Introduction

The Advanced Colonies modpack is built around MineColonies, while trying to provide a well-integrated variety of technology, magic, nature, and transportation mods.

This guide is VERY MUCH a work in progress, it probably has mistakes!

You can view the map at map.canine.systems.

Getting Started

If you don’t haven’t joined before, this is how to set it up:

1. Download and install Prism Launcher
2. Run Prism Launcher
3. Drag this link to the main Prism Launcher window
4. Click “OK”
5. Launch the “advanced-colonies” instance and connect to the server
6. When it asks if you want to download an external modpack, click “Download”
7. When it asks to restart Minecraft, click “Yes, close the game”
8. Launch Minecraft and connect again

There is also a YouTube video showing steps 3 through 8.

(Video is slightly outdated, I’ll make a new one soon.)

Keybindings

TODO

Crafting & Recipes

Crafting Station

Advanced Colonies includes the Crafting Station, which:

• keeps your items stored
• displays items in it on top
• can access neighboring inventories

Crafting Interface Additions

The Crafting Tweaks mod adds some features to call crafting tables (including the Crafting Stations):

• button to rotate the crafting grid
• button to balance the crafting grid stacks to be even sizes (or as close as possible)
• button to clear crafting grid items into your inventory
• holding “w” while clicking an item will transfer an item (shift+w transfers all of type)
• right click the result slot to craft a full stack

Recipe Conflicts

If there are multiple recipes with the same input, the Polymorph mod allows you to switch between the various outputs.

Unified Resources

If multiple mods add the same resource (e.g. copper ingots), Almost Unified makes sure they’re consolidated.

Supplementaries

Additional recipes are provided by the Supplementaries and Supplementaries Squared mods.

Custom Recipes

We use CraftTweaker to add the following recipes:

(TODO: find a good way to import what’s in https://github.com/canine-systems/advanced-colonies-server/tree/main/scripts)

Navigation

Waystones

Aircraft

We have the Immersive Aircraft mod.

Steve’s Carts

CreeperHost Presents Steve’s Carts

Ultimate Car Mod

For cars and trucks, we have Ultimate Car Mod.

Basics

Car go vroom. Car go more vroom on road (I think).

Fuel Stations

puppy is going to try adding some free fuel stations. let them know if you have a specific location or a general area you’d prefer!

Building A Car

You need a Workshop to build a car.

A “workshop” consists of one “Car Workshop” block with 8 “Car Workshop Parts” around it.

Components

Cars need:

• 1x vehicle body
• 1x engine (3 cylinder, 6 cylinder, or truck)
• 1x tank (small, medium, or large)
• 4x wheels

A battery will probably make it work better.

Repairs & Maintenance

The required tools are:

• Wrench (car:wrench)
• Screw Driver
• Hammer

Fuel Production

Fuel is produced using Immersive Engineering technology.

• Sedans and sports cars can only use gasoline.
• Transporters can use gasoline, diesel, and biodiesel

It is worth noting that Transporters run more efficiently on diesel and biodiesel. (I think? This might be outdated.)

Roads

If you have some places you want connected via road, let puppy know.

Colonies & Companions

SmallColonies for Minecolonies Stylecolonies Better With Minecolonies Compatibility addon for MineColonies Tweaks addon for MineColonies Modern Companions TownTalk Towns and Towers Dungeons and Taverns

MineColonies

Technology

For tech, our modpack is built around:

• Applied Energistics
• Create
• Immersive Engineering
• ComputerCraft
• Extreme Reactors

We did our best to integrate them with each other as nicely as possible.

Applied Energistics

See the Applied Energistics 2 guide.

Create

The Create fandom wiki has some information.

The kudos14 YouTube channel has some good introduction videos:

• MINECRAFT CREATE MOD, FOR DUMMIES | lesson 1
• MINECRAFT CREATE MOD, FOR DUMMIES | lesson 2

We included Create Crafts & Additions so Create can bridge between electricity and kinetic energy,. which lets you use Create to power other tech mods.

There is integration between Create and the following mods:

• Ender Storage
• Farmer’s Delight
• Ars Nouveau
• Sophisticated Backpacks
• Iron’s Spells & Spellbooks

We also added the folllowing Create-related mods:

• Create: Enchantment Industry, for automating enchanting
• Create: Copycats+
• Create: Escalated, to add escalators
• Create: Hypertubes, so you can pretend this is Satisfactory
• Create: Metalwork
• Create: Mob Spawners

These aesthetic/visual mods are also in the modpack:

• Create Deco
• Create Encased

Immersive Engineering

Immersive Engineering provides its own in-game guide, called the Engineer’s Manual.

You can craft a book and a lever to make it.

ComputerCraft

We technically use CC: Tweaked, which provides online documentation.

Extreme Reactors

The Extreme Reactors page on Modrinth implies the lack of information is intentional.

Magic

We have the following magic-related mods:

• Ars Nouveau
• Iron’s Spells ’n Spellbooks
• Reliquary Reincarnations

In addition, we added Enchanting Infuser, which lets you choose which enchantments to apply.

Ars Nouveau

This chapter discusses Ars Nouveau.

The following mods provide tighter integration between Ars Nouveau and other mods:

• Ars Creo: integration with Create
• Ars Nouveau’s Flavors & Delight: integration with Farmer’s Delight
• Ars Polymorphia: integration with Polymorph
• Ars Énergistique: integration with Applied Energistics 2
• Reliquified Ars Nouveau: integration with Relics

We additionally have the Ars Elemental mod, which adds glyphs and spell foci.

Thanks to LuminaDragon for writing the rest of this section! <3

Getting Started

Basic Starting Resources

• Archwood (5 types getting some saplings and logs of each is ideal)
• Gold
• Glass
• Lapis and/or Amethyst (get ready to store as much as you can, you’ll need a lot as they make Source Gems which are a staple crafting item)
• Diamonds (only a couple to start - need increases you get to mid-late tier crafting)

Starting Structures/Items

• Imbuement Chamber - this transmutes some items to source gems or essences for crafting.
• Inscription Table - crafts glyphs for casting from mundane items and experience
• SourceLink (agronomic, mycelial and/or vitalic) - creates source (your magical “fuel”) from different means
• Source Jars (5ish is a good start) - where you store your source
• Arcane Pedestals or Platforms (3 for Imbuement, 8 for Enchanting) - used for placing items in magical crafting rituals
• Novice Spellbook (iron sword, shovel, axe, and pickaxe with a book on a crafting table)
• Enchanting Apparatus and Arcane Core - 2 block structure needed for some of the mid-tier crafting but really, good to get it setup anyways so you know how much space you need.

Ars Nouveau — Machines & Source

Arcane Pedestals and Platforms

• These items function the same as they hold an item for rituals; it’s a matter of your preference.
• Pedestals take up one block for the base and the item sits on top
• Platforms are flatter to the ground and the base and item sit in the same single block (this is my personal preference as you can set up a multi-output structure more easily. See next section about the Chamber)

Imbuement Chamber

• When placed into this chamber, Lapis and Amethyst can become Source Gems that are a big component to all crafting, you’ll be making a ton (eventually you’ll get a large auto farmed source from Amethyst)
  • Magical Essences: for crafting need an Imbuement Chamber and 3 Arcane Pedestals or Platforms where on those pedestals, you place items associated with an element or a school of magic to change a Source Gem into an Essence.
  • Abjuration: fermented spider eye, sugar, milk bucket
  • Conjuration: book, wilden horn, starbuncle token
  • Manipulation: clock, redstone, stone button
  • Animus: golden apple, wither skull, bonemeal
  • Air: arrow, wilden wing, feather
  • Earth: iron ingot, dirt (any), seeds (any)
  • Fire: flint and steel, torch, gunpowder
  • Water: water bucket, snow block, kelp
• It is important to note, the Imbuement Chamber does NOT consume items. They’re more like foci so it’s recommended to just have a chest for those focal items so it’s easier to swap - or if you got the space and feel like it, have multiple setups for each.
• Source can be used to speed up the processing of the chamber and a few late tier items require source.
• All pedestals with focal items and source jars need to be in 1 block of the chamber but it can be from any side or diagonal.

Example: This image is a setup where 3 Imbuement Chambers can use the same 3 platforms to make Earth Essence. This setup also lets all 3 use the same jar of source.

SourceLinks

These devices will produce source and send it to a nearby Source Jar when a condition is met AND the jar has space for it. These 3 are easiest for starting source farms.

But there are a multitude of others that, depending on your automation, could also be beneficial to include:

• Agronomic: whenever a crop grows a stage, a little source is generated
• Mycelial: eats edible things on adjacent platforms/pedestals to produce source, it will also slowly make mycelium and mushrooms below it (may want to source a 3x3 with stone so you don’t get rampant mycelium everywhere). Higher quality foods give more source but the best is Sourceberries. (can use advanced hopper upgrade with chests from Sophisticated Storage to push items onto nearby platforms from multiple sides to automate it too!)
• Vitalic: When nearby animals breed, grow up, or die, it will produce source.

Example of a Mycelial SourceLink set up with Sophisticated Storage:

Enchanted Apparatus

This block is set on top of an Arcane Core as a 2 block structure for magical crafting.

• Up to 8 Arcane Pedestals or Platforms are placed around the Enchanted Apparatus for the items required for the enchanting where the item that will be transformed will go into the Apparatus.
• This process WILL consume the items on the pedestals.
• Some rituals do not cost source, and some do. Your worn notebook or JEI/EMI will show recipes and amount of source needed (each jar is 2000).
• The pedestals and jars within 3 blocks of the Apparatus to work and the items need to all be on the pedestals (order doesn’t matter) before placing the item to transform inside the Apparatus.

Example of my personal preferred setup to save space and easier item placement:

Spellcrafting

Ars Nouveau — Basic to Advanced Spellcrafting

Make your glyphs on the Inscription table - tap the empty table with your spell book, and the menu to select the glyph you want to craft comes up. It will show the items you need to throw onto the table and the experience levels needed to craft.

Tip: you can also shove a bunch of items you need to craft multiple glyphs in a chest next to the table and the table to take what it needs for you!

Sharing is caring: You can also make glyphs you already know more than once but if you’re trying to share the love, try an Annotated Codex instead! You can also craft and learn any tier glyph but you cannot use it if your book can’t handle it.

Glyphs are your building blocks of your spells. And they have categories:

• Form: vessel that deliver the spell (ie: Touch, Self, Projectile); only one may be used per spell
• Effect: what the spell does, can be multiple, but resolved from left to right as placed
• Augment: this changes the Effect glyph directly left of the augment in placement, you can place multiple, but they still will search for the nearest effect to the left. You can stack up the same augment too (ie: 1 AOE augment will make an effect cover a 2x2 area, 2 AOE will make it 3x3) but every augment does have mana costs.
• Exception: There are 5 Augments for the Projectile From - Accelerate, Decelerate, Pierce, Sensitive, Split.
• Filter: A special kind of Augment that can make the closest effect to the left to either only allow or ignore a category of targets even if it would normally be an acceptable target (examples of categories: Aerial, Insect, Summon, Undead)

Some handy glyphs for everyday wizardy:

• Break (Effect) - your shovel, axe, pickaxe, and shovel tool in one (iron level harvest)
• Fell (Effect) - cuts as much of a tree as your mana will allow from one block
• Crusher (Effect) - breaks down stone to gravel or gravel to sand, bonus dye from flowers (tip: use sensitive to effect items on the ground… like getting extra blaze powder from blaze rods)
• Conjure Mageblock (Effect) - Need a boost up a cliff? Or across a gap? Makes a temporary solid arcane block wherever the form sends it. Projectile can make a temp bridge for traveling.
• Amplify (Augment) - increases spell damage, break’s harvest levels, other misc spell effects
• Extract and Luck (Augment)- Silk touch and Fortune/Looting respectively

Basic order of spell glyphs needs to be Form -> Effect -> Augment -> Filter.

Thankfully, the book will prevent you from placing an augment next to a glyph that is not compatible, and it will fade out incompatible glyphs once you place it in the row.

Examples

Ars Nouveau — Example Spells

Dig

Projectile > Break > AOE >AOE.

This makes a digging spell that will hit anything that can be effected by Iron Level tools in a 3x3 pattern centered on where the projectile lands.

Shock

Projectile > Accelerate x2 > Spark > Amplified x2.

A fast projectile that hits a target with an electric spark at 3x power!

Thor’s Rage

More complicated spells need to take in account that multiple of the same effect glyph is wasted due to i-frames of how damage in Minecraft works. Also don’t put two effects directly next to each other, the tick needed to find and resolve an effect will also take augment placement into account. It’s hard to explain but here’s an example:

Projectile> Accelerate > Split x2 > Spark > Amplify > Discharge > AOE > Thunderstorm > Amplify.

Fast THREE projectiles that hits targets with a stronger spark and shocked debuff while then giving discharging more electricity damage and spreading the shocked effect to nearby enemies then striking the ground with lightning at each projectile - all happens in just a matter of a second.

Iron’s Spells ’n Spellbooks

• https://modrinth.com/mod/irons-spells-n-spellbooks
• Iron’s Spells’ Recipe Additions

Reliquary Reincarnations

https://modrinth.com/mod/reliquary-reincarnations

Food & Farm

Farmer’s Delight

We have Farmer’s Delight, as well as the following add-on mods for it:

• Coffee Delight
• End’s Delight
• Ender’s Delight
• Miner’s Delight
• Ocean’s Delight
• Fruits Delight