Kind of a hard question to word, but is there anything in your life you have recommended to other people but no one’s ever gotten into?
I love podcasts and have friends who still thank me for getting them into this one or that one. But I’ve never gotten anyone to listen to My Brother, My Brother and Me. I don’t know if the name is unappealing or the concept but people seem to bounce off immediately.
So what can’t you get people into and why should we check it out?
I have asked many a friend to play modded Minecraft with me.
Unfortunately, I am reminded time and time again that the Venn diagram of people I know who are interested in that and people with PCs who can run that is two circles.
Three separate times now someone’s invited me to a Create server and 2 hours later I’ve somehow instead ended up joining a 300+ mod modpack that takes roughly 45 minutes to load on my laptop, crashes and errors out every few hours, and dies within a week after someone uses some random mod to gain infinite diamonds or something.
I tend to burn a little slower than that, but yes. Post-scarcity is usually the goal and the game needn’t overstay its welcome.
The problem with modded servers is that the guy who’s done this 10 times is havingg a great time building a mega factory and outpaces or outshines (depending on versus or coop mentality) everyone else. You might be different but this is a very consistent experience for me.
Yeah, this is inevitable.
My limiter tends to be that anything I make has to do things not only efficiently, but fashionably. I like to be immersed in a factory that looks vaguely like a real factory, rather than laying down a bunch of minmaxxed spaghetti. So I spend a lot of time faffing about with where a thing should actually go and how do I hook it up in a novel way.
Casuals still can’t keep up and tryhards pass me by. Stuck in the middle, lol.
I respect the effort lol
The other thing I try to do that I didn’t think of in the other reply is not mixing mods together.
Most major tech mods are balanced for standalone play. They merely contain integrations with other mods as convenient curiosities. So when you mix overpowered machine from mod ABC that is regulated by some restriction, and combine it with machine from mod XYZ that trivializes that restriction, the progression collapses and it’s boring.
Some people like that. I try to avoid it.
Some might wonder what the point is in playing with all the mods if I don’t actually use all the mods. And my answer is I do, but all separately in parallel. I like being a botanist and a thaumaturge and a blood magician and an astral sorcerer and a pressure mechanic and a mekanism engineer all at the same time, but like… in shifts. When I get bored of one I put it down and advance another. I want to feel like I’ve mastered them all rather than cherry picked the best parts of each. I get all the variety but few of the problems.
All of this context switching means I waste a tremendous amount of time, but it does make the game last longer. But not too long.
Also, in coop, it pays well when players specialize. I do this magic, you do that tech, etc. Share one or two things in common, but also be different. You might end up wickedly out of power balance depending on which mods you picked to specialize in, but imo that’s not really the mark of success.
Good ideas
I’ve been trying to get a LAN party together with some IRL friends for a little bit, but we all are so different in experience level that even playing vanilla, we’ll inevitably have some people run rings around others.
My current pitch is that we all share one house and bolt different spaces of different styles onto the sides of it whenever we need a new space, share all resource except a small personal chest and the experienced players can only do specific tasks like going caving or into the nether if it’s as a whole group, so the newer players get to experience some of those parts fresh.
Doing things as a group is much more fun anyways. We always do that with the ender dragon but even something like caving is more fun with a few other people.
My friend and I tried this with sevtech ages. Too heavy, too much, too slow.
We switched to life in the village with iris shaders, and we’re much happier!
Have you tried increasing your RAM usage on the MC launcher?
CPU requirements are usually fine, but RAM can get out of hand rather quickly. I usually try to put at least 8 GB, although 6 works in most cases.
Unfortunately I have a laptop with no RAM upgrades so it’s cranked up as far as it can go lol
Is Minecraft heavy now?
When you cram it full of tech mods it is.
If you don’t have at minimum 4 GB of RAM to dedicate to the game alone, you are not going to be able to load the packs I want to play. And yet, this is apparently how much RAM a lot of people still have in their PCs total in the year of our lord 2024.
I also have a lot of friends using underpowered netbooks as daily drivers, which will quickly be CPU-bounded in a game like modded Minecraft.
Minecraft, especially modded Minecraft, is almost an anti-game. Unlike nearly every other big game, where it’s a neat and tidy compiled package that stays in its lane memory-wise, loads relatively quickly, and only makes you ask questions about how many pretty settings your GPU can handle and what FPS you’ll get doing it, Minecraft instead is a bloated, memory-hogging dumpster fire written crappily in Java (many of the mods are, anyway) that runs like a dream on integrated graphics but can bring nearly any processor you might have to its knees on single thread performance.
pretty sure ATM9 recommended minimum RAM is 10GB…i have it at 12GB.
but i also run it at about 100fps and view distance set around 16 with shaders…
It amazes me that my laptop, which would have been sold alongside phones with keyboards, still has more RAM and pixels than some people, and an appreciable number of cores. The GPU is caca and increasingly unsupported though.
Are there any mods that are surprisingly economical? CPU-heavyness is pretty much just the genera - Dwarf Fortress has long been the same - but coding your thing well can make a huge difference. DF itself just got multithreading, and apparently some of the sorting tasks were implemented very naively before.