I started a playthrough of
StaTech Industry. It's a GregTech-inspired modpack for Minecraft, using
Modern Industrialization
as the core tech mod. The first thing I did was create a testing
world in creative mode and take a gander through the questbook.
Here's a few observations:
-
It's really nice that the pack's questbook introduces the major
mods and mechanics
-
I immediately ignored the main questline to take a look at the
side chapters - there's a few "collect 'em all" quests, although
why the "World of Food" chapter categorizes regular pizza as a
cursed food, I've not the faintest. And I heavily object to
pineapple pizza being classed the same as uranium cereal!
-
Create and the "World of Magic" chapters look like interesting
diversions - I'm interested to see if there's a good balance
between main quest progression and sidequest progression.
-
It's interesting to note how the quests really shape progression.
I'd disagree with punching trees being the start of a modern
Minecraft playthrough - perhaps getting three logs for a boat is,
but I usually ignore stone tools in favour of iron tools and an
iron farm.
-
Also, fancy storage systems (a la iron chests and AE2) seem to be
more heavily featured than I think is necessary for a good pack -
MI's barrels and pipes should be good enough, no?
-
I also take exception to the statement that paper production has
been "Statified"! That's a vanilla MI recipe you're claiming
there!
-
I think there's going to be some very interesting cross-mod
interactions - Create, for example, will probably trivialize early
game smelting and plate production with its press and fan.
-
On the subject of Create, I remember Static, the pack author,
musing a year or so ago about wanting to make MI depend on Create
(which was achieved), but also make andesite alloy depend on MI's
mixer (which is a circular dependency). It seems this was broken
by dropping andesite alloy's dependency on MI.
-
It's interesting how the quarry isn't a strictly required quest -
I suppose it is, in principle, possible to just mine for
everything, but that's got to be annoying.
-
Most MI recipes seem to have been kept intact - or at least the
early-game ones. This is good; my knowledge from having played
vanilla MI is still valid.
-
Huh. They're letting us have infinite and simply renewable EU
using the Create alternator. I'm sure this doesn't scale nicely to
higher power requirements, but it's nice to have a backup power
source.
-
Oh, cool! They've got MI stuff added to Create's ponder system. I
think there's an open request for Create to split the ponder
system off into its own library so non-Create mods can also use
it.
- Also, I guess a tree farm is useful sometimes?
-
There seem to be a lot of alternative paths (alternative from the
perspective of base MI) to resource production here - for example,
plant oil seems like it's going to have greater significance since
it's more easily produced now.
-
Seems like TR is being used to "fill the gaps" in base MI - the
autocrafting table from TR, for example, automates recipes that
base MI doesn't, although passive energy production does generally
seem to be pretty heavily limited - thankfully.
-
Oh, interesting - there's a branching questline at the start of
HV.
-
This really feels like base MI with a few diversions - I suppose
that's okay.
-
Ah, but the endgame gets a lot more interesting. This might be a
bit of a challenge. I remember only barely scraping across the
finish line in my previous MI playthroughs.
And in the next installment, I'm going to be actually playing the
pack.