Mod List

Optional Mods

Mods that you can chose to install or not.

OptiFine

A performance improvement mod. Allows a far greater number of graphics options to help tweak the game to run smoothly on your crappy laptop. Also allows you to install shaders, just in case you’re playing on a not-crappy laptop. This mod is notorious for causing some weirdness though, so I suggest if you want to run this do some digging to see what kind of configs you can play with.

RandomPatches

A mod that just makes some minor tweaks to Minecraft for various performance and back-end usability things. It’s optional because on most systems it’s hardly noticeable and really it’s just here because I wanted some of the server-side tweaks, but I do use it.

Gameplay Mods

Mods that make up the actual game!

Protip: at the bottom of most wiki pages is this little bar; hit the [show] to expand and show a list of links for most of the blocks/items relevant to the mod.

AE2 Stuff

Adds a few minor niceties to making AE2 networks a little smoother.

Appleskin

AppleSkin changes the hunger bar to show your saturation and exhaustion values. It also adds hunger and saturation recovery info to foods; you’ll see it under the food name when you hold it.

Applied Energistics 2 (AE2)

AE2 is a pretty complex storage mod. It essentially digitizes items into data and stores them on hard drives.

Basic Nether Ores

This mod adds ore veins to the nether. Not every ore that appears in the overworld can appear in the nether, but most can, even ones added from other mods.

Watch out when you mine valuable ores near Pigmen!

Baubles

Baubles adds 7 vanity item slots to your equipment. There aren’t too many ways to get items that fill these slots, but if you go into Thaumcraft you might find more.

BetterFPS

This mod makes minor tweaks to Minecraft’s code and back-end that make the game run smoother, and give–well–better FPS. Stuff like better rendering math, more efficient code, stuff like that.

Biomes ‘O Plenty

Adds tons of new biomes to the world, both overworld and the nether. Most of these are made of vanilla blocks, but it does add a few new blocks and many new plants.

Buildcraft

Has some overlap with the Thermal series, but mostly it adds an expansive quarry system. May end up killing this one.

Chisel

Chesel adds the ability to put unique patterns on most decorative blocks. This is great mod for building some really unique-looking structures.

Clef

Clef is a neat mod that adds musical instruments. Enemy mobs will randomly spawn holding instruments and playing music, which is both hilarious and terrifying.

You can play songs by holding the instruments. If you know about .abc files (like Starbound), you can add your own songs to your own instance to easily play other songs. Maybe I’ll add more to the server in the future as well!

Comforts

Adds sleeping bags and hammocks for ways to sleep without setting a spawn point, or to pass day into night.

Controlling

Controlling helps with managing your keybinds. It allows you to search for specific actions, highlight unused keys, or highlight conflicting keybinds.

I suggest you browse your keybinds before you start really getting into the game.

There are quite a few control conflicts in the game, most noticeable are the keybinds for making a waypoint, sucking blood, and switching jetpack modes. Just hop in your controls and take a look, and set them to whatever you want.

Cooking for Blockheads

CfB is a cool mod that adds kitchen blocks, and a cookbook that will show you what you can cook based on what you have in your inventory (or kitchen-attached storage). With Pam’s Harvestcraft changing the entire cooking system, this mod is pretty valuable.

Cook a book to get started!

CraftTweaker 2

A scripting mod that lets me make minor tweaks to our other mods. Mostly I’ll use this to expand compatibility between mods.

Decocraft

Decocraft adds 3000+ decorative blocks that you can use to scatter through your buildings for ultimate customization. The creation of these decoblocks is done through a unique process with dyes and stuff, so give it a look if you’re interested.

Energy Converters

Almost every mod in the pack uses RF as power, except Buildcraft. This mod allows us to convert RF to Buildcraft’s power system (MJ).

Extra Cells 2

EC2 is a companion mod to Applied Energistics, and adds just a few useful things to customizing ME networks. Originally AE2 did not handle fluids, but EC2 did. Fluids are now handled natively, so there’s big red warnings when you try to use one of EC2’s fluid things.

Extra Utilities 2

EU2 is a classic mod that adds a lot of miscellaneous things to the game. Generators, building utilities, decorative blocks, all kinds of stuff.

My favorites are the Building Wand, and the Dark Glass.

Extreme Reactors

Extreme Reactors (was Big Reactors in 1.7) is a nuclear power-based mod that adds uranium, and huge nuclear multi-block structures. This can be pretty dangerous, and if you’re not careful you will blow up huge chunks of the world. 🙂

Fixable Slots

Lets you lock slots so that only certain items can go in there. I’m still evaluating this mod since its functionality is a little sketchy and doesn’t seem to work as well as I want it to.

The biggest thing is that if you use InventoryTweaks’ automatic inventory sort or dump all items functionality, it will not respect your fixed slot (meaning that it moves anyway).

Forestry

Forestry is a pretty deep mod revolving around crossbreeding trees to make new trees. Additionally it adds bees, which can be bred to do tasks like mining and farming. Butterflies are also added, but they’re mostly decorative. This mod also has some support for automatic farming.

Hats

Pretty self-explanatory for what it adds. If you see a mob (friendly or enemy) with a hat on, you can kill it and you’ll unlock it. You can cycle through your available hats at any time.

Hatstand

An addon to the above mod, that adds a craftable hat-stand that you can put hats onto for display.

Here’s What You’re Looking At (Hwyla)

Hwyla is a great mod that adds information about what block you’re looking at, showing its name and the mod it came from. This works whether you’re looking at a block in the world, or hovering your cursor over an item in an inventory or in JEI.

Immersive Engineering

Another technology mod, IE is interesting because it adds more realistic kinds of machines, like windmills, blast furnaces, and power poles and more realistic power lines. IE also adds tons of large multi-block machines. There’s a lot of power here, especially combined with our other mods!

Inventory Tweaks

Inventory Tweaks is a powerful QoL mod that adds a lot of great inventory functionality. Sorting, auto-dump all items, slot rules, and more. Definitely check this one out to make the best use out of it.

Also you’ll definitely want to look at your keybinds, since this one overlaps a lot of other bindings.

Iron Chest

This mod adds a set of 1 block chests with expanded inventories. They go from Copper to Diamond, and can have a massive amount of slots! Even though AE2 is much more efficient for storage and storage space, these are still extremely useful, especially because side-by-side chests will never merge.

JourneyMap

JourneyMap is the go-to map mod for Minecraft; adding a minimap, a full-screen world map, and the ability to add waypoints (including automatically generating a waypoint when you die). It does render Minecraft’s innate map system complete obsolete, which in my eyes is a good thing. 🙂

There’s quite a lot of customizability in this mod, so go ahead and give it a look.

Protip: The default key to bring up the world map is ‘J’
Protip 2: When you collect your stuff after you die, you should open the waypoint editor and remove that waypoint so that you don’t clutter your map.

Just Enough Items (JEI)

JEI is another very important mod for servers that have a lot of mods because it adds an item and recipe browser to the game. Make liberal use of the search bar to find items and recipes.

Check your keybinds for this too, as it uses a lot of the ‘usual’ keys (r, b, u) and has a lot of conflicts.

Morpheus

Morpheus changes the sleep mechanic by allowing time to pass if only >=50% of the server is currently sleeping. It will also notify when someone is ‘sleeping’ so that you can sync up if need be.

Mystical Agriculture

Mystical Agriculture adds the ability to essentially grow most blocks or items in the game. It does take a while to build up to the ability to grow stuff like diamonds or emeralds, but it’s there.

Because growing items kinda trivializes a lot of the game, I’m avoiding growing most things. There’s no restriction on it currently, but I might end up disabling a lot of the higher level recipes down the line.

Open Modular Turrets

OMT is a cool mod that adds various kinds of turrets with a pretty good set of targeting and customization options. Can be fun for setting up mob farms.

OpenComputers

The successor to ComputerCraft–essentially lets you script various things through computer interfaces utilizing LUA. Also adds robots and drones for world interaction.

Oreberries

Oreberry bushes are just bushes that spawn in caves, and when mined will drop oreberries, which are equivalent to nuggets of their respective ores.

Pam’s Harvestcraft

PHC changes the cooking mechanics of the entire game, adding tons of ingredients and cooking tools that are required to make various things. This does make basic cooking more difficult (no three wheat = bread!), but the ingredients can be eaten on their own if need be.

Make use of Cooking for Blockheads to get recipe information!

Railcraft

Railcraft is a classic mod that brings new mechanics, structures, and fixes for minecarts and rails. This is a pretty hefty remake of how rails and minecarts work from the vanilla game, so I suggest reading up on the wiki if you want to get a feel for how to use rails now.

Originally I didn’t have this mod installed because between Simply Jetpacks (for fast player transport) and Buildcraft (for fast/automatic item transport) I felt this mod was a little redundant. I still feel that way, but at the end of the day there’s no harm in having it, and I think it’ll be pretty fun to play around with!

Recurrent Complex

Adds randomly generated structures to the entire world. Some of these are cosmetic only, some are like miniature dungeons that have spawners and loot. This mod is great because, being on 1.12, we don’t have some of the structures and stuff that later MC versions have added (raiders, towers), but this mod adds functionality similar to that.

Roguelike Dungeons

Adds expansive dungeons that have different kids of puzzle or combat rooms, and tons of loot. These dungeons always have a structure on the surface as their starting point; it could be a tower, a nether structure, an innocuous brick house, stuff like that. Give it a look!

Serene Seasons

Adds seasons to the world. The seasons change leaf and grass colors, as well as changes weather conditions. The biggest thing this mod does is affects all crops by giving them associated seasons where they grow better or worse.

Simply Jetpacks 2

Technically an add-on for Thermal Expansion, Simply Jetpacks adds jetpacks and power packs. You can imagine how useful these are. 🙂

Protip: Even if you have a jetpack, add stairs or ladders when you mine or build even though you don’t need them. This helps for people who don’t have jetpacks, or if you die and you don’t have a jetpack you will thank yourself.

Also this is another mod with a lot of out of the box control conflicts.

Thaumcraft

Ridiculously deep magic mod based around gaining aspects and merging them to different effects. This mod also adds the Crimson Raiders, which can randomly attack!

Something to note when looking up this mod is that we are using Thaumcraft 6, which has changed a lot of things about it, so some wikis or info might not be relevant to v6.

The Twilight Forest

An RPG mod that adds a new dimension, which has a progression-focused quest line. Tons of fun but surprisingly difficult. The mod also adds some pretty cool items, like an Uncrafting Table or a magic magnet.

This is a pretty good server goal, to progress through these quests.

The Thermal Suite

The Thermal Suite is the go-to technology mod that adds and automates tons of crafting, gathering, enchanting, and all kinds of machines, sorting, and storage. For the most part, if you want a machine to do something, it will come from one of the Thermal mods. Additionally Thermal Innovation adds drills and saws, which are both very great.

Tomb Many Graves

TMB is a life-saving mod that bundles your dropped items when you die into a ‘grave’, which is impervious to damage and will linger forever.

Sneak over your grave in order to get your stuff back. Clicking on the grave will change if the items will go back to what slot they were at, or just fill up your inventory in whatever slots it can.

Protip: After you get your stuff, just throw away the item list that it gives you.

Tree Chopper

Tree Chopper allows axes and axe-type tools to fully chop down a tree by hitting any part of it. Chopping like this makes destroying the block take longer the more blocks it attempts to break.

If your axe doesn’t have enough durability to chop all the blocks, it won’t work. You can also sneak to ignore the functionality.

Does not work with powered items like saws.

Vampirism

A deep mod that allows you to become a vampire or a vampire hunter, getting special abilities. Also adds random vampire attacks, and changes how villages work a little by adding vampire mechanics.

If you get bitten by a vampire, you might get a debuff on you which lasts about 1 day, after which you’ll become a vampire. Drink a bucket of milk to cure it.

Library Mods

These mods don’t do anything on their own, but provide support for other mods.