Hinterlands Exploration

Hinterlands

Hinterlands is an exploration pack for Minecraft 1.21.1 on NeoForge. I put it together for a small group of friends playing on a shared server, but it works just as well solo.

The focus is on travelling and finding things. The overworld has new terrain and biomes and a lot of extra structures, there are several dimensions to visit, and a quest book walks you through all of it. Tech, magic and farming mods are in there too, mostly to support the exploring rather than replace it.

What’s in it

World and structures

Tectonic and Biomes O’ Plenty for terrain, YUNG’s Better Caves and Cave Biomes underground. Structures come from Dungeons Arise, Structory, Towns and Towers, ChoiceTheorem’s Overhauled Village, Moog’s Structures and the YUNG’s mods, which rework most of the vanilla dungeons. Waystones, JourneyMap and the Explorer’s and Nature’s compasses help you get around, and Distant Horizons lets you see a long way.

Dimensions

• The Aether, with Deep Aether, Aether Villages and Umbral Skies
• The Twilight Forest
• Deeper and Darker (the Otherside, below the Ancient City)
• A reworked Nether and End, including Nullscape
• Ad Astra, if you want to build a rocket and go to the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury and further

Combat

Better Combat, Epic Knights and Fantasy Armor. Bosses from L_Ender’s Cataclysm, Gateways to Eternity and Aquamirae. Enderman Overhaul, Creeper Overhaul and Friends and Foes for more varied mobs.

Magic and gear

Iron’s Spells ‘n Spellbooks, Mahou Tsukai and Apotheosis.

Tech

Mekanism, Applied Energistics 2, Ender IO and Extreme Reactors.

Food and farming

Farmer’s Delight and many of its addons, Brewin’ and Chewin’, and Cooking for Blockheads. Spice of Life: Carrot Edition gives you extra hearts for eating a variety of foods, and Serene Seasons means crops only grow well in the right season.

Quality of life

Sophisticated Backpacks and Storage, Lootr, Gravestones, Carry On, Simple Voice Chat, EMI and Jade.

Quest book

The FTB Quests book has 346 quests across 17 chapters:

First Steps, The Kitchen, The Larder, Wilds, The Overworld, Landmarks, Below, Industry, The Network, Ender IO, The Stars, Arcana and Power, The Nether, The Twilight Forest, The Aether, The End, Trials

Most quests are tied to each mod’s own advancements, so things you’ve already done count when you open the book. Quests give XP and a roll on one of three loot tables, with bigger quests rolling the better tables.

Requirements

• 8 GB of RAM allocated is recommended (6 GB minimum)
• Iris is included if you want shaders (Euphoria Patches works well)
• The usual performance mods are included (Sodium, Lithium, ModernFix, FerriteCore, Entity Culling, ImmediatelyFast). Distant Horizons is the heaviest part, so turn its render distance down on weaker GPUs.

Multiplayer

Runs fine on a dedicated NeoForge server. Client-side mods like shaders, visual effects and Distant Horizons don’t need to be on the server.