Well, I promised to do something lighter after the last two weeks, so here we go:
Over the course of the last year I really got into Minecraft. Now obviously the thoughts "took you long enough" and "who doesn't love Minecraft?" are probably the first things you're going to think, but stick with me. I had played Minecraft before, back in the earlier days when the game was new, and it never really grabbed me. Sure, the game was fun to play around in with friends, but once you've built your house you quickly start to run out of things to do. It was during this past year that I discovered modded Minecraft, which is a whole different animal.
Adding mods to Minecraft opens up a whole new world. Mods for Minecraft can do anything from add weapons and armor to totally change the way you create tools and build things. Some are just quality of life improvements, to fix annoying things about the vanilla Minecraft game, while others add whole new mechanics like electricity management and dynamic storage. The big draw of these kinds of mods are to be put together into a "modpack", which can be downloaded all at once, and played on a server running the same modpack. There are several launchers that allow you to create, distribute, and download modpacks, including Technic Launcher and FTB.
These modpacks are where the "game" of modded Minecraft really shines. Numerous mod authors have designed their mods to be compatible with other mods, which means you can have numerous mods in place, which can all interact with each other, and allow you to build crazy contraptions that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Let me try to give you an example:
The primary method of "power" that many mods use is called Redstone Flux (or RF for short), which is measured in how much is produced each in game tick (RF/t). This power can be generated by machines using a variety of fuel sources from coal to steam to uranium, and is used to power a variety of machines. A mod called Minefactory Reloaded has a number of machines that run on RF, including ones that can run a farm for you automatically, breed animals, kill hostile mobs, and even automatically mine resources. The usual goal is to create systems that are not only automatic, but also self-sustaining, so once you start them off they will just continue to run for you and produce resources on their own. This is where much of the entertainment of modded Minecraft comes from, being given a certain set of tools, and trying to make your resource gathering and processing as fast and efficient as possible. It's obviously not for everyone, but it scratches my engineering/building itch nicely.
If you ever find yourself asking why someone would drop hundreds of hours on (modded) Minecraft, that's the basic answer. There's something relaxing and cathartic about designing and developing your own controlled systems. Coming up with ideas, testing them, finding what does and does not work, correcting, and then trying again is very relaxing, and creating a finished product is affirming and rewarding. It triggers that dopamine release in my brain just right when everything clicks into place and works properly. If you like to build things, or you like figuring out how things work I highly recommend a tech Minecraft modpack as a great way to unwind.
Next week is a pretty big week for people in my circles. We're getting the final Smash 4 Direct on Tuesday, Star Wars VII on Friday, and the Forge update for Halo 5 at some point as well. I'm going to be quite busy, and that's even before holiday plans. I'll probably have next week's blog post be a (spoiler free!) Star Wars review, since I'll be taking the day off to see it.
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