It’s been 24 hours since the release. Happened early yesterday morning around 12:17am. Cojo and the team released Tropicraft. I didn’t grab it that second due to one reason; SPC. It’s been reported and proven to me, that SPC doesn’t work right with Tropicraft (and even with it just installed).
It’s some kind of rendering issue that only the author of SPC can fix.
That’s not the only reason. The main reason is, Tropicraft doesn’t excite me. Now, I still find the volcanoes are pretty cool and so is the wind system, and the new furniture options are very cool and I plan to use them in the future (when or if the SPC issue is fixed).
But the realm itself seems it’s another one of those “best played in Survival” mods. That depresses me that some of the best mods are Survival-only, but doesn’t surprise me because most players play in Survival. That they treat Creative Mode as “testing”.
They’re not saying you can’t play in Creative, but you’ll only do a 3rd that Survival players can do.
Do want to say, I did think about wanting to make another transit system in Tropicraft. But the endless beaches, rainforests, and plains areas nearly bore me to death. And decided against it. Too much, randomness. The same thing is said for the Twilight Forest (and even the Overworld). How could I possibly make anything that goes to “random volcano 29212”, and “random beach 31220” that’s been seen over, and over, and OVER again in different locations? This is not the fault of the devs, by the way.
In the afternoon, I decided to give it a chance after someone in the IRC chat had a temporary solution of dealing with the SPC issue; quit the map, back to the menu, go back in.
Unfortunately, again I needed a higher Forge version. And Build 94 is reported to have alot of issues in Railcraft. So I grabbed the latest version (102), and the latest version of OptiFine. I managed to slap them in my existing install, and they WORK! 😀 Railcraft and all my other mods worked too.
Tried out Tropicraft. The way to get in is unlike Twilight Forest and the Nether. You got to make a Pina Colada, a Beach Chair, then sit in it while waiting for sunset, then drink your drink and you’ll be teleported to it. Quite ingenious.
When you pop up, you’ll be in a pit of water. Just swim up and boom, you’re in the Tropical realm. When I first ported in, I found myself near land with ocean surrounding me. And there’s small pockets of coral scattered around the sea floor.
Started flying around. Found a volcano. A month ago I was watching MrRube’s stream of his Slinger boss mob (that had to be dropped from 3.0 due to time constraints). We waited a good half an hour for the damn thing to erupt, and it never did.
Now, they are. Though, it isn’t the eruption I was hoping to see. As the lava rises, parts of the sides of it open up, allowing lava to seep in. And when the eruption is over, the lava doesn’t go away. I assume both are Vanilla bugs.
Also, IMHO, the smoke looks cartoon’ish. Perfect for Minecraft though, but not really realistic.
.
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Soon I ran into that warned about SPC bug. But this time I couldn’t avoid it. I was told about his ‘MultiMC’ program but didn’t know about it. Went there and watched a video, and was sold. Grabbed the download and found out it can load an existing install into it for loading. So I had my install, and created one for Tropicraft and did as the video said, and it works.
Now I have two copies of Minecraft that I can easily switch to, without having to create annoying manual backups. And best of all, it has a “manual” way of installing mods that take the stress out of updating into the .jar.