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Can You Have Too Many Mods in an NPC/Questing Modpack?
So I've been trying to build a modpack for the longest of times, and I feel like it's always out of hand before I even realize it.
The modpack should have Custom NPCs, loads of quests, bits of lore and towns of many flavors scattered all around a preset map made with WorldPainter, and a very tiny story to go with it.
Before I start coding NPCs, making quests, or tweaking configs and fiddling with recipes, I decided to pick out all the mods I want, refine that selection of mods down to exactly what the pack needs, no more and no less, and then not ever touching that set of mods to avoid having conflicts, invalid quests, unused items and blocks or an error in the story that can't be explained.
This dang modpack has gone through over 100 iterations since the Summer of 2017. I've shifted focus so many times it just feels like a big jumbled mess. It's been on 1.9, then 1.10.2, then, very briefly, 1.11.2, and then it finally landed on 1.12.2, and has stayed there for a long time. I'm not shifting versions again unless something wild and amazing happens with modding on 1.13. I've just bounced too much trying to find the sweet spot, and I'm not going to waste any more time with that. Aside from version shifts, I have changed the mods in each instance so many times it's not even funny.
The biggest problem I have is this:
How many mods is too many?
I understand that there isn't an exact answer for this. Every modpack has a different focus, with a different number of mods required to fit that focus. My pack doesn't seem to fit in a solid, common category at all though.
I put some of my ideas for the pack in the following spoilers for tidiness's sake:
Advanced Chimneys
AppleCore
Applied Energistics 2
ATLCraft Candles Mod
Attained Drops 2
AutoRegLib
Bad Mobs
Better Railroads
Better Fps
BiblioCraft
Biomes O' Plenty
Blur
Bottled Milk
Chameleon
Chickens
Chisel
CodeChicken Lib
Comforts
Cooking for Blockheads
Corpse Complex
Crafting Tweaks
Crafting Craft
CT Watercan
Connected Textures Mod (CTM)
Cucumber
Custom NPCs
Ding
Dirt2Path
Dynamic Surroundings
Dynamic Trees
Dynamic Trees BOP
Earthworks
Electroblob's Wizardry
Exotic Birds
Extra Utilities 2
Fairy Lights
Fence Jumper
Fence Overhaul
Ferdinand's Flowers
First Aid
Floricraft
Foam Fix
Forge Endertech
Garden of Glass Skybox
Hopper Ducts
Hunger In Peace
iChunUtil
Immersive Engineering
Immersive Railroading
Item Zoom
Just Enough Items
Landlust
Loot Bags
Lycanites Mobs
Mantle
MmmMmmMmmMmm
MrCrayfish's Furniture Mod
MrCrayfish's Gun Mod
Natura
No More Recipe Conflict
Not Enough Items
Obfuscate
OpenComputers
OptiFine
Pam's HarvestCraft
Pam's Weee! Flowers
Placebo
Quark
Quick Leaf Decay
Redstone Paste
Roost
Rope Bridge
Rustic
Rustic BOP Woods
Signpost
Simple Teleporters
Soul Shards - The Old Ways
Sound Filters
Storage Drawers
Storage Drawers Extras
The Spice of Life
Tim's Expansion Mod
Track API
Unlimited Chisel Works
Vanilla Automation
Varied Commodities
Vein Miner
Water Strainer
WorldEdit
Xaero's Minimap
There are 93 total mods, and wow that feels like too many.
On the other hand, no matter how much I try to pare it down, I can’t. I feel like all of this needed to achieve what I want from this pack. This takes 3-4gb of RAM to run smoothly, and 5-6gb of RAM to run comfortably with shaders and no stuttering at all.
So, after all this ranting, is this too many mods? Is there a good amount of mods for something like this? If there is questing and NPCs involved, can lots of mods become useless or confusing? Is there even such a thing as a mod limit? Can anyone suggest which mods might not be needed here?
Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
The modpack should have Custom NPCs, loads of quests, bits of lore and towns of many flavors scattered all around a preset map made with WorldPainter, and a very tiny story to go with it.
Before I start coding NPCs, making quests, or tweaking configs and fiddling with recipes, I decided to pick out all the mods I want, refine that selection of mods down to exactly what the pack needs, no more and no less, and then not ever touching that set of mods to avoid having conflicts, invalid quests, unused items and blocks or an error in the story that can't be explained.
This dang modpack has gone through over 100 iterations since the Summer of 2017. I've shifted focus so many times it just feels like a big jumbled mess. It's been on 1.9, then 1.10.2, then, very briefly, 1.11.2, and then it finally landed on 1.12.2, and has stayed there for a long time. I'm not shifting versions again unless something wild and amazing happens with modding on 1.13. I've just bounced too much trying to find the sweet spot, and I'm not going to waste any more time with that. Aside from version shifts, I have changed the mods in each instance so many times it's not even funny.
The biggest problem I have is this:
How many mods is too many?
I understand that there isn't an exact answer for this. Every modpack has a different focus, with a different number of mods required to fit that focus. My pack doesn't seem to fit in a solid, common category at all though.
I put some of my ideas for the pack in the following spoilers for tidiness's sake:
Here's a bunch of backstory and stuff and also I want the pack to be like and what I think is needed to complete that:
I want the quests to have a tech tree, a farming tree, a magic tree, an exploration tree, a social tree and a hunting tree. Tech, magic and farming are self-explanatory, exploration will deal with finding plants, rocks, and lore from around the map, social will deal with finding NPCs and befriending them and helping them, and hunting will deal with finding, taming and killing various mobs around the map.
Building wise, there should be a giant map in the form of a peninsula with a bay at one side.
I know I said “peninsula” but also like I said it’s not finished, so eventually I will connect it to a larger land mass (that you won’t be able to get into by the power of world boundaries and laziness). The map is 1792 x 1792 blocks wide. It has an area of 3,211,264 blocks squared.
The “story” that goes along with the island is this:
Under the bay lives a rift into another dimension. From this rift comes a host of demons, monsters and horrible beings every night, and sometimes the day. The rift could be closed, but it would just reopen somewhere else, possibly larger and stronger than it is now. The people of the bay decided the leave the rift be and fight whatever comes from it in order to spare any other location from the horror that lies within. Despite this, the bay is relatively peaceful, and the people there live comfortable lives. A band of citizens, called the Guard, defend the bay from the monsters and investigate any anomalies that arise from the presence of the rift.
Here's what I think is needed for the pack:
1. The map needs monsters, and lots. This is achieved by using Lycanites Mobs.
2. The economy is based off technology, mining, ranching and farming, so mods of this breed are needed. Lots of RF power is likely needed. Since there is so much else in the pack, the tech should not become overly complicated.
3. Since everything on the map is prebuilt, structure and decoration mods are needed. The pack should have a feel of slightly decayed modern enhanced with futuristic bits, but also kind of rustic because farming.
4. There should be a train/monorail that can take the player around the map due to its size and structure.
5. There has to be magic and weapons in the game, but the magic shouldn't get out of hand.
6. There has to be terrain generation, plant and biome mods, so that the large map doesn't look repetitive and exploration is fun and rewarding.
The main goal is to pick a homestead, join the Guard to protect the Bay at night, and finish up your quests and build up your home during the day. There will be lots of terrain and towns to explore, and NPCs that can help you along the way.
Building wise, there should be a giant map in the form of a peninsula with a bay at one side.
I know I said “peninsula” but also like I said it’s not finished, so eventually I will connect it to a larger land mass (that you won’t be able to get into by the power of world boundaries and laziness). The map is 1792 x 1792 blocks wide. It has an area of 3,211,264 blocks squared.
The “story” that goes along with the island is this:
Under the bay lives a rift into another dimension. From this rift comes a host of demons, monsters and horrible beings every night, and sometimes the day. The rift could be closed, but it would just reopen somewhere else, possibly larger and stronger than it is now. The people of the bay decided the leave the rift be and fight whatever comes from it in order to spare any other location from the horror that lies within. Despite this, the bay is relatively peaceful, and the people there live comfortable lives. A band of citizens, called the Guard, defend the bay from the monsters and investigate any anomalies that arise from the presence of the rift.
Here's what I think is needed for the pack:
1. The map needs monsters, and lots. This is achieved by using Lycanites Mobs.
2. The economy is based off technology, mining, ranching and farming, so mods of this breed are needed. Lots of RF power is likely needed. Since there is so much else in the pack, the tech should not become overly complicated.
3. Since everything on the map is prebuilt, structure and decoration mods are needed. The pack should have a feel of slightly decayed modern enhanced with futuristic bits, but also kind of rustic because farming.
4. There should be a train/monorail that can take the player around the map due to its size and structure.
5. There has to be magic and weapons in the game, but the magic shouldn't get out of hand.
6. There has to be terrain generation, plant and biome mods, so that the large map doesn't look repetitive and exploration is fun and rewarding.
The main goal is to pick a homestead, join the Guard to protect the Bay at night, and finish up your quests and build up your home during the day. There will be lots of terrain and towns to explore, and NPCs that can help you along the way.
Here's my current list of mods:
Advanced Chimneys
AppleCore
Applied Energistics 2
ATLCraft Candles Mod
Attained Drops 2
AutoRegLib
Bad Mobs
Better Railroads
Better Fps
BiblioCraft
Biomes O' Plenty
Blur
Bottled Milk
Chameleon
Chickens
Chisel
CodeChicken Lib
Comforts
Cooking for Blockheads
Corpse Complex
Crafting Tweaks
Crafting Craft
CT Watercan
Connected Textures Mod (CTM)
Cucumber
Custom NPCs
Ding
Dirt2Path
Dynamic Surroundings
Dynamic Trees
Dynamic Trees BOP
Earthworks
Electroblob's Wizardry
Exotic Birds
Extra Utilities 2
Fairy Lights
Fence Jumper
Fence Overhaul
Ferdinand's Flowers
First Aid
Floricraft
Foam Fix
Forge Endertech
Garden of Glass Skybox
Hopper Ducts
Hunger In Peace
iChunUtil
Immersive Engineering
Immersive Railroading
Item Zoom
Just Enough Items
Landlust
Loot Bags
Lycanites Mobs
Mantle
MmmMmmMmmMmm
MrCrayfish's Furniture Mod
MrCrayfish's Gun Mod
Natura
No More Recipe Conflict
Not Enough Items
Obfuscate
OpenComputers
OptiFine
Pam's HarvestCraft
Pam's Weee! Flowers
Placebo
Quark
Quick Leaf Decay
Redstone Paste
Roost
Rope Bridge
Rustic
Rustic BOP Woods
Signpost
Simple Teleporters
Soul Shards - The Old Ways
Sound Filters
Storage Drawers
Storage Drawers Extras
The Spice of Life
Tim's Expansion Mod
Track API
Unlimited Chisel Works
Vanilla Automation
Varied Commodities
Vein Miner
Water Strainer
WorldEdit
Xaero's Minimap
There are 93 total mods, and wow that feels like too many.
On the other hand, no matter how much I try to pare it down, I can’t. I feel like all of this needed to achieve what I want from this pack. This takes 3-4gb of RAM to run smoothly, and 5-6gb of RAM to run comfortably with shaders and no stuttering at all.
So, after all this ranting, is this too many mods? Is there a good amount of mods for something like this? If there is questing and NPCs involved, can lots of mods become useless or confusing? Is there even such a thing as a mod limit? Can anyone suggest which mods might not be needed here?
Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
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2
I would finish building the map first trying to use as few mod blocks as possible so you can eliminate some of those mods. Otherwise I don't know, never tried something like this before and not entirely sure I know what you're trying to do.
I honestly thought about this too. I'll try to stop worrying about mods for now and start working on the map/architecture instead to see what I actually need instead of what I think I might need in the future.
My goal was to make a modpack with a map that played a bit like an RPG, with quests, towns and NPCs to guide you through the mods included instead of you just being out on your own in the wilderness. The player can do what they want really, and nothing is stopping them from just playing Minecraft, but the map will leave them with something weird and pre-built to explore and engage in if they chose to do so.
I also want to build this because I feel like I'm good at mapping and modpacks, and I don't see those combined all that much. Maybe I'm wrong, but this feels like a unique idea, and I want to see if it can actually be done at all.
Thanks for the feedback!!
My goal was to make a modpack with a map that played a bit like an RPG, with quests, towns and NPCs to guide you through the mods included instead of you just being out on your own in the wilderness. The player can do what they want really, and nothing is stopping them from just playing Minecraft, but the map will leave them with something weird and pre-built to explore and engage in if they chose to do so.
I also want to build this because I feel like I'm good at mapping and modpacks, and I don't see those combined all that much. Maybe I'm wrong, but this feels like a unique idea, and I want to see if it can actually be done at all.
Thanks for the feedback!!
