Vampires Strike Back

(VSB) is a hardcore Roguelite modpack that aims to significantly alter Minecraft's core gameplay and progression, giving you the option to play as either an outcast human attempting to save the world, or as one of the last vampires aiming to dominate it.

Start with randomised loot, and earn more as you play from the large array of different Illagers you can find and kill to grow stronger, all with the ultimate goal of getting to the end before you run out of lives.

Significant changes to gameplay include:

Handcrafted Origins

Ravage the world as a vicious Vampire with dashes, flight and groundpounds; Save it as the brave Hunter with a powerful whip and fast reflexes; Or roam it aimlessly as a humble Wanderer. The choice is yours!

A Different Populace

Monsters are primarily limited to spawning underground; Meanwhile, Illagers dominate the surface, and are NOT your friends, no matter who you are. The more of them you slay, the stronger the troops that'll chase you too. Their structures are incredibly abundant in both frequency and populus, making them ripe for the ransacking.

Enabling you to do this is...

Stronger Strategy

Mobs now only notice you when you're within their line of sight. Additionally, you can backstab mobs for extra damage, making ambushes and planning ahead highly worthwhile. Shield Expansion also features, allowing for highly-rewarding parrying gameplay via Shields. Chose your targets wisely though, since you have a...

Truncated Inventory

You only get 9 slots of inventory space by default, and have to earn more by killing and earning Limitite to upgrade. Picking and choosing what to keep and what to craft into Scrap Metal for repairing other items is incredibly important! Similarly, you begin with a lower max Health value, so snagging Heart Crystals is vital.

Try to increase your health as quickly as possible, since...

Limited Lives

You only get 10 lives, and each time you die, you respawn in a new location to encourage exploration. Play carefully! Instead of dropping your items, they're retrieved by the Spectral Servant, whom you can buy items back from with Emeralds you obtained in your previous life. Obtain these Emeralds with...

Weapons O' Plenty

A bunch of new weapons and tweaks to existing ones via Jaam's Weaponry open the door to a ton of variety in combat. Swords can parry; Axes can be thrown; Shovels can chain-shove enemies - And Tridents enable air-combos. Get experimental with Charkrams, Katanas, Cleavers, Hammers, and more by looting them off of slain Illagers, alongside various trinkets that can give you special abilities!

Spells Galore

Additionally, Iron's Spells & Spellbooks and Summoner Scrolls feature too. Distract a group of mobs with a spawn of Summoned Bees, then set them ablaze with a Flamethrower spell! That's just the tip of the iceberg, too: Experiment with all mana of elements and combos to take your opponents out! ;D

Custom Content

Vampires Strike Back comes loaded with a ton of custom content, including but not limited to: Pack-exclusive reimaginings of the Grenadier and Shieldbearer from Minecells; Humanised redesigns of the Ghast and Blaze; Mechanical tweaks of familiar mobs such as Cataclysm's Prowler and Species' Bewearager, and even a custom-built tutorial dungeon for the Vampire by Calcyon!

Unique Shaders

Many hours were spent crafting a unique visual identity for the modpack through the thoroughly configured Complementary + Euphoria Shaders pack, enabled by default. If they're too intensive for your PC though, try the far more low-end friendly Mellow Shaders setup instead!

Highly Optimised

Clocking in at less than 200 mods, with strongly curated shaders and few content mods that would create major performance deficets, Vampires Strike Back should run smoothly across most setups with only 6GB of allocated RAM!

If you want to improve performance further, consider removing the following mods:

Oculus + Euphoria Patches (Shaders)
Wakes (Water ripple visuals)
Burnt Basic (Fire mechanics)
Fowl Play (Bird mobs)
GUI Clock (World timer)
Figura (Vampire player model)

Additionally, if you experience lag spikes, try using the command /spark profiler open and pull up a server profiler to identify the specific cause of your lag. Alternatively, use /sparkclient profiler start, then /sparkclient profiler open after some time to see sources of client-side lag. Please report any significant lag and crashes in the Discord server! Info below.

Why?

I made Vampires Strike Back to achieve a couple of goals:

1. Make something unique

The idea of a modpack where you play as the 'monster' has rattled around in my brain for ages now, and given monsters in Minecraft individually stand far worser odds than players, I wanted to try and translate that feeling into the gameplay of this pack by giving the Vampire numerous disadvantages that become incredibly satisfying to overcome as you get stronger over time. The human origin was added later to facilitate faction-style gameplay in multiplayer, in addition to giving more casual players an 'easy mode' of sorts to utilise if they find the Vampire too great a change of pace.

2. Show that mainstream doesn't have to be king

Vampires Strike Back does not include Quark, Supplementaries, Create, Farmer's Delight, Xaero's Maps, Waystones, Corpse, FTBQuests, and other very commonly used mods. This is intentional, and done as both a challenge to myself and as evidence to you to prove that you don't necessarily need all the biggest mods out there to make a modpack that's great!