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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3199 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 9, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What video games are people playing?

I just finished the Outer Wilds after picking it up on sale, and wow, that game was incredible. The ending actually made me cry, something I haven't experienced in a video game in almost a decade.

I usually don't go for narrative driven/mystery type games, but Outer Wilds is truly in a class of it's own. I've heard Return of Obra Dinn is similar quality, as well as Disco Elysium, so I'm curious to check those out.

I've been in modded Minecraft a good bit. The modded Fabric multiplayer server I'd been working with kinda fell apart while I was offline for work reasons, not that far from the typical start-of-school-season life cycle for those things, so starting from scratch.

Mostly been running a single-player 1.12 Forge Sky2Void instance. It's rough in a few ways, both boring ones like typos, and some less polished broader balance problems, but the central loop of finding new materials and equipment as you break through challenges is fun.

A month back I set up a server to try out the in-development Valhelsia 5 pack. After years of not playing MC it was hard to tell what was modded. Whether the core 1.19 or the mods, a lot of the systems that were skeletal when last I played have gotten rich, robust progression and mechanics.

I almost want to set up a lighter modpack that keeps the gear and loot and worldgen, but only a few of the tech mods. Some of the more 1800s ones really fit the vanilla Minecraft aesthetic better than others. Also, Create is an absolute miracle of a mod.

But delving into modpack assembly...feels like much more than I want to commit at the moment. That way lies madness.

Modpack assembly's less bad now than in the 1.7 or 1.6 days, from a technical side. There's inevitably some dependency-hunting that the launcher should be more able to help resolve, but once that's done you're almost always going to get a loading game with a valid world (at least in Forge/Fabric).

From a design side, and picking the right mods for what you're interested in sticking with... that can be a deep rabbit hole.

Vanilla's gotten better, and it avoids a lot of the 'big empty world of nothing' feeling that earlier generations often had if you weren't so much into building megastructures. Admittedly, to have other different incomplete systems bolted on instead, but at least the useless fletching-table and near-useless copper are. There's been some controversy, but the villager, map, and dye colors rework alone make going back to older versions a lot harder than I expect every time.

Valhelsia's not bad as kitchen-sink packs go, but it's very crowded feeling and always feels a little unpolished to me. But if you're an explorer, they're one of the better options in terms of giant modded-structures outside of Yet Another Twilight Forest Run.

Create's amazing. Most vanilla-like mods tends to be pretty subtle, even if they've got a ton of content (eg, Quark), while most major new system mods can feel glued-on poorly-at-best (ThermalExpansion) to outright disruptive (AppliedEnergistics has a lot of sins to answer for). The closest serious competitors I can remember are ThaumCraft 4 and Immersive Engineering, but Create's at a whole different level. I wouldn't recommend it for your first modded playthrough for a few different reasons (not least of all that it's built around an old version now), but Create:Above and Beyond does some really interesting things that are worth seeing if you enjoy the automation ecosystem.

Afraid I don't have too many not-obvious recs for 1.18 or 1.19 right now. Of the big names, Create Flavored doesn't really look polished enough for me to be comfortable reccing it for someone's first pack. Bliss is fantastic if you add Create in, (and doing so is just dropping Create and Flywheel), but it's also a very specific sort of play that you can probably guess in a glance (and the worldgen is a little boring). The custom 1.18 pack (h/t to KirinDave) I'd given some code on from the last server probably count or be close (arguably can also drop Requiem/HexCraft/Yttr), but it's Fabric, a little more multiplayer oriented, and overworld worldgen was pretty intentionally left alone.

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