and i'm not really even branching out either because a lot of my effort has gone into building up thaumcraft, the mod i already basically knew. it's version 4 and i'd previously been using the less-complete & mostly-reworked version 6, so it's.. sort of new?and theres a bunch of other mods expanding it... i like wands better than the newer power glove thing just for aesthetic, and even though it's slower & more complicated i like that nodes are tangible and manipulable in a way that the formless blanket of magic in the new versions isnt, but there are SO MANY aspects. one of the mods adds MORE, why on earth did that seem like a good idea
anyway this is an illustration of the time i threw an ender pearl against the wall instead of placing it on a pedestal, which is a fairly typical level of competence
another mod i played with for awhile is just called Necromancy and it's bad, objectively. the documentation is awful (i STILL can't figure out how to make pigman parts) it doesn't integrate right with WAILA, rideable minions (the whole reason i got interested in the first place) don't work, a lot of the models & textures are mild-to-moderately broken, it's just generally messy and the dev has abandoned it. also, it adds its crafting components to, as far as i can tell, the loot table of EVERY MONSTER, and there's nothing else you can do with extraneous hearts and brains and lungs except eat them like they're rotten flesh that spreads out over three valuable inventory slots.
but modular custom monsters was a very ambitious project and i salute them for that, from the head of my reanimated army of horrors.

from left to right that's Shorty, Skelly Longlegs, Clyde, Squidiuqs, Heavy Metal Album Cover, Henderman, and Diogenes.
Clyde is a creeper with Enderman torso & arms but it came out looking like a creeper in an oversized black sweater, which is unexpectedly adorable. Squidiuqs is the result of me realizing the "squid torso" and "squid head" items look exactly the same and you can apply both of them to the same monster. This isn't how the mod works but in-fiction I imagine Shorty and Enderhen are the result of me basically just swapping the heads of an Enderman and a chicken; the Enderman head is stuck in the screaming 'aggressive' position which makes me think Shorty is deeply resentful of all this nonsense. Henderman silently followed me several hundred blocks away from the house one time. She's completely inscrutable. Diogenes wandered into a Nether portal and returned, and now he hangs out next to the soulless husk of a human body I keep in a big jar outside, contemplating the nature of life and death.
Not pictured are THE BIG MAN (an enderman with iron golem chest and arms), Patches (a mishmash of mostly skeleton and zombie parts with one oversized enderman arm), Dwayne (in fiction I consider him Squidiuqs' half-sibling; squid head, iron golem torso, I think creeper legs but I don't remember), Butch (a sheep with a wolf head, and you wouldn't think this fairly simple conceit would break so badly but... the spatial relationships of her component parts are Casual At Best), Andersen the Wolf Squider, etc, etc, etc.
the minions tend to teleport around when nobody's looking at them, i don't know if their stored locations are just approximate or their AI hiccups and they start following me again when i hadn't asked them to or what. i shouldn't have given some of them creeper heads bc my reaction to that pattern is Visceral and Immediate right up until i realize it's one of my loyal beloved abominations.
...my ingame persona has gone a bit off the deep end, yes. i'm competing with other people on the server who are, like, completing unholy rituals to become vampires and werewolves, mostly. they like bragging about how they can run ridiculously fast or their bare fists hit like a tank or they have natural damage reduction or whatever, but i don't burst into flames in direct sunlight and i have opposable thumbs all the time, so i'm good. i think i might actually be closer to on par with them now that i've enchanted a real good set of gear and infused my body with a bunch of permanent magic, but i can Never Die Again because it turned out that the infusions only last until you respawn the ordinary way and it's a hassle to keep manufacturing the aforementioned soulless husks to artificially reincarnate into. also i kind of explode into purple goo on death now.
but i have 'chameleon skin' (permanent toggleable invisibility) and a set of mutable 'chameleon tools' so that's very satisfying
anyway this is an illustration of the time i threw an ender pearl against the wall instead of placing it on a pedestal, which is a fairly typical level of competence

another mod i played with for awhile is just called Necromancy and it's bad, objectively. the documentation is awful (i STILL can't figure out how to make pigman parts) it doesn't integrate right with WAILA, rideable minions (the whole reason i got interested in the first place) don't work, a lot of the models & textures are mild-to-moderately broken, it's just generally messy and the dev has abandoned it. also, it adds its crafting components to, as far as i can tell, the loot table of EVERY MONSTER, and there's nothing else you can do with extraneous hearts and brains and lungs except eat them like they're rotten flesh that spreads out over three valuable inventory slots.
but modular custom monsters was a very ambitious project and i salute them for that, from the head of my reanimated army of horrors.

from left to right that's Shorty, Skelly Longlegs, Clyde, Squidiuqs, Heavy Metal Album Cover, Henderman, and Diogenes.
Clyde is a creeper with Enderman torso & arms but it came out looking like a creeper in an oversized black sweater, which is unexpectedly adorable. Squidiuqs is the result of me realizing the "squid torso" and "squid head" items look exactly the same and you can apply both of them to the same monster. This isn't how the mod works but in-fiction I imagine Shorty and Enderhen are the result of me basically just swapping the heads of an Enderman and a chicken; the Enderman head is stuck in the screaming 'aggressive' position which makes me think Shorty is deeply resentful of all this nonsense. Henderman silently followed me several hundred blocks away from the house one time. She's completely inscrutable. Diogenes wandered into a Nether portal and returned, and now he hangs out next to the soulless husk of a human body I keep in a big jar outside, contemplating the nature of life and death.
Not pictured are THE BIG MAN (an enderman with iron golem chest and arms), Patches (a mishmash of mostly skeleton and zombie parts with one oversized enderman arm), Dwayne (in fiction I consider him Squidiuqs' half-sibling; squid head, iron golem torso, I think creeper legs but I don't remember), Butch (a sheep with a wolf head, and you wouldn't think this fairly simple conceit would break so badly but... the spatial relationships of her component parts are Casual At Best), Andersen the Wolf Squider, etc, etc, etc.
the minions tend to teleport around when nobody's looking at them, i don't know if their stored locations are just approximate or their AI hiccups and they start following me again when i hadn't asked them to or what. i shouldn't have given some of them creeper heads bc my reaction to that pattern is Visceral and Immediate right up until i realize it's one of my loyal beloved abominations.
...my ingame persona has gone a bit off the deep end, yes. i'm competing with other people on the server who are, like, completing unholy rituals to become vampires and werewolves, mostly. they like bragging about how they can run ridiculously fast or their bare fists hit like a tank or they have natural damage reduction or whatever, but i don't burst into flames in direct sunlight and i have opposable thumbs all the time, so i'm good. i think i might actually be closer to on par with them now that i've enchanted a real good set of gear and infused my body with a bunch of permanent magic, but i can Never Die Again because it turned out that the infusions only last until you respawn the ordinary way and it's a hassle to keep manufacturing the aforementioned soulless husks to artificially reincarnate into. also i kind of explode into purple goo on death now.
but i have 'chameleon skin' (permanent toggleable invisibility) and a set of mutable 'chameleon tools' so that's very satisfying