Sail Away

Have you ever wanted to be stranded on a deserted island with nothing but the clothes on your back and your most annoying friends? Well, this might be the pack for you. The goal is to provide a rewarding but relaxed pack that provides all the tools you'll need to feel at home while also encouraging you to get out a little (of your in-game fortress, not into the real sun of course, eww!).

The centerpiece of the rpg aspect is the wonderful 1.15 update to Mine and Slash. Magic is now an essential part of every build, not just those who chose wands/staves (there are no more wands as far as I can tell), and weapons from other mods should be compatible with it (you'll pry my terrasteel sword from my cold, blocky hands), though I still find outliers at times. Along with this are some quality of life upgrades to make the experience more fun/less tedious. These include Corail's Tombstone for the graves and eventually instant warps back to them, wall jump (because every game should let you double jump and wall climb), and backpacked, because when traveling long distances extra bag space is a must.

For home you have some options. 

For those who love complex mechanical setups mekanism is there for you. Get those ore quadrupling (or something, it's truly crazy!) factories going and watch the ingots pile up. For the more magic inclined there's the ever rewarding Botania. Being more survival focused there aren't so many in the way of cosmetic blocks, but there are lots of storage and transport choices - essential to any long term base.

World Generation:

Perhaps the most important part of any minecraft pack is the world generation. As you hopefully gathered from the intro the theme of this pack is island survival. As such the main generator is the Survival Island generator made by Voronoi. It has the added benefit of playing well with other's custom biomes, so plenty of those have been tossed in too. Each island is (roughly) one biome, so when you find yourself in need of some cactus, well, time to go exploring. 

That covers the basics of the pack. I'll cover some things that I feel might be helpful in a FAQ below.

FAQ:

Q: I'm trying to play this on a server but I can't seem to get it to use the islands generator. What should I do?

A: Man, this one gave me a bit of a headache too. First off, try opening server.properties and setting "level-generator=byg" (without the quotes, of course). That's the recommended soluton, but that didn't work for me. I had to NBT edit the level.dat file. Google a NBt editor, and once you open it go to "Data" and then look for "generatorName" and set this to "islands". Then make sure all the old region data is cleared (just go inside [saved world name] > region and ctrl-a then delete). Thus the next time you start the server it'll be using the survival island and generate new land around spawn.

Q: All the mobs are getting super easy to kill and I'm not getting much mine and slash exp anymore, but the next island they're too hard! Help!

A: Well, 1) did you make a search pattern based on the spawn when you went island searching? The farther from spawn the harder the mobs so look for close islands first. 2) The ocean does not go down to bedrock. Try digging down on your first island and then following the cave(s) around. That should give you a smoother progression, until you can waste those mobs too.

Q: Why do you have so many ores around? They don't seem to be doing anything!

A: You are mostly correct, my observant friend. There are indeed lots of mostly pointless ores generating. Why? Because gosh darn it I love (and miss) Tinker's Construct and want to be able to install it as soon as it's updated. To do that and keep my current world it needs ores that will work with it, so there they are. Not all will work with Tcon, but the extra ones can always be used for decoration, and I'm still toying with the idea of allowing them to be converted into more useful things via craft tweaker. Let me know your thoughts on this!

Q: When did pressing c to lie down become a thing, and how have I lived without this for so long?!

A: I hear you. I never thought about it before, but now that I can crawl through 1 block high areas I'm not sure I could play without it. Sadly it's not a vanilla feature (well, it technically is, but you have to get your head smashed down to go prone in vanilla) but the lovely goprone mod updated to 1.15, so fear not.

Q: Your modpack sucks, it crashes all the time, and you have no artistic talent.

A: 1) Sorry you feel that way, 2) Send the crash log (or if you add it to a comment please, please use the spoiler tag) and I'll see what I can find, and 3) well duh, that's why I chose a life of math and red tape, not beautiful souls and touching art... yeah, I regret it too xD

Hope you all enjoy it!