ENCORE

Encore is a modpack made for Minecraft version 1.20.1, created solo over the course of about two years. The pack started as a side project for me to have fun with in my spare time. It had the simple goal of "recontextualizing Minecraft in my own vision", and quickly grew as others around me expressed interest in the pack.

Recontextualizing games is something I really enjoy, and it can be an excellent way to exercise design muscles. In this case, I got quite the workout. My vision for the pack was fairly complex. I wanted to lean into survival elements more, but also give more freedom to play the game as a sandbox. Adventure was also a big focus, and my direction there was to try and make the world feel isolated. It was also important that the game was still recognizable as Minecraft - the pack was supposed to recontextualize the base game, not replace it.

The goals above presented a massive challenge - all of them contradict one another. In many ways, extra survival elements made exploration more difficult (and in certain parts of the world, nearly impossible early on). Likewise, trying to expand the freedom of the sandbox tugged on both the survival and adventure sides of the game. Eventually, I did find a solution to weaving these widely different systems together - I treated each "category of play" as a different "micro-game" that players could choose to experience. For instance, to allow for more sandbox freedom, monster spawning was disabled except within dungeons and structures found around the world. This creates two different modes of play based on where you are in the world - at your home, you are safe to free up space that might be taken up by combat equipment with blocks and other tools, but on an adventure, you won't want to bring many blocks and will instead replace most tools with swords, shields, and good foods. The same principles are applied to every other major system of play - you choose when to interact with certain systems of the game, not the other way around. Don't like combat? If you don't go into dungeons, you won't ever have a fight. If you love combat, simply seek out dungeons instead of spending time building.

The pack also has a major focus on collaborative multiplayer. To make this happen, I created ten unique "Professions" that players pick between at the start of the game. Each profession has unique ways of interacting with existing systems in the game, and each is designed to bring something to a community. Players might go to an Artisan for free tool repairs, go to a Scholar for a source of powerful enchantments, or visit a Cleric's Sanctum to cheat their next death. Professions never provided raw stat upgrades or nerfs, and instead focused on dramatically changing how you (and your friends) engage with the game.

Encore, from start to finish, went through loads of iterations. I had the pleasure of hosting multiple playtesting servers, which let me receive plenty of feedback and bug reports, but also allowed me to observe how players interacted with the pack hands-on. These servers very quickly taught me how to push hotfixes, updates, make human-readable patchnotes, and live service a game - especially when things didn't pan out as expected. Much of the feedback I received while working on the pack was taken into account, which let the project flourish - though I was the sole developer of the pack, it would not be where it is today without the input of others.

As a final note, while I have hand-crafted much of the core of the modpack, this project would not be possible without Mojang Studio's Minecraft or the fantastic mod authors who contributed so much to it. Please do not mistake every little thing within this pack as my own - it is a collection and integration of the works of many others into a single vision, and could not exist without them.