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[Review] My favorite (tech) mods for Minecraft 1.16.5(!)

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ShelLuser's Avatar ShelLuser
Level 57 : Grandmaster Engineer
89
Editorial (intro)

Minecraft 1.13 changed a lot for the communtiy, both for good and bad. The good parts should be obvious: a much better command interface, a massive increase in "block options" (referring to the removal of the block amount limits) and don't get me started on the /data command and the debug stick...

But at the same time all these new enhancements also caused a lot of problems for the modding community and as a result many didn't want to bother with all the extra hassle and thus stuck with 1.12 which, as a result, has become a very popular version. But as the years went by a lot more players became more interested in the later versions and going back to older stuff became a burden... at least that's how I fared. Eventually I stopped bothering with "modded Minecraft" because of all the extra hassle. As a result I eventually also became a little saturated with Minecraft itself. It was always more of the same so to speak; many recent changes were often mostly cosmetic (think about the new villagers) and also introduced new mechanics which took getting used to. Or... new mechanics which made existing play styles a lot harder than before.

Needless to say I kinda moved away a bit and started paying attention to other games (my Steam library is a bit massive). Now, don't get me wrong here: I still loved Minecraft for what it is, it's still one of my all time favorite games. But I simply don't play as often as I used to.

Now fast forward to 2021....

I'm behind my laptop and purely by accident I get reminded about the Curseforge website, they host a lot of mods. Being a bit curious and having some time to kill I started looking for a few names which I still remembered. Several mods simply confirmed what I had come to expect: they were still on 1.12 and some, unfortunately enough, didn't seem to be maintained at all anymore.

And then I suddenly remembered my previous "top 3". I looked up the names and... the heck?!! 1.16.5 (!!). Now, not all of them mind you, one mod in particular seems to be stuck on 1.12 but I found a more than suitable replacement for it. This evening my gf was over and so I invited her to an evening of "Shell's TechCraft" and she loved it!

Fun fact: Several years ago I had already planned to write this blog post but after the massive hiatus in upgrades (see above) it became pointless. SO yeah, I'm very excited that I can now finally "finish" (actually rewrite from start 😁) the blog post I had in mind. I really love these mods.

What's this about?

I don't believe in mod packs, but instead prefer to roll my own collection. Most modpacks focus on quantity: trying to cram as many mods into the pack as possible but.. I don't think that gives you proper gameplay. If you can build 20 different types of furnaces then where's the challenge?

SO in this post I'd like to share with you guys a collection of mods which I consider to be a near to perfect setup. And it's only 4 main mods with a few supporting mods. These provide a massive enhancement to your gameplay while still managing not to devitate too much from the game of Minecraft. In other words: the mods don't suddenly become a goal in itself, we're still playing Minecraft. However... it can become (very?) beneficial if you follow up on a few new leads for extra enhancements.

My story begins...

From here on we're going into "Story mode". See, none of the mods I'm going to review here has a real story to them, or a vague one at best. There's no new "Lore" to enjoy and quite frankly I think that's a massive pro, because now we can make up our own fantasy stories, just like we can in Minecraft itself.

So I think it seems fitting to share mine... (don't worry if this doesn't make sense to you right now, just continue and it'll become clear soon enough!).

#1 Tinkers Construct
(mod page can be found here).

[Review] My favorite (tech) mods for Minecraft 1.16.5(!)

Have you ever wondered why our tools in Minecraft are so limited? I mean... take the pickaxe. Sure, we have several variants like wood, stone, iron, gold and diamond but in the end no one uses gold. In fact, wooden picks are only used temporarily to get stone and from there on it's only waiting for iron to show. Which eventually leads to diamond.

Yah, but what if it doesn't? I'm sure several veterans have been here before: you're in a new game (without cheating) and digging and digging but for some reason you can't seem to find iron anywhere. What you did find were hostile mobs (you killed a few skeletons), plenty of coal and you even got some lapis with your stone pick but no iron just yet. And to make things worse your pick just broke and "ploink", it's gone.

That's no good!

I'm sure you'd get pretty frustrated by now, also because mining with stone gear isn't exactly very efficient. Fortunately for us problems like these are now a thing of the past!

A new way of crafting!

Just for reference sake: a regular stone sword only has 5 attack damage and also 1.6 attack speed. But as you can see this sword also has a 0.5 reach distance bonus!

So what's this all about?

Well, with Tinkers Construct ("TC") you don't create your tools in one go as you do in regular Minecraft, but instead you create different parts using several different "work stations". A pickaxe for example is made from a pickaxe head, a tool binding and a tool handle. And all those 3 parts can be made from different materials, including things like bone and flint! And because you're making precision tools they also have very special features:

[Review] My favorite (tech) mods for Minecraft 1.16.5(!)

Here Aya is making a 'Kama', this is TC's equivalent of the hoe which we have in regular Minecraft. The only part left is the sword blade which Aya made out of bone. As you can see in the right corner this tool can do more than simply hoe down soil: it will even harvest and replant crops as well as shear animals!

Making tools using TC is more work than making a normal tool, this will become painfully obvious when you want to make metal tools. But because of the extra effort you also get several useful advantages. Take that lapis I mentioned earlier... in vanilla Minecraft you only use lapis for enchanting or as a blue dye. With the "Tinker tool tables" however you can also use it to enhance your gear; applying lapis to a tool will add the "luck effect" to it, a little bit comparable to the Fortune enchantment.

Making an iron ingot...

Here we're at the TC smelter which we build; Aya is preparing to make an iron ingot. That red stuff you see? That's molten iron. Aya just placed a sand cast onto the so called casting table and then pressed a random ingot into the shape. When she removes it it'll leave a gap after which she can open the valve and pour some iron into it. The result will be an iron ingot.

Of course that's not very practical but it does provide a good example. Normally you'd use this method to create metal parts like sword blades or axe heads which you can then put together using the Tinkers anvil. Trust me: an iron sword made with Tinkers Construct is way more versatile than a regular one.

Not only because of the enhanced stats, but also because these tools will never fully break down. That is... TC tools can break, but they won't magically leave your inventory which can make a huge difference. Oh, and those repairs also won't require a ton of XP points either...

#2 Botania
(mod page can be found here)

Filling a mana pool...

Did you know that there's way more to Minecraft's nature (the flowers and trees and such) than Mojang have told us about so far? There are several flowers which contain special - magical - powers that can provide you with lots of new ways to get ahead in the game. Botania is all about using those natural forces to your advantage (hopefully).



For example... After Aya had collected a lot of those magical flowers she plucked some of them which got her some petals. She then threw those petals into a basin called the "Petal Apothecary" together with some water (and some seeds) and wham.. Suddenly she got a "Pure daisy", which is a small white flower. Sounds useless enough, right?

Yah, but when she planted the daisy and then surrounded it with several blocks (in the above screenshot she used oak logs) the natural forces began to work and changed those oak logs into "Livingwood". Aya then used those livingwood blocks to make livingwood twigs and then she used those together with other flower petals to make a "Wand of the forest".

For your information: that thing rivals my Minecraft debug stick! 👀

Make a book, combine it with a sapling of any kind and you'll get the magical Lexica Botania which will help you unravel all the mysteries of the natural Minecraft forces!

I can't go deeper into this for now because Aya has just unlocked the rune table and we're still learning more about it. Even so... this mod is truly magical. Use flowers to collect 'Mana', which is a magical energy, and the very moment you gave some in your Mana pool (the blue stuff in the first screenshot) you can immediately use it to convert even more items.

And as a side note... do you notice those items on the tables in the screenshot above? That's another advantage of Tinkers': when you're crafting something and need to add other items you can simply walk away and the items remain on the table so that you can continue later on. And because everyone can see what you're doing you can even help each other with finding the right recipes.

#3 Mekanism
(mod page can be found here)



Botania is Aya's absolute favorite whereas this mod is mine; this thing takes tech to a whole new level!

Tech Minecraft - to me - is all about trying to get the most efficiency out of your game. For example... If you dump a coal block into a furnace and then smelt 8 ores you're left with a burning furnace. You can put some more stuff in, sure, but it'll still keep on burning no matter what. So if you don't have anything else to smelt you're essentially wasting a lot of energy.

If only there was a way to turn a furnace on and off and only make it consume power when needed....

Well, there is now! 😎

Before I go on I strongly recommend to grab all of the Mekanism mods: the base mod as well as the Tools, Generators and Additions mods.

As you can imagine lava is hot, if you fall in you'll surely die from burning up and pretty much everything you throw in (other than netherrite) will immediately burn up as well, poof!

In other words: there's a lot of energy involved here. What if.... we could use this energy for other things as well?



So here I have a small setup... In the lava pool I placed 5 so called "heat generators"; these devices can generate energy through heat. Either by burning up fuel or.. see above: placing them in lava which gives you a continuous source of energy. I then added some cables (the green "Basic Universal Cable") and connected them to all of the heat generators and the devices I placed on the land. This simple setup can already get you way more efficiency than a regular furnace can provide.

See... Mojang never bothered to tell us that the regular furnace we got in Minecraft was hardly optimized. Meaning? You can get much more out of your ores than you thought so far. It's true! The three devices on the right (from left to right) are an enrichment chamber, an energized smelter and finally a crusher.

What makes these devices so cool is that you can fully customize their behavior. I didn't place them like this just for show you know... nah: the enrichment chamber can be used to get the most out of your ores and extract all the embedded metal as powder. The advantage is that you can get 2 "dust" items from one ore block. And one dust item can easily be smelted into an ingot! You read that right: by applying some of these technological advantages you can get twice the amount of ingots than before! 😎

It gets better... All of the devices can be fully customized. When the infusion chamber or smelter is done I can configure the device itself and tell it where it should eject the resulting items to (or not eject them of course...). In the above screenshot my smelter is on the right side of my enrichment chamber. So... I can tell my enrichment chamber to automatically eject enriched items out of the right side which will then immediately inject them into my smelter!

And that can lead to seriously advanced and complex devices....



Here I added a 'Digital Miner', set up some wiring (using yet another mod, we'll get there...) and the result was basically a more or less fully automated mining operation. The miner would extract the ores, these were transported to the enrichment chamber, from there pushed into the smelter and then extracted and placed into the golden chest you see in the screenshot.

The thing which makes this such a pleasant experience is that almost everything can be done as easy or as complex as you want it to be. Every machine can be upgraded with speed enhancements, energy enhancements and so on. But... if you made a mistake you can actually retrieve one of those enhancements and then maybe apply those to another machine. Or store them for later use. Those are the kinds of details which make this mod so awesome.

And trust me when I say that this blog is only scratching the surface here... Do you know what components make up water? Hydrogen and oxygen is what. So what do you think an "Electrolytic Separator" could do? And hydrogen might make for a nice fuel source, right? Well.. that's some of the stuff you can find out for yourself by using this mod.

However... there is another reason for using this mod in combination with the previous two: Tinkers Construct provides support for many different metals but it does not add those on its own. You need a support mod for that. Guess what? Mekanism adds copper, tin, lead, uranium and osmium to the world. Metals which can also be used with TC. If you wanted to you can now wear copper armor for example...

Another advantage is that Mekanism can easily co-exist with other mods and even supports some of the other standards. Which brings me to...

#4 Applied Energistics 2
((Curse) mod page is here, the official homepage is here)

Alien technology...

Applied Energistics is a so called "end tier" mod. Meaning that you won't be able to use much of it until you've progressed much further into the game. Take this meteorite above: without solid tools you won't be able to salvage it. Not even TC"s enhanced iron tools will get you through those hardened blocks. It fell through the atmosphere and crash landed, what are you thinking? 😁

But once you do manage to complete your salvage operation you'll soon discover alien technology which is far beyond anything you've seen so far in Minecraft! And it's that mystic part, that totally "standing out" which I enjoy so much about AE2...



In the background you can see an "energy receptor" which I've connected to my existing cabling. In case you're wondering: yes, those are solar panels you see in the background. I then used "AE2" cabling and connected the source of energy to the (now green) "ME Controller"; this block constantly changes color. What you're seeing here is a small so called "ME network", and in case you're wondering: 'ME' stands for "Matter Energy".

See that purple block on the right? That's a so called "ME chest" and the blue thingie in front of it (with the green light) is a 4K storage cell which provides storage for 63 block types and has 4096 bytes worth of storage. That's right: computerized mechanics now truly found their way into Minecraft. Prepare to go beyond those pesky 64 stack amounts:

306 copper blocks? It's no problem..

Despite all this I've only used up 1108 bytes (out of 4096) and stored 28 out of 63 item types. In other words: I stored 1108 items in 1 'block' and there's still plenty of storage space left.

This is technology that is truly out of this world 😁

Support mods

Other than the top 4 above I'm also using a few support mods to help make some things go more smoothly yet without making the game too easy again.

Iron Chests
(you can find it here)




When you're playing with tech mods you'll soon find yourself on the receiving end of a lot of new items to collect.

Remember that digital miner I talked about earlier? To craft it you'll need: 2 atomic alloys, 1 basic control circuit, 2 logistical sorters, 2 teleportation cores, 1 steel casing and 1 Robit.

Oh right... that Robit? => 1 steel ingot, 2 energy tablets, 1 atomic alloy, 2 refined obsidian ingots and one personal chest.

No, it doesn't end here... that person chest? => 5 steel ingots, 2 chests, 1 basic control circuit and one block of glass.

Oh, you thought we were done already? That energy tablet? => 4 redstone dust, 3 gold, and 2 infused alloys. Speaking of infused alloys: that requires iron + redstone to make. And that atomic alloy requires a reinforced alloy. Which in its turn requires an infused alloy together with diamond dust or an enriched diamond.

Did I mention that you craft a logistical sorter using 7 iron ingots, 1 basic control circuit and a piston? Oh right, a piston: 4 cobblestone, 1 redstone, 1 iron ingot and 3 plank blocks.

Trust me: a regular storage will not suffice. Fortunately there's Iron Chests: a collection of single block chests that actually contain a whole lot more:

The contents of a gold chest

Here you see the contents of a gold chest after auto-mining for 40 or so minutes... Remember: those blocks used to be ores, we had to manually craft those.

What makes this mod so much fun is that it'll take effort to make these chests. And... you can also apply upgrades, so if your chest gets full then maybe it's time to upgrade to the next tier, which you can do without having to move your items.

Integrated Dynamics & Tunnels
(Dynamics here, Tunnels: here)



I believe this to be a highly underappreciated mod and it makes no sense to me, none what so ever: this thing is awesome. Sure, it's a light weight mod, you can probably tell by the design of the screen displays. But what it may lack in "visuals" it makes up for with sheer flexibility. Fun fact: the furnace here gets fueled with coal or coal blocks from the bottom, and to add insult to injury it receives its smeltable items from the (left) side as well! And obviously: the smelted items leave on the right.

What's the big deal you wonder? Vanilla mechanics allow you to fuel a furnace but the fuel needs to come in from one of the sides whereas the smeltable items need to be inserted from the top. Unless there's a redstone signal then melted items exit from the bottom.

But not here...

What I love about this mod is its simplicity and the realization by the authors (= guess on my end) that simplicity can still lead to seriously complex designs. The concept is simple: the cables can transport items, liquid or energy and this can be done by using interfaces, importers (these get stuff into the cable network) and exporters (these work the other way around). Exporters pull from interfaces whereas importers push onto interfaces.

The whole thing works thanks to so called variable cards which you can program in a certain way. For example... if you only want to get all items out of a chest you'd simply use a Boolean with a "true" value: program a card with this value, insert it into the import or export "all items" slot and you're done. You can also "nest" equations but to do that you're going to need "Variable store" which can contain all the other required variable cards. Everything relies on those cards.

Cards and most other items are made from menril, this is an item which you can get from a Menril tree (you see an example in the background above). Chop down the tree and then you can place its logs into a squeezer, combine the squeezer with a drying basin and you're all set to go: insert the block, jump up and down on the squeezer and eventually all the menril sap gets out into the basin, dries up and you'll end up with a block of crystalized menril which you can then use to craft your other items.

Those blue cables you saw throughout many of my screenshots? 6 menril chunks (9 make up a block), 2 sticks and one redstone dust in the middle; that gets you 3 cable segments.

There's still plenty of effort involved to get this going, don't let the simple looks fool you!

Voxelmap
(find it here)

Screenshot courtesy of AyanamiKun

When you're dealing with so much going on around you it becomes even more important to find your way around the world. Enter Voxelmap... It shows you a good overview of your surroundings and you can even add waypoints so that you can find interesting locations at a later time. Other than the overal map shown above you also get a map "insert" (as shown in several screenshots above) which can also help you find your way.

Seriously... if you're trying to prevent a nucleair meltdown from happening then the last thing you want to worry about is wondering where the coolant chest is at...

Just Enough Items ("JEI")
(it's just here)



The main downside to tech mods is that the documentation isn't always superb, in my opinion more than often the opposite. So how do we find out what to do and how to do it? You can make a safe bet that Mojang won't have included all those new crafting recipes into their game 😁

The solution is JEI, see above. I'm in creative mode and as you can see every mod has its own creative tab. But there's more: the right side shows an overview of blocks and items and you can even search through it quite easily. "@app" applies to "Applied Energistics" which is the name of the mod, "che" is short for "chest". Basically I was searching for a chest item within the context of a specific mod. Easy!

Oh it gets better... wondering what a basic control circuit may do for you? Find it in the overview or your inventory, hover your mouse over it and press 'u': now you'll see its usages (so: how the item gets used in crafting recipes). Want to know how to make one? Same as above: have it selected and then press 'r': now you get to see a recipe. A recipe which JEI can apply onto a crafting table for you provided that you have all the ingredients in your inventory.

Bear in mind: this functionality already existed back in Minecraft version 1.12. In fact, that applies to pretty much everything I showcased above. You may want to remember this the next time you may think highly about Mojang's marvelous game innovations. Don't get me wrong here: the additions to Minecraft over the years? I love them. But... credit where credit's due: most of the stuff already existed long before Mojang ever thought of it. And that deserves a mention too.

Why this particular collection of mods?

Because they truly enhance each other and hardly overlap. There is some overlap in functionality, sure, but in the end it's not disruptive. Take for example the cables in 'Intergrated Dynamics' (and "Tunnels") vs. the cables in 'Mekanism'. The latter do a good job, they even have visuals (you can see liquid animations for example) but they lack control. If I need more control I'll simply use "Menril".

After I build the auto miner and upgraded some of the machinery everything went automatic. So Aya wondered: could we turn all those melted ingots into blocks somehow? Well... Not using Mekanism nor the "Integrated" series (they have a mod expansion for this, but I don't like it so don't use it). However... Applied Energistics 2 does provide an automated crafting option. Add the amazing alien storage facilities and this thing becomes a no brainer.

This collection of mods doesn't "overrule" your Minecraft game, it only enhances it. You're still going after the Enderdragon, but maybe... maybe you also want to spend a little time to get your MekaSuit all fitted out in order to get yourself a seriously "unfair" advantage. And I quoted that because although you may end up kinda overpowered it will still have taken you plenty of effort to get there.

A mekasuit helmet => 2 bolonium pellets, one basic induction cell, 4 HDPE sheets, one Ultimate control circuit and finally a netherrite helmet. Oh... that pellet? You'll only need water + polonium gas + fluorite dust. And those HDPE sheets are made from HDPE pellets which in their turn are made from pressurizing ethylene with oxygen together with substrate.

Easy! 🤔

And there you have it!

For now... 😉

Yah, this was the appetizer. Remember me mentioning that I didn't like some of the documentation for certain mods? I don't stop with complaining / mentioning, nah, I'll also try to do my share. Expect more blogs to surface about this (IMO) amazing mod combo.
CreditAyanamiKun for helping me test stuff
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1 Update Logs

Update #1 : by ShelLuser 05/11/2021 10:24:15 amMay 11th, 2021

Finally managed to fix most typoes!

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