The Clay Experience

Clay is a new project intended to recreate some of the key elements of TPPI in an updated environment.

It is in its early stages, and will be developed with the following key goals in mind:

• The pack should contain a wide variety of content, including some overlapping technology mods
• Despite the overlapping content, no one mod should stand out as the best in its field
• The pack should have a unified feel despite the variety of content – reducing the different type of ores, ingots, etc. to as few as possible.
  • Players shouldn’t need to care which mod a gem or metal comes from, and each part (gear, plate, etc) should work in every mod.
  • Ideally, players will only see an ingot, plate, gem, etc. from a single mod. The experience should be seamless and declutter inventories and recipe lookups.
  • Only one type of each ore should generate in the world, and from as few mods as possible.
• Any changes to core gameplay should be intuitive or clearly documented.
• The gameplay of individual mods should be modified as little as possible while ensuring the above goals.

Many of the above design principles have lead to the non-inclusion of some commonly used mods, including:

• Draconic Evolution – its endgame content far outperforms any other mods’ and trivializes the game once reached.
• Tinkers’ Construct – While its newer iterations are more balanced, its gameplay can become repetitive for players who have used it many times. Additionally, its tools tend to outperform those of other mods for very few downsides. As an alternative, Silent’s Gems is currently included. This particular mod choice may change if Silent’s proves to be too obtrusive or unintuitive.
• Integrated Dynamics and EvilCraft – While the contents of both of these mods are interesting, the documentation can be overwhelming and does not have a clear progression for EvilCraft.
• Extra Utilities – Likely the most controversial exclusion so far. In my experience, the ExtraUtils generators are simply too powerful compared to their counterparts in other mods, while the other utilities it provides are superior to those of other mods. While the transfer pipe system is amazing, the functionality (cheap item transport) can be provided by BuildCraft pipes, which are currently in the pack.

Because this project is in its infancy, I would appreciate any and all bug reports and suggestions. Questions are welcome, but the best way to reach me is via email: spyboticsguy [at] gmail [dot] com.

This pack is NOT an official TPPI team project. Spyboticsguy is one of the former maintainers of the original pack for 1.6.4. The project is named ‘Clay’ because it is the most useful point of balance in the entire game, and changing its mechanics could possibly throw off the balance of an entire modpack.