So, there has been a semi "official"... ish... Minecraft server running for a little while. Whitelisted and in creative mode. It had a small burst of activity upon setup but has since mostly died with only sporadic activity from some. When it was set up it was put as a creative mode server because for the most part what all of us did in SMP was spawn blocks and build things. But that gets boring after a while and while I've tried even I can't keep my spawn area project going. Good intentions, poor result.
This weekend however a few of us have been playing multiplayer with each other just running the server on our desktops but with a twist...
Thanks to El-Destructo we've been playing with IndustrialCraft BuildCraft RailCraft and RedPower mods all at once. Any one of these expands what you can do in minecraft immensely. So far we've only touched the first two in our work but the others have so much potential as well. I personally have worked seriously only with the IndustrialCraft and even then have only touched some of it. Buildcraft I've tested some but not seriously. The other two I haven't touched at all only looked at information for.
To sum them up:
IndustrialCraft gives you hugely enhanced industry (duh). There are now more furnaces, that are faster and/or run on electricity. Which can be generated by wind power, solar power, coal, wood, geothermal(lava), or nuclear power plants. The last of which will explode epicly if not taken care of. You can also build smart auto miners which (while requiring quite a bit of power and resources to do) will dig down into the earth and extract the useful minerals for you.
BuildCraft gives you pipes, engines and pump systems (maybe some more I haven't used it much). You can pump out lava and water from areas, power machines to move your resources from the depths of your mining complex back to your base, automatically sort items, pipe them into furnaces to automatically smelt them, then pipe them into a finished materials chest. You can also build giant strip mining facilities with it.
RailCraft gives you better, you guessed it, rails. All kinds of things to improve how minecarts and rails systems work. new cheaper rails (that are slower), expensive faster ones, elevator rails for vertical movement, new detectors for carts, special rails for controlling traffic, crossing rails, all kinds of stuff.
Red Power enhances redstone, I haven't worked with it at all yet but from what I understand it lets you turn redstone into wires you can run, they can be bundled into groups color coded, comes with new detectors and compact inverters and things like that. Again though, haven't tested it personally yet, just seem the crazy awesome it can do.
All that being said I'm thinking about resetting the server and setting it up with all of this. Honestly it makes minecraft feel like what minecraft is supposed to be, there are tech trees, it takes time and effort. A nuke plant is hugely beneficial but also very hard and expensive to install and run, potentially incredibly damaging. It's not just "oh I have diamond I have the best". It takes work, effort, even without mobs it's DEADLY if you mess up. The number of times we've had "Why would you hook up that high voltage line while I'm walking on it?!" moments is... well stupidly high
I'm pretty much ready to just go ahead and do it but I figured I would at least run it by the people who (semi) use the server as is first for questions/comments. So I'll keep an eye on this and I'll try to talk to people who use it as I can. One note whatever happens the server will remain whitelist only, no random griefers to deal with.
What do people think?