Survival Industry is a sandbox challenge tech pack, meaning that it is a sandbox game (not using Hardcore Quest Mode) with technical mods that is designed to be more challenging than usual, while attempting to avoid the clichés currently in force in the modpack landscape.
- Monsters are more aware, more varied, and more cooperative. They can spawn in groups, travel in groups, and work in groups.
- You will need to sleep; staying awake for more than two days can take its toll on you. And sleeping doesn't prevent monsters from spawning; while you sleep, the world will continue to go on, even if at a faster rate. If you're not inside shelter, you can expect to be killed.
- Hunger is more than merely a mechanic; you need to eat to survive. Food is less filling, and you need to eat more than one thing. The only hope of keeping yourself fed enough to progress is to take advantage of advanced recipes that provide significant increases to your hunger satisfaction; eating crops will suffice, but not for long.
- Mining is a much bigger challenge. The mining progression has six stages, from wood to diamond, rather than the three present in vanilla. Ores are not sprinkled about, but concentrated in veins. You will have to look for them; they won't just be where you mine.
- Technology is a mental challenge. This isn't a redstone flux pack; you will need to learn a simplified form of mechanical (and eventually nuclear) engineering to progress through to the endgame.
However, with all these challenges, you are not without your own advantages.
- You are not required to fight the monsters right away; items normally collected from mobs can be found or crafted using alternative materials collected from nature. And when you need to fight, you will have stronger weapons, as well as the ability to carry and use a shield to take hits for you. You also can take a small amount of temporary damage, which can quickly heal back up without affecting you at all.
- You are given a sleeping bag to begin the game, and with several ways to collect and make wool (or its closest equivalent), you should quickly be able to make a bed for yourself. And as long as you have shelter, nothing can get to you.
- Wild gardens are plentiful, and spawn all over the place. The number of crops are legion, both in farmable form, and in tree-grown form. You can mutate crops to make seeds you might not otherwise have, and can strengthen crops to always get the maximum yield. And there's a plethora of advanced recipes to keep you fed and satisfied.
- Flowers spawn to indicate the location of key ores (and using bone meal can give hints to the ores' depth), and massive caves sometimes spawn in the earth that you can explore to find exposed veins of ore. Mining a single vein can result in multiple stacks of ore once you've exhausted it. And you won't be able to reach the end without actually making it to the end, as all End Portals have eroded down into cobblestone.
- The engineering knowledge required is a heavily-simplified form of real-world engineering skills; if you know how to multiply and divide using a calculator, you should have all the skills necessary to learn the system. And the technology has no limits. Once you reach the minimum requirements, increasing shaft speed will always increase the speed of the machines attached to it (except in the case of heat generation, but even that just requires an increase in power). There are machines that can do just about everything, from farming, to mining, to base construction, to base defense. Power ranges from the minuscule DC Electric Engine to the immense output of a nuclear fusion reactor. You can tweak your genes, or convert useless junk into priceless materials. You can automate just about anything.
- And as for the End... you can now make your very own End Portal once you advance far enough. Indistinguishable from magic, indeed.
So grab your sleeping bag, make your stone tools, and begin your journey. Because you're up to the challenge. And once you get started, you're more than capable of establishing your very own Survival Industry.
Survival Industry is a sandbox modpack, made by the Synergy Mob, designed around several mechanics.
- The hunger mechanic is centered around Hunger Overhaul, designed to make hunger a more important part of the modpack's design.
- The farming mechanic is centered around AgriCraft, Hunger Overhaul, and Harder Wildlife. These add several mechanics that affect crop management including seasons, crossbreeding of crops, and longer-scale crop-growth.
- The mob mechanic is centered around three mods, Special AI, Special Mobs, and Zombie Awareness; these mods work together to provide hostile mobs that behave in ways that would almost seem intelligent.
- The mining mechanic used to be centered around Iguana's Tinker Tweaks and Tinker's Construct. This has since been changed to a custom mod designed specifically for this modpack, which handles the mining progression and ore smelting, while several other mods were added to duplicate the features lost when Tinker's Construct was removed.
- The tech progression is based around RotaryCraft and ReactorCraft. In fact, progressing in RotaryCraft is required to unlock the "Mad Science" tech tree, and ReactorCraft is required to unlock "Ender Tech." There are machines that require Redstone Flux, but all RF engines have been disabled in favor of their RotaryCraft counterparts; RF can be generated using the Rotational Dynamo block from RotaryCraft.
This game is designed to avoid specific modpack clichés, such as:
- The Kitchen Sink Pack - Modpacks that are simply a large number of mods thrown together without any concern for balance or preference to specific mods.
- Survival Industry implements a "one block per function" rule, in which no major function can be handled by two or more machines. This does not extend to minor features, such as pipes or containers.
- The Redstone Flux Pack - Most tech mods tend to depend on Redstone Flux as the primary power mechanic, meaning other mods' power systems are simply incidental at best, or ignored at worst.
- Survival Industry uses RotaryCraft as the central power mechanic for the game. This can provide a more challenging tech experience, but the result of the challenge is worth more than Redstone Flux is capable of, since machinery using shaft power have absolutely no limit on the speed they can attain.
- The HQM Pack - Modpacks that make extensive use of a "play manual" to provide the plot to the game, and direct a player's energies toward a predetermined "end."
- Survival Industry does use gating, but this is minimal, and meant to keep entire mods in one of four categories: Earlygame (Agrarian), Midgame(Industrial), Lategame(Mad Science), and Endgame(Ender Tech). Outside of these four gating mechanisms, it is the player's own imagination that directs their play.
- The Hardcore Pack - Modpacks that pile on the difficulties in the hopes that the hardcore players will find the game a supreme challenge. Survival Industry seeks to make the game harder, but attempts to balance it with mitigating factors. It also provides rewards for the player who does step up to the challenge, and advance through the game's progression; as they can have downright powerful tools at their disposal once they reach endgame.
This page is the github for this modpack. The modpack itself cannot be distributed outside of the Feed the Beast launcher, but here you can find the configuration files used in the pack. Additionally, this will be the official issue tracker for the modpack.