Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Back to Minecraft

After several years of neglect, I've decided to come back to Minecraft. Now is an amazing time to play the game because there are so many incredible modding projects going on. From MCMMO, Feed The Beast and all its modpacks, to Pixelmon and more. Personally, I've recently gotten hooked on Feed The Beast: Mage Quest and have gone so far as to create a server for my friends and I to play on. It's safe to say that I've got the Minecraft bug again.


Pixelmon has been one of my favorite Minecraft projects and is honestly the only reason I've even remembered Minecrafts existence the past few years. For the longest time, I would just check in every few months to see how Pixelmon has come along, not playing. There was a time when I played on a couple of servers almost religiously, putting in several hours a day. Playing on a good Pixelmon server is like playing the 3D Pokemon MMO fans of the franchise have always wanted.

Playing Pixelmon on single-player survival is a bit weird, though. The world feels a bit... pointless. Without people to play with, playing single player seems like a waste of time. The Pixelmon developers have been working to fix this, however, by implementing a new town system into the mod. This will replace the vanilla minecraft towns with something more fitting to the Pokemon theme, with NPCs, PokeCenters, trainers, and more. Though I'll probably stick to multiplayer even after that goes live.

Feed The Beast has proven to be something amazing. I've had friends tell me I should play in the past, but that only amounted to be thinking, "Feed the beast? That sounds dumb..." and then forgetting about it. I'm a bit glad that I waited, though, as there are a ton of Modpacks with some incredible mods included in them now. My personal favorite, so far, as been Mage Quest. This takes some of the biggest and most in-depth magic-based mods in Minecraft and puts them into one mystical world. These are Thaumcraft, Witchery (My personal favorite), Botania, and Blood Magic. A few "lesser" magic mods are thrown in as well, such as Necromancy and Archmagus.

After playing with FTB: Mage Quest in single player for a while, I couldn't help but think, "This would be so much more fun with other people" and went searching for a multiplayer server that used this modpack. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any. But I did find a fantastic server hosting service (CreeperHost, a partner of Feed The Beast). So I set up my own Mage Quest server and began inviting friends. As it stands, we're running FTB: Mage Quest, which is the only thing players need to download, with ForgeEssentials to enable plot claiming and an economy system.

For anyone interested in joining, head to ami-tab-ha.org to request access in the shotbox. Or you can hope on our TS3 server, ts3.ami-tab-ha.org, and ask there. We're set to whitelist (at least for now, that may change in the near future since we added land claiming).

That's about it for now. I'm thinking of setting up a second 'instance' on the server that runs Pixelmon but I'm not sure as of yet. Dragomon Hunter is the MMO I'm looking forward to in the near future. Aeria has a reputation (and not a good one), so I'm hesitant to put money into the game. But we'll see.