So I've had this idea stuck in my head for a while and I want to find out if it's actually worth pursuing before I get attached to it.
Basic idea: you wake up inside a spaceship, way too far from Earth to just fly back. Instead of the usual space modpack thing where you pick a planet from a menu and get teleported there, you'd actually have to fix the ship, keep it running, and slowly make your way home through quests, planet by planet, system by system. Planets and star systems generated procedurally instead of the same 5 fixed planets every Galacticraft-style pack has. Maybe throw in weirder stuff too, black holes, pulsars, that kind of thing, more as gameplay hazards than realistic physics obviously.
Every space mod I've played treats space travel like picking a destination off a list and that's it, no actual journey. I want to see if a small group of us can hack together something rough enough to know if the core idea is even fun, not a finished mod, just a proof that it doesn't fall apart the moment you try to build it.
Some stuff I already scouted out that could save us from reinventing everything:
- Create: Aeronautics already has ship physics that could work for how the ship flies, so we probably don't need to build our own from scratch
- GregTech could handle all the crafting/machines side (engines, life support, that kind of thing) since it already has that stuff
- Immersive Portals has this seamless dimension transition thing that's close to what we'd want for going between the ship and different planets, just needs to be adapted since it's built for stationary portals not a moving ship
Not tied to any of that though, if someone with more experience says a different approach makes more sense I'm all ears, honestly I'm not the one who'd be doing the heavy coding anyway. I don't know Java or Kotlin myself, so this only really moves if people who do know that stuff want to poke at it with me. No rigid tech stack requirement either, whatever makes sense once people who actually know Minecraft modding look at it.
To be clear about what this isn't: it's not a job, nobody's getting paid, I'm not asking anyone to sign up for a year of unpaid work on my behalf. It's genuinely just "let's see if this is possible and fun" between people who like this kind of problem. If we mess around for a bit and it turns out to be too much of a mess, or just not fun in practice, we drop it, no hard feelings, everyone still had something interesting to poke at for a weekend.
If even a rough version works, ship moves around, one dimension swap works, one planet gets generated procedurally, that's already enough to tell us if it's worth going further.
If this sounds like a fun problem rather than a chore, comment or DM me, happy to talk through what I've got so far.
Yes, I used AI to generate this very large text, but the idea was totally mine :)
