Age of Engineering Server Hosting

Age of Engineering is an expert-mode tech pack by davqvist with more than half a million downloads on CurseForge. It takes the familiar tech mods — Thermal Expansion, MineFactory Reloaded, Ender IO, Extra Utilities 2, Actually Additions, Tinkers' Construct — and rewrites hundreds of recipes so that nothing is as cheap as you remember.

Progression is divided into fifteen ages. Each one is a gate: you cannot skip to the machine you want, you have to build the chain that unlocks it, and finishing an age awards an achievement and a trophy you can place in your base. The pack takes obvious inspiration from FTB Infinity Expert Mode but goes its own way.

This is not a pack for a casual evening. It is aimed at players who already know tech mods and want the recipes to fight back, though it also works for a semi-experienced group willing to read. If your friends enjoy planning a factory on paper before placing a single block, this is their pack.

On a server it rewards specialisation hard. One player running ore processing, another on power, another on the logistics that feed both, will clear ages several times faster than three people each building their own half-finished setup.

Age of Engineering is a Minecraft 1.10.2 pack. That age shows in its mod list — these are the versions of Thermal and Ender IO from that era — and it means the pack is stable and fully documented, with a guide book built in through FTB Utilities that explains what each age expects of you.

As with any older pack, everyone must run the same build as the server. Launchers keep old copies around, and a friend who installed a year ago may not be on the version you are.

4 GB handles a small group; 6 GB is the comfortable number once several machine setups are running at once. It is a mid-weight pack — far lighter than a modern kitchen-sink one — but expert packs push players toward large automated builds, and those are what eventually cost you performance.

Watch the machine count rather than the player count. Ten idle players cost less than one fully automated ore processing line running around the clock.

• Create a Minecraft server and pick the location closest to your group.
• Install Age of Engineering from the mod installer and wait for the first-run setup to finish.
• Start the server and check the console loads cleanly before handing out the address.
• Make sure everyone installs the same pack build in their launcher.
• Turn on scheduled backups before the first big factory goes up.

The age system solves the problem every kitchen-sink pack has: too much choice at once. By gating what you can build, the pack keeps a server working on the same problem at the same time, which is exactly what keeps a group playing together instead of drifting into separate projects.

When a machine costs five times what it used to, you stop building spares and start designing properly. That is the point of the pack, and it is why players who like optimisation stay with it long after lighter packs get boring.

It is manageable if at least one person in the group enjoys reading the guide and planning ahead. Without that, expect the server to stall in the middle ages, where the recipe costs climb faster than a casual play session can supply.