SevTech: Ages - Age 5 | The Futuristic Age

November 16, 2019

Moon Landing

“One small step for a Piyo, one giant leap for Piyokind.”

— Piyotato

It is with great pride and accomplishment that I announce my safe landing on the Moon. Contrary to popular belief, it is actually flat.

Don’t question the clouds - it is a mere side effect of shaders. As I landed, I realized I forgot the Fuel Loader. Oh no! I decided to leave that problem for future me to solve, and instead start looking for a Moon Dungeon.

Now, if I had simply looked at the Advancements which tells me how to craft a strange item used to locate Monster Spawners, which can easily help me find a dungeon, I wouldn’t have needed to traveled 10000 blocks looking for one that was visible (or at least, apparent) from the surface. I was almost giving up when I stumbled upon one!

2019-10-28_03.04.41.png — Dark Side

I absolutely annihilated this wonky boss and as it died, it let loose an extremely manly scream.

2019-10-28_03.05.44.png — Ultra Chest

I stuck the key dropped by the boss into this wonky chest and retrieved the blueprints for the next rocket.
This chest otherwise behaves like bedrock.

As far as I’m concerned, this mod is only fun the first time you step into a rocket. After the first time, you realize you’re just looking at the same old terrain generation with the same old dungeon generation, just in increasingly ugly colors. There’s probably so much more they can add to the mod, but that’s just what it is. Just like every other player who has played SevTech, I am going to complain about the inclusion of this mod. Sigh.

I tried a few ways of going back to the Overworld. I brought along a Swamp Talisman from the Betweenlands, and tried to summon a tree to bring me to the Betweenlands from where I can go back home. Nope.

I then realized I could simply make a Nether Portal. Likely due to negligence of the mod author, you can actually make Nether Portals in the Moon, and, as far as I understand, all of the other planets. Only problem - where to get fire?

I tried using torches and fuel to catch it on fire, but it didn’t work. Then, I recalled that there was lava in the Moon Dungeon! I quickly ran over to the dungeon and scooped some up. Using the fir planks stored in my building materials bag, I managed to catch the Nether Portal on fire - in an environment without oxygen. Wonderful!

I went to the Nether and went back into the Overworld, where I spawned some 80000 blocks from base. I simply used the Swamp Talisman to generate a Betweenlands portal, stepped through it, and used my Bone Wayfinder. It teleported me straight to my home portal, where I exited safely.

Home Sweet Home

It felt awesome to be back in familiar grounds!

Geology

In the meantime, ZeZe and TehPiyoNoob were busy gathering ores.

2019-10-28_03.44.24.png — Shiny Blue Rocks

ZeZe used the **Mark of the Falling Tower** ritual from Blood Magic to summon a giant meteor from the heavens containing large amounts of ore, including diamond.
He then used a pickaxe enchanted by Astral Sorcery with high levels of Fortune to break the ore.

2019-11-09_20.51.17.png — Radioactive Ore

I stumbled upon some uranium while looking for osmium. It has a strange lime tint.

2019-11-09_21.13.52.png — Osmium Vein

After wandering for a good thousand blocks, I found some osmium! Yay!

Piyotato the Architect

I also did lots of building when I got back.

Coarse Path

I swapped out the pathway to coarse dirt so it’s a darker brown and looks more steampunk.

I added a skin around our Pneumaticraft setup, and connected it to the top of the mountain behind the base. Now, I can expand there! Using a Mob Duplicator from Industrial Foregoing, a bunch of awesome pipes from Mekanism, as well as some Mob Grinding Utilities from Mob Grinding Utils, I whipped together a system which spawns and farms mobs. I put in some Blazes so we could get more Blaze Rods for Ender Chests and Ender Tanks from Ender Storage. Those are immensely helpful in automation.

Spawner Test

Aha, the Mob Duplicator works!

Mechanical Pipe

Due to the absence of Thermal mods in this pack, Mekanism offers the most aesthetic pipes.

Polished Interior

I like to make the interior of spawner rooms look great - especially when there’s a giant glass window!

Sleek

I think it looks amazing.

ZeZe the Engineer

This madman wanted to run two Immersive Engineering Steam Turbines to supply energy for his accelerated Void Ore Miner. I demarcated the area out for him, and off he went! This man is a grinder and a half, if I’d ever seen one.

Mekanism

Mekanism is an overpowered mod with lots of magic blocks that can do many things within a cubic meter of space. It can smelt things! It can infuse things metallurgically! It can crush things! It can saw things! It can purify things! It can inject chemicals! Magic! (Or technology…?)

Mekanism used to have really disgusting textures and was, overall, an unpolished mod that looked out of place from this game. Then, Unity happened. They adopted the amazing Unity textures into their mod, and, boom. The mod became unspeakably better.

2019-11-10_02.05.41.png — Giant Robit

This cute giant robot magically extracts stuff from the ground in an overpowered manner! Unfortunately it’s mostly disabled in this pack and just gives cobblestone when told to mine ores.
I instead use it to get me my slate for building.

I tried out the Logistical Sorter from Mekanism for the first time, and it is, after all, the best pipe sorter system in SevTech. I used them to automate the Inscriber from Applied Energistics 2 so I can get my printed circuits to make stuff in Refined Storage.

The setup was messy but it was also temporary, which allows it to be messy.

The Elegant Solution to Our Hoarding Problem

“Refined Storage is a mass storage mod for Minecraft that offers the player a network-based storage system, allowing them to store items and fluids on a massively expandable device network.”

— Refined Storage CurseForge page

Sounds cool, but actually, it’s broken because some modpack author decided to add QuantumStorage. Behold: the item that destroys the will for anyone to use Applied Energistics 2 instead of Refined Storage.

Oh wait, it takes 100000 ticks to craft, which is a good 1 hour 23 minutes 20 seconds, which is longer if the server doesn’t run at 20 tps. After a short while of waiting, we got the storage unit! I think that sorts out our hoarding problem for the rest of the lifetime of this server.

Personal Gear

2019-11-10_04.04.17.png — Shiny Green Rocks

We added some kickass emerald to our armor to make them shinier.

Looking excellent! Perfect for this Age, which looks like it will take a long, long while to complete…

SevTech: Ages - Age 4 | The Modern Age

November 9, 2019

Modernization

Age 4 - The Modern Age. Looking at JEI, it looks like we’ve got quite a few things on our menu.

The End
Immersive Engineering
Galacticraft
Refined Storage/Applied Energistics

Of course, the moment we unlocked Age 4, we did the most important thing first.

Modern Kitchen

I tore out the antique bookshelves and Engineer’s Workbench to make space for the most wonderful and amazing kitchen on the planet.

_2019-10-19_23.00.59.png — Master Chef

The world-reknowned Master Chef TehPiyoNoob demonstrates his prudential culinary skill by preparing his award-winning crispy roast chicken - right out of the oven. Tasty!

The End

Once we got our morale back up, it was time to get to business. I was told to make a Solid Eye of Ender to bring us to the Stronghold. I forgot to bring a boat, though.

_2019-10-20_12.14.56.png — Shipwrecked

At least I got a cool screenshot in exchange for being stupid.

_2019-10-20_12.17.20.png — Big Bad Cliffs

My Solid Eye of Ender brought me to this insane mountain range. I had to dig down from there.

_2019-10-20_12.22.55.png — Overgrown

The End Portal room was overgrown with mossy cobblestone and oak trees. Looks quite cool!

_2019-10-20_12.23.59.png — Black Portal

Obligatory End Portal screenshot.

Dragon Slayer

R.I.P. SevTech Ender Dragon. 2019 - 2019.

_2019-10-20_12.45.07.png — Outer Islands

To our disappointment, there was nothing at the outer islands. End City chests were empty and we just snagged the Elytra. We did mine out a crap load of End Stone and Obsidian though,

The Between

Instead of making progress in the main Advancements page, we decided to start knocking off some Advancements in the other pages. We started off with the Betweenlands!

I found the Spirit Tree and the Wight Fortress, while TehPiyoNoob worked on killing Betweenlands mobs with their respective weapons. He also found a Cragrock Tower.

I gathered a lot of scenic screenshots which portray how insanely beautiful the dimension is. ZeZePiyo and TehPiyoNoob took on Herblore. They experimented unethically on geckos. Unfortunately, I was caught up working on the base and destroying the Twilight Forest for ores and Advancements so I didn’t get to dabble with this unethical business. What a shame.

The Midnight Jungle

Being an environmentalist from the Overworld, I was against stealing so many materials from its lands, so I did it in the Twilight Forest instead. Well, actually it’s because the ores are easier to find there. In the meantime, I blasted down structure after structure in the Twilight to get more loot.

Honestly, despite what I have said before, the Twilight Forest is a great mod, which has only gotten old over time. While exploring the icy caverns of the Alpha Yeti and the glaciers of the Snow Queen, I’m starting to see parts of the mod which I’m less familiar with. The ideas behind the Twilight Forest are great, but perhaps it will be the most enjoyable experience if it is complete.

The Labyrinth offers a good lot of Steeleaf for me to repair my tools with. I discovered that using blocks of Steeleaf will repair Steeleaf Tinkers Construct tools as well, and at a much faster pace. It became my goal to gather one stack of Steeleaf Blocks, which I obviously didn’t complete. I wonder if there’s a way to quarry out a maze…

2019-10-24_21.13.46.png — Unfortunately Not (Yet)

Instead of feeling sorry for being unable to repair my tools at a faster pace, I decided to do some building. This amazing staircase connects the ground to the Starlight Infuser.

Starlight Power

While on the topic of Astral Sorcery, I also attuned myself to Discidia which provides me with extra damage. The process was painless and made me feel awesome.

2019-10-24_21.17.13.png — Woohoo!

I am one with the stars!

Astral Sorcery has an interesting skill tree system which allows me to specialize in certain powers that make me stronger. My attunement to violent constellation of Discidia allows me to gain experience from attacking poor little mobs in order to make me stronger. I feel like a bully but I think it’s worth it.

2019-10-24_21.18.46.png — Starlight Power

By clicking on certain parts of this cool book after hitting things a couple of times, I can get stronger!

Illegal Parking

I decided to build a plastic factory to automate the production of plastic so I can breeze through Pneumaticraft, but a dumb wooden car made by TehPiyoNoob some time ago was blocking the way. Although I can instantly obliterate thousands of cubic metres of extremely hard igneous rock, I am unable to move this dinky wooden car. Luckily, TehPiyoNoob was around to move his car. He gave me a ride before almost crashing into the river.

2019-10-26_20.55.22.png — Uber Ride

It was a bumpy ride but at least the car is out of the way. The Ultimate Car Mod is quite cool.

Crash by the River

We sorta ran out of fuel at the wrong time. Luckily it didn’t go into the river.

Plastics and Pneumatics

With the stupid car out of the way, I can finally get my plastic factory going. I had to craft up some extra Modular Machinery controllers and casings and input valves and output valves, among other things, so that I can get the three machines required to process molten naphtha and steam into molten plastic. Oh wait… steam.

I begged TehPiyoNoob to whack together three more of those solar reflector thingies so that we can have our steam production cranked up to maximum speed. We manually feed water to the system using one of those ugly tanks which can somehow contain more than 1 cubic meter of water in 1 cubic meter of space.

Honestly, I’m pretty proud of the outcome. With a good production of plastic, I can finally get into Pneumaticraft! Being a high achiever, the first thing I did was to construct this huge pressure chamber.

2019-10-27_12.04.36.png — Under Pressure

Using some of those Air Compressors which eventually blew up, we got a simple Pressure Chamber running to do stuff in.

I fumbled with the thing for a while since I couldn’t input the items into the Pressure Chamber through the ports. I eventually realized you need to use an automated item input instead. Oh well, that was a good use of 45 minutes of my time.

Apologies for the streak of glass, the raindrop, and the darkness of this screenshot, but you can see how I tried to mass-produce transistors, capacitors, and PCBs. I discovered that the items in the Pressure Chamber don’t update properly visually and I was feeling sad about my items being stuck in there when there weren’t actually items stuck in there.

I also spent quite some effort setting up an assembly. It looks cool but it’s painfully slow. After a thousand years, I finally managed to get my Advanced Pressure Tubes which are used to make Flux Compressors. Finally, a renewable source of gas!

Base Upgrades

2019-10-27_12.41.45.png — Danger!

Using this dangerous pylon crashes the server sometimes. Don’t use it!!!

“The Smeltery can be any size from 3×3 to 11×11.”

— Materials and You

2019-10-28_01.31.03.png — 11×11

Well, they said I could, so I did.

2019-10-27_21.24.58.png — Biofuel

We casually used a crap load of Immersive Engineering Garden Cloches to grow lots of strange crops to feed a Industrial Foregoing Bioreactor.

More variety of plants means better yield. Well, they said I could, so I did. It doesn’t show in the screenshot, but we eventually automated 9 different items to maximize this Bioreactor:

Potato
Carrot
Beetroot Seeds
Wheat Seeds
Nether Wart
Pumpkin Seeds
Melon Seeds
Brown Mushroom
Red Mushroom

These are easy to grow and produce and the farms also look pretty amazing, so I see it as an absolute win.

Villager extortion

My New Victim

Say hello to Villager #18! He’s my scam victim for today. A round of applause, please!

In today’s edition of stupid trades, we see a guy who converts 1 fleece into 9 string which can be directly crafted into 2.25 fleece. With a little bit of convincing and just a small flair of charisma, I managed to squeeze quite a good bit of string off this poor testificate. Tough luck!

“This has been the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever.”

— Villager #18

Poor Man’s Storage Network

As I peered hopelessly at the expensive crafting recipes for the Refined Storage and Applied Energistics items, I felt overwhelmed with a pang of sadness. I had to resort to using the Simple Storage Network mod, which is although amazing to use and seems cool, is also extremely laggy when used in large-scale.

Simple

It looks nice and clean on the surface…

2019-11-09_00.17.38.png — Storage

…but beneath, it’s a monstrosity of Actually Additions Large Crates.

2019-11-09_00.17.49.png — Network

And it’s laggy! It takes a while for items to go in and out of the network.

But at least everything is in one place now! That should facilitate some rapid progress…

Rocket Science

2019-10-27_21.25.04.png — Double Distillation

Boom! ZeZe casually gave me another set of materials to build another Distillation Tower to get kerosene.

2019-10-28_00.30.46.png — Rockin’ Rocket

Pow! ZeZe used the annoying Galacticraft Compressor to make a rocket.

2019-10-28_02.21.08.png — Woolly Spacesuit

Bam! ZeZe also made me a spacesuit out of lots and lots of wool. I suppose the villager extortion was for a good cause…

I volunteered my life for this mission. Hopefully I don’t forget to bring anything… As I took off, TehPiyoNoob sarcastically waved at me to bid me goodbye. I suspect he’s secretly glad I’m gone.

Took a while, but… aha, I hit the Moon! Amazing. Oh, look! Age 5.

A stupid challenge awaits me…

SevTech: Ages - Age 3 | A Scoop of Toppings

October 28, 2019

While making progress on the Advancements, we also messed around with some mods for decoration, as well as personal gear.

Base Detailing

I got my hands dirty and splintered handling this huge amount of wood to build up frames for our staircases to add detail to the house. Some parts might be a bit cramped but I compared to real life where corridors are usually about a meter wide so I was no longer disturbed by that.

I remembered the balloons from Immersive Engineering and placed them down around the base as an atmospheric light source. Also, this allows me to put to good use all of the Twilit Shader Packs which we got from the various boss mobs in the Twilight.

Base Expansion

I slapped a gigantic roof on the hall area and moved our Coke Oven and Blast Furnace to the back, hooking the former up to a Tinker Tank to store Creosote Oil. Since the structure of the main house was complete, I paid more attention to the area outside and started setting up a path.

Blood Magic

Personal Gear

We felt that the Resistance perks from the Nutrition Mod were too overpowered so we modified the configuration files to fix that. Now, my armor was no longer good enough so I had to improvise by grabbing some of the readily-available Steeleaf Armor we had looted from the Twilight. Of course, this is just a short-term solution as it breaks easily and isn't easy to repair.

Well, the Steeleaf Armor did break, so I had to reuse my Construct's Armory Iron Armor, which also broke easily. I fixed that by plating it with obsidian, which makes it look dumb, almost Draconic Evolution level of dumb. Well, this crap doesn't protect against fall damage, so I attached a Traveller's Cloak (Slow Falling) onto it, and now it looks even dumber. I later swapped out the iron for silver, which is a little more protective despite being a softer metal.

73186c_65894d9ce82d49179fc91cdc0b8d58a9~mv2[1].png — Draconic Clown

At least I don't look exactly like a clown, I guess...

But dang, silver just doesn't cut it, and anything above that would be too annoying to repair. So, TehPiyoNoob and I hatched a wonderful plan: make Construct's Armory Stone Armor, which is easy to repair, and level it up until it has 5 modifiers. Then, we can make it unbreakable, and swap out the stone for a stronger material. Perfect.

_2019-10-20_03.22.34.png — Masochistic Armor Training

We spent some time whacking each other and standing on a cactus to gain experience for our armor.

The project dragged on until we reached Age 4. But at least we got our armor!

I added a stack of Steeleaf to my hotbar. I made sure each of my Tinkers Construct tools have at least one part made of Steeleaf so it gains the Synergy trait, which makes the tool repair itself in the presence of Steeleaf in the hotbar without consuming them. With an entire stack, it repairs quite rapidly.

Beacon

The screenshot isn't very clear, but there's now a beacon beam beside our base. Unfortunately, due to a bug, it doesn't work properly and only gives effects to players along a certain axis. Oh well.

_2019-10-19_18.23.19.png — The Wither

We got a few more Nether Stars but did not use them for the beacons since they don't work. Now we have two random Nether Stars lying around.

Well, that's about all the extra stuff we did for Age 3. There was a lot of grinding and not a lot to show, but I guess that's just the nature of the game.

SevTech: Ages - Age 3 | A Scoop of Engineering

October 28, 2019

After having some good fun with decorating the base, it's time to work on some progress. There are some monsters that I had to take down, some of which I hadn't looked up yet:

Energy Generation (Water Wheels?)
Energy Transfer (LV Wire?)
Arc Furnace
Pumpjack
Distillation Tower
Solar Tower
Modular Machinery Mod
Astral Sorcery Starlight Infuser
Astral Sorcery Attunement Altar

I built another two sets of Immersive Engineering Water Wheels which were definitely insufficient, but would have to do as those are extremely space-consuming.

Triple Triple Wheel

I expanded to the other side of the base. I decided to build up a steampunk-style environment for our area since separate buildings are easier to build than one gigantic one.

It looked like my block palette has already been settled, but I am an adventurous builder and prepared a huge sample of my favorite Treated Wood Planks from Immersive Engineering and Red Rock Bricks from Traverse, which I thought looked quite good and steampunk-ish.

I built up the frame and now TehPiyoNoob has space to build the Arc Furnace! He is fast and builds it quickly. The screenshots after the first two are actually from quite long after it was built, but it's the same building so I'll include them. I like the depth which I was able to add, all thanks to the wonderful Chisels & Bits mod. The steampunk is shaping up nicely!

Now that the Arc Furnace exists, we can use it... right? Nah, we actually need Graphite Electrodes. Oh well, no biggie, just gotta build another machine for that - another simple 3x3 Industrial Squeezer. Not much to see, I just nicely asked TehPiyoNoob to settle that part.

Energy Gobbler

Well, it takes 512 IF/t to run and we make about 250. Maybe that's why this is so, so, so slow.

Having had enough of technology, I decided it was time to do a little bit of magic. Well, more like I wanted this modpack to last a little longer than the others that we have played so I decided to procrastinate on the main progress a little and work on "other progress".

A bit of a rainy mood, but I managed to build one of the most annoying structures in Astral Sorcery - The Starlight Infuser! I was even more annoyed when I found out that the Liquid Starlight on the floor gets consumed when I perform operations using the Starlight Infuser, AND it invalidates the structure so I need to replace the Liquid Starlight once it gets depleted. Dang. I heard there's a future solution to this, though, so I'm hopeful.

Finally, we have "easy" Stardust! Now, onto the Attunement Altar:

Turns out it's just a bunch of flashy particles... Still super pretty to look at, though. Reminds me of the Arcane Infusion from Thaumcraft 4, which was the first mod I ever played with in survival. Using the Attunement Altar, we can attune ourselves to a particular constellation and try to grow a Skill Tree. TehPiyoNoob and ZeZe have already done that, but I was too busy dealing with other things so didn't find time to do it.

After this well-deserved break from Immersive Engineering, it's time to attack the long crafting and processing sequence which will get us plastic for the next age!

Indoors Oil Pump

Well, not really. ZeZe actually made the Pumpjack quite long ago but found out that we had no way to process the oil. As you can see, it's placed on some strange position since it's supposed to be temporary.

We got the oil from the Pumpjack (which has a really good operation animation) and got stumped when we saw this:

Well, they told me it's my job to build this thing. Dang.

All is well. I proceeded to prepare the materials, which were thankfully not too terrible due to the amazing infrastructure we came up with for making steel in a non-automated way because hoppers are too annoying to get.

_2019-10-19_19.18.46.png — Project Chest

This is the biggest multi-block machine I have made from Immersive Engineering, ever.

Using the Immersive Engineering Projector for the first time since the machine is so huge, I quickly built up the monster.

To power it, I used Thermoelectric Generators from Immersive Engineering. I think the concept is quite cool for a passive power generation, but I suppose it's kinda annoying to set up. Also, wires are annoying.

Next: either a Solar Tower or a Boiler for some steam. We chose to do the Solar Tower since it's passive. TehPiyoNoob quickly got the thing running.

Solar Steam

It's a pretty-looking multi-block which has a really good steampunk feel to it. Well, I suppose it creates steam, so it's steampunk.

With the naphtha from distilling oil and steam from the Solar Tower, I can mix them up in a chemical mixer to obtain - get this - molten propene. If you look up this dang compound on Wikipedia, you see this:

73186c_5ca5aaca01d64214818fe6da4ee83aba~mv2[1].png

And this thing looks like lava, and burns you. Cool! Okay, time to make it.

_2019-10-19_21.52.44.png — Modular Machinery

Found a good spot with a spare Windmill to power the Modular Machine.

As I understood the Modular Machinery mod, I realized it's the mother of all multi-block structures. Modpack creators can pull whatever dang machine they want out of their butt and it turns into a real thing. I was quite traumatized when crafting the components to make the machines since they are really annoying to make.

Magic GUI Mod

Turns out it's just an uninteresting bunch of user interfaces and doesn't even have a nice texture to go with it. Disappointing.

After the Chemical Mixer, it's the Liquid Processor - which is just another load of bull from this mod. As I walked into the base for some intense crafting, I realized I could just reuse the blocks from the Chemical Mixer. So I did.

_2019-10-19_22.24.50.png — More Magic GUI

Funny how the Liquid Processor looks and functions exactly like a Chemical Mixer.

Well, the next step was a Plastic Molder, which is just the same dang crap again. Oh well, time for the Liquid Processor to turn into something else.

_2019-10-19_22.25.55.png — Micro-Management

ZeZe and I are busy micro-managing the fluid inputs and item outputs of things.

Finally, we got it! The dang plastic.

I heard Age 5 is not fun so I'm going to stay in Age 4 for a good long time. We actually did quite a bunch of things in between, but I'll include that in a separate blog post instead.

SevTech: Ages - Age 3 | A Scoop of Design

October 28, 2019

Whilst progress in the pack was being made, I worked on finishing up the house. I changed out the floors from Olive Planks to Ironwood planks for a more muted color and to create some contrast between the walls and floor. I scaled the house up to 4 floors and threw in a roof! On the other side of the house, I added a large courtyard area for our machinery in the future. I have yet to roof that part of the base yet as it is still in a mess.

From the exterior, the house still looks rather bland since the walls are uniform. The irregular shape of the first floor made the roofing rather troublesome. The last image shows the house during a thunderstorm. It looks way too ominous and I should add some lighting around the outside.

On the inside though, it is a different story. I thought of many different ways to spice up the interior.

_2019-10-12_17.08.18.png — Decorative Function

I put down an Engineer's Workbench to occupy the corner whilst serving its functional purpose.

_2019-10-12_17.08.21.png — Bits and Bobs

Throughout the house, I put down little bits of decoration to occupy space. This adds detail and lag to the design.

_2019-10-12_17.08.45.png — Rustic Lighting

I discovered the Iron Chandelier Ring, Iron Candle, and Iron Chain from Rustic which have the most amazing textures and models.

_2019-10-12_17.08.26.png — Rustic Everywhere

I loved them so much that I added them all over the house.

Rustic Statue

The Gargoyles from Rustic are also a good decorative item to put around the place but it doesn't agree nearly as much with my style since it's made of stone rather than wood.

Timekeeping

I made some clocks from BiblioCraft which I'm still indecisive about as the texture seems unnecessarily high-resolution and fits strangely in the style of the game. I put it on the table in our bedroom for now.

_2019-10-12_02.10.17.png — Laggy Barrels

I added some Ironwood Barrels to the outside of the house but, man, they are really laggy to look at.

I integrated our Immersive Engineering Water Wheel into the walls of the house. I'm deciding whether to modify the style into a steampunk style to accommodate the many machines from Immersive Engineering.

Moving ahead, I'm hoping to finish up the expanded part of the house and add some decorative elements to the exterior of the house so that it's more pleasing to look at from the angle from which we don't look at it.

SevTech: Ages - Age 3 | A Scoop of Discovery

October 28, 2019

Today, we ventured to Age 3. I immediately found out that the Coal Engine we made in Age 2 isn't of much use yet. The Advancements told us to get to the Nether by finding a pre-generated portal, which ZeZe went and did. He took kinda long since it was far away.

_2019-10-12_02.58.09.png — Fake News!

Well, it turned out that you CAN make a portal normally. Oops.

Meanwhile, TehPiyoNoob and I went for a resource run in the Twilight. Since the surface level is much lower down, it is much easier to dig for ores there. We grabbed a good load of every ore so that it will last us longer.

This required us to wander around the Twilight Forest a little bit so I took some screenshots of this good old land.

After our resource run, we jumped into the Nether to collect some resources. We needed to build a Blast Furnace from Immersive Engineering which required Blast Bricks, which required Nether Brick, which demanded a really dang long chain of crafting. We had a collection checklist:

Netherrack
Soul Sand
Nether Wart
Nether Quartz
Blaze Powder
Glowstone

The list wasn't that long so we managed to grab the stuff quickly. SevTech: Ages includes the NetherEx mod which adds all kinds of biomes into the Nether which have different kinds of Netherrack, like Fiery Netherrack and Gloomy Netherrack. This meant that gathering normal Netherrack for certain crafting recipes was kind of a pain in the butt. TehPiyoNoob managed to find some, anyway.

_2019-10-13_02.15.15.png — Fiery Present

TehPiyoNoob hand-carried a Blaze Spawner back from the Nether Fortress.
When interviewed, he said that it was a tough job but worth it in the end. This is our new supply of Blaze Powder and is hidden beneath the Village, where any Blaze spawns will hurt absolutely nobody.

_2019-10-12_22.54.23.png — Pressing Matters

I took a little break from the game, and when I came back, ZeZe had made a good load of progress, which I was impressed by.
He built up the Metal Press so that we can make a Blaze Rod, as instructed by the Advancements. We haven't found out what they wanted us to use it for yet.

_2019-10-12_22.10.40.png — Blast Furnace

Say hello to the Blast Furnace! It looks dark and stupid but it takes a lot of effort to make so I must love it.
Also, in the back you can see some blue fire which was annoying for ZeZe to make. Also, rock on the left for scale.

I love heavy machinery and good textures so I painstakingly whacked together a Mixer from Immersive Engineering to mix up some liquids. Well, it's actually to make some Blue Slime to make Blue Slime Crystals to emboss my awesome Knightmetal Pickaxe, but I suppose the base will always look better (and laggier) with more machines. Well, TehPiyoNoob also loves making huge machines for no reason so he went ahead and made a dang Crusher, whose ore-doubling output we still cannot use because, for some reason, we cannot melt down any of that grit that it makes using methods we have. The images below absolutely do not include a Realms Mapmaker Cape flex.

I embossed my pickaxe with paper so that it gains the Writable tool trait which gives it an additional modifier to work with. I then added the OreExcavation modifier and named my pickaxe VeinMiner. (Psst. Did you know we have VeinMiner???) Now, instead of digging ores the legitimate way, I hold down a button and the entire vein disappears into my inventory. From a game balance stand point, I actually have no dang idea why they included this mod since it's so dang overpowered.

SevTech: Ages - Age 2 | A Whole Old Land

October 28, 2019

I got a little sick of playing in Age 2 and wanted to upgrade to Age 3. Unfortunately, I discovered that the progression tree was actually quite long. I needed a few things.

The crafting recipe for a simple Coal Engine. I'm not very sure why it needs to be infused with starlight.

A Coal Engine, which required Fiery Gears, Steeleaf Rods, Ghast Tears, and a Carminite Reactor from the Twilight Forest, whose portal required a Starmetal Ingot, which required a Starmetal Ore made in a Starlight Crafting Altar using Stardust. I couldn't find any more Stardust since I couldn't find any more Rock Crystal Samples despite travelling great distances so I had to craft it. The Stardust had to be made in a Hellfire Forge which uses Demonic Will as catalyst. Unfortunately, the catalyst required a Tartaric Gem to store which I still did not have. I progressed through the Tartaric Gem upgrade tree and finally upgraded my Luminous Crafting Table to a Starlight Crafting Altar and then a Celestial Altar.

_2019-10-05_20.27.07.png — CONSOLATION Prize

Some nice scenery I found whilst searching for some Rock Crystal samples, unfortunately eventually to no avail.

_2019-10-06_13.49.48.png — Costly Portal

The Twilight Forest portal in this modpack is one of the most annoying ones I have made. When I threw the Starmetal Ingot into my puddle of water, I was momentarily jolted when I saw that no portal was created. Fortunately, it was just a lag spike.

I didn't take a lot of screenshots since it wasn't something very new to me. I did enjoy the huge FPS spikes from my shaders though. Provided a little extra challenge compared to normal. The Ur-Ghast tower looked really cool with shaders, though.

We didn't have a trophy room so we used our storage as a makeshift one. I've always felt that the Hydra Trophy doesn't look as good as the others.

_2019-10-06_15.21.59.png — Flex That Gear

I smeared some armor stands around the base to showcase the nice textures of Twilight Forest armor and tools.

After painstakingly stealing anvils from the Knight Dungeon, looting sticky pistons from the Ur-Ghast Tower, harvesting the Fiery Tears from the Ur-Ghast and Fiery Blood from the Hydra to make Fiery Ingots to make Molten Fiery to make Fiery Gears, and casting the Steeleaf Rods, I had finally prepared the materials for the Coal Engine! Perfect!

But when I placed the items into the dang altar, I couldn't craft it. Didn't have enough starlight. Dang it.

I had to come up with some Spectral Relays which needed Glass Lens which needed Aquamarine and Glass Panes which take a really long time to cast. Oh, and the Aquamarine is found in the Beneath, a strange dark place included in this modpack just to provide a place to get Black Quartz and Aquamarine.

_2019-10-06_16.44.44.png — I set up the Spectral Relays and ta-da - my Coal Engine was crafted!

SevTech: Ages - Age 2 | A Whole New Base

October 28, 2019

While TehPiyoNoob and Zhengy further explored the Betweenlands, I embarked on my building project. We migrated the chests from our dirt shelter over to the fancy new base. I slapped a nice gold polish on the outside of our crummy chests to increase the space inside...?

The screenshots above showcase some parts of the building and the view from inside. Unfortunately, I have yet to slap a roof on the building yet so our heads still get wet when it rains. I made use of some of Ferdinand's Flowers to spice up the gardens around our base a bit. At this time, the base is still far from finished so there isn't much to showcase currently.

_2019-10-05_19.27.36.png — Shiny New Armor

In the process of building the base, I cooked up a set of Construct's Armory iron armor to give myself the warrior look I've always wanted. It's very comfortable and I use it as pajamas.

SevTech: Ages - Age 2 | A Whole New Land

October 28, 2019

Age 1 was a heck of a ride. Things have started to get grindy!

This post will cover the start of Age 2 as Age 2 seems to be much longer than the previous 2. Through this stage, I found myself stumbling through mods which I have never before seen and am quite impressed by.

2019-10-04_16.20.49.png — Sparkly Gold

The first thing we did when we progressed to Age 2 was to look for ore. We wanted to find hematite, but was instantly greeted by a vein of gold ore instead, right beside our base. We dug down to it and quickly dug it all out. There was a lot of lava around the vein and we unfortunately lost some pieces. This gold ore was eventually enough to sustain us through almost the entirety of Age 2.

We saw that the progression tree required us to progress through Astral Sorcery in order to finish Age 2. We wanted to shake things up a little bit before we progressed, so we covered the other advancements first. Seeing that the Betweenlands mod was installed and we have never tried it out before, we tackled that first.

Rafts

We made some rafts to get us to the Swamp where we would find the altar to make the Swamp Talisman, which is required to open a portal to the Betweenlands. The raft has a great model but is rather slow.

Swamp Altar

We arrived at the altar and destroyed a bunch of Druids to obtain the pieces required to make the Swamp Talisman. The formation of the item on the altar was very interesting to look at and objectively one of the best animations I have seen in-game.

2019-10-06_17.01.12.png — Portal Tree

When I right-clicked a sapling with my Swamp Talisman, this gigantic tree appeared! It took me a while to figure out how to get into the portal (standing in it for a period of time just like a vanilla Nether portal).

When I phased into the Betweenlands, I was spawned in a wall and suffocated to death. I spent the following 3 hours trying to find my grave and rage-quit a couple times.

Evil Creatures

This thing is a Chiromaw. While it only has 5 hearts of health, it takes a while to kill it if you're using your fist because you lost all your equipment in a wall.

Once I got my items back, I could finally appreciate how much of a masterpiece this mod is. The sprawling swampland with detailed fine flora and fauna scattered amongst the murky waters and Weedwood Trees was a sight to behold. I was deeply impressed by the intricate, immersive textures and the complex block models which somehow fit entirely into the game. Unfortunately, so far, the progression tree in SevTech: Ages required little of this mod. Our spelunking gathered us a volley of interesting ores and metals which have special uses. Due to limited equipment in the overworld, I adopted Octine tools from the Betweenlands as my primary tool material. TehPiyoNoob managed to get his hands on some Valonite and used those instead.

2019-10-04_20.36.09.png — Valiant Armor

TehPiyoNoob is clothed in a shiny new set of gear (minus the boots).

Despite the greatness of the mod, I have yet to venture further into it since the progression did not require me to do so yet. From JEI, however, I saw a plethora of intriguing machinery like the Animator and Alembic, as well as all kinds of weaponry like the Shockwave Sword and Hag Hacker.

SevTech: Ages - Age 1 | A Whole New Look

October 28, 2019

I decided to install some shaders so that the screenshots are cool. I tried using Sildur's Vibrant Shaders Medium at first but it gave me FPS problems, so I downgraded to Lite instead, which was still a little laggy.

The first thing I did with the shaders was to jump into some water to take this screenshot.

Copper

TehPiyoNoob went to mine up some malachite and we melted that down in the Melter. It takes very long and I was getting quite annoyed by the amount of manual work that had to be done just to get some copper.

We followed the Advancements which taught us to use a cart on our horses. Using the cart, I went exploring with TehPiyoNoob over at the Darklands (AbyssalCraft) and Swamp to get some Shadow Gems and Coralium. I took some screenshots of the scenery and our amazing dirt bridge to get our horse across the river.

Abyssal Totems

I took on the Totemic mod (see Totem on right) as well as AbyssalCraft. On the left is the platform we use to charge the Necronomicon. In order to stop the corruption when not charging, we place the statues together. The platform is aboslutely not a Villager's home.

In the meantime, I started working on a house on the flip side of the river. I didn't have many blocks so I just made the entire thing out of different types of wood. I think it looks rather quaint.

Primal Basin

TehPiyoNoob used a Wooden Basin from Primal Tech to craft some things. It is very slow but the animations are quite cool.

It's time to progress to Age 2! To do that, we need to craft a Luminous Crafting Table from Astral Sorcery. It involves some black magic done on a bunch of pedestals and was quite cool to look at.

SevTech: Ages - Age 0 | A Whole New World

October 28, 2019

We started a world using the SevTech: Ages modpack so that we can have a bit of a challenge. The last time we finished a long-term expert pack which truly challenged us was Project Ozone 2: Reloaded in Kappa Mode. Age of Engineering was peanuts! Hopefully this will be a good ride.

The starting was a little rough since I had no idea how to get things done in this pack. Luckily, the Advancements system was excellent at teaching me how to play the game in a new way. I was particularly annoyed by the unavailability of crafting tables and non-tedious chests.