VastCraft is a Minecraft modpack that I have been working on for a little while. I am actively figuring out details about the pack, so this page is a little bit of a brain dump.
The plan is not to stray overly far from vanilla gameplay early on, but to slow down progression somewhat and integrate Create features near the late game. The concept revolves around the idea that the player spawns into a largely wild, hostile world with village generation disabled and replaced by ruins structures. The player has to explore the world, engage with archeology gameplay and may recover the lost villager civilization by curing zombified villagers.
Taking some inspiration from Vintage Story, Create mechanisms are the technology of a lost civilization. To this end, the player only unlocks the recipes for Create machines by discovering ancient codexes. These might be loot from structures like ancient cities, and some might be locked behind villager trading. Wandering villagers might be kept in the game and given guaranteed map trades for important structures to reduce dependence on RNG in exploration. I might also use Quark’s explorer maps and add them to fishing loot etc.
Overall, I am hoping that the pack will have a relatively slower progression than vanilla, and that locking away Create mechanics will encourage players to use vanilla redstone farms in the earlier stages of the game. I do want to keep the modlist relatively minimal, so it should be reasonable for inexperienced players to play without getting overwhelmed.