Everyone knows Minecraft. It’s probably the most revolutionary game to come out in the last 10 years. It took the definition of a sandbox game and completely blew it out of the water. It’s my all-time favorite game, no questions asked.
But why, after all these years, has Minecraft kept my interest? That’s a good question, because castles, villages, and bridges do eventually get stale, especially after years of playing. I can only build a city so many times before I shrug my shoulders and go “eh.” The key is that at this point, Minecraft is not Minecraft anymore. It’s more of platform upon which a monster has been created. A community of dedicated developers have taken the game they love, made something spectacular, and aptly named it Feed the Beast.
FTB is the overarching name for a collection of modpacks mostly revolving around technical and magic based modifications for Minecraft. Let me give you an idea of what you can do. Right now, I’m working on a better mining system. Gone are the days of building branch mines or hiking through miles of cave systems; I can do better. I am setting up a huge quarry machine that will extract all the ores I need from the ground. Once extracted, they travel by automated minecart into a dedicated processing facility where a huge crusher pulverizes the ore into dusts. Conveyor belts move the dusts up to the furnace which smelts them into ingots. Finally, the ingots are sorted by type into chests, ready for use in even more machines!
Have I piqued your interest? It gets more exciting. I need to power all these systems, right? What better way to power something than a nuclear reactor! Yes, that’s right, you can design and build nuclear reactors in FTB. They can be designed with efficiency or power in mind, producing thousands of Redstone Flux, FTB’s main energy units, per second. In past worlds, I even coded a computer system that constantly monitors fuel amounts, power output, and core temperatures, adjusting accordingly depending on my current power usage
The best part is, even after all the countless hours I’ve spent designing and building crazy contraptions in my worlds, I’ve barely touched the surface of what mod developers have to offer. I’m just now starting to get into drones and bee breeding. Genetics is still something I’ve been meaning to start, and the magic based mods are still completely foreign to me. There is just so much content that it’s impossible to be bored.
With a whole community of developers, these mods are constantly being updated and new mods are constantly being released to the community. Just when my favorite mods are starting to get a bit stale, something new comes out that I can get excited about.
If you have previously enjoyed playing Minecraft, I encourage you to try out Feed the Beast. There are so many options that there is bound to be something that interests you. Just be careful not to melt your CPU, FTB can be a hungry beast.