Hi gang!

Editorial

So it has been quite a few years since I've been active here on PMC and make no mistake about it: this place is still quite special to me. But for some (brief!) backstory... I've been playing Minecraft ever since 1.8, my girlfriend introduced me to it, and we've always had an amazing time playing together. Of course we did take our breaks and such but a good Minecraft session has always been a thing. Unfortunately a lot of things changed when the "Cliffs and Caves" update got released.

I'm going to be blunt: we actually stopped caring about vanilla Minecraft completely because we no longer gained any satisfaction from our mining sprees. Sessions that could easily last up to 2+ hours because.. we were always having fun. Thing is: we still enjoy exploring and such because I will happily admit that the looks of "current Minecraft" are still plain out impressive, maybe even more so than before. So what gives? Easy: the "copper curse" as we like to call it; in other words: the - in our opinion - completely messed up ore spawn ratio between iron and copper:



What you see above is the result of several hours of automated mining (most of an IRL day) and from several "hot spots" at once, and look at it...

• 108 thousand blocks of cobblestone (= mined stone).
• 12 thousand Andesite, 10 thousand Diorite and 10 thousand Granite.
• 5 thousand dirt blocks.
• 143 thousand (!) cobbled deepslate; are we sure this extra dimension is balanced? (= unfair (!) comment).
• AND => 2066 raw iron vs. 9294 raw copper. That's a 4.4941 to 1 ratio!!! Four times as much copper than we got iron!

For the record.... I set up auto-miners in a Flower biome, a Windswept Hills biome as well as a Stony Peaks biome. And we had this going for at least 12 hours, mining all the way from bedrock (y-60) in a 32 block radius up until 3 blocks below the miner. Even dug into the biomes which are claimed to "get you lots more iron if you dig deeper", just see the amount of cobbled deepslate we got. So yah, we beg to differ!

Don't worry though, this isn't going to be a complaining tirade; I'm just trying to picture the right context for you guys here. Because...

Minecraft itself never stopped to impress!

So yeah... while we no longer played vanilla we were still very much hooked on Minecraft itself, and especially when playing with our favorite collection of mods to help fill in the gaps.

About us & our gameplay (briefly!)

These days I often mess around in creative while my gf plays in survival, but we both have full access to the server commands.. And yes, I sometimes help out a little bit. The rule is basically that she gets to ask me to "do" something special once per in-game day (for example: "Can I get the mats back for these tools I no longer use?") and sometimes just "because". However, she prefers to do things in a fair way and so I try to make sure that we play by the rules..

So this week I finally managed to scratch off an item on our ever ongoing todo list: setting up a local Forge server. And it's nostalgia at its finest (Aya & me hadn't really played Minecraft like this for a very long time now, most definitely longer than a year!

Not gonna lie: I love SpigotMC, as well as Paper, because they provide a lot of awesome "server-sided" mods. You know: extras which you can use without having to install those on your end. But if you really want to experience a modded or enhanced session... then you'll want Forge!

What's the big deal about these "mods" anyway?

Mods change the game of Minecraft, sometimes more than others. They often add new blocks and tools for you to use, things that Mojang never thought off or just doesn't want to implement. For example: how about beekeepers gear? So a beekeepers hood, jacket, pants and boots which roughly gives you the same kind of protection as leather armor but also prevents you from getting stung by bees at all? Obviously you can't just use wool for this: you need woven fabric, which is made by combining strings with a honeycomb.

When looking at technology mods then you'll get access to lots of cool machinery which can help make your life a lot easier. I mean, why smelt using a furnace which just keeps burning as long as there's fuel while you could also have a Redstone furnace or an Energized smelter? These machines only turn on if you use 'm, so they conserve a lot of energy.

And mods can take your gameplay into new and wild directions as much as you want. I mean... what good are wheat, potatoes and carrots without a bit of salt, or maybe some onions, radish, and who can resist some tomatoes?

The thing is: all of that isn't crafted using just iron or planted with regular seeds. You're going to need things like steel (made from enriched iron), copper and tin gears, and also a basic control circuit which is made from infusing osmium with redstone. And lot more seeds than you can imagine! Meaning that when you go out to mine & explore you'll find a lot more stuff: it's not just about basic materials anymore these days. Nope, now you're also going to come across ores like tin, lead, silver, osmium and even things like uranium and sulfur! And hopefully you'll get some good tea as well.

So when we come back from a big mining spree on modded Minecraft, or TechCraft as I like to call it, then we always come home with plenty of useful stuff in our inventories! That is satisfying gameplay.

TechCraft; a tour of our favorite (forge) mods!

What we want out of a "modpack"

So one last thing: we don't use a premade modpack, we came up with this collection on our own. We wanted a collection that doesn't have a very steep starting point but at the same time also not somthing that's too easy on us. This isn't a huge collection of mods because we believe that "less = more".

And this is what we came up with, I hope you can enjoy this one!

1) Tinkers Construct

We've all been here before: after you punched your way through plenty of trees, you created a crafting table, set yourself up with some wooden tools and then continue to collect some more wood. Finally you start digging and now you'll come across stone; time for an upgrade! However, not every piece of ore can be mined with stone tools, so where is that iron?!

It's basically always the same thing. And also... why can we only use four ingredients like wood, stone, iron, gold and diamond?

Well, Tinkers' gives us a whole new way of crafting our tools; instead of crafting tools "just like that" you now need to start smaller: by building tool parts. For this you need a so called "part builder" which is the table with the four 'squares' which Aya is standing behind. A part is made by using a so called pattern: you use the pattern to specify what part you want to build, then you provide the material which you want to use after which one of those patterns as well as your input material is used up and you end up with a tool part. When you got the right collection of these parts you can then use the 'tinker table' to assemble the whole lot and build your actual tool.

Now, this isn't just about making things harder on us, because these tools also come with some special perks.

First: a tool made in Tinkers Construct can't break down and disappear "just like that". Things can still break down, but you won't loose your tool. In fact, if you keep some repair kits around you can easily repair your tool on the fly so that you can continue to use it. But there's more: you're also not limited to just using wood, stone, iron or diamond. You can make your tool parts from all sorts of things! And even better: different materials also give you small different bonuses:

• Wood: provides the 'ecological' trait which means that the tool can repair itself; there's a small chance that you'll regain 1 durability point.
• Stone: stone is "cheap" which will result in your tool having less durability, but also less repair costs.
• Bone: you can re-use your spoils from skeletons to make tool parts as well; bone material gets the 'fractured' trait which means that your tool is going to do more damage.
• Flint: this gives you the 'crude' trait, meaning that it will do more damage but only against enemies without armor.
• Cactus: gets you the 'spiky' trait: blocking using such a tool will deal damage to your attacker.
• Copper: grants the 'well established' perk, this will grant you extra XP.

And this is just a small selection of all the things which you can use... nether rack, prismarine, but also items like obsidian, steel and cobalt can be used as well. But wait, it gets better! => once you have your tool you'll also be able to upgrade it by applying other materials to it which will provide even more specific behavior. Here are some examples, but there's much more:

• Redstone will give your tool the 'Haste' effect.
• Lapis will provide 'Luck'.
• Nether quartz increases attack damage.
• Diamond gets you increased durability.
• A piston gives the tool knockback.
• Popped chorus fruit will make your enemies float away.

One thing to note though is that you can't "just" use metals like you do in vanilla: metals can't be crafted into toolparts but have to be melted.

Getting started with 'Tinkers'

I'm not going in full detail here because there are more mods which I want to cover, but the general recipies can be seen above. First you need to make yourself some patterns, see the upper left corner. Then you can use those to create things like the crafting station, part builder, tinker station and the pattern chest. The easiest way to use these is to place them next to each other, side by side, but keep in mind that Tinkers' will expect your sequence to go from west to east (= negative X towards the positive X). Also good to know: if you place a double chest behind the crafting station and part builder then you can use that as storage while you craft. This chest doesn't even have to be uncovered for this!

It may seem like a lot more work to get started, but you'll also gain a lot of benefits from all your extra efforts.

And as one could expect using metals has also become a little bit more complex: instead of using a furnace you'll be needing a so called melter or a so called foundry:



Here's how it works: first you make a so called ingot tank which you'll be using to store lava. Yes, this is the real hot stuff ;) Then you create a melter block (as shown in the screenshot) which is placed on top of the tank. The melter can then use the heat from the lava to melt any metal you put into it. In the screenshot above Aya has put some iron into the melter and is now using it to melt an iron block.

See, even this simple melter comes with perks => if you melt 3 raw iron at once you'll actually get enough molten iron for 4 ingots. So by using this method you'll gain more materials than if you were to dump this into a furnace. Note that this is merely the small version, you can also build yourself a full blown smeltery which is a multi-block structure. The main advantages is that the smeltery can store more liquid, can store multiple liquids at once and best of all: it can be used to create alloys. For example: mix tin with copper and you'll get bronze.

One thing to keep in mind: Tinkers Construct does not provide its own resources. So if you want to use metals like tin, steel, bronze and so on then you'll need to find a mod that provides those. Needless to say, we found those, but more on that later.

2) Botania

Botania is all about harnassing the "natural energies" in Minecraft and then using those to your advantage; this is Aya's absolute favorite. The cool thing about Botana is that you can start enjoying this mod from the very moment when you start playing the game!

See, Botania fills the world with so called mystical flowers in all sorts of different colors. Fortunately these are easy to recognize because of their shape, but also in which they behave: they constantly release small magical particals which makes them easy to spot. So... time to start collecting flowers! As many as you can! Don't worry about your inventory overflowing: as soon as you manage to get some wool you can craft yourself a flower pouch which is a magical item that can store hundreds of flowers for you. The best part: if you keep this pouch in your inventory then any mystical flowers which you pick up get automatically stored in the pouch!

Once you got a good collection of flowers you'll need to craft yourself a Petal Apothecary. Don't worry: you can simply use cobblestone for this. But... you're also going to need to pluck one of the mystical flowers so that you'll get its petals. These petals may seem small and useless, but looks can be deceiving!

After you placed the Apothecary you need to fill it with water, and then you'll need 4 to get white petals and 1 seed. Throw these into the water and wham: now you'll get a small flower: the Pure Daisy. Put it into the ground, then surround it with either log or stone blocks, then give it a minute or so. Now the flower will change those blocks into Livingwood (the logs) and Livingrock (the stone blocks). Those blocks will allow you to craft just everything you need.

So what's the goal?

Everything in Botania evolves around mana: the magical natural energy of Minecraft. This mana can be stored in a so called mana pool (made from livingrock) and it's generated by flowers which you can conjure up using the Apothecary. For example: the Endoflame is a flower that consumes fuel like wood, coal or sulfur and then releases mana. The Gourmaryllis is a flower that can consume food (meat, bread, etc.) in order to release mana. There are even flowers such as the Rosa Arcana which will actually consume your XP and turn that into mana.

Mana then can be used create lots of new stuff. For example: throw an iron ingot into a mana pool and you'll get a manasteel ingot. You can then use this to create armor and tools. Doesn't sound all too special, eh? Well, what if I were to tell you that if you carry a so called mana tablet with you then these tools can use the mana in the tablet to repair themselves. You could even turn that tablet into a ring so that you can carry it on you; this will prevent it from taking up an important inventory slot.

Eventually you'll be able to create a runic altar (as seen in the screenshot above) which allows you to create runes: powerful artifacts which are fused with the combination of mana and the essence of life in Minecraft itself:




But yes, these runes represent the four elements (top left), the four seasons (bottom left) and the seven 'deadly' sins (right side). Finally there's also a rune of mana. They can unlock more powerful ways of handling and using mana. For example by creating mana lenses which can make the mana spreaders more efficient. Or by crafting a Terrestrial Altar which will allow you to generate terrasteel; the next 'tier' of building materials.

What's so special about Botania, in our opinion, is that it provides a very well balanced gameplay which slowly but steadily builds up. Be sure to combine a book with a random sapling so that you'll get the Lexica Botania which is the in-game manual, and it's pretty good!

One thing though: the Lexica often glitches in multiplayer. For some reason it doesn't always properly track your progress, so if you're playing with others you may need to disable "Advancement locking" in the 'Patchouli' mod; this will make sure that you can access all chapters in the book right from the start.

3) Thermal Expansion ("Thermal series")

Thermal Expansion is almost as old as modded Minecraft itself, there is some serious history here! It started as a single tech mod but eventually evolved into what we have today: a series of mods which, next to machinery, also provides extra contents for almost every activity. Remember me mentioning earlier how Tinkers Construct doesn't provide any ores of its own? Well, this is the first part of our solution to that.

But back to 'Thermal', we use the following mods from the series:

• Cultivation: this drastically expands all your food and farming options. It's no longer just about potatoes, carrots and some bread. Now you get to grow radish, onions, corn, tomatoes, strawberries and some rice as well. You can even water your crops with a watering can if you want to.
• Dynamics: everything you need to set up your logistics. Here you'll find pipes to transport energy or liquids as well as blocks to store it. It's not very advanced but gets the job done quite well.
• Expansion: the original mod which also expands on Minecraft. Here you'll find all the basic machinery and overall enhancements.
• Innovation: this mod provides more advanced options for power generation and also gives you several gadgets as well.
• Foundation: this is the core of the 'Thermal series'; it provides all the basic required resources (machinery & tools). Not much to be said about this one because all other mods depend on it.
• Integration: last but not least this mod makes sure that the Thermal series will properly work together with other mods.

There's also "Locomotion" but we specifically decided not to use it because much of this kind of automation (rails) will also rely on your so called chunks to remain loaded, which is hard to guarantee considering that there are only 2 of us on one entire server ;)

The main advantage of the Thermal series is its relative easy access as well as its awesome gadgets. For example... do you want to collect some honey from a bees nest, or maybe try to get some honeycombs? You're obviously going to annoy the bees unless you place a campfire below the nest. Only problem: you can't easily collect this campfire again unless you have a silk touch tool. So why not get yourself a beekeepers outfit which will fully protect you from getting stung by the bees? Want to explore the deep sea? Then you'll want to get a diving suit!

And to get started with the machinery all you basically need is iron and copper, redstone and gold and finally a bit of tin and some glass. Nothing very excessive. If you want to build some really complex machinery then you'll want the next mod instead...

4) Mekanism

For the record: I am a huge fan of Industrial Craft, but unfortunately its author(s) decided to stick with Minecraft version 1.12. All the more power to them mind you, no complaining here, but to be honest I don't fancy playing with 1.12 anymore. I became way too dependent on commands like /data, and /execute. And Aya also doesn't want to miss out anymore on her favorite Llama and of course the baby turtles.

It took me a while but eventually I discovered Mekanism and it quickly became one of my favorite mods; it seriously change my gameplay!

Mekanism is all about building machinery which can help you "do" stuff. From simple tasks like smelting blocks using the energized smelter, or maybe you want to do something more complex such as separating water into its basic components: oxygen and hydrogen. Wondering why you'd want to do this? Well, hydrogen is a powerful gas; you could even make Ethlyne from it when you combine it again with water and biofuel. Biofuel is something you can extract / generate from natural items such as saplings, wood and flowers. Exactly the kind of thing you'd control when using Botania...

Getting started





To get started with Mekanism you'll need 2 specific machines: the heat generator shown on the left, and a metallurgic infuser which is shown on the right. Note that I chose this specific location for a very good reason: notice the huge lava lake behind the board? If you place a heat generator in a lava bath like that then it will immediately start generating power. All for free! Hook it up with the infuser and you'll be ready to create all the required basic components. Notice the green square on the left? That's a power outlet, so if you place the infuser in front of the heater then it'll automatically pick up the generated energy.

Let's say that we want to start by using en energized smelter so that we can save up on coal for something else. To craft one you'll need two so called basic control circuits. You're also going to need steel. All of that can be made using the infuser:

• If you load 2 redstone dust into the infuser, insert a so called osmium ingot then it will build this basic circuit for you. You can find and get osmium just like you'd get any other metals like iron, copper and gold.
• Steel then... just like in the real world you'll need to enhance iron with carbon. First you load 1 coal into the infuser, then you insert an iron ingot and this gets you enriched iron. Now insert another coal, then re-insert the enriched iron and this time steel dust will be created. Dump this into a smelter or furnace and you'll get a steel ingot in no time.

And this is basically the whole core mechanic: infusing one material with the other to create alloys, dust parts and circuits. Materials which you can then use to craft advanced machinery. Another cool example: if you load the infuser with some tin, then insert three copper ingots you'll eventually get four bronze ingots. Oh, right: you won't be able to use tin ingots for this, first you'll need to crush that into tin dust which can then be fully processed.

Just so you know... this isn't some kind of fantasy, these processes are based on real world mechanics (<= link to Wikipedia page on bronze). Meaning that if you play around with Mekanism you may even actually learn something!

5) Applied Energistics 2

Now, I don't want to scare you guys but... have you ever looked up and wondered what might be up there other than the sun and moon? Because if you start playing with this mod you may want to keep an eye out for the skies because... look what we found?!

That's right: meteors fell from the sky and left a huge mess. Not just that, it seems they also "seeded" our world with alien minerals which you're bound to find when you go out to mine. In specific you're eventually going to find certus quartz dust, and maybe also some crystals. If you can't find crystals then you'll need to grow these yourself by combining one certus quartz dust with a block of sand, this gets you 2 quartz seed which you can then throw into a water block.

Don't worry: they won't despawn, instead if you give it enough time they'll eventually grow into full crystals. These crystals can then be used to create machinery. But that's only a very small part of it. If you charge these crystals you'll get a charged certus quartz crystal (duh!). Now... if you throw that into a water block together with redstone dust and a piece of nether quartz you'll generate fluix dust. So what do you think is going to happen if you were to combine this dust with another block of sand? Then you'll get fluix seeds. Which, once again, you'll need to grow inside a waterblock so that you get a full fluix crystal. Which is yet another component which you can use to build specific machinery.

Oh, and we're not done yet... about these meteors? If your tools are strong enough then you'll be able to mine them. Inside you're going to find a so called sky stone chest which will contain one or more inscriber presses. In specific you'll be able to find a Logic, Engineering and Calculation press as well as a Silicon press. You can use materials like gold, diamond, a certus quartz crystal and silicon to inscribe these (one specific material for each press) which will get you circuits. You can then inscribe those with redstone and silicon to create processors. Which are key components to create several of the machinery.

Yah, I hope you'll realize that this isn't something you "just" set up; this mod is all about the so called end game process. Meaning that it's going to take a while before you get here.

But what's the big deal?!

As you can see above you're going to need a lot of specific materials which you'll only find in specific places. This even includes a mandatory visit to the Nether!

For your reward you'll be able to build a network which is capable of storing pretty much every block in the game, and then some more! Remember my editorial story in which I told you about an auto-miner which dug up hundreds of thousands of blocks? Yah, all of that was stored and processed using none other than the so called "matter energy network" from Applied Energistics 2.

And storing blocks is one thing... how about building crafting processors which can build any required materials on the fly?

You can even use AE2 to interact with machines from other mods and then configure all of that as crafting recipies as well. This mod is truly something else! However, also extremely complex.

6) EvilCraft

I suddenly got an omnious looking book in return: a purple colored book with a crimson red ribbon around it which is titled "Origins of Darkness". In this book the author explains how he too discovered all these weird happenings, but not just that... he goes on to explain how he managed to obtain and utilize several dark relics and machineries in order to tap into forbidden yet extremely powerfull magic.

Just like the magical Lexica Botania this book also talks about gaining power using of the forces of nature. With one small yet important difference... instead of trying to co-exist this book talks about domination. For example by performing blood sacrifices where you kill animals or other creatures and then harvest their very life energies which you can then use to fuel your own desires.

This poses some seriously difficult considerations. Sure, it's probably nicer to fuel a few flowers with coal, sulfur and what not, then harvest the mana they generate so that you can tap into that energy. But on the other hand it seems much easier to kill a few chickens and maybe some sheep and then use all of that energy instead.

No one is going to miss a few animals... right? .... right?!!

About this mod

I somewhat consider this to be the "opposite" of Botania, at least where morale is concerned. Like I said: instead of growing flowers and finding effective yet innocent ways to generate and store mana you're now basically looking at slaughtering decent amounts of creatures in order to obtain their blood and maybe even harvest their very spiritual energies as well!

So far I haven't dug into this mod too deep as of yet but the things I saw immediately made it stand out for me, which is why it quickly became part of my server.

Our support mods!

Although the mods I mentioned above do an excellent job, you're going to need a few more to fully optimize your experience. Although optional their use is highly recommendable...

Xaero's world & mini map

After having used several different "map mods" we finally found one which gives you a "full" experience but without making things too easy. Also important: this mod doesn't drain too much of your resources either, especially when used on a server because it can also be loaded "server sided" which can help balance your load a bit.

But this has everything you may want: fully customizable, easy to recognize icons, supports waypoints in many different ways (temporary, local, global, invisible and what not) and it looks pretty amazing too I think.

As mentioned this actually consists of 2 mods that can fully work together.

But this is really something else. One feature which I really appreciate are the specific red icons for dropped items. So if you chop down a tree then you'll immediately see if you already picked up all the dropped items or if there are still some left.

Oh, by the way... maybe you already noticed that I prefer having other players show up as mini-icons instead of a small dot. This isn't a standard setting, so I figured I'd share how we set that up:

• Open the Xaero settings, then click on "Minimap settings".
• Then select "Entity radar settings".
• Now click on "Entity category settings".
• Create a new sub-category called "Players" (name doesn't matter!) and move it to the top of your list (above "Living", "Item" and "Other").
• Click on it, then click "Settings".
• Now it's easy: change the 'Icons' setting to "always", then add "minecraft:player" to the include list.

That's it & that's all. This will make sure that players will always show up as icons.

Just Enough Items

Do you recall how I explained earlier how you can generate certus quartz crystals as well as fluix crystals by throwing things into a water block? This may be well documented on the Internet right now, but all you basically need to find these things out on your own is the Just Enough Items mod. Many mods rely on it (though usually as an optional dependency) but even so... this is easily a must-have to fully enjoy modded Minecraft.

This is your access into pretty much every existing recipe or (crafting) mechanic out there. And then some more!

All our core mods mentioned above fully support JEI and as a result you can pretty much look up everything in here. Another example: remember me talking about how some Mekanism machinery can separate water into oxygen and hydrogen? If you have Mekanism installed, then try this:

• Open your inventory so that JEI shows up.
• Now press control + f to enter the search field, then type: "separ" (without the quotes!).
• You will probably see 2 devices: hover your mouse over the "Electrolyte Separator", then press 'u' (without the '').

If you then open its dedicated tab you'll get to see everything it can do for you. Keep in mind that the amount of recipies heavily depends on the types of mods you have installed, and if they provide specific (and compatible) fluids.

Finding blocks and/or recipies has never been easier.

Iron Chests

Playing modded Minecraft is totally awesome, or so we think. There is however one very specific issue to keep in mind and that is your storage. See, if you're going to be building all sorts of machines or other contraptions then you'll be handling a lot of different items. Also because many things which you may want to craft need components which also need to be crafted themselves.

And trust me when I say that using your regular double chests won't be enough. Not if you don't mind building an entire storage just for your tech needs.

Our solution to this problem is called Iron Chests; a mod which provides several 'tiers' of different chests and each tier gives you more storage. The best part is that you can easily upgrade from chest tier into the next by crafting so called upgrade items (the 'arrow items' above?) which you can then use to click on a chest to apply the actual upgrade.

If you have a regular single block wooden chest then you can upgrade immediately to either copper or iron. From there you can upgrade to iron, gold, diamond and then either obsidian or crystal. The last two chests are the same size: the only difference is that the crystal chest gives you a small preview of its items.

Integrated Dynamics & Tunnels

Having some proper storage early on in the game is one thing (see Iron Chests?), but how are you going to keep track of all your items?

Well, that's where Integrated Dynamics and Integrated Tunnels can come in. Now, this series provides more mods such as Integrated Terminals and Crafting, but we prefer to stick with just the core mechanics of dynamics & tunnels.

As you can see above this mod is all about logistics: it can monitor and transport items, energy, fluids as well as gasses.

If you look at the above screenshot you may notice a cyan / blue'ish tree in the background. That is the key into "dynamics": that tree is a so called Menril tree and if you chop it down you'll get menril logs (I placed one on the right side). You can insert these logs into a so called squeezer (the device on the left, behind the pressure plate) and if you place a drying basin next to the squeezer you're all set: start jumping up and down onto the squeezer until it has flattened the menril log and poured all its saps into the drying basin. Once it has dried up (as shown above) you'll end up with a block of pure crystalized menril.

That block gets you menril chunks which can then be used to craft all the different components such as logic cables (the "blue lines" which you see in the background), a logic programmer and variable cards.. everything you need to keep full but early control over your storage facility.

What I like about this mod is that it provides a bit of everything. While it is an early way to apply some automation, the caveat is that this is going to cost you plenty of effort: grow & chop down trees, squeeze the menril out of all the logs and then you'll need to craft all the individual components. It may sound easy but there's still plenty of effort involved, which is exactly the way we like it.

And there you have it!

All our favorite mods in one huge blog post. If you're interested in these mods, then here's where you can find 'm:

• Tinkers Construct.
• Botania.
• Thermal Expansion. (keep in mind that this is a series of mods!)
• Mekanism. (keep in mind that this also provides multiple mods!)
• Applied Energistics 2.
• EvilCraft.

And our support mods:

• Xaero's World Map and Minimap.
• Just Enough Items. (absolute must have for modded Minecraft!)
• Iron Chests.
• Integrated Dynamics and Integrated Tunnels.
• And Flan; this is a server-sided mod which provides area & claim protection.

We're playing with the latest Forge version for Minecraft 1.18.2, also because several mods such as Tinkers' only support 1.18 for now. No Warden yet for us, but instead we'll have to deal with werewolves, poisenous libelle's and vengefull spirits. Not to mention baby creepers and terracubes... brrrr!

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed. And if you got any questions be sure to drop 'm below!