There has been some interest, from myself included, about Hawknet providing a Feed The Beast (FTB) service. Similar to Tekkit (except more balanced), it is a version of Minecraft that is heavily modified. Some of the mods add magic, some of them allow you to make your own tools from scratch, some are all about bee keeping, and others are about complete automation of your activities, from mining quarries, to processing the ores kept, and making new tools, or armour for you to wear.

The unfortunate side to this is that there are so many packs to choose from, we need one that the community wants. For those of you who have likely played it before, you probably know which pack you want, and for others, it may take a bit of research, grabbing the client, and testing it. Very similar to Tekkit, FTB comes with its own launcher, which automates the entire process. You login with your usual Mojang account, and the launcher will do everything for you, including downloading the mods, and installing them to make sure they work.

Another major downside to this is that (and I may be wrong here) due to limitations with Forge, the server is very unprotected. Only trusted users would be able to join through a whitelist, and we wouldn't have any plugins running, so difficult teleporting to people, and no /back when you die...

There are so many packs that we unfortunately cannot have a selection based poll here, but please do take a look at the available packs, and reply to this topic stating your vote.

My vote goes to a pack not in the launcher list, but is still quite good.

FTB HatPack - By HatFilms



It doesn't have a server version available, but I don't see why I can't get the server from another, and just install these mods to it.

Sounds like a great idea, however I wouldn't be able to be a part of this, lots of people I know (me included) have had trouble getting the ftb launcher to work, or getting it at all. If I can get the launcher working though I would defiantly go on the ftb server

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LEADER OF THE MIGHTY CITY OF VARLOS!

I am able to get the launcher to work however I don't know how to get modpacks that aren't listed and odds are my computer couldn't handle it anyway. My vote is for the Mindcrack pack as it's large enough to give us things to do but it's not over the top like FTB Ultimate plus my computer can run Minecrack with very little lag.

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This seems like a pretty cool idea, but if it has the same problems as the Tekkit server did then I don't really see the point.

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2nd chance made the background by the way, he makes some pretty cool stuff: http://2nd-chance.deviantart.com/
"People don't think the universe be like it is, but it do."
-Black Science Guy

This is much more balanced than Tekkit is. It's not as easy to become overpowered, you have to actually work for it, rather than just use matter harvests to get infinite anything.

I use FTB unleashed and find it easy to use, after i had the launcher working properly after searching google. As far as i know it does not seem to be easy to become "overpowered" as i have read some people are concerned. The only problem i would think of is that it takes a lot of RAM to play and to run a server would take a lot more which could cause individual lag due to computer and internet capabilities.

Our server was capable of running Tekkit with a 32 slot server quite well, it should be fine with FTB. As a point of case, we can give it a full 8GB (out of 16GB) of RAM to use, and it's got a fairly decent i5 processor to handle everything, in addition to the 12Mbps upstream connection we've got (which each client should only really need around 300kbps of), which will soon be upgraded to 16Mbps. I think we're pretty sorted on that front, we just need to decide on which pack to use, or if we should make our own from a selection of mods, and hope they work together.

Dont worry Zion, if you run out of RAM you can just download some more from the interwebs.

Taking a selection of mods seems like it'd be really fun as it would have the mods we all want to use and none of the ones we tend to ignore due to them being a little boring despite being useful (Railcraft I'm looking at you). Perhaps something like the "Moon Quest" pack that the Yogscast threw together or maybe something like the "Chaos" server. That being said I know it'll be a strain on Zion and the admins putting the mods together, making sure they work without crashing the server and such.

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Lets create a pack called the hawkpack

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LEADER OF THE MIGHTY CITY OF VARLOS!

Satan has a point, we could make our own pack, but I've not got much experience with any of the mods, and wouldn't even know where to start when it comes to providing a stable server for it.

Lets just stick to the packs already available in stead of trying to worry about our own pack when we don't know the popularity of the server yet.

I'm certainly up for a FTB server, and the HatPack modpack seems to cover most of the really good mods (Thaumcraft, OpenBlocks, ArcsMagicka and IndustrialCraft), plus it'd be pretty good for server use since they're making a series on a server with it.

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Never used feed the beast, but I loved tekkit when we had it, so I'm all for this. HatPack looks like a good pack to start with, and if all goes well, maybe we can eventually make our own like stan and mf said.

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Seems we're in favor of this for the most part. Shall we attempt a whitelisted server to start with and see how it goes?

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Indeed, but no one really made a decision on what pack to use. I have been writing a page up on how to install and use the server, and a whitelisting script which will add users to the whitelist automatically. The users will have to be of a certain rank in SMP in order to access, purely to keep things safe.

I suggest watching the above video on how to install the pack, and their playthrough on some ideals behind the mods that are used, as we will be using the HatPack unless a large majority of the community votes to change.

I'm cool with the hatpack now that I've seen the video. Seems fairly easy to get it so why not.

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We now have a new button at the top of the forums and other pages linking to Servers. This is a page that has details about the servers we provide, and also a tutorial and whitelist system for FTB.

FTB is not secure. It's a vanilla server with no plugins. There will be operators who will have full control, but there are currently no way to protect chests or other content. All of your builds are at risk. If you find someone griefing you, or taking your items, use the Abuse Report forums atop.

We hope you enjoy our services.