Feed the Beast Minecraft Sandbox

Our adventures, builds, ideas, and mishaps playing with a heavily modified version of Direwolf20's Feed-The-Beast modpack. You'll find mod reviews, build showcases, tips, tricks and all manner of FTB gems.

[minecraftidea]

[beastfeedersab0t]

[beastfeedersab0t]

The building of a Titan! (Power Plant construction - Part 1)

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Power Plant - Water pumping station, liquid storage. 

[beastfeedersab0t]

Power Station - Computer Development Lab

[minecraftserverfinder]

Here’s a lighthouse I built on my server. - more at http://ift.tt/1a7N3av

[beastfeedersab0t]

very nice work. awesome terrain location for this too, fits perfectly.

what resource pack is this??

[duh102]

SO MUCH POWER. My new reactor setup is complete and running at full capacity, with an efficiency of ~7340 mB of steam per mB of fuel, which translates to a whopping ~108kRF/t, or 89.9MRF per ingot of fuel.

At the moment I’m not making use of all the power, I’m only using about 40kRF/t, but I plan to make another few mining lasers (my first two pictured in the top image). At present I don’t know if my yellorium delta is positive or negative, I’m going to work on that next.

[beastfeedersab0t]

#reactorporn <3

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jackpot!

[beastfeedersab0t]

Some seriously amazing shots of a huge mountain Crag nearby our town, captured via Hang Glider by player (and also my lovely girlfriend) Vondick.

Crags take full advantage of the world height: Massive, sweeping plateaus that feel like entire biomes of their own, complete with deep mountain lakes and a cobbled, wind-scorched surface rock unique to this biome. To give a sense of just how high Crag mountains go, Vondick's IndustrialCraft2 jetpack puttered out during the ascent, hitting its height limit halfway up o_o 

If you haven't tried Biomes O' Plenty yet, do yourself a favour and spin up a world with it and go exploring.

[beastfeedersab0t]

NEAT

tried out OpenBlocks Tank for the first time...i don't think i'll ever be using anything else from now on.

[beastfeedersab0t]

When 4 or 5 monsters keep accidentally injuring each other, resulting in a giant mosh pit: Relatively amusing

When 4 or 5 monsters keep accidentally injuring each other, resulting in a giant mosh pit, with Mob Amputation installed: Epic, bloody, hilarious

[beastfeedersab0t]

An Important Lesson in Procrastination

Once upon a time we built a super compact, effective and kick-ass looking grinding apparatus. It was perfect in every way! Except for one tiny thing...

We didn't plan space for a kill-switch circuit, which is needed to prevent the power storing coil from being wound beyond its capacity. Doing so causes the coil to 'violently fail'.

We added a clutch so we could turn it off manually. "It's very temporary", we said. "We will be careful, we won't forget!", we said. "It takes so long to charge, we would catch it before anything happened", we said.

There are probably several morals to today's story, but I think one we can all agree on is that 'violently fail' is a total understatement :p

[beastfeedersab0t]

Reactor Blast Door

Lead-clad 3x5 blast doors to my Power Plant's main reactor facility.

You might shed a tear at the crafting costs, but i guarantee it's worth whatever you might end up mechanizing with Funky Locomotion. You will instantly forget the resource costs, all of your friends will be jealous, look like a pro. See? You're jealous right now!

The best part? (Well, second best, nothing really beats creating a walking house or massive retractable weapon bay doors)...it's exceedingly simple, you'll learn all there is to learn in less than 15 minutes.

This is the redstone circuitry for the blast door! In fact, the only reason this is even half as complex as it is was due to wanting to set up buttons outside to toggle open/closed. I have many more screenshots of the prototype of the door I built, including exposed cross-sections that show off how microblock pieces can be used. If there's enough interest, I'll put together a separate post detailing how to build the blast door.

[beastfeedersab0t]

Our new modpack list

Apologies for being a bit late with this, but I'm excited to provide our new modpack list today! Our group has been really enjoying it so far - really, we're pretty much all totally addicted, and we have barely scratched the surface of all of the content.

We spent waaay too long curating, but it has been totally worth it in the end. A couple of us examined every single mod's wiki in the direwolf20 pack (shout-out to all the wiki authors out there, thank you all for your neurotically in-depth awesome work). THEN we went through a mind-numbing number of mods in this really handy indexing of forge compatible mods, grabbing several mods that we felt added the most value to the modpack.

If you plan on customizing your modpack with that list (something I highly recommend), make sure to avoid unnecessarily bloating your modpack. We have a few pointers to help ensure you really nail what you're looking for, while avoiding some potential 'modpack hazards'. I'll cover this in a separate post soon, so stay tuned. Or don't! I'm not your mom.

Onto the topic of new mod additions, the theme has changed only very slightly. It is still a tech-focused pack, keeping almost everything we've grown to love from TechWorld2, as well as a few new additions I am seriously stoked to get into. Special mentions from what I've seen so far, for tech mods new to our group in this pack: PneumaticCraft!  While I've only had a brief foray into what this mod offers, it's devices and machines are all interesting, the general mod quality seems very high, and it has the most creative plants I've seen yet in Minecraft (Creeper plants eject seeds to spread when mature, complete with an always frightening explosion sound, and Flying Plant seeds will soar away before eventually settling). Ender IO also gets a mention here for being an all-around incredibly well done mod, with one of, if not the best item/liquid/energy transportation systems I've used yet (To veterans of this mod, yes I realize you're all thinking "You just NOW started using Ender IO? WTF!?" to which I can only respond with "I KNOW!!!"), and Funky Locomotion, a mod that focuses purely on a new, but similar take on 'Frames', which, for those that used RedPower back in 1.4.6 will remember, adds slick and simple-to-learn devices for moving blocks. NO, not one dumb, measly block like a piston. Entire walls, massive gates, mecha-death-robot legs!

Due to increased interest within our player group (myself included), we've also got more magic mods than ever...so, not just ThaumCraft anymore. Blood Magic, Witchery, and Botania are now all added to the mix, along with ThaumCraft. All are thematically unique, and handle their respective idea of how magic works in Minecraft in original and creative ways. IAnd as if ThaumCraft isn't a huge and magnificent enough mod, we now have 2 Modspansions* for it, Thaumic Exploration and Thaumic Tinkerer. If this is starting to sound like a sales pitch, I really have no defense other than that I'm impressed and excited with everything I've seen so far.

* Modspansions: Mod Expansions! i just made this up. Patent Pending.

Unfortunately, we did lose a few amazing mods somewhat unwillingly..

Emasher's Mods (Engineer's Toolbox, GasCraft, Emasher Resource, Emasher Defense), while somewhat recently released for 1.7.10, appear to not be actively maintained, much less new development (the mod author stated he no longer has enough free time to continue on with it, and is looking for other(s) to take over its maintenance). I was actually planning to include it anyway, as we are planning to stay on 1.7.10 for a very long time, but even worse news is that the latest posts in the mod thread indicate the current version is suffering from a pretty major "worldbreaking" bug </3 If you haven't had a chance to try these mods and are playing on 1.6.4, I highly recommend them! We'll be patching this group of mods in the day the major issues get fixed, so fingers crossed :)

After significant consideration, and despite that several players in our group loved them and used them extensively (myself most of all on both accounts...</3), we agreed to exclude Reika's mods this time around. RotaryCraft, ReactorCraft, DragonAPI, Eletricraft, ChromatiCraft and Geostrata (the last three of which were all brand new mods that us Reika-fans had all been anticipating) - I'll be writing a separate post outlining some of the problems that very reliably crop up when adding these to modpacks, in hopes that our trials and tribulations can aid others in the never-ending quest of the bug-free modpack. ;)

My last shout-outs (really, i swear this time) are to mods that add an incredible amount of aesthetic value to the world. Carpenter's Blocks and Chisel are like a dream come true for me, the potential when using them truly is incredible. I'm sure most FTBers are plenty acquainted with both , but if not, you'll soon be seeing lots of both in almost all of my future posts. The last mod to point out is Plant Megapack. This is a hidden gem that I wish more people knew about, adding vibrant flora to the MC world the likes of which I've never seen. Again, you'll be seeing awesome examples constantly in the near future.

Direwolf20 (MC1.7.10) Mods:

Another One Bites The Dust

AromaBackup

Automagy

bdlib

BiblioCraft

Better Storage

Blood Magic

Botania

BiblioWoods - (Biomes O Plenty) / (Forestry) / (Natura)

Big Reactors

BinniesMods

Biomes O'Plenty

BuildCraft

Carpenter's Blocks

ChickenChunks

Chisel

ComputerCraft

Open Mods Lib for ComputerCraft

Open Peripheral Addons for ComputerCraft

Death Counter

Dense Ores

DenPipes / DenPipes-Forestry / DenPipes-Emerald

Ender IO

Ender Storage

ENet Bridge

Extra Trees

Extra Utilities

Factorization

Flat Signs

FoodPlus

Forestry

Forge Multipart

Funky Locomotion

Gany's End / Gany's Surface / Gany's Nether

Help Fixer

IndustrialCraft 2 (Experimental)

IndustrialCraft 2 - Nuclear Control

InfiniBows

Magic Bees

MineChem

MineFactory Reloaded

Mo' Creatures

Natura

OpenBlocks

Plant Megapack

PneumaticCraft

Power Converters (Being added again soon!)

Project Red

Railcraft

Redstone Arsenal

Steve's Carts 2

Steve's Factory Manager

Storage Drawers

Thermal Expansion 3

Tinker's Construct / Tinker's MechWorks

ThaumCraft

Thaumic Exploration

Thaumic Tinkerer

Twilight Forest

Witchery

Our very cool ClientSide mods

Better Title Screen

Back Tools

Inventory Tweaks

JourneyMap

Mob Amputation

Administrative Tools, Support/Patch Mods, Better User Experience

Custom Mob Spawner

Morpheus

Not Enough Items / Addons / Plugins

EVOC / JABBA / Opis / WAILA   (Adding EVOC again soon!)

Required Libraries, APIs, etc.

Aroma1997Core

BDLib

CodeChickenCore

CoFH Core

CoFH Lib

iChun Util

IMpure Core

Keithy Utils

Den Lib

Mantle

Mobious Core

Open Peripheral Core for ComputerCraft

PowerCrystals Core

Again I'd like to thank all the mod authors as well as the FTB team for all of the quality work that's led to the glory that is this modpack. Cheers to you. now GET BACK TO WORK!

[beastfeedersab0t]

"you can eat this bread and become invisible!"

"REALLY!? hehehe, i'm going to go prank keesa and scare the crap out of her"

*nom*

"...............damnit"

(Dimensional Bread from Gany's Surface)

[beastfeedersab0t]

PSA: Fixes for "Ticking Block Entity" Client & Server crash

We ran into a nasty crash involving the Forestry Trade Station, I haven’t seen our specific case posted online yet, below are a few solutions for the error, as this can be caused by a bugged block or custom mob skins.

A player had broken a Trade Station block to move it elsewhere, but this caused their Client as well as the Server to crash. The server would restart normally but every time someone joined, both would crash a couple seconds later due to the chunk with the glitches block being loaded. I am guessing this can happen with other blocks too.

This error can apparently be caused by mods (most notably, IndustrialCraft2) changing monster or mob skins based off of the date such as Halloween or Christmas skins. Since this is easier to check than the next solution, try setting spawn-monsters to false and game-difficulty to 0 in the server.properties file (located in the server root).

If that didn't fix it, try shutting the server down, opening forge.cfg and changing removeErroringTileEntities to true. You may also want to try setting the other (removeErroringEntities) to true as well though we didn’t need to do so. Start the server and join in to load the chunk with the problem block - If you didn’t crash then your problem is solved… either case you should shut down the server and set both of those fields back to false, start the server again and start playing :)

[beastfeedersab0t]

Happy New Year! (and Happy new Modpack!)

Happy 2015! My New Year’s Minecraft resolution is to actually post here, and post often! Last year was pathetic, my only defense is that I’m a complete tumblr n00b, but I’m going to be spamming west content faster than a beta bow…

We have built some seriously cool stuff and I’m stoked to share - I will also be posting our current list of mods, as well as some tips on solving some of the configuration challenges we’ve run into.

Stay tuned yo.

[beastfeedersab0t]

A view of our town, from a floating gelatinous slime island nearby. I'll be covering everything here in more detail in future posts - Yes, including explaining why there is a monstrous tree.