Sky Magic Islands

Sky Magic Islands

A highly integrated modpack weaving together a cast of Custom NPCs with both classic and new magical mods all while turning completely re-balanced ProjectE/EX EMC on its head!

Open video link below in new tab to check out Kelley Engineering's Let's Try Quick Look!

Highlights

• Explore amazing new Sky Island World Generation provided by Topography SkyIslandsV2 provider!
• 70+ beautiful biomes from Biomes O' Plenty, Thaumcraft and more! Find out which are peaceful (not spawning mobs) and which are more dangerous than others (spawning powerful Mutant mobs)!
• No grinding thanks to a heavily revamped ProjectE and ProjectEX progression turning alchemy on its head offering the EMC "idle game" without ruining anything!
• Mana from Steam Power?! Liquid Starlight from Nature's Aura?! Why not! Create late game Philosopher's Engine multiblocks to blend magic and gear powered mechanics converting "mana" types between many mods!
• Unleash your creativity with a bevy of blocks to decorate all those beautiful multiblock structures!
• Show off your style wearing a boat-load of baubles and tweak your appearance without losing stats thanks to cosmetic armor slots!
• Build an airship and fly into the Nether for fast travel then back up into the overworld! (Your friends can ride on BiblioCraft seats, but they will glitch off if you try to take them across the Nether/Overworld line).
• SNAD and Chisel blocks in Bonsai Pots! Stamp molten Thaumium and Void metal into gears! Totally rebalanced Monk Mod!
• Many inventory solutions available early game with complex Crate/EMC/Magical integrations possible for all you warehouse keepers out there!
• Get off to a great start with early game quests provided by an all star cast of Noppes' Custom NPCs!

What are you waiting for?! Go get started with this magical blend of mods only all available in Mineraft 1.12.2!!!

Getting Started

A few tips to start you off on the right foot:

• You must "turn in" a completed quest with the NPC that gave it to you to receive your reward!
• After "turning in" your first quest with "Sunyata", you will receive everything needed to begin using EMC and completing more quests.
• You can access NPC Quest Log by rebinding the L key or by using the tab above your inventory on the right.
• You can craft better quality Transmutation Tables and Tablets before completing the Philosopher Stone quest!
• You will need to use the JEI to figure out creative ways to transmute items into other items using different mods' recipes. You can also find many useful and high EMC items by simply exploring the structures that generate on many of the islands.
• Many mods provide Achievements to guide your progress but might need to be unlocked before the tab is visible. For example, punch and break 10 wood logs with your bare hands while not wearing any armor to unlock The Monk Mod Achievements. This mod pack uses NPC quests to provide more organic and open exploration of the various magical mods and does not add any explicit step-by-step task Achievements other than those that come with the mods.

This modpack is designed with small private multiplayer servers in mind, so of course you can divide up the crafting items for the Philosopher's Stone quest and then all complete it by sharing your items and EMC knowledge with friends!

Installation

• ~6GB RAM seems fine for client; less okay for small server.
• I suggest turning off fog, clouds, and to disable auto-jump.
• If your PC can handle it, turn up render distance a bit to 10 or 12.
• During world generation select the default Sky Magic Islands an do NOT click preview.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Do NOT update Modular Mechanics/Magic/Diversity or you will break the pack! I specifically chose these versions as they are the newest that work together. It's not a perfect solution, but unless Modular Diversity updates or Modular Magic adds in better coverage this is the state of things. If you did update and break your pack, manually downgrade to these exact versions:

• Modular Diversity-1.10.jar
• modularmachinery-1.12.2-1.10.0.jar
• modularmagic-1.4.0.jar

Server

Make sure to download the server zip file for the same version as the client from here: curseforge

Example Linux Installation

Make sure to read the EULA, configure the startup script for the amount of RAM available on your server, and edit the server.properties:

• unzip SkyMagicIslands-Server-v0.9.4-Minecraft-v1.12.2.zip
• cd SkyMagicIslands
• cp server.properties.example server.properties
• echo "eula=true" > eula.txt
• ./start.sh

Windows will be very similar, but you might need a start.bat file instead.

Mohist Server

This modpack was developed using forge-1.12.2-14.23.5.2854 but also has pretty good compatibility with Mohist as well if you want or need a hybrid server implementing Forge/Paper/Spigot/Bukkit APIs. There are some known issues with specific tileEntities with issues open on their tracker. You can find the latest Mohist 1.12.2 server jar build here.

Please confirm any unusual behavior while using Mohist is also present under Forge before reporting bugs so you know where to report it.

If you choose Mohist, you might need to configure the vaious .yml files it creates.

Scoreboard

Some commands for you and your friends to work together on the Philosopher Stone quest on a multiplayer server. Neat also displays entity names so it looks better to disable nametagVisibility:

• scoreboard teams add TeamMagic TeamMagic
• scoreboard teams join TeamMagic player1
• scoreboard teams join TeamMagic player2
• scoreboard teams join TeamMagic player3
• scoreboard teams option TeamMagic friendlyfire false
• scoreboard teams option TeamMagic nametagVisibility never

Pregenerate Chunks

It is highly recommended to pregenerate chunks for both stability and performance! Example commands to start/stop generating 100 chunk radius around your x/z location in the Overworld dimension (you need to have OPs):

• /pregen gen startradius square ~ ~ 100 0 TerrainOnly
• /pregen stop
• /pregen clear

I recommend using TerrainOnly as I noticed a glitch with un-openable loot chests in structures after doing full pregeneration.

Visual Metrics

For anyone self hosting I suggest checking out Netdata to provide pretty and easy system metrics to help keep an eye on sever resources and load. You can even run it in docker!

Pin and renice the tickUpdate thread

Some advanced linux commands for all the SysOps out there, find the pid of the tickUpdate task and pin it to a single cpu core an give it slight priority to make it easier to monitor how much CPU headroom you have and how hard world gen hits you.

• Learn to recognize what is usually the 2nd highest process on CPU usage:
• $ htop
• Pin the process if you have multiple cores so the scheduler leaves it alone:
• $ sudo taskset -p 04 pid
• Renice the process to give it slight priority over other user threads:
• $ sudo renice -n -1 pid

Resource Packs

Many of these mods have great resource packs available over at bdcraft forums if you can't find it on curseforge first. I also highly recommend Fatasy Ores as well. For development I personally use about ~20ish packs at 64px which cover a lot of the mods without out-shining the mods with original textures imho.

Here is a list of all the resurce packs used during development and for the screenshots

Shaders

This modpack is compatible with OptiFine 1.12.2 HD U F6 pre1 and many shaders. I personally develop with optfine installed which gives some performance benifits, the c button zoom features, and dynamic lighting, but unfortunately many shaders are not very comptibe with the advanced magical and particle effects many that these mods provide; therefore I don't recommend using them to preserve original mod makers effects more accurately.

Shout Outs

• Mischief of Mice Valen goes in depth explaining mods bit by bit!
• AsianHalfSquat This guy has a great signal to noise ratio and is how I discovered many of these mods!
• Mods Summed Up Info-packed quick overviews of a single mod all summed up!
• How To: Pack Dev IterationFunk keeps it funky and gives pro-tips that taught me much to create this pack!
• Equivilent Skies Inspired starting off with the new ProjectEX customized book of knowledge sharing!
• Project Ozone 3 Inspired some of the Magcal Modular Machine Multiblocks and I enjoyed playing it with my friends.

Also a big shout out and thank you to my personal gaming and play-testing crew of friends: katgoespewpew, Malkthius, and GregoryZamuza! Without their long hours trying to figure out confusing multiblock structures, fussing with glitchy cauldrons, dealing with broom problems, and re-installing the beta client multiple times in a week I never would have been able to finish and test this pack!

Finally, thanks to you and all the players out there making this community great!

Mods

Please support our mod developers! They are the creative inspiration and perspiration for many beautiful gems and works of art! Check out their project pages and follow the links to donate, follow, subscribe, and support them however feels right to you! Thanks and have fun!

Complete list of mods with authors and links available here under Related Projects.

Updating

If you started playing on an earlier version of this modpack, to get the updated Grutax item giver and Lilith / Luciana trades you either have to start a new save (generates a fresh NBT spawn island) or you can manually update them using the Custom NPCs npc wand and mob cloner e.g.

1. as an op or w/ cheats enabled:
2. /give @p customnpcs:npcwand
3. /give @p customnpcs:npcmobcloner
4. Then use the Wand to right click on an NPC and select Delete
5. Right click the exact same spot on the ground w/ the Mob Cloner
6. Click the Server tab, the NPC name, and finally click Spawn

This is only needed for Grutax and Lilith as all global dialogue and quest stuff is not stored in the NBT files.

Logo Font

Intuitive Font by Bruno de Souza Leão

Other Projects

If you're into tech mods, combat, and survival check out my other modpack Rotten Economy

License

CC BY-NC 3.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported