🔮 The Story of The Architect's Prism 🔮

Eons ago, there was the Architect’s Prism. It was originless - it had no maker, no beginning. It was universal, only one existed among all realms. Its only purpose - shaping thoughts into form, and form into reality.

The Prism  was discovered and wielded by the greatest nation of its time, millenia before today. Its power gave rise to elegant weaponry, cities of unimaginable beauty, and a deeper understanding of the world itself. The influence of the Prism profoundly shaped the magical arts, as well as the creation of other - albeit less powerful - artifacts that still exist today.

However, should the thoughts fueling the Prism become ever so sligthly corrupt, its creations would twist and turn to darkness. A curious sorcerer, in an experiment to test the Prism’s true power, once unleashed its darkest creations - beings so terrible they consumed both him and the nation. Having barely managed to contain the outbreak of these wretched beings, other sorcerers, recognizing the danger of the Prism’s power, resolved to destroy it. 

Though shattered, the Prism’s essence survived through the split shards, which then started adapting and took the form of Eyes. Every eye inherited a tiny fraction of the Prism's powers, but some were scattered across realms, some lost to time, others reforged through arcane craft and ritual lost their power. Knowledge of them withered - first becoming legends and eventually fading into myths.

Yet there remains an old saying that whoever retrieves all of the Eyes can restore the Architect’s Prism and wield its miraculous powers of creation

✨ About ADJ ✨

A Distant Journey (or ADJ for short) is a modpack which aims to flip the game upside down, making it feel both like a whole different game, but at the same time preserving the vibe of a typical Minecraft modpack. 

• Is it an adventure/RPG modpack? - Yes. 
• Is it a building/magic/tech/farming/combat modpack? - All of those actually.
• Is it good for roleplaying? - I think so.
• Is it a kitchen sink modpack? - It falls under the definition of one, except it has effort to it.

ADJ is my own vision for an adventure pack, with its main design principle being doing things differently. The core gameplay was altered in almost every possible place, with the game turning into a linearly progressing campaign where more and more items are unlocked the further the player progresses. Progress is gated behind Chapters, each focusing around a different dimension. 

In order to beat the main campaign, you will have to dip your fingers in every content mod to at least some extent, being a bit of a change of pace from adventure packs which just focus on killing bosses and upgrading equipment with no real progression whatsoever. All equipment was also reworked, so the game isn't just about getting diamond armor and keeping it for the rest of the game. I mean you can still do that, but the mobs are likely going to slime you out if you do...

Despite being partially labeled as an RPG, ADJ doesn't put much pressure on its lore. Outside of what's already written, you are free to make your own canons and stories, just like in vanilla Minecraft. It's a sandbox game after all, and I tried my best to keep that feeling all throughout the playthrough. The progression also isn't super strict - in every new chapter, you unlock at least a few new things to do, and you can choose the order in which you do them yourself.

⚒️ Key Features ⚒️

• Features a huge roster of 500+ mods, ranging from community favorites like Create, Botania, Farmer's Delight, The Aether and The Twilight Forest, to slightly less popular ones like Ars Nouveau, EvilCraft, and Cracker's Wither Storm, plus a few hidden gems, e.g. Rediscovered. To finish the pack, you’ll have to dip your fingers into most of the core mods, so you will experience everything included. 
• Plenty of custom content. Hundreds (if not thousands) of recipes have been changed, duplicated mod content was removed, making it feel less like you are playing every mod in the modpack separately and more as if you were playing one enormous mod. Some mods even got huge reworks:
  • Botania and Ars Nouveau use the same Mana system rather than 2 - Mana and Source. EvilCraft was also integrated into the mix, so items from each of these mods are used in their recipes. 
  • Create mod underwent some changes, like most machine component recipes being reworked. They aren't any more grindy, but it sure should bring some freshness to a mod used in absolutely every modpack.
  • Twilight Forest was reworked from scratch, with every biome getting completely new generation (wow! I cannot believe it's not glorified superflat anymore!), as well as some structures. The Final Castle now has an actual purpose, being an important part of the modpack's progression. Needless to say, the mod is a bit more than nostalgiabait now...
  • Armor, weapon and item reworks, featuring armor set bonuses, new weapon on-hit effects and such, etc. etc.
  • Completely new items unique to the modpack.
  • ...and probably some content I forgot about.
• Completely reworks progression to be linear and have scaling difficulty, with a full achievement-driven campaign to compliment it. As previously mentioned, ADJ is split into Chapters. In the current version, there is a total of 5 Chapters, each one ending with a different boss. Beating them will permanently increase the threat level of your world, empowering mobs, making them drop new loot, and sometimes even generating new ores underground or in different dimensions. In short - mobs get stronger, but so do you.
• Improves ambience all around. Like fun fact, ADJ has actual sunrises and sunsets which are visible without shaders!
• Completely rebalances the game and alters core gameplay. Every number was flipped upside down. The game is balanced around what could be described as 'double digit numbers of damage and triple digit ones for health'. If you like how games like Terraria play, you might like ADJ.
• Freshens up and expands the world generation. Built on top of Clifftree with plenty of my own edits and features, and a semi-strict "no overused worldgen mods” rule, giving worlds a fresh and slightly unique look compared to other modpacks. There is a total of 6 dimensions (including the Overworld).
• Keeps the sandbox spirit of Minecraft, on top of everything mentioned above. There are plenty of mods included simply because they were fun! Etched, The Joy of Painting, Transmog, Immersive Paintings, Immersive Melodies, Blahaj... If you want to turn your world into a huge roleplay, then do so! Have fun and do wacky stuff, it's a block game.
• It's multiplayer compatible, so you can have fun (or suffer, depending on how you look at it) with friends! If you cannot afford to rent a server, you can host it yourself with no setup needed - just 2 clicks are enough to open the world for anyone to join from anywhere (courtesy of E4MC).

🧿 The Eyes 🧿

In order to assemble the Architect's Prism, you will need to collect a total of 7 mythical Eyes, each possesing a small fraction of the Prism's power, and fuse them back together. You will get some of them through defeating bosses and the rest through semi-grindy crafting trees. But nothing to be scared of, this isn't GregTech ;)

From left to right:

1. Eye of Cinders - essence of fire that destroys and recreates. Dropped by Wither.
2. Eye of Angels - essence of purity that cleanses what's dirty of its imperfections. Dropped by Aerwhale King (Lost Aether Content).
3. Eye of Dreams - essence of memories so strong they alter what's real and what's not. Dropped by Red Dragon (Rediscovered).
4. Eye of Desolation - essence of nothingness where everything comes from. Dropped by Ender Guardian (Cataclysm)
5. Eye of Verdancy - essence of life that allows everything to bloom. Crafted through Gaia Infusion (Botania + Botanic Additions).
6. Eye of Arcana - essence of magic that keeps the threads of reality together. Crafted through a ritual at a Twilight Altar (Summoning Rituals + Twilight Forest).
7. Eye of Ethercraft - essence of power that allowed technological progress. Crafted by combining 3 pieces, each crafted slighlty differently (Create).
8. Eye of Hedonism - essence of joy that comes from food, drinks and other material items. Crafted by combining some of the hardest meals to cook and drinks to prepare (Farmer's Delight + its addons).
9. Eye of Curiosity - essence of, well, curiosity, that kept pushing every adventure forward. Crafted at a Crafting Table with a few of the rarer materials found throughout progression.

Unfamiliar with the aforementioned mods? Don't be intimidated! Most items in ADJ have descriptions explaining their usage. Combine this with achievements, which will give you a push in the right direction, and connecting the tech components from different mods becomes nothing more than a simple riddle with big rewards.

⚙️ Technical Info and Notes ⚙️

• Minimum of 8 GB of RAM is required to run the pack, with 10GB - 12GB being recommended.
• The pack was made on a higher-end PC, but tested on a few machines with different hardware. It should run fine on weaker machines if you tweak some client mod configs. You can also debloat the pack of purely cosmetic mods, full list of which is available on the modpack's wiki.
• This pack is still in active development, so please bear with some stability/performance problems or idiotic bugs! I'm constantly trying to fix them and improve the pack to the best of my best abilities.

📜 Special Thanks 📜

• ElocinDev, blueversal, raspmary, and the ATM Team as their projects were a huge inspiration for ADJ, especially raspmary's Raspberry Flavoured and blueversal's Beyond Depth. Especially the last one, as it was actually a direct reason why I started making my own modpack in the first place.
• MidasDaEpik and brokenemp for making some item textures for the modpack.
• Persie, The Dragon and Valerypire from Discord for allowing me to use their screenshots.
• Everyone who participated in the early tests.
• YOU, for even checking out this page <3.

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