The Journey Neverending

The Journey Neverending is a progression based adventure, exploration, and automation modpack that seeks to create the adventure experience that I have always wanted in modded Minecraft.

Inspired heavily by the likes of Terraria, the core progression of the modpack takes the form of 4 tiers of bosses and equipment, with each tier of bosses dropping the ingredients necessary to craft the next tier of gear. Players will be able to choose to engage freely with three broad “classes”, each with gear balanced for each tier in progression. These are:

• A Warrior class built around the Simply Swords and Ice and Fire mods, which add draconic equipment and a range of unique legendary weapons.
• A Gunslinger class centered on the Create Protection Pixel and Kinetic Pixel mods, which respectively add modular power armour and customizable firearms.
• A Mage class that makes use of the Ars Nouveau mod and its various addons, allowing the mage to create custom spells for any situation using their spellbook. 

Much time and care has been put into balancing the progression of the pack specifically, be it adjusting the stats of bosses to make them all into challenges befitting their tier, or dividing the equipment that these disparate mods add into those tiers, while still providing each class with unique challenges and styles of gameplay. The modpack’s quest system provides some guidance on what the next challenge to tackle might be, but otherwise doesn’t tell the player what to do. 

Alongside this intricately designed progression system, many other typical features of modpacks were added or removed to better suit the vision of this modpack. The deliberate choice for fast travel/teleportation to be difficult to access in the early to middle game stems from a desire to see transportation mods such as Small Ships, Immersive Aircraft, or Create trains be used, rather than the otherwise ubiquitous waystone. Similarly, tweaks to ore and fluid generation forces players to rely on the Create: Ore Excavation mod to automate the production of these, once again encouraging the construction of infrastructure like trains. This modpack was designed with the perspective that, while player freedom is quintessential to modded Minecraft, too much ease can be uninteresting and lead to boredom; these tweaks serve to present interesting challenges to players that they likely do not encounter in modded Minecraft otherwise, such as not having an easily accessible infinite water source or needing a means to travel at night safely, and gives them the freedom to solve it however they like.

Additionally, many of the core mechanics of Minecraft were tweaked as well to better evoke the specific fantasy that this modpack is chasing. This ranges from player attacks not giving mobs immunity frames to mob aggro being determined by the player that deals the most damage like in an MMORPG to bosses scaling with multiple players and resetting back to full health if all players fighting the boss die, and much more. These tweaks were added in the hopes of creating a challenging but immersive experience, something that, especially when played cooperatively with friends, evokes exactly the feeling of challenging a raid boss in an MMORPG. 

As such, be warned, this pack is moderately difficult. Every boss should be beatable solo, but the modpack was originally designed and intended for multiplayer cooperative play, especially the key bosses that serve as “raid bosses”. Along with being more enjoyable with friends, the modpack is designed to challenge players on a gameplay level, avoid the mindless facetanking afforded by overly powerful gear and instead force the player to strategize, engage with the various systems provided by the mods, and gather every tool and advantage they can get to stand on top. 

(This project was conceived as a modpack designed for a server hosted by myself for my friends, as well as to serve as a portfolio item in my game design pursuits.)

And thus, the journey begins…