Alter Earth

Alter Earth is a long-haul modpack for Minecraft 1.21.1 (NeoForge) built around one idea: the colony and the machines are two halves of one economy. Your MineColonies citizens gather, farm, craft and build. Create, Immersive Engineering and Mekanism are your tools. Neither side works without the other, and neither works without the parts of the world you haven't visited yet.

It is not a kitchen-sink pack. Every mod is there because the progression needs it.

What makes it different

🏘️ Colony and machines need each other

Key machines need parts that only colonists can make. A Create water wheel needs Seasoned Timber Frames from your sawmill. Presses and mixers need Machined Gear Sets from your blacksmith. Immersive Engineering's dynamos need Wiring Harnesses from your mechanic. The other way round, colony research costs machine parts, and higher building levels need pressed iron sheets that only Create can make.

🗺️ The world is regional

Base metals (iron, coal, copper, gold) are everywhere, and more common than in vanilla. The metals that move you forward are not. Each one is rich in its home region and only a trace everywhere else:

Resource	Home region	What it unlocks
Zinc	badlands and dry mesas	brass, the second half of Create
Silver, lead	cold mountains	medium-voltage wire, batteries
Nickel	boreal and taiga forests	constantan, heat power
Bauxite	jungles and savannas	high-voltage wire
Osmium	mountains	Mekanism machines
Uranium	volcanic and hot lands	fission
Certus quartz	fallen meteorites	digital storage

You can always scrape by at home. Building an outpost in the right place is what makes progress comfortable. MineColonies' climate crops push the same way: no single colony can grow everything.

✈️ Travel is gameplay

Walk and ride first. Build Create trains to haul freight between your colony and your outposts. Later, take to the air with Immersive Aircraft and build your own airships and vehicles with Create Aeronautics. Waystones work like airports: you find them in villages and the wild (you can't craft them), and longer jumps cost more.

📜 Five ages, guided by quests

A hand-written FTB Quests book, told through the journal of the Surveyor, who explored this land before you. Every quest opens with a plain goal. Each age ends in a Trial that mixes colony size, exploration and machines, and completing it opens the next age.

Age	You will	Trial
I · Landfall	survive the first night, find a village, found your colony	a town of 10, a level 2 builder, 8 km walked
II · Labour	build Create machines, travel to the badlands for zinc, make brass	a working train, 25 citizens, a precision mechanism
III · Power	smelt steel, build a power grid, gather far-away metals, enter the Nether	high-voltage wire, 50 citizens, a Nether fortress
IV · Advanced	build Mekanism machines, find meteorites for AE2, fight the dragon	75 citizens, an ME network, wind power, the dragon
V · Atomic	what lies ahead…	—

It starts fast: minutes to your first quests, and under an hour to a colony. No hours of sticks and stone. The depth comes later.

🧭 Exploring pays

Rebuilt dungeons, temples, strongholds, fortresses and monuments (YUNG's), plus When Dungeons Arise. Chests hold things you can't craft: Ancient Tomes for colony research, colony teleport scrolls, backpack upgrades, and the only warp stones in the game. Lootr gives every player their own loot. Rare biomes carry big diamond and emerald deposits. An optional Atlas chapter rewards people who want to see everything.

🌄 A world you can see

Distant Horizons is built in, so you see mountains and coastlines far beyond your render distance. The terrain comes from Terralith and Tectonic. Complementary shaders come with the pack (optional, via Iris).

Headline mods

• Colony: MineColonies, Structurize, Domum Ornamentum, Macaw's building mods
• Machines: Create, Create Crafts & Additions, Immersive Engineering, Mekanism and Mekanism Generators, Applied Energistics 2
• Travel: Create Aeronautics, Immersive Aircraft, Waystones, Xaero's Minimap and World Map
• World: Terralith, Tectonic, Distant Horizons, YUNG's structures, When Dungeons Arise, Lootr
• Quality of life: FTB Quests, FTB Chunks (claims), FTB Ultimine, Sophisticated Backpacks and Storage, JEI, Jade, Farmer's Delight
• Performance: Sodium, Iris, ModernFix, FerriteCore, ImmediatelyFast, Entity Culling

Requirements

• At least 8 GB of RAM for the game.
• Java 21.
• Use a concurrent garbage collector. Distant Horizons stutters without it. Add these to your instance's JVM arguments: -XX:+UseZGC -XX:+ZGenerational
• Install with the CurseForge app, or import the pack zip into Prism Launcher.

Multiplayer

Alter Earth is made for playing together. A server pack is available. It needs Java 21, installs NeoForge on first launch, and uses ZGC by default. MineColonies allows one colony per player, so a group of friends means a group of towns trading with each other.

⚠️ Worldgen changes between major versions (a new major version number) need a new world. Minor and patch updates keep your world.

FAQ

Why Minecraft 1.21.1? MineColonies and Create have no builds for newer versions yet.

Is there magic? Very little, on purpose. The focus is colonies, machines and exploration.

Can I add mods? Of course. Just know that recipes and worldgen are tuned for this mod list, so new mods can upset the balance.

The Multiplayer section says a server pack is available. On CurseForge that means uploading dist/alter-earth-server-0.12.0.zip as an additional server file alongside the client zip. I can do that in the same upload once I have the token, or you can remove that sentence.