dizzysoul
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dizzysoul last won the day on June 17 2014
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Nefzen reacted to a post in a topic: 【Hexplore-It Modpack 】〖TechnicSolder〗Creates a beautiful and DANGEROUS world that begs to be explored!!! (。◕‿◕。)
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My server currently runs Chestshop, Citizens, Clearlag, Essentials, Factions, Vault, WorldEdit and WorldGuard. You might also want to use Anti-Cheat plugins for a public server, and PermissonsEx if you have access to a MySQL instance. I would also highly recommend you set up a Multiworld plugin so that you can have separate adventure worlds with routine resets, otherwise they get "used up" very quickly.
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Okay so there's a couple of phantom keybinds that don't show up in the config files and don't explain which mod they're coming from and I'd like to reclaim those valuable keys. For example when I press P, I get a message about switching between classic or JPS pathing. Another pair are the F7 and F9 keys which loads a grid-like overlay onto the word, without any explanation as to what or why. What mod does these functions belong to? Can I disable them? Edit: So F7 and F9 are overlay options from the NEI mod. I still can't figure out for the life of me what mod is binging to the P key with that JPS pathing message.
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I'm having trouble installing liteloader into the modpack.jar from Technic. I have edited the version.json properly and added it to the modpack.jar, but it fails to download. I've exhausted searching for a solution through google. Is there a special procedure for installing liteloader properly into the modpack.jar? Never mind, just figured it out. All of the instructions on liteloader's main site and numerous other threads I found are all wrong. The latest Forge under 1.7.2 can simply run the extracted liteloader .jar file from the mods folder. No chain-loading or messing around with verson.json required.
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Maybe it is that simple, I'm not too familiar with those tools and I don't think most people are. If there's an in-game way to build things then that is what I'm most familiar with. It's fun and easy to build things in creative mode and much less intimidating than using an editor program. Ruins does support custom chest inventories and hooking them into existing mine craft loot tables though. I would also check out FatherToast. He has made some mods that allow you to customize the existing loot tables for mobs and chests. I think Hexplore-It already uses his Deadly Worlds mod. For controlling loot tables in 1.7.2, I found this mod.
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You can add templates, but I think it's a more complex process that requires a world editor. Other dungeon mods generate the structures using code only. But with Ruins 1.7.2, you can literally just build a structure in game, then use simple commands to instantly convent it into a template that's fully configurable using folders and config files. Using existing in-game tools like red stone or mob spawners, and maybe some extra mods like command blocks or custom chest loot, you can create some pretty elaborate dungeon experiences in a much simpler manner. I'm so intrigued by the possibilities, that I went through the various mods and tracked down 1.7.2 versions of nearly all of them. Some minor ones are abandoned but have suitable replacements, and others are close to a 1.7.2 release already. If you're interested, I can host it as a pack for private download. So far 1.7.2 seems to be *much* friendlier with handling multiple mods and possible ID conflicts. Of all the 1.7.2 replacement mods I downloaded, only Highlands had conflict issues and that's because it's a very early alpha. If you want, I can bundle it into a private mod pack and give you the link.
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I found a fix to add TreeCapacitor support to Highlands generated trees by using the fix provided here. Also, I would recommend watching this video on how to create your own Ruins template files to be generated in the world. This new feature is for 1.7 version of minecraft, but I'm going to try and backport ruins files to 1.6.4 and see if they still work. Because if they do, then this is HUGE. This means you can create your own dungeons easily and add them to the world. You could probably use this mod with another one to control loot drops in chests! Then you could create your own battle tower, with your own encounters and your own loot tables! My hopes are to craft an experience for me and my friends that is always challenging, but never pushes too far into becoming tedious or punishing. Rust is not a challenge, it's there to grief you for no reason. Not even unbreaking really counters it. Mobs that stack poison and fiery on you to ridiculous levels mean you have to do silly and tedious things to kill them, to the point it's better to ignore those mobs entirely (until you get enchanted gear, then you become god). What is the challenge in fighting a Blaze with Ender modifier? It's not worth the frustration. On the other hand, I set unique mobs like jabberwockies and battle-tower golems to always spawn infernal. I'm not a big fan of skype so I only use it when I have to. I can link you to my private server and pack so you can see some of the extra mods in action. The next mod I'm testing is MoCreatures! Ruins cannot be back-ported between versions. Sadface. :-(
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I have been playing this modpack extensively with friends and have added a lot of different changes. These are the changes that I play-tested with and definitely recommend: Added ArsMagika 2. A very extensive and well made modpack that introduces full-featured magic mechanics, becoming different mage classes, etc. outside changing the item IDs. Stable, no problems whatsoever. Highly recommended. Added Animated Player (Client only). more detailed model and animation for players. Better immersion, no performance loss. Added AnimationAPI. Requirement for a few mods. Works with existing modpacks and a few new ones to improve animations for players and creatures. No problems. Added Aquaculture. Simple mod that adds more depth to fishing. No problems. Added Archimedes Ships. This mod adds the ability to create your own sea and airships. Has a bit of an initial learning curve on the few quirks with saving/building ship states, and I have only come across a lag glitch once. I really enjoy this mod. Added Mount & Blade Battlegear. Of all the mods to include in your pack, it should be this one. Adds desperately needed shield mechanics, spears, quivers, different arrow types (player and mob), weapon switching (essential against things like sticky) and much more. Greatly inproves combat in the game. Runs with zero issues. Added Better Sprinting. Double-tapping to sprint in a PC game is beyond ridiculous. This mod lets you bind sprint to a proper key, with additional control options. Also allows you to sprint in all directions, improving combat. Runs with zero issues. A must-have. Added Better Villages. This mod is supposed to improve the village generation, and so far in my testing it does look much better. Villages still spawn horribly on hills or mountains, so I've removed those biomes for village generation. Added Dynamic Lights (Client only). It looks really cool to explore a dark forest or cave while holding the torch for light. Great immersion booster. No problems or performance hit. Added HarkenScythe. Big mod that was part of the Hexxit pack. Adds vampiric and necromancer game play. Haven't tested out the features yet, but so far it runs without issues. Added Mutant Creatures. Introduces random mini-boss versions of all the vanilla mobs. The mechanics are very well done. Requires AnimatedAPI to function. No problems so far. Added WeatherMod and dependencies. This mod is very, very cool. Adds highly improved wind and weather effects, waves on the water (awesome!), and includes a devastating tornado. By default, the tornado is too strong and grief-like, so I would configure it to only pick up dirt and loose blocks, or none at all. Otherwise it runs without any problems, and adds a lot of immersion to the game. Added Zombie Awareness. This mod improves the zombies to act more zombie-like by being attracted to lights and noise (and blood)! Other enemies will also become more curious to lights and sounds. Roaming mobs will naturally form into packs and go hunting. Very cool mod. Runs without issues. Removed BetterFurnaces. This mod offers duplicate functionality to Metallurgy, and the later upgrades are incredibly overpowered . Metallurgy already has a more balanced take on furnace upgrades. I suggest removing this mod. Removed Chococraft. The chocobos have the same problems since hexxit and before, with constantly desync and rubber-banding issues while riding. Gysal Greens spawn far too often, and the saddles are too easy to craft, making horses irrelevant. Some people might still enjoy this mod for the easy mounts and breeding system, but I decided to remove it. Removed Rust, Sapper, and Wither from InfernalMobs. Those modifiers were always too griefy in hexxit and there's no difference here. Disabled infernal status on certain mobs (silverfish, blaze, cinder) that made fights too tedious or frustrating. I also drastically lowered the ridiculous health multipliers. Infernal mobs should take slightly longer to kill but at much greater difficulty. Too much health causes fights to become incredibly tedious and harmful to fun game play. (400 HP Cyclops with regeneration/ender/sticky, for example). If there's a way to reduce poison and burning duration, I'd recommend that as well. Removed MagicalCrops/magicalExperience. Doesn't even work. Seed generation is broken. I read the mod description and it seems really overpowered anyway. Takes the mining out of minecraft. Removed PetBat. That damn book. Removed Voxelmap. Way too much cheating. Has no good configurations for disabling the wallhacks on a server. Waypoint incompatible with mapmaker. Honestly, remove this mod and use the minimap built-in to mapmaker. It works much better to use one mod for all the mapping and waypoint functions, and mapmaker shares all the necessary features. Lowered spawnrate on battletowers, Floating Ruins, and DungeonMod. For an adventure game, there's not much reason to venture out with everything at your doorstep. Dwarf villages should be disabled entirely for being nothing but a diamond loot pinata. Also the glass domes in the ocean should be disabled, because... they don't seem to do anything but look weird. Drastically lowered spawn rate on inferno mobs in Lycanite's Mobs. This includes the Cinder and Lobber. The spawn rate on these mobs were way out of control. Changed Doggy Talents pet to never die or use hunger. These changes at least make the pet worth using. Reduced ambient audio levels to 0.6 for MATMOS. They were set way too loud. I couldn't even hear people on skype and there's no specific volume slider. They might even need to be set lower. Another thing I would recommend is disabling some of the duplicate items in the game. One part of the game that's heavily saturated is plants and crops. There's too many duplicate plants with differing recipes and mechanics and it gets unnecessarily confusing. I'll be doing this on my own version of the mod pack and I'll post any changes that I recommend. Edit: Here are some changes I'll be making to my own version and what I would recommend: Disabled ore generation in Chisel and Artifice, since this is already handled by GeoStrata. Disabled coins, sickles and steel recipe in Artifice, since these items are better handled by Tinkers and Metallurgy. Removed BetterFurnaces mod since it added a lot of redundant (and overpowered) content over Metallurgy. Removed Vanity Blocks mod since it added a lot of redundant content with not much benefit. Removed duplicate food items from Natura and Plant Mega pack that conflicted with Harvestcraft. Also removed Nether Furnace from Natura, which conflicts with Metallurgy. Disabled vanilla recipe for forming metal blocks. Crafting metal blocks now requires the smeltery, making it more relevant in vanilla gameplay. Edit 2: So apparently the mod Plant Mega Pack uses hundreds of block IDs in multiple ranges that conflict with multiple mods. For some reason, this does not cause the game to crash (but I have noticed naming conflicts) until I made some innocent changes to the config file. Now the ID conflicts are a show stopper. Since this is not good, I went ahead and renamed ALL the item IDs in Plant Mega Pack to ranges that are currently unused. To save yourself the time, you can download the updated config file here.
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I have not had any crash issues using the mod so far, even with the mouse scrolling. The devs for Mount & Blade are active and have joined forces with the dev fro Asgard shield, meaning that Mount & Blade might be the only mod source for proper shield mechanics for a long time. One thing I have disabled in Mount & Blade is their custom arrows and quivers, because I'm using Better Archery for that purpose. The new mods that I am trying are Archimede's Ships, Aquaculture, and Harken Scythe. I like the added depth to fishing with Aquaculture, and it seems to work well with no issues. I haven't started building ships or blood harvesting yet, but so far the latter mods appear to be working. Harken Scythe was actually part of the original Hexxit pack, and someone paid $150 to have it updated to 1.6.4. So nice of that guy! I removed Dynamic Sword Skills, because much as I love the new combat in that mod, it's locked behind something called "Z-Targeting" which is clunky and very frustrating to use. I made a request with the developer to allow people to disable that part of the mod, and I hope he decides to add that functionality, because the rest of the mod is really great. I also like the idea of having some sort of companion and I'll do some research on what other pet mods might be out there. My biggest problem with Doggy Talents is the food upkeep. Having to deal with my own hunger is a chore already, but the damn dog must spawn with a tapeworm because food goes right through him. I could deal with the buggy pathing and poor companion AI if it weren't so expensive to do so. It seems drastic to turn off the hunger mechanic completely for pets but that might be the best solution. Feeding your pet should be an optional benefit, not a mandatory punishment. Edit: I also want to mention that Ars Magika 2 will throw an ID error for the new blocks it introduces, but not for the new items. The mod needs a new ID range specified for all the items to be introduced properly. Currently I'm using the starting range 2585 for blocks and 25000 for items. Edit 2: I have been testing Archimedes ships and everything seems to work just fine. There are some building guidelines however, and the "Pirate Ship" dungeons do not follow them so they require some in-game modifications before becoming sea worthy. I don't know why pirates keep fire monsters inside their ship, but it sure makes it difficult to commandeer a vessel without burning it down. :-) Edit 3: I'm starting to get lag issues with all the mods I'm adding. In the interest of science I'm picking apart the server logs to see where the lag is coming from. So far, it looks like a lot of errors are coming from some of the other mods in the pack. Battletowers, Color Portals, and a couple others might be causing chunk corruption which is spamming the server console with lot's of errors. I'm going to keep working on this to see if I can narrow down exactly where the extra lag is coming from. Edit 4: I did a fresh re install of the modpack and server, and I'm still seeing a lot of errors in the console. It's mainly Battletowers being unable to access its own generated text files, and small amounts of world-gen corruption. The corruption is only with small decorative terrain features spawning in random places, but it happens very frequently. My tick rate latency bounces all over the place. I don't remember it being this bad, so there might be something wrong on my end. Edit 5: The lag is server side only and I have no issues in single player. I was able to severely reduce the lag, server load, and tick rate latency while increasing performance and multi-core utilization by running the server with these settings (in launch.bat): mode con cols=120 lines=32766 java -server -Xincgc -Xmx2048M -Xms1024M -Xmn512M -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:NewRatio=2 -XX:CMSFullGCsBeforeCompaction=1 -XX:SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB=2048 -XX:+CMSParallelRemarkEnabled -XX:+UseParNewGC -XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy -XX:+DisableExplicitGC -Xnoclassgc -oss4M -ss4M -XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods -XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=90 -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:UseSSE=4 -XX:+UseCMSCompactAtFullCollection -XX:ParallelGCThreads=4 -XX:+AggressiveOpts -cp "forge-1.6.4-9.11.1.965.jar" -jar "forge-1.6.4-9.11.1.965.jar" This pretty much solved all my lag problems and the server runs silky smooth. Running "mode con cols=120 lines=32766" for debugging is also amazing. Edit 6: While the lag has been greatly reduced, some errors are still in the console and probably still causing unforeseen problems. For example: 2014-05-23 02:55:28 [INFO] [LegendaryBeasts] Attempting to load data from directory C:UsersDizzysoulAppDataRoaming.tech nicmodpackshexplore-it_server.worldbeastData This mod is defining the full system path while still inserting . for a working path. This seems like a bug that could cause the mod to not work properly. 2014-05-23 03:45:40 [INFO] [Minecraft-Server] Colourful Portals - Error while loading the colourful portals list. The actual error is much bigger, but basically it says Colorful Portal is having trouble loading one of its config files. It doesn't say where or how, but I'm guessing it's located in the world folder. 2014-05-23 02:54:27 [WARNING] [ForgeModLoader] [Uncrafter] Found multiple recipes with the same output! ItemID: 21264, Metadata: 6 This warning is spammed for hundreds of items. It might be a false alarm, since uncrafting different objects would break down into the same base materials. However when I checked over the item IDs it was referring to, it pointed to all sorts of stuff that doesn't seem like base materials. I don't know, but probably not a big deal. 2014-05-23 03:12:44 [SEVERE] [Minecraft-Server] Wrong location! EntityItem['item.tile.rail'/21441, l='world', x=511.91, y=15.61, z=339.64] These errors seem like corruption in the chunk generation, and they reference far-away chunks that shouldn't even be generated. I've investigated a few of these and it's always a lone stalagmite underwater or some other small decoration set in the wrong place. Small errors in the generation, but they happen frequently and in unloaded chunks for some reason. 2014-05-23 02:54:24 [INFO] [STDOUT] DRAGONAPI: magicalcrops field not found! seeddropchance 2014-05-23 02:54:24 [INFO] [STDERR] java.lang.NoSuchFieldException: seeddropchance I haven't tried out magical crops, but I think seeds being unable to drop is a pretty big deal. 2014-05-23 03:15:09 [INFO] [GraveStone] Create entity.mca.EntityVillagerAdult.name's grave at 199x61x-335 Not a bug, but these gravestones are being spammed an awful lot in the console. I don't know how much overhead is added by each gravestone, but hopefully it doesn't gunk up the server. Maybe they despawn after a certain threshold? Edit 7: I have since added and tested a few new mods. I think Mutant Creatures and Animated Player offer some great additions, while also using the same AnimationAPI. that ties into Lycanites mobs and other mods. The Better Sprinting mod allows me to use standard FPS movement controls, which uses shift to run and control to crouch. No more of that double-tap garbage. I removed the VoxelMap mod because it has a lot of ridiculous features that are borderline cheating in survival/pvp and impossible to configure through the server. I'm using Rei Minimap instead, which is better configured for survival mode and includes config files for disabling unhealthy features. The creator is also still actively developing the mod. I added BetterVillages to help improve the (hilariously) bad village generation, and they now look quite impressive. Their road engineers are still defeated by mountains, so I removed those specific biomes from generation. NPCs also still mosh together and look silly, but now they can do it in nice houses and on working roads. I cut the spawn rate for a lot of dungeons in half, because they were collectively spawning way too often and cluttering the world. It's a short adventure when over a dozen dungeons are just outside your front porch. The beaches were a clusterfuck of pirate ships, floating islands and mermaid hotels. I also drastically cut the spawn rate of Cinders and Lobbers. Any kind of small fire was like opening the gateway to hell. A small patch of lava was a guaranteed Lobber pool party. Pretty crazy stuff. The InfernalMobs mod is also still as unbalanced and unforgiving as it was in hexxit (although I haven't come across the Rust modifier yet.. thank god). I'd like to tackle that balancing nightmare some day. The chocobos seem to have the same desync and chunk loading issues that drove me crazy in hexxit. I love chocobos, but not so much flying off into an empty void every 5 seconds and rubber-banding back. I'm tired of also starving to death in a field of Gysal Greens. They look like freaking carrots, why can't I eat them!?
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Munaus reacted to a post in a topic: 【Hexplore-It Modpack 】〖TechnicSolder〗Creates a beautiful and DANGEROUS world that begs to be explored!!! (。◕‿◕。)
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Okay so I have been experimenting with adding and removing mods from this pack here are my results: I removed the doggy talents and pet bat mods. A lot of the functionality of the pets didn't work very well. The dogs were constantly getting stuck, going hungry, or generally inactive during combat. A lot of the commands and talents just didn't work. I didn't try the pet bats specifically, but was tired of seeing that damn book in my inventory all the time. I added Ars Magika 2, Better Archery, Dynamic Sword Skills, and Mine & Blade: Battlegear 2. After changing a couple IDs to avoid conflicts, everything seems to work together. I'm looking for more mods to adds, and one source of inspiration is the Hexical Future modpack, which also aims to update the Hexxit experience to 1.6.4. I'll continue trying out more mods to see if they are compatible. having a lot of fun already! I came across one while testing out some combat mods. Needless to say, they did not enjoy my visit. The babies were very fast runners.
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Just an update: I used your advice on stopping/starting the world after generation and things are more stable now. Me and my friend were able to play for an hour or so, with only 1 server crash. I have been able to play by myself for a long time without any crashes. It also seems I was able to disable vanilla villages, but the leave everything else intact. Other things life dwarf villages and Millenare mod still work fine. I have seen a few Farlander houses as well.
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I downloaded the MCPC+ 1.04 zip file listed on your mod page and started a brand new server with 4-6GB available. However, I did not stop and restart the server before joining it, so maybe that was the issue! I will try making that change and see if it persists. From what I can tell, there are two different types of villages generated by two separate programs. One village is (probably) generated by vanilla minecraft and has nothing but problems with handling different terrain and other objects. Some mods try to interact with these villages (poorly), others ignore them completely. NPCs either swarm to one specific area and cause lag (or crashing), or wander with no purpose. There are two separate villager trading UIs mixed together and one of them is broken. A lot of features don't work and the loot tables are hilariously unbalanced sometimes (four diamond swords in 5 minutes!). It's just a total mess. The second type of village is simply amazing. The entire village spawns correctly, with proper roads connecting the various buildings together. Each building has a purpose. The crops and gardens are varied and well placed. NPCs actually go around to gather resources and expand their village. Different villages have relations with each other and either trade or fight. You can build relations with the villagers and interact with an extensive relations and trade UI. Some villagers even offer quests! Village chests are locked to their owners and defended by proper Militia. The villagers have proper day/night cycles. Villagers even get married, have kids and build new houses. It's incredible. The second type of village is so impressive on it's own, I'd think about getting rid of the first type completely. In fact I think I have done it before in hexxit through a config file somewhere. Edit2: The included VillageMods config file seems to allow disabling vanilla minecraft villages entirely. The mod Millenaire creates the second types of villages. I'm going to disable the vanilla ones and see what happens.
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I was trying to play the 1.04 update with a friend right now, using the MCPC+ server. The server crashes after a few minutes of light playing. One of the crashes was so bad, I had to delete the world and start a new one. Here is a copy of my server log file. Another thing I noticed is that village generation seems to ignore objects generated from other mods, causing them to become deformed. Villages would spawn over battle towers or large trees, on mountains terrain that breaks roads and blocks doors, or sometimes in the middle of the ocean. The new intro and title screens look great! Everything looks more polished. I like all the new sounds and music. Edit: The game also crashes in single player after a few minutes of playing. I'm not sure where to find a log file for single player crashes.
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Hello and thank you for putting together this mod! I was a big fan of Hexxit when it first came out. I liked how all the new content created a big sense of adventure mixed with survival. It filled a nice in adventure games that has been severely lacking for the past few years, and I think with enough development that Hexxit could have become more popular than Terraria, Starbound, or even Minecraft itself. Having only played your mod for a little bit, I can already see some major improvements. Biomes and terrain features blend together more naturally, enemies and dungeons are more varied and interesting, and resource distribution has greatly improved! There's one thing that still bothers me, and it's that the world seems a little too densely packed with content. It's not as bad as Hexxit having back-to-back battle towers or a sea of identical pirate ships, but it's hard to appreciate and digest so much content at once. I think a more conservative balance of content generation world have a lot of benefits on gameplay and overall make the worlds more interesting to explore! The world would have a grander sense of scale with more distance between points of interest. Adventuring becomes a more engaging commitment with greater feeling of accomplishment. It creates more emphasis on things like preparation, rationing supplies, and methods of travel the further you are from home. Setting up shelter in camps, houses and other ruins becomes more significant and interesting. The breadth of content is digested at more reasonable pace, extending the longevity of the game. However my biggest gripe with the mods in Hexxit was the lack of balance on any of the loot tables, monsters, dungeons, chests, items or spells. When your first spawn is next to a village full of free diamond gear, and raiding a nearby battle tower guarded by basic creatures rewards you endgame mats and a rift sword.. it undermines any meaningful sense of character progression. One of the few examples of good balance was the forge mod. If you followed through the deeper methods of crafting, you would be rewarded with increasingly useful tools. But the power of rare tools did't detract from the relevance of common ones. Even though you could make a molten ardite pickaxe with silk modifiers, an iron pickaxe was still more economically practical for common tasks. Everything had its place. I think balance is a very important thing. It's what prevents half of your game's content from being alienated while the other half gets burned through too quickly. Hexxit never really attempted to balance the mods that it included, and it turned what could have been a deep and immersive experience into a novelty modpack. I hope you find some way to balance the mods in your pack, because I think the underlying experience of minecraft is much more powerful than games like Terraria, and deserve to be more successful. Good luck to your modpack and thank you for all the work you have done!
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I've been on a lot of the more popular servers (that have between 20-50 average active users at any given time) and these are the five major problems they seem to have: The game is way too easy. It's very easy to reach endgame quickly and become unkillable in any dungeon. Adventuring becomes trivial and boring. The ore distribution is heavily inflated. Diamond is extremely common, making any lesser equipment type completely irrelevant. (this also makes the game way too easy) The loot tables are heavily inflated. Farming dungeons (which is very easy with diamond armor) will give you everything you want/need for little effort. There's limited economic growth for trade, because farming endgame materials will also give you huge supplies of lesser materials. As time goes on, the map gets 'used up' by players looting dungeons and gathering materials. This pushes newer players to venture further and further out to find pristine land, reducing interaction between players in the world because the playerbase is so heavily dispersed. (and you can abuse /warp commands to get around) The servers tend to crash a lot. I don't know exactly why, but it's a degradation of performance over time, so it might be memory leaks or too many entities. Some servers use a 'garbage collection' plugin to remove items sitting on the ground every so often, and other optimizations. Some of the issues with ore distribution and loot tables can be fixed by editing the config files. The different dungeon mods have configurable loot tables, and the cofh/tinker's config files allow you basic adjustment of ore distribution. Other balance issues are harder to fix (Giant swords make shields irrelevant, Steel makes Alumite irrelevant, Luck mods make exp gain lightning fast, etc). In terms of difficulty, I would highly recommend running the server on hard mode and at least changing the ore distribution so diamond is more rare, and copper/tin is much more common. The rarity of different material types should be balanced based on their strength, so that all materials have a usefulness, and there's a steady progression in gear. I would also highly recommend at least removing drops of craftable items in chests in place of their materials (don't drop pre-made ender giant swords and livingmetal bars, otherwise what's the point in crafting them??) Another way of increasing difficulty is adding the Mo'Creatures mod (which adds some pretty difficult/cool new creatures), however your players would be required to install the mod as well. In terms of the world being 'used up' over time, the best solution I've seen is on the play.hexxit.org server. They actually have three worlds, two of them being 'adventure worlds' that completely reset every two weeks. The third world is static, allowing players to venture out and build permanent homes. This is all contained within the same server, and going between worlds is done at the main town.