What makes a magic mod?

What makes a magic mod?

Among minecraft mods (regardless of version or modding API), a sizable chunk can be sorted along the dichotomy of “magic” versus “tech” mods. Tech mods are typically themed after science (fiction) and technology, while magic mods are themed after fantasy magic systems and historical magical traditions.

This document is an attempt to show that the difference between tech and magic mods is more than just flavour, and that the mechanics and progression of magic mods is different (or at least ought to be) from that of tech mods in a few key ways.

The characteristics of magic mods proposed here are by no means strict, nor are they prescriptive. They are based on observations of the most successful mods that are considered to be magic. That being said, I still think that magic mods should be different from tech mods beyond mere flavour, and the criteria implicitly carry that value judgment.

Tech mods

Tech mods emulate the technological/industrial approach to existence. Their basic premise is to make the life of the player easier by automating tedious tasks and making them faster and more efficient. In particular, various machines facilitate the extraction, processing and storage of resources.

Miners and quarries extract ores from the ground. Any number of machines are used to increase the yield of these ores and the end product is stored in high capacity storage blocks from where it can easily be retrieved remotely.

All these machines require a simplistic approximation of electric power to run. Such power is generated by dedicated machines inspired by real life electrical generators and conveyed through wires/pipes either directly to machines or to energy storage blocks (batteries). Along with energy, pipes are used to transport items, fluids and other resources between storage and machines. Some mods are more creative than that, but most end up using some form of pipes/wires.

The progression in tech mods often mirrors the historical progress of real life technology. Machines become faster and more efficient, often at the cost of more resources to craft them, and more power to operate them. Generators go from coal generators to fuel, then to nuclear power, sometimes with geothermal, solar and wind power along the way. Almost universally, what limits the progression of the player is the amount of resources and power he has accumulated.

This trend of striving towards speed, efficiency and automation also describes the evolution of tech mods themselves. The first generation of tech mods (best exemplified by Buildcraft and Industrialcraft) was eventually “replaced” by newer mods that offered a more streamlined experience (e.g. Thermal Expansion). This latter mod does both transport and processing and allows for more compact setups, whereas buildcraft and ic2 have little overlap in their features, and often take much more space. These newer mods also eschew the visual flair of their predecessors. Whereas buildcraft moves each item stack individually through its transparent pipes, newer mods instantaneously transfer items through opaque pipes. This is partly for the sake of making their implementation more efficient, something especially important on large servers using modpacks with many mods.

Not all tech mods follow that trend. Immersive Engineering is perhaps the best example of a tech mod that actively avoids streamlining for the sake of aesthetics.

Magic mods

In contrast to tech mods, magic mods base themselves on magic systems, taken either from other games or inspired by real life magical traditions. There is more variety in their premises, but it generally revolves around the fantasy of being a magic user that progressively gets more powerful, as well as bringing magic systems from other media into the game.

The progression in magic mods often represents the player character gaining knowledge about the magic system. As such, many mods tie their progression to something immaterial. In Thaumcraft, the player must do “research” in the form of puzzle minigames to progressively unlock the features of the mod. Ars Magica, and many others implement a levelling system where the player grows more powerful and unlocks new spells by using the spells he already has. This is not universal, and some magic mods work exactly like tech mods in this regard. Equivalent Exchange is perhaps the best example of such a mod.

Another thing that distinguishes magic mods from tech mods is that they often include mechanics that are morally loaded. One of Thaumcraft’s core features is the activity of the player having a negative effect on the world through pollution, something seldom found in tech mods. Blood Magic requires sacrificing either the player’s own HP or NPCs to gain power, with villagers providing more power than other mobs. Both of these carry a moral judgement: The pursuit of power may have undesirable consequences. This can be summarized by stating that magic mods often have a cost to their magic, a cost that doesn’t become irrelevant as the player progresses.

A critique of tech mods

From the previous section, one might think that tech mods are “amoral”. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Any mod that has a progression implicitly carries moral values. In the case of tech mods, these values are speed, efficiency, streamlining and automation… industrial values if there ever were any. The message of tech mods is that considering every part of the world as a resource to be used is a good thing, and that technological progress is always a free lunch.

Leaving aside the moral content of tech mods, I think they can be rightly criticized for presenting an overly simplistic view of technology. Machines require no maintenance. Their operation has little noticeable impact on the world. Clean power can easily be procured by plonking down a couple of solar panels. The solution to all of the player’s problems comes by building a machine according to the assembly instructions (NEI/JEI/REI…).

This simplicity partly comes from pragmatism. Machines that require maintenance would be tedious and unfun for most players, so would pollution of the player’s base. Another aspect is that the base game itself is simplistic. Simulating the complexity of real life technology would be harder for the programmer, and more expensive for the server.

My criticism here isn’t that the values conveyed by tech mods may be questionable. It’s that the drive towards these values in newer mods has made them less fun and less demanding of their players than their predecessors. Watching items slowly flowing from your buildcraft quarry through pipes all the way to your base where they are sorted and processed will always be more fun than pumping power into a machine that generates ores from thin air, which are then instantly teleported to your ore processing setup.

Older mods like buildcraft require the player to be creative. They provide simple pieces for solving a problem, and leave it up to the player to figure it out. Newer mods provide an easy way to solve problems, such that little if any creativity is required. Playing buildcraft makes you feel like an engineer. Playing Thermal Expansion makes you feel like assembling an Ikea shelf.

There is a place for both types of mods. However, I think that mods that stimulate creativity are more interesting, and have more value both as entertainment and as education. Computercraft is the ultimate example of that. It literally makes you learn programming.

That being said, an important thing about newer tech mods is that they are less taxing on the server. If everyone on a server chunk-loads maximum size quarries, the server is going to have a bad time. This is less of a problem with machines that generate ores from energy.

Three criteria for magic mods

After that long rant about tech mods, one might wonder if this document is really about magic mods. Rest assured, I merely wrote at such length on tech mods to better define magic mods in contrast to them. In a sense, magic mods embody many aspects that I think tech mods lack.

I will now present three aspects that I think make a good magic mod. None of these is strictly necessary for a mod to be “magic”. At the end of the day, it’s up to the mod developer’s vision of what their mod should be. That being said, I will argue that these make sense thematically for magic mods, and that the simple act of formalizing them is useful in itself.

Mystery

There should be a certain amount of unknown to the mechanics of a magic mod, especially at the beginning of a playthrough. Precise information about the inner workings of the mod should be hidden or obfuscated to the player, who has to learn them by himself.

For instance, if your mod has a mana system, don’t show the numerical amounts of how much mana the player has. Show him just a bar at first, with only how much mana he has, and a rough indication of how much mana a given spell will consume. Then, as the player progresses through your mod, make that information slowly more accurate. Maybe make the estimation of how much spells cost more precise, maybe make the bar update faster…

By doing this, you mechanically represent the player character gaining knowledge about your magic system, starting from an intuitive feeling of the character’s magical energy, and slowly gaining more insight and intuition as she gains experience.

This does two things. First, it frames the progression through the mod around the player character starting from zero magical knowledge all the way to mastery. It uses mechanics to represent the fantasy of learning to be a wizard.

Second, by introducing uncertainty into the information available to the player, you open the door for some interesting ways of balancing the mod. Let’s imagine that when the player casts a spell the amount of mana consumed is random within a certain interval. When the player doesn’t have enough mana, instead of not casting the spell, you could instead have a negative effect happen to the player (e.g. lose hp, lose hunger, make the spell fail in a funny way, …). Now, when casting a spell at low mana, the player is taking a risk. There is a chance for the spell to fail, without being as annoying as a flat probability of failure for each cast.

Non-Materialism

The progression of a magic mod should not be tied purely to material resources. In order to unlock more features, the player must do something other than gather crafting materials.

Tech mods being based on technology, they assume that the material world is all there is. As such, their progression is purely tied to how many resources the player has. In order to craft the next level of machines, one needs only have enough materials from the previous level. Magic, on the other hand, posits that there is something outside of the material realm, whether it be gods, demons, spirits, other planes of existence subject to different rules…

The reason I’m not calling this criterion spiritualism is that I want to put the emphasis on magic mods having something non material in their mechanics. Thaumcraft makes you solve puzzle minigames to unlock features, thereby representing the process of scholarly research with mechanics. Ars Magica and its descendants have a levelling system where you become more powerful by casting spells.

There are a couple of glaring exceptions to this rule. Equivalent Exchange, in particular, is all about having enough resources, with the added bonus that literally any resources will do. I won’t argue that EE isn’t a magic mod, but the fact that it breaks the progression of literally any mod played beside it is a serious balance problem that might be solved by having some form of non-materialistic mechanic.

Whimsy

A magic mod ought to have unconventional mechanics, particularly for its crafting. Don’t just use single block machines, or pipes.

This one is pretty vague, but is arguably universal among magic mods. Magic mods almost always include elaborate crafting systems (think the infusion altar from Thaumcraft, or literally anything from Botania). They also include unusual ways of transporting stuff (e.g. golems, Mana beams, …)

You could argue that this is pure flavour, but I think it’s more than that. Crafting systems like Infusion or Botania Rituals take space (as in, they literally require a room by themselves) and time. This makes every craft using them memorable. You have to design and build a room for them, and then you have to think about a bunch of things to use them. In comparison, placing and using a machine from your average tech mod is just an afterthought.

This originality in mechanics is often served with copious amounts of visual flair. Custom models, particles, lights, items floating and whizzing around in the air… Again, this serves to make the mod more memorable.

Other aspects of magic mods

The three criteria above, while not being universal among magic mods, do make sense thematically. There are other other aspects found in magic mods that are worth discussing, even though these could just as well be applied to tech mods.

Danger

Magic mods sometimes present magic as an inherently dangerous or even evil thing, and as such using it can have negative consequences for the player. This is often done to create the fantasy of being an evil sorcerer.

To my knowledge Thaumcraft is one of the few mods to actually implement a pollution mechanic in the form of Flux. It also implements the player becoming insane from learning dangerous knowledge with Warp. No other mod has you fight tiny mind spiders because you have delved too deep into eldritch knowledge. Thaumcraft’s magic is fundamentally dangerous, and actively resists the player. Thaumcraft will happily give you the fantasy of being a mad sorcerer, and judge you appropriately for going that route.

Compare that with tech mods that, despite being ostensibly based on industry and technology, rarely feature any of the negative effects that these can have. The closest we have is nuclear reactors from ic2 going boom and irradiating the nearby terrain when you go out of your way to make them overheat. Modern tech mods don’t even have that. Nothing will ever go wrong on its own, and there are no negative consequences whatsoever.

I think more mods should be like Thaumcraft. It not only makes the mod more engaging, it also gives it more depth. Your mod doesn’t simply yield to the player’s desires, it resists them, thereby making it all the more satisfying when these desires are met.

Rule of cool (aka Style over Function)

Almost universally, magic mods strive to be visually entertaining, by the use of custom models, particles, …, often to the detriment of the mod’s performance.

This is obviously justified by the very idea of magic, which is supposed to be flashy. It also serves to make magic mods stand out from the single block machines that most tech mods use, making them more memorable. This is pure flavour, but while the whole point of this document is to argue that magic mods are more than just flavour, it is still an integral part of the experience.

Sadly, there is a cost to the rule of cool. All these particles, custom models and animations don’t come cheap, and have a tendency to choke the server when used on a large scale. With Minecraft being what it is, I don’t think this problem is likely to go away. Even if you optimize the visuals of your mod, the very nature of Minecraft’s engine (not counting the Bedrock version here) means that you can’t get away with as much cool stuff as you could in another game engine.

Mystery Flavours

There are multiple flavours of mystery. One of them is esotericism. Historical magic traditions were often part of organised religions, and many recent ones style themselves after the mystery cults of antiquity (e.g. Gnosticism, Mithraism). They were called so because new initiates into the cult were gradually introduced to more secrets as they progressed through the cult, becoming more and more “enlightened” in the process. The secrets of the world are already known. It’s just that the initiate has to go through the necessary steps to learn them. Mechanically, this can mean that the progression of your mod depends on the player performing certain tasks. Thaumcraft technically does this by unlocking new thaumonomicon entries when scanning certain things in the world.

Another flavour of mystery is that of research. Real life alchemy was an early form of science, albeit without the scientific method and mixed with charlatanry. Indeed, the word “Alchemy” itself comes from “El Khem” which was the ancient egyptians’ primitive knowledge of chemistry. The difference from the previous point is that the knowledge discovered through research is new. It was deduced from existing knowledge rather than learnt. How might this be translated into mechanics? Simply allow players to be creative with the mod. Give them simple tools to combine into complex ones, and they will find uses you hadn’t thought of. (This is related to the concept of emergent gameplay/behaviour) Another way is to explicitly represent research through mechanics, as Thaumcraft does, but it doesn’t capture emergent behaviour.