integrated into the pack and scaled accordingly.

Technology

This modpack is based around using Create to solve most of your engineering problems. This encourages you to learn and build useful contraptions that are not perfectly efficient magic boxes that you just feed power into and they work. Tom's Simple Storage can be used earlier to handle your inventory needs. Redstone has been upgraded a bit to make it easier to make restone circuits as well. In future expansions things like AE2 and Ad Astra will be integrated into the pack, but somewhat nerfed and tailored so it doesn't trivialize the need to use create for many of your needs. Computercraft will also be added in a future expansion but will require a huge amount of materials to make and have some tweaks so it doesn't make everything else useless.

Future

This modpack has taken a lot of work, custom code, custom mods, and troubleshooting to get to where I consider a beta / release stage, and will be in heavy and active development for quite a while. Currently my plan is to keep beta testing and flush out the foundational version of the modpack with my community server and make balance and progression changes as necessary. Any bugs or crashes will be priority. In the next phase of the game I will focus on character progression, classes and further differentiating play styles with armor and equipment. Shortly after that I will be adding more end game content in the form of unique artifacts and weapons that you can only bind to 1 or 2 of at a time, and new dimensions that are integrated and scaled in difficulty to offer new challenges and secrets to discover. Then I will look at expanding with other mods like AE2, Ad Astra, and possibly some magic based tech mods like Botania. Thaumcraft 6 is of course an instant in if they ever finish it.

Synapticraft