This post is the second part in a retrospective of where Minecraft has taken me. For the first part, see here.

After playing with vanilla for a few years, eagerly awaiting each new snapshot for an incremental improvement to the game (a byproduct of which I thought I still had to sneak on tilled ground to avoid damaging it until 90% of the way through Civcraft 2.0), I finally stumbled across a link to r/feedthebeast. I should mention that my first exposure to modding had come some time before with a couple mods added in occasionally to test the waters, but once I joined that community, the sky was no longer the limit. Since I have a fascination with improving systems (after all, that's been a large part of my time in Civ), the new mods were like five Christmases rolled into one. Just Industrialcraft and Buildcraft alone expanded what was possible in Minecraft by many times.

I got into the modding scene in 1.4.7 and played with hundreds of mods, all the way up through 1.12, but peaking in 1.7 with Infinity Evolved. I tried to build one world where I explored every dimension (quite literally in some cases) of every included mod. The folks who created mods like Thermal Dynamics and RFTools were legends to me. Killing the dragon in Draconic Evolution was the highlight of my gaming life (on my third attempt, and I went full invincibility on that one).

I even continued in SkyFactory3, but mostly had fun automating resource collection through hundreds of egg-laying chickens.

Over all, I had a wonderful time exploring just what was possible with all this new content. At the same time, however, no matter how big, how cool, or how nice it was sharing pictures and base tools, I had no one with whom to actually share it. I finally dipped my toe into multiplayer Minecraft. I'll pick that story up tomorrow.

Bonus: A couple shots of one of my first really cool modded bases in its fairly early stages.