MineCraft...

So, after a bit of a hiatus (a couple of years, actually), I'm back into the MineCraft fold.

Here's what happened: I fell across some MC Let's Play YouTube videos (I don't even remember which ones now--probably one of ThatMumboJumbo's). Some changes had happened since I last had played.

But here's the thing: I'm not playing vanilla. I've been playing modded. Specifically, mods made for Forge. Note: all mod links are to the Curse Forge version of the mod.

Vanilla is great, don't get me wrong, but there are some problems that I wish Mojang would address, storage among them. The Shulker boxes go a little bit in this direction, but this is clearly an end game item (in more ways than one, as the only way to get one is to get an Elytra and the only way to get an Elytra in vanilla is to kill the Ender Dragon, an element of the game I have very little to no interest at all), so it doesn't solve the problem of item sorting and finding the shit you could have sworn you put in that chest right fucking there. I have a hard time finding my car keys, never mind the beacon I put in one of 34 double chests or that Mending book I could have sworn I had put in Chest #14a just five minutes ago.

So, I have gone with some other storage solutions.

At first, I tried Applied Energistics 2 (AE2). The problem with that is:

It is very memory intensive.
It is not updated to 1.11.2. The latest version it is updated to is 1.10.2.
It is very grindy. One of the items in the game (pure fluix) requires approximately 8 hours of game time (see the MindCrafter's tutorial on AE2 on the YouTubes)

Now at first, that updating problem really cheesed me off: there are a lot of features (shulker boxes, for example) that I wanted access to that I couldn't because either I had shulker boxes or I had AE2.

I got over that, but that grindiness killed it for me. Trying to find a meteorite (even with the meteor compass) was a pain, particularly when the compass didn't seem to work right.

So I went with Refined Storage and that was fine for a while. My problem with it is that it lacks something, je ne sais quoi. It lacks fun, for lack of a better term.

Part of the appeal of MineCraft, at least for me, is its ability to not take itself too damned seriously. This is a game, after all, where a creeper can sneak up on you and blow up all your shit and spiders drop from trees just because they're assholes. Even zombies are silly in their own way. You can put a saddle on a pig, mount it, and actually get an achievement if you can convince the pig to jump off a cliff with you on its back.

So, yes, MineCraft is a very silly game. And that, among many other reasons, is why it is brilliant.

But anyway, here is a mod list that I'm currently using:

Maybe if there is enough interest, I will make a mod-pack of all my mods. And, hey, if it can run on my POS system, it can run on yours. 😁