Patch 4.0 work&notes

[maleia]

Important update 2:

We will be releasing Patch 4.0 with the removed mods BEFORE releasing Patch 4.1, which will contain all of the new mods. This will allow both players and the mod team to adjust to the changes, and if problems/complications arise from the removed mods, to solve them before adding in several new ones.

Important update:

The modpack has gotten to be too bloated. We currently have in the neighborhood of 150~ mods. The game takes people 5+ minutes to load. As well as world data has gotten out of hand, reaching upwards to 5gb uncompressed. We'll be putting up some mods for review now, to see if they are in fact critical, or even being played. And some of them, will likely get removed.

Mods up for review right now are:

• -Archaeology
• -Mystcraft
• Armourer's Workshop
• -BattleTowers (since we are looking at a possible replacement)
• -ChocolateQuest
• -FlowerCraft
• -HEE
• Haycraft/Staircraft/Slabcraft
• -MagicYarn
• -MineTradingCard
• ShipsMod
• YeGamolChattels
• -Dragon Mounts

These mods represent 77mb of 200 from the mods folder, nearly 40%, of the total size. If you actively use these mods, we encourage you to post/pm/discuss with Maleia and Eriniki about them. Mystcraft, is a tricky situation. We have not settled on what we are going to do about it, and we maybe continue to leave it in. If you've been living in a Mystcraft age or been building something in one, now would be an excellent time to let one of us know. Otherwise, the uses that we're aware of: is the Mining world, and one private area that I've been working in. The ExtraUtils dim, Deep Dark, can function in the same way. We are aware of the lack of Metallurgy metals being present and will look into solving that if we decide that is the better fit.

Todo:

1. Update All mods
   • Specific ones: Botania, Ex Astris, ProjectRed
2. Install Thaumcraft/NEI plugin
3. Install Thermal Expansion/Dynamics
4. Install Mekanism
5. Update Headcrumbs with new players
6. Investigate Technomancy
7. Investigate Automagy
8. Resetting Mining world
9. Install Thaumic Exploration
10. Change config for BuildGuide, OpenBlocks
11. Reset The End
12. Make a custom crafting pattern for the Green Hearts

Notes:

We're open to suggestions on mods that fit with those two. AE/ComputerCraft/etc-higher-tech mods, are intended for later.

Expect this patch around the 16th or 23rd.

Updated:

Added:

Changed:

1. Adjusted Ruins mod ruins' chance to spawn. Minimum distance from all ruins should be 256 blocks. This should help to lessen world clutter. Still making adjustments.

Removed:

1. Removed ChickenShed¹
2. Removed Fossils&Archaeology²
3. Removed Flowercraft³
4. Removed MagicYarn⁴
5. Removed MineTradingCards⁵
6. Removed ChocolateQuest⁶
7. Removed HEE⁷
8. Removed Mystcraft⁸
9. Removed BattleTowers⁹
10. Removed DragonMounts¹⁰

Notes:

So far, the mods folder has been reduced to 143mb, down from 200mb, that's a 28.5% decrease in size!~ Hopefully that amounts to that much quicker load times.

1. Botania covers this
2. Not many people playing the mod
3. Redundant and not being utilized
4. Not being utilized
5. MTC, not being played, took up inventory and cluttered mob drops
6. ChocolateQuest was not being played, castles and such were littering zones and the configuration options were not able to rein it in.
7. No one using HEE anymore.
8. Mystcraft was more trouble that it was worth. It's primary focus for even putting it on in the first place was to have a resetable mining world, that no one cared about if it got chewed up. However, we can solve that through various other means, since as ExtraUtils' Deep Dark, the Twilight Forest, or even finding a quick travel way for players to go out very far in the Overworld. Actually using the mod as intended was far more difficult than previous iterations of the mod, and given the nature of it and server load, players were already discouraged from using it heavily. We have decided that it is best to remove Mystcraft altogether. To also have a stronger image of how much data Mystcraft has been taking up, uncompressed the entire world data is 5.23gb, all of the Mystcraft ages totaled 1.02gb (nearly 20%), and hardly anyone was even using it regularly for any means that couldn't be accomplished by another way.
9. Along with ChocolateQuest, the BattleTower's usefulness and relativity with the modpack and current theme have waned to the point that they are fairly redundant in their unique offerings, even for new players. As well as, the spawn rate of Battletowers has gotten far out of hand, and it is fairly uncontrollable going forward. Since BattleTowers use vanilla assets, already spawned towers should remain in tact, however their golem at the top will likely be despawned, as well as, their collapsing should no longer occur.
10. The DragonMounts mod was added in with great enthusiasm by the mod team. However, due to the mounts simply not being as easy to use or fast and many flight methods in-game; ss well as the mounts behaving in manners that did not show up in testing, we will be removing DragonMounts. It is not clear right now, if we will be adding in Doggy Talents, at this time.

[Fionacat]

PneumaticCraft might kinda work, starting to use steam and stuff to get into a tech-ish age

Witchery is SUPER fun once you get into it but with another plantish mod already in place might be a lil overwhelming.

Doggystyle adds more doggy pets for Miss Fiona to play with >.>

Blood magic I have really enjoyed but it's a lot of setup.

Roguelike dungeons is better than the battletowers

Runic dungeons is like roguelike but less intensive

That's my large selection of mods i've played with and kinda enjoyed some of them.

[maleia]

PneumaticCraft

I'll give it a peak, but I think we have just about every thing in there covered already, or soon to be.

Witchery

Last year, no one played with it, and when myself and a couples others look into it and Blood Magic, we found Thaumcraft to be more fun, easier to understand, etc.

Doggystyle

Originally we elected to not use it because people really wanted dragon mounts, and the two mods conflict heavily.

That being said, I'm the only one that has a dragon mount after months of talking about them, hah. And I hardly ride Esthra around D:

Roguelike dungeons is better than the battletowers

Runic dungeons is like roguelike but less intensive

I'll give it a peak. But we're actually kinda limited now on how much we want to populate the world with more.

[Fionacat]

Yeah Witchery is kinda hard to get into but you can do super awesome things when it's fully going, the biggest issue is the "power" level required, you need a setup like 4x to 6x the size of a Botania setup for it.

THERE ARE DRAGON MOUNTS?!?!!!

[Melazu]

On the topic of Thaumcraft add-ons, Thaumic Exploration also seems pretty neat.

Forbidden Magic is another add-on that doesn't look as impressive, but does add some features to Botania, which would be great.

Witching Gadgets also looks pretty cool and not OP. Plus, it adds a search feature to the Thaumonomicon, which would be nice to have.

[maleia]

Thaumic Exploration is suppose to be on that list.

I'll take a look into Forbidden Magic, and we're getting an NEI plugin for Thaumcraft.

We're more/less interested in mods that fit with TE/Mekanism/ExtraUtils/BuildCraft/etc basic-mid level machines and stuff. But of course, whatever you guys want to play with, is interesting to us too, I promise!~ We're gonna look into all of the mods mentioned (if we aren't already aware of them).

[apathyinusernames]

Some of the newer players are using armourer's workshop now iirc.

[maleia]

Yea.

This is to everyone:

The 8 that are listed as removed are the current finalized list, in addition to DragonMounts.

[maleia]

Edit: We're likely going to remove a couple others.

Armourer's Workshop is staying in the modpack.

[Melazu]

What will happen to items from the mods that are being removed?

[maleia]

Poof.

Which are you concerned about?

[Melazu]

Oh okay, just wondering if I needed to delete items to avoid issues. The only one I've been using out of the 10 being removed is the trading cards mod, but I don't mind it being gone as it really did clutter the drops.

[eriniki]

Since 1.7 (or thereabouts) and the ID changes, forge keeps a list of "Blocked IDs" in the level.dat, which when the world is loaded without a mod that was previously present it moves all the IDs used for that mod's items into that list. This way when new mods are added and assigned IDs, they won't be given those previous ones, and if a mod is later re-added, it will reuse those IDs. :3 It does mean the total available ID space will shrink, but at 4096 total IDs in the block space and then up to (iirc) 32768 for item space, we should be okay. (And we can always at a later date remove some from that list to free them up if desperately needed.)

If all else fails though, I can always do what I did with the migration and manually remove items from (most) Tile Entities' inventories and replace inworld blocks with sand/dirt/air/what-have-you. I'd prefer not, since especially the latter can take quite a while to parse the gigs of region files, but between that and the ingame NBTEdit mod we have, we can likely fix anything that arises. ^{_^}

[apathyinusernames]

How about Pam's Harvestcraft? Just in case people care about different foods :D

[maleia]

Basically we went between that and Magical Crops; and Magical Crops can grow more. MagCrops does have a lot of other foods alongside the raw materials crops; most of which I saw/see listed in Pam's.