The past week’s singleplayer poison of choice has been the Banished modpack for Minecraft.
In it, you take on the role of -the- dark mage responsible for tainting the world of the Hubris modpack (also by the same mod creator) who has now been banished to an entirely subterranean jail dimension.
Not the most auspicious of beginnings.
This jail dimension is one of its core strengths and unique features, utilizing the Caveworld mod to create a sprawling nested network of tunnels, caves and scarily deep ravines that also have their own separate biomes, so forest caves, swamp caves, plains caves, mesa caves of hardened clay, etc.
Grass blocks and vines provide a slightly more varied cave experience than the standard vanilla Minecraft cave.
There’s even a hell cave biome made up of netherbrick (which you will need, since there’s no crossing over to the Nether when you’re jailed in Caveworld.)
Lycanites Mobs is used in conjunction to populate this subterranean world with a host of fairly terrifying entities (especially when encountered for the first time.)
Grues lurk in the dark making horrendous noises. Phantoms walk right through most walls, and are fairly impervious to ranged projectiles, so your only inkling that one is coming by to murderize you is its hoarse whispering chant of “kill kill kill…”
Chupacabras are certainly not rare legends here. And I’ll confess, the griefing capacity of certain augmented creepers has prompted at least one world ragequit and entire new world restart, plus a reinstall from AromaBackup.
The first was a case of getting blown up before even getting a bed set up and losing the bed and iterim chest contents while spawning somewhere else. The second was having some precious machines blown up while sitting at home base reading through one of the many magic mod books trying to figure out what to do next.
The only reason I haven’t turned off mob griefing yet is laziness looking for it in the configs. I do heartily recommend doing that if you hate mob griefing though.
The good news, if you’re more of a “play as intended” type, is that you can build interdiction torches from the ProjectE mod when you’re a little more progressed through the early game – these things will push away hostile mobs within a 5 block radius.
Apparently, the mobs won’t go through obsidian either, so there is the option of sheathing your entire base in obsidian too. (That’s something I might get around to, way way in the future though.)
Banished’s other selling point is the strong focus on magic-related mods and its initial set up that establishes you as a dark mage front and center.
There aren’t a wealth of mod options, you mostly get Ars Magica 2, Aura Cascade, Botania, Thaumcraft 4, and ProjectE, so these are what you’ll have to learn to progress. But damn, all of these are hefty -deep- mods that will take a while to go through.
It ostensibly uses HQM, so there are some guided goals that will point you in various directions.
Honestly though, I’ve seen better written guidance/learning quests in modpacks like Regrowth, so don’t expect the Banished HQM book to hold your hand every step of the way.
It’s more sparse when it comes to coverage of the magic mods. You’ll be leafing through the actual mod books/manuals more often, and there are gaps where you’ll have to figure out for yourself what to do or how to best get a certain item. (Locating mushrooms come to mind, as well as trying to figure out how to get a bucket of milk.)
The HQM book is strongest in its initial setup quest:
You start off with nearly nothing, and must conjure your first materials out of nothing but sheer willpower and the dark energy you harvest from killing a whole bunch of monsters (plus the handy dandy player focus and HQM book that actually enables this, of course.)
The basic idea is that killing various types of monsters completes a HQM quest, that you then claim a reward that boosts your Dark Power reputation.
Other HQM quests will let you turn in said Dark Power reputation, to obtain necessary items like saplings, seeds, eggs and so on.
Furthermore, turning in Dark Power reputation also allows you to unlock some pre-made spells from Ars Magica 2.
This gets you set up as a mage pretty quickly, as you can get a spell to Dig and mine blocks without a pickaxe, a Rock Blast that packs a larger punch than a bow and arrow, a Grow spell that acts like free bonemeal, and can Conjure Water out of thin air.
What isn’t really spelled out for you though (pun fully intended) is that these initial basic premade spells are mostly Touch range spells, so you have to be up close for most of them to work. This can lead to some perplexed spamming of things like Conjure Water, wondering what’s going on, and then inadvertently drenching yourself when your cursor gets close enough to you to work.
Later, you get other spells that can work in a beam fashion, or in a 3×3 panel or 3x3x3 cube, or as projectiles. (Hint: Magelight 2 is awesome, essentially free spammable torches that are shot in a projectile fashion.)
It’s nice that your spellbook can essentially replace more standard Minecraft tool use for most things, which changes things up from the more typical Tinker’s Construct tool focus.
The Silent’s Gems mod give the option for really supercharged tools to augment this foundation of self-powered sufficiency, built out of gems mined from the earth, and enabling the creation of Enchantment Tokens that let you pick and choose the desired enchantment, rather than relying on the RNG of vanilla Minecraft enchantment.
Again, what’s not explained is that the Fluffy Puff from this Silent’s Gem mod can actually be planted and grown to provide a source of string/wool/feathers. You’d have to figure it out for yourself, or hey, stumble across something like this post to learn about it.
Yours truly has gotten a little more established a base now, after a week of slow and careful play.
This is the Aura Cascade corner, which is quite technical/machine oriented, even if it has a magical theme.
I’m still working out the hows of the mod, but the basic principle is that the red squares are pumps that can shoot Aura energy upward to the grey node squares. Aura flows downhill, so they will fall back down to the lowest point, and generate Power while doing so. Relevant Aura Cascade machines use that Power in order to perform various functions.
Such as coloring sheep woold various colors, as well as combining/crafting new items via Vortex Infusion (the cyan altar-like thing.)
The Botania chamber has been expanding somewhat over time, while I try vainly to figure out how to get more in-depth with the mod yet again. (This is maybe my third encounter with Botania and still haven’t learnt/progressed much with it.)
I want to make a more or less semi-automatic tree planting machine for mana, but the required Botania flowers require all sorts of other materials, most of which send me up another path entirely while trying to figure out how I’m going to get those things. (eg. Snow, cake, milk, unsoweiter.)
My little underground experimental pasture, with what turned out to be a pretty bad decision to put an isolated mob spawning chamber next to it.
I veered completely off the HQM book for these guys. As of right now, I still have no idea if the HQM book provides a way to obtain passive mobs.
The original plan was to just dig a huge underground grass patch and see if natural spawning would take place.
Then I got immensely impatient, and while reading one badly documented mod webpage/website after another, figured out that the Philosopher’s Stone from ProjectE can fire a projectile charge that transmutates mobs (and it seems to consume redstone to do this. Possibly other fuel too, but since I don’t want to lose anything inadvertdently, I’ve just been keeping redstone in inventory.)
Enter about an hour of wandering around caves, trying to find a mob, and then changing it into a sheep, then trying to lead the damn sheep up cave slopes and shove it through a very narrow tunnel into my underground pasture…
That ended up more than a bit of a wash.
Then I had the bright idea of putting two modpacks together in possibly unanticipated ways…
Apparently, zapping Lycanite Mobs (aka mobs ProjectE doesn’t really recognize or know how to deal with) with a Philosopher’s Stone changes them either to a sheep or a slime. 50/50 ain’t bad.
Apparently, one can summon Lycanite Mob minions with a Summoning Staff…
The question then popped up… can I zap my own minion (which you can set on passive) with a Philosopher’s Stone?
The answer was: YES, YOU CAN.
So I ended up in my underground pasture, summoning my own minion mobs and changing them into sheep or slime.
You can then zap the sheep to randomly change them into all the other passive mobs. (Passive mobs => passive mobs, apparently.)
There were some casualties through this process. I changed a sheep into a wolf, which then promptly went after the -other- sheep and cows that were in said pasture. (Argh.)
I needed blaze rods, which can be dropped by a Lycanite mob called Cinders.
A previous base-ending (and backup reviving) incident suggested that a big enough fire would spontaneously spawn Cinder mobs.
So I set up a temporary Cinder spawning area in my dark room mob spawner with a 3×3 netherrack patch set on fire.
This worked great in terms of spontaneously summoning 3 Cinders in an enclosed area.
Unfortunately, they managed to fire projectiles through the same gap that I was using to kill them… and light ME on fire… which then spread to the livestock that was busy humping me in the pasture I was standing in while trying to snipe the Cinders to death…
There was roast chicken and cooked pork chop for dinner that day.
Also, a lot of panicked Conjure Water flooding of both rooms in an effort to both drown the Cinders and put myself out, while suddenly angry sheep (that were mad at me for setting them on fire, but still alive from my efforts to flood the room and heal them with spells) nipped at my sides.
I managed to leash them to fence posts temporarily while dealing with the immediate concern of Cinders spraying fire everywhere, but they refused to forget that I had been the source of their misery and I had to euthanize them later and start the sheep summoning process all over again.
Yeah. My advice: don’t do it how I did it.
Memo to self: New pasture / livestock holding chambers away from the mob spawner and clear grass patch area for weird experiments.
Why I Game 