A Place to Call Home

A Place to Call Home is a modpack with a basic, fundemental goal – to explore a vast and beautiful world and find a place to settle down and truly call home. This rests on three primary gameplay pillars: an expansion of villages centered around Minecraft Comes Alive and expanding upon the MCA paradigm, a proliferation of building tools and blocks to allow for the creation of better and more interesting buildings for settlements, and an overhaul of world generation to create more interesting space and surroundings for these builds.

Looking at village expansions to support MCA, there are a number of mods like Better Villagers, More Villagers, Homesteaders, and more that proliferate the roles and utility which villagers can fulfil. There are also mods like ChoiceTheorem’s Overhauled Villages and Towns & Towers to improve the spawning of naturally spawning settlements, while mods like Villages and Pillages and Illager Revolution serve to put them under a bit more threat, encouraging you to stick around and build them up.

When looking at a selection of mods to expand building possibilities, I tried to take care to select mods that would expand the block palatte without becoming overwhelming or bloated. To achieve this, I settled on a few classic options – Quark, Rechiseled, Chipped, and Supplementaries – as well as a couple more expensive mods, like Dawn of Time, Builder’s Crafts & Addons, and Domum Ornamentum. Alongside these are a few smaller mods like Snowy Spirit and some Macaw Mods to round out the building palatte in a way that expands building possibilities without overly conflicting design visuals.

For worldgen, I had a very specific vision for how I wanted the world to look. I wanted larger biomes that stretch more expansively and with more variety, but without the overwhelming and (in my opinion) unfun scale that some of the more “cinematic” worldgen mods can create. So after some trial and error, I have gotten to a point I am happy with – a custom setup for Tectonic, Lithistitched, and Terra Blender that creates a gorgeous basis for terrain gen, layered beneath a combination of great biome expansions and improvements such as Regions Unexplored, Verdant Voyages, Immersive Weathering, Galosphere, Spelunkery, and Alex’s Caves. It is a world that is large, beautiful to look at, and fun to build in and explore, without being overwhelming in scale.

These three pillars of gameplay are accentuated by a host of mods improving upon a few basic mechanics and environmental areas. Tinkers’ Construct and the Create suite add a number of engaging ways to expand the tools available to you as a player, Better Combat and it’s extensions make fighting off Pillager raids that much more exciting, a number of additional animal and critter mods add new fluffy friends to find while exploring, and NiftyShips and Immersive Aircraft give you new ways to see the world. Finally, a suite of mods that improve game and server performance round out a pack that should run as well on a server as it does in single player.