Progress – Skymall

Progress – Skymall is the latest iteration of the Progress series, a tightly designed series of modpacks aimed at providing multiple means of progression (naturally), a curated mix of tech, magic, and exploration, and an emphasis on high server performance and sensible default settings.

After a magical cataclysm that has nothing to do with everyone’s favorite megacorp, Shitsco Inc., the Overworld has been shattered into chains of sky islands! Building from the previous Progress pack, the progression has been rebalanced around the difficulties of a land with a bit less, well, land than you’re used to, and fresh resources and production chains.

Strike out into the skies! Build airships and heist floating islands to integrate them into your base! Brave the eternal dusk of the Old World and make it home with your plunder! Build the sky factory of your dreams, or ignore all that and live in a flying wizard tower, practicing the esoteric arts. Can you put our world back together?

This pack is primarily for a small tight-knit private community, and several custom items and recipes reference nostalgic moments and in-jokes from its decade-long run of servers. That said, it should still be a nice experience for the advanced player who doesn’t enjoy too much tedium in their block game, but still wants a fresh challenge.

Performance

We recommend Java 25, and allocating 6-8 GB of memory for this pack– it’s on the larger side!
Additionally, these JVM arguments can help with garbage collection and performance:

-XX:+UseZGC -XX:+ZGenerational

This pack has shaders and the Distant Horizons mod on by default, both of which can impact performance a lot on lower end machines, but can be turned off.

Shaders:

Options -> Video Settings -> Shader Packs -> click Shaders:Enabled and set it to Disabled. Or, consider using the Sildur’s Enhanced Defaults pack– it’s a lighter weight preset.

Distant Horizons:

Options -> Square button to the left of the FOV slider -> click Enable Rendering and set it to False. Note that in a server environment LODs are vended from the server, which should make this easier to keep enabled.

Running on OSX?:

Remove the mod Accelerated Rendering — it uses graphics APIs that are not present on OSX.