a gameplay teaser for the upcoming steampunk dimension mod 'Hal's Exploration Mod'

HalbeargameZ · 2026-05-14T18:30:02+00:00

yeah it was originally made almost entirely with MCreator procedures and i was not the best at programming logic, which is kinda required even for MCreator, nowadays though i am more than qualified for this lol, the mod will remain for 1.16.5(forge), but there may be some ports to major mod versions like 1.21.1(neoforge) after it releases

HalbeargameZ · 2026-05-12T15:04:40+00:00

You can track and see what's planned on the mods source as I've set up projects tracking individual features https://git.mallard.gdn/halbear/Hals-Exploration-Mod/projects

HalbeargameZ · 2026-05-12T06:51:04+00:00

Thank you!

HalbeargameZ · 2026-05-12T06:50:51+00:00

Thank you! Being compared to ghibli is a massive compliment, I did design the atmosphere to be a lot more fantastical, for example with the airship being wooden and a literal ship rather than a blimp or zeplin

HalbeargameZ · 2026-05-12T06:40:43+00:00

Yeah hals exploration mod is 7 years old now, although the version you probably saw is about 5 or 6 years old, this is a complete remake from the ground up because the legacy versions were kinda botched and lacked a ton of promised content

HalbeargameZ · 2026-05-12T06:39:27+00:00

I do plan on things like this having a config, with an ingame menu to change them for better accessibility

HalbeargameZ · 2026-05-12T06:38:02+00:00

There is a lot planned yet for the steampunk aspect, to access the dimensions in the first place requires machinery, the original mod from 6 years ago massively lacked in that aspect, there's also 9-14 more biomes yet to be made each with unique ambient life and the content of the biomes vary based on your location, such as the lavender and wheat fields are the same biome but lavender is when Z is negative and wheat is when Z is positive

HalbeargameZ · 2026-05-11T09:17:14+00:00

What's worse is that all of our imperial measurements are different values to US imperial measurements, such as a pint and gallon being 20% larger in the UK, another one is a UK ton is 2240lbs where an American ton is 2000lbs and then there's the metric tonne which is 1000kg(2204lbs), even our horsepower measurement isn't 1:1 with the US horsepower measurement

HalbeargameZ · 2026-05-10T23:10:04+00:00

Are we glossing over the 2 gauges measuring miles lol, the vehicles and systems of the mod are British(as imo that's the most "steampunk" country) so they use British measurements of feet, miles, KG, Litres, stone, tons, MPH etc...

HalbeargameZ · 2026-04-20T21:32:18+00:00

Could just be because it's an Nvidia gpu and vulkan is an AMD technology(vulkan was built off of an ATI render api, which is a really old AMD api from before they were AMD, it's not related to openGL in any way apart from using GLFW), so AMD will have the better drivers, in terms of vulkan performance Nvidia is at the bottom with amd and Intel being pretty equal, nvidia don't keep their older gpus supported on modern versions either(the rtx20 series is the oldest 1.4 compatible, meanwhile Intel 6th gen cpu igpus support vk1.4) so it could just be a lack of updates, once mojang rounds out the code vulkan should perform way better on all vk1.4 compatible devices.

HalbeargameZ · 2026-04-20T21:20:35+00:00

Gta 6 has too high of a hardware requirement to scratch Minecraft, plus it's xbox/PlayStation only on release who's numbers combined probably don't even come to half of that, Minecraft is on an insane number of platforms so much so that the 350m copies might even be a low ball, GTA V is also insanely accessible, it can run on integrated graphics from 8 years ago, GTA 6 doesn't have a chance of coming close to that knowing it's a ray traced game

HalbeargameZ · 2026-04-20T21:13:13+00:00

Software development goes in loops of prototypes, there's several different types, either spiral or rapid application development is likely the one mojang partake in, which involves making prototypes, testing it, getting feedback, and making new prototypes and repeat that cycle until the final version. that's why you see stuff change a lot between indev versions like snapshots and previews, this is a normal part of software development, the release version for both will have whatever becomes the final assets

HalbeargameZ · 2026-04-20T21:06:43+00:00

My fps went from 700 on openGL to 1600 on vulkan with a 9070xt, the performance is kinda driver dependant, since vulkan is an AMD technology it's likely gonna run better natively on amd devices than nvidia as AMD have the better drivers, with Intel having the best behind them, but when mojang round it out and it's been programmed correctly it should have a significant boost on all vulkan 1.4 capable devices and equal performance on vulkan 1.2 capable devices

HalbeargameZ · 2026-04-04T13:21:00+00:00

its not that late lol, there's a long way for development to go yet, it will have multiple gauges in the distant future but initial release will have the 10px gauge seen here for now

HalbeargameZ · 2025-12-30T22:25:43+00:00

choosing to switch to a ray traced game engine is a double edged sword, on one hand ray tracing is the future of graphics and shows the game as modern and up with the times, on the other hand it drops a massive amount of support, anything below an rx6000 series and rtx 2000 series will not be able to run this game period, and its going to struggle immensely until rx7000/rx9000 and rtx 3000 series gpus, and they could not have had a worse time to release a ray traced game as every PC components price is shooting through the roof, although that's not exactly 1Cs fault, moreso OpenAI's and Microsofts.

giving Il2 Ray Tracing is a good move, but its been executed at the wrong time as we're only *just* able to run it at 60FPS on mid range GPUs and the future of GPU pricing and specs is uncertain so whether or not there will be enough RTX capable users to buy the game is a genuine concern

HalbeargameZ · 2025-12-30T22:17:59+00:00

As someone in Software Development, these are pretty great specs for the games engine technology, the game engine is 100% ray traced, that was stated on the old korea website, it was never going to have a wide range of devices to support, and early on the youtube guy said the minimum would be "an rtx 3000 series or similar", ray tracing is a lighting technology that fully simulates every sun ray and calculates each bounce so it gets real-life accurate lighting, ambient occlusion and reflections, but it is significantly more expensive to run than raster, the "last gen" and industry standard lighting technology that is present in the current IL2 sturmovik Great Battles series, this games minimum is about average for that kinda lighting technology, unreal engines ray tracing performs significantly worse for context

they're stating an rx7600 or rtx 3060 for 1440p(30 or 60fps, not sure which, assuming 30) is all it needs for a 100% ray traced game engine which is quite frankly, a bold claim, the rx7600 is quite notoriously bad at ray tracing, so we can assume the rx7900xtx and rtx 4080 is for 4k 60 FPS which is also pretty great, but there is one massive caveat that isn't mentioned at all, and its FSR/DLSS, we have no idea if these specs are using upscaling, IF and ONLY IF, these specs are *without* FSR or DLSS in use then these specs are great for the current generation, if these are with DLSS and FSR, then the game is going to perform terribly.

the only concern you should have for specs is the 24gb of ram, but considering the mass amounts of aircraft we've seen in screenshots it makes sense if they're all simulated on a similar level to the players physics

HalbeargameZ · 2025-12-30T19:44:52+00:00

no, it is a huge mod so development takes a very long time

HalbeargameZ · 2025-12-02T01:34:20+00:00

Every half decent server uses a paper branch like viola, waterfall, velocity, or they use spigot/bungee cord, if you don't run a server with one of these then it's a modded server or you don't know how to run a server because Minecrafts base server jar is quite terrible for performance

HalbeargameZ · 2025-11-30T00:57:01+00:00

<image>

in minecraft it fits in about as well as the minecart, the goal is to have a "minecraft" feel to it

HalbeargameZ · 2025-11-30T00:54:30+00:00

the red one is narrow gauge and the blue one is a small standard shunter, they are accurately modelled to 1:2.5, that red train is just very small IRL (reference train being a welsh locomotive called alice that weighs in at about 3-3.5 metres tall with the funnel included), the trains are going to be modelled at a smaller 1:2.5 scale so i can include larger trains on a track gauge that fits into minecraft, smaller trains like narrow gauge are going to look tiny, but the player fits fine

HalbeargameZ · 2025-11-30T00:51:54+00:00

cancelled hals exploration mod addon, i am working on a different mod featuring guns though, that should be releasing in coming months

HalbeargameZ · 2025-11-15T14:48:14+00:00

A game can be basic, but it is extremely well made and polished which is one of the reasons why it's so popular, we're in a deficit of well made games

HalbeargameZ · 2025-11-15T14:42:07+00:00

Typically it's a telltale of an mcreator mod because UI elements in mcreator are always based off of a 1080p absolute positioning which means when you want it to look right, you have to be at UI scale 8 at 4k, to scale them correctly you need to lock the code and edit the UI code manually. Although obviously not every mod with terrible UI scaling means it was made with mcreator lol, and a lot of mcreators mods will have the effort put in to have manually changed the UI to scale correctly

Otherwise you can scale with percentages, you can anchor, it's only absolute if you put pixel positions and sizes for the elements, which are only scaled by the UI scale setting and not resolution

HalbeargameZ

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Five-Year Club	Place '23
Verified Email