My Modded Play Diary
I wanted to keep a play diary for my latest playthrough of modded Minecraft, so why not keep it here?
Things to note:
This is a version 1.12.2 game. Yes, that is a very outdated release in 2022. Nostalgia is a big motivator here.
I'm playing a custom, private modpack, catering purely to my personal tastes. There's magic, there's some tech, there's a lot of weirdness. There's even dinosaurs! I'll be showing off varius mods as I encounter them.
Day 1
Welcome to my world!
I stumbled upon this lovely-looking seed as I was doing testing for my modpack. It's got plenty of relatively flat space to spread out and do some building, something I really want to focus on for this playthrough.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. It's all well and good to think about grand goals, but for the immediate future, I'm mostly concerned with the Minecraft basics.
I do have a little bit of a head start. With the Custom Starter Gear mod, I begin with a set of stone tools, a sleeping bag, and a bundled collection of various mod documentation books.
I've done the vanilla start dozens of times. I decided to spare myself that annoying five minutes of using wooden tools. Meanwhile, the sleeping bag will be great for avoiding those early nights of huddling in a hole in the ground. However, the bag does not set my spawn point, so getting wool is still a priority.
Forge lists 255 mods in this pack, so there should be plenty to keep me occupied for a long while. I'm excited to share my new journey!
Day 8
It may be modded, but that doesn't mean I can avoid the early-game tree-chopping. With the Dynamic Trees mod, not only do the trees look more realistic, but they actually fall to the ground when you chop them from the bottom. For the first few days, I chopped wood, mined stone, and flattened out a small area for building.
I haven't had to kill any animals yet. Fruits and berries are plentiful, and I used what little iron I found to make shears for the lone sheep I found. I've just gathered enough wool for a bed.
Here's the in-progress house. I'm still not settled on the design. I tend to build the same house over and over in Minecraft, and I want to challenge myself this time to make something new. We'll see what I come up with.
Day 16
While mining cobblestone for the house, I stumbled upon a cave, with a creeper spawner from Apotheosis. So many deaths...
But it wasn't all bad, because underneath the spawner was a chest with loot, including an enchantment table!
The house is still coming together, slowly. I'm definitely no Minecraft speedrunner. :P
Day 25
Here's the house. I think it's reasonably cute, though I may eventually switch the birch wood out with something else when I have the materials.
It has one main room, and a basement which I can use as an early-game storage area.
I think the Bibliocraft labels look nicer than item frames for identifying chests (and unlike item frames, they don't need leather).
My next goal is to sink a mineshaft, and spend a good few days gathering resources. Having a supply of the basics will be useful when I start jumping into mods. Should probably start farming, too. And getting animals would be helpful... lots to do, so little time.
Day 32
Well, I've got the farming going. One field for wheat, and another field that will have various modded crops--I haven't encountered any carrots or potatoes, etc. yet. In the pens are farm animals from the Animania mod. Unlike vanilla critters, they have wants and needs. Each pen has a watering hole, and the pigs have mud to flop around in. If I take good care of my animals, they'll give higher-quality produce, and there are several new food items I can make.
Speaking of food, with Spice of Life: Carrot Edition installed, I'm incentivised to try as many different eatables as possible, gaining more health as I do. My food diary says that this pack has nearly 800 foods in total, so it'll be quite the culinary journey!
Day 50
I've done quite a bit of mining and caving. I've found lots of neat things, from dungeons to spawners to a massive vein of coal, enough to keep me cooking for quite a while. I even met a couple bosses from Apotheosis, who generously donated their enchanted armor. Amongst the other loot I found were a couple magical baubles: a golden horseshoe that negates fall damage, and a cross necklace that increases the invincibility window when I take damage.
To be honest, I'm still not quite done mining for now; I especially want a better stockpile of diamonds. But soon, I'll be able to start looking into tech mods and actually processing my stockpile of ore.
Day 62
I've made a small workshop for my beginning machines. It's a bit boring, but I wanted a modular design for when I inevitably need more space. Hey, it's better than a dirt cube filled with cables, so good by my standards.
Day 70
Built an extension to the house for an enchanting setup. I haven't gathered quite enough leather to fill it out with bookcases, yet.
One thing I am doing pretty well on is experience. The mod Improvable Skills not only lets me improve things like my attack damage, mining speed and more with experience, it also lets me store xp through its interface. I've got over 40 levels banked just from all that mining I did.
I'm still working on my initial tech stuff, but once I've got a processing system going, I'll share more.
Day 75
So, I've at least got some initial ore processing going from the Thermal series of mods. I'll probably move the machines around at some point. Aside from the dynamos behind the machines, I've also got a trickle of solar power coming in from the roof.
I also managed to scrounge up enough leather to fill out the enchanting table, and so enchanted that energy cell in the picture to hold extra power. Now I've got a nice buffer for if I have a lot of processing to do.
Day 78
Well, my basement looks a little crazy now, but I've got a storage system! Using the Simple Storage Network, I can access all my chests at once. I also crafted a handy remote that will let me access the network from up to 64 blocks away. Later, I'll be able to craft even more convienient remotes, but the next upgrade involves Nether materials. I've got some more work to do before I try braving that dimension.
Day 90
Let's talk about the birds and the bees. Well, just the bees. I've actually got three different types of bee in this pack, if you can beelieve it. There's the bees from the Rustic mod, simple creatures that can be collected from hives and used to boost your crop growth, and who produce honey for brewing and beeswax for candlemaking. There's the backported Minecraft bees from the Future MC mod. And then, there's Forestry.
Among many other things, Forestry adds a wide variety of bee species, which were one of, if not the first "resource-generators" in Minecraft modding. However, breeding good, productive bees is infamously tricky and time-consuming. Time and power creep have largely left Forestry bees behind in the resource-generating field. Yet I decided I wanted to at least give apiculture a fair shot in this playthrough. Time will tell if I lose my mind... or get burnt out and install Mystical Agriculture instead.
For now, I've been exploring, cracking open wild hives and scooping out several types of bee. Soon, I'll start on the journey of breeding them. I wanted this playthrough to last a while, months or even years, and I imagined Forestry bees as something I could work on from time to time for as long as I play. We'll just have to see how it goes!
Day 97
I'm a wizard! Or I'm trying to be.
While out exploring and gathering bees, I found some cool structures from Chocolate Quest: Repoured. Unfortunately, they were full of some tough customers, and I realized that I needed to work on upgrading my offensive capabilities.
So I turned to the arcane arts. Electroblob's Wizardry adds a neat spellcasting system, where you acquire new spells by finding spellbooks and levelling up your magic wand. I've only found a few books so far, but between the base mod and addons, there's hundreds to collect! If nothing else, I'll be a bit more effective in combat now.
Day 100
A hundred days in! It flew by so quickly. To be honest, I've barely scratched the surface of the content in this modpack; there's so much left to discover. But I'm having fun. If you're reading this, thank you for sharing my Minecraft journey with me! Here's to more adventures in the future.