Realms of Reverie

This modpack was created to find a balance between being approachable for casual players and having deep, rewarding systems that keep players playing for a long time.

The main focus is fostering community play and giving every type of player something to do. Some of the games that inspired this pack are World of Warcraft, The Legend of Zelda, Dark Souls, and Wurm.

I wanted to create a game that takes work and effort and is always challenging, but you and your friends will have a blast along the way as you build your cities, discover secrets, and level your characters.

What sets this modpack apart from others is its extensive character development work. I have created 15 custom mods built just for this modpack, most of which are integrations and additions to Project MMO and Pufferfish's Skills. These integrations either tie in experience gain and level requirements to other mods like Farmer's Delight, Iron's Spells and Spellbooks, and Animal Weights, or adds new and interesting ways to use these levels and skills, like an entire player ability system where you gain permanent abilities (consume Iron's spellbooks mana to use) by taking nodes in the skill trees. At level 8 mining you get to choose between Deep Sight and Escape Shaft, but you can only take 1. This gives unique and interesting abilities to players as they progress through the trees and get better at their professions.

The other thing that sets it apart is its level of integration. Every structure has been tuned and integrated together to be balanced, the items are all integrated into Project MMO and Pufferfish's Skills, and xp gain has been fine tuned to be granted for practically everything you do. There are also different kinds of levels you gain. Break a coal block and you'll gain experience in Mining, but also Dexterity and a little bit of Constitution. Cast Fireball at a group of enemies and gain experience for Pyromancy, as well as Intelligence and Arcana. You gain permanent perks for increasing attributes, like max mana or health increases, and you gain skill points for increasing professions like Mining, where you can spend those points to craft the character you want. Most items in the game are gated behind obtaining a specific level in something to use, so as you progress your options open up. Since these requirements are mainly tied to the attributes, not the professions, you don't have to spend a ton of time mining to unlock new pickaxes (although it is a surefire way to get them quickly). Instead you just need to work on your dexterity, which can be gained through a few different activities, like using Knight based weapons. These attribute gains translate to other categories as you improve them, letting you shape your character while still jumping into other like activities without having to start at the bottom.

Core Design

There are a few core design elements the whole modpack was shaped around.

Travel is never trivial

There are only 3 ways to teleport in the game. One is on a 30 to 60 minute cooldown and can't be done during combat (homebound stones). The other two are for you to discover, but they also have their own limitations.

This encourages players to invest in training or breeding a horse, one of which you can save and call to you from anywhere. There are also character movement abilities you unlock after leveling your acrobatics skill, plus things like grappling hooks and deku leafs to help you get around.

In the future there will be airplanes and rocket ships, but they'll require many materials and have limitations of their own. There will never be creative flight, and elytra-like movement will be limited to special cases (a spell and a subclass).

The world is always dangerous

You will never be completely invincible, and unless you invest in a tank playstyle you'll have to be careful about where you go and what you do or you might not make it back.

Once you level up and get higher tier gear, the overworld may start to feel much safer. But if you want a challenge, you can venture into the Twilight Forest, or try your nerves in the revamped Nether or the End, where mob difficulty has been scaled up.

Gathering and processing take effort

These are two sides of the same coin.

There are no quarry systems in the game, and no magic boxes that you feed energy into and they process all your materials for you instantly. If you want to mine at scale, you'll need to design and build Create contraptions to help you, or train a miner in your minecolonies city and have him do it.

There are also some benefits to mining yourself, like vein mining that can be augmented with gear and makes it much quicker to go off and do it yourself.

When it comes to processing materials, you'll need to build assembly lines in Create. Some recipes have been made slightly more expensive so doing it with a group of people will be even faster.

There is some ore and wood doubling, but currently just 2x. In the future there may be hard to build upgrades that offer 3x or 4x, but they'll be balanced into the modpack and take a lot of work to get.

Community

The main point of this modpack is to create an environment that encourages players to work together and build communities, and to increase interactions between communities on bigger servers.

Since travel is initially limited, the game is dangerous, and gathering resources isn't as easy as other modpacks, working together with other players offers a ton of benefits.

Some areas of the game will have difficult mobs and bosses, but players can specialize in different playstyles (tank, healer, damage, utility) and work together to survive. If you get downed you can have a friend get you back up, so always bring an adventuring buddy.

There's a fully integrated shop and money system, so set up shop and make enough money to buy a chunk of land you can call your own. There are many new structures and locations with treasures and danger. Take your close group and go see what's out there.

Character Progression

The core of character progression is built around Project MMO, where practically everything you do develops your attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc.) as well as your skills (Mining, Marksmanship, Arcana, Acrobatics…).

Raising any of these 6 attributes and many skills results in perks, like increased mining speed, more mana or mana regen, access to higher tier equipment and spells, or even new movement abilities thanks to Parcool.

There are also ways to differentiate your playstyle. You can play as a tank and level your defense and constitution and use heavy gear to take more hits. You can play the quick but weaker archer or mage, or even a priest and heal other players. There's always the tried and true warrior, dual wielding or two handing weapons and making sure to kill them before they kill you.

Different gear offers different bonuses, increasing or decreasing movement speed based on its weight, and giving buffs to certain playstyles or stats based on the type of equipment.

Weapon choice is also interesting. Each weapon type, of which there are many new ones, has its own unique bonus the others don't have. So choosing which to specialize in, and which weapons to bring for different scenarios, can be a real choice.

As you gain levels in professions you will unlock skill points to spend in the skill trees. Gain attribute bonuses, abilities, and other special unlocks as you do, like the ability to bond to animals and summon them to you.

Adventure & Exploration

There are many added structures and mobs, and currently 1 new dimension: Twilight Forest. Players must adventure through the Twilight Forest before they unlock the newly revamped Nether, where enemies will be much more dangerous than you remember. You'll need to bring your best gear and your friends to conquer it.

After that, unlock the End and go see what has changed there.

Many structures will not allow you to place or destroy blocks, so you'll need to solve their puzzles and challenges while fighting off baddies to get the treasures.

In the future more dimensions will be integrated into the pack and scaled accordingly.

Technology

This modpack is based around using Create to solve most of your engineering problems. This encourages you to learn and build useful contraptions that are not perfectly efficient magic boxes you just feed power into.

Tom's Simple Storage can be used earlier to handle your inventory needs. Redstone has also been upgraded a bit to make redstone circuits easier to build.

In future expansions, things like AE2 and Ad Astra will be integrated into the pack, but somewhat nerfed and tailored so they don't trivialize the need to use Create for many of your needs.

Computercraft will also be added in a future expansion, but it will require a huge amount of materials to make and have some tweaks so it doesn't make everything else useless.

Future

This modpack has taken a lot of work, custom code, custom mods, and troubleshooting to get to what I consider a beta / release stage, and it will be in heavy and active development for quite a while.

Currently my plan is to keep beta testing and flesh out the foundational version of the modpack with my community server, making balance and progression changes as necessary. Any bugs or crashes will be priority.

In the next phase of the game I'll focus on character progression, classes, and further differentiating playstyles with armor and equipment.

Shortly after that I'll add more endgame content in the form of unique artifacts and weapons that you can only bind to 1 or 2 of at a time, and new dimensions that are integrated and scaled in difficulty to offer new challenges and secrets to discover.

Then I'll look at expanding with other mods like AE2, Ad Astra, and possibly some magic based tech mods like Botania. Thaumcraft 6 is of course an instant in if they ever finish it.