Pack shape

What's in the pack

128 mods, organised by what they let you do rather than what they are called. Here is the shape of the thing.

Tech

Automate everything

If you have ever looked at a repetitive job and thought "there must be a better way", Thunder probably gives you three.

  • Create gives you belts, shafts, cogs, presses, trains, and contraptions that are just plain fun to watch once they start moving.
  • Mekanism takes things into heavier industry with ore processing, chemicals, power generation, and big machinery that means business.
  • Applied Energistics 2, Refined Storage, Storage Drawers, and Modular Routers help stop your base becoming a museum of badly labelled chests.
Magic

Spells, rituals and witchcraft

These are not three mods that all do the same trick in different hats. Each one has its own flavour.

  • Ars Nouveau lets you build your own spells from glyphs, which means plenty of room for both clever utility and bad ideas.
  • Blood Magic is slower, stranger, and far more ritual-heavy if you fancy power with a bit of menace to it.
  • Hexerei brings brooms, potions, familiars, and enough atmosphere to make a forest cottage feel genuinely enchanted.
Building

Build something worth showing off

Vanilla gives you the basics. Thunder gives you room to make a base that does not look like a hurried bunker.

  • Macaw's suite adds doors, roofs, bridges, windows, fences, and all the bits that make builds feel finished.
  • Chipped and Rechiseled add a ridiculous number of block variants when you want a palette finer than "stone, but slightly different".
  • Create Deco and related pieces help industrial builds look clean, deliberate, and properly joined up.
Exploration

Wander off and find something interesting

The Overworld should feel worth poking about in rather than just something you sprint through on the way to the next machine.

  • Biomes O' Plenty makes the world far less samey and gives different regions a proper identity.
  • Alex's Mobs adds more life, more oddities, and the occasional thing you would rather not stumble into underground.
  • Oh The Trees You'll Grow and Nature's Compass make exploration more varied and less of a blind trudge.
Daily life

Less faff, better multiplayer

A big modpack needs the boring little improvements as much as the headline toys.

  • JEI and Jade keep the pack readable instead of leaving you to guess recipes and block behaviour.
  • Waystones, Xaero's maps, Sophisticated Backpacks, and Lootr make ordinary play much less tedious.
  • Simple Voice Chat means people can just talk in-game instead of vanishing into another app every five minutes.
Hosting

Server support that is actually useful

Running the pack should not require a second hobby in deployment archaeology.

  • Thunder ships install and startup scripts for Linux and Windows, plus a pterodactyl.json egg for panel hosting.
  • LuckPerms, FTB Essentials, WorldEdit, SecurityCraft, and GriefLogger cover the usual admin jobs.
  • The packwiz metadata host keeps server sync simple instead of leaving you to manually rebuild the pack from scraps.