Data Center in the Sky

A SkyBlock pack where the resource you are short of is compute.

You start on a small island a few days before Bitcoin's genesis block, with a rack, a mining rig and just enough hardware to make the first dollar. There is no ore below you and no forest around you. What you have instead is a calendar that runs from 31 December 2008 forward, a market that moves on real historical data, and a hardware catalog that unlocks a piece at a time as the years go by.

The loop

Mine. Point a Mining Rig at Bitcoin, Ethereum, Kaspa, Chia, Monero, Litecoin or Dogecoin. Every coin runs on its real historical price, its real network hashrate and its real block reward schedule, including the real halvings and supply caps. Mining Bitcoin in 2009 with one CPU works exactly as well as it really did — which is to say, surprisingly well, and it will not last.

Sell. Coins convert to USD at that day's real closing price. Watch the chart or don't; the market does not care either way.

Buy. The Shop sells over 270 real components — Athlon 64s and Core 2 Quads, GeForce and Radeon cards from the GTX 200 series to the RTX 50 series, DDR1 through DDR5, power supplies, drives, fans and mainboards with real sockets. Each one appears on the date its real counterpart launched and carries its real launch price. If you want an RTX 4090, you will be waiting a while.

Build. Assemble servers at the Workbench: a mainboard decides how many CPUs, GPUs, RAM sticks, drives and fans fit, sockets have to match, and a GPU will not boot without a CPU. Slide the finished blade into a Rack and it produces Compute. Into a Mining Rig and it produces hashrate. Into a Hosting Rack and it produces rent.

Spend the compute. Compute travels over structured cabling — seven cable tiers and five switch tiers with real bandwidth limits — into Synthesizers that turn it into any item you name, and into Simulation Nodes that stand in for the things a sky island cannot have: a mine, the Nether, a mob grinder, a breeding pen, open terrain, and a radiation lab for the uranium the other mods want. An Enchantment Downloader lets you pick an enchantment off a list and pay for it in bytes instead of gambling at a table.

Keep it cool. Every watt you draw becomes heat in the room you built. Racks throttle and crash when they cook, dust accumulates, and filters wear out. Room fans, air conditioners and split systems with their own refrigerant lines are how you stay ahead of it — and the simulation knows the difference between a sealed server room and an open platform.

The contracts

The pack is built around a quest book of client contracts: 221 quests across 16 chapters. An onboarding chapter gets your first rack breathing and your first dollar earned. Your own facility gets chapters on cabling, cooling, the trading floor and cross-mod integration work, plus repeatable standing orders when you need cash. Then ten client chapters walk you through the tech mods in the pack, each framed as a customer with a problem: a refinery running on Mekanism, an archive on AE2, a foundry on Create, a heavy-industry client on Modern Industrialization and a second one for its reactors, an atomic authority on Nuclear Science, a regional grid on Mekanism's fission plants, a municipal utility on Electrodynamics, a bulk warehouse on Storage Drawers, and a manufacturing group that wants Extended Industrialization's wireless power.

Three of those clients build reactors, and all three do it in a completely different way — which is rather the point of putting them in the same pack.

Contracts for hardware you build pay in parts. Contracts for work you perform pay in cash.

Built on

Mekanism and Mekanism Generators · Applied Energistics 2 · Create · Modern Industrialization · Extended Industrialization · Nuclear Science and Electrodynamics · Solar Flux Reborn · Storage Drawers · Iron Chests and Ender Storage · Building Gadgets · FTB Quests, Teams and Ultimine · JEI, Jade and JourneyMap · Sodium and Iris.

The Data Center mod bridges into several of them directly: an AE2 Power Interface that runs an ME network on Compute instead of FE, a Compute Interlock that gates a Mekanism reactor on delivered computation, and a Compute Control Rod that plugs into a Nuclear Science reactor as a real part of the multiblock.

Shaders

This pack includes Rethinking Voxels by gri573, built on Complementary Shaders by Complementary Development — https://www.complementary.dev/

Any issues arising from the use of this shader pack within this modpack are the sole responsibility of the modpack author, not of the shader pack's authors.

The machines are built to be looked at: racks are open at the front so you can see the blades you installed, every blade carries its own drive and network activity lights blinking on its own rhythm, and a working machine throws a coloured pool of light onto the floor. It reads well without shaders and better with them.

Before you start

The starting island is deliberately bare. On your first login you are given the smallest viable setup — a rack, a mining rig, a hosting rack, a couple of assembled servers, cabling and a solar panel — because without a working mining rig from minute one, the entire economy is unreachable. Open the quest book first; the first chapter is the tutorial. No real cryptocurrency is involved

The prices, difficulty curves, network hashrates and block rewards in this pack are real historical data — bundled with the mod as plain files and read offline, so the simulation behaves the way the real market once did. That is where the connection ends.

Nothing here touches an actual blockchain, exchange, wallet or payment system. The coins you mine are numbers in your world save. The dollars you earn buy pixels. None of it can be traded, transferred, cashed out, or connected to anything outside the game, and there is no account to create and no real money to spend. This is a simulation of a historical market in the same spirit as a game that simulates a stock exchange or a 1990s hardware catalogue — the history is real so that the decisions feel real, and that is the whole of it.

A note on how this was made

This pack and the Data Center mod at its centre were built with substantial help from AI. The design decisions, the playtesting and the direction are mine; a large share of the code, the models and the quest text was written with an AI assistant. I would rather say that plainly than have you wonder.

This is a work in progress. It is playable from start to a good few hours in, and I play it myself, but it is not finished and not fully balanced. Numbers will move between versions. Expect rough edges, expect things to change, and please report anything that looks broken — that feedback is what the next version gets built from.