Create: Above and Beyond

What sets it apart

Above and Beyond is a challenge pack made by simibubi. The CurseForge page presents it as the official Create challenge pack. It runs on Minecraft 1.16.5 with Forge.

Create’s rotating machinery is the core of the pack, and other tech mods are woven into its production chains. The project page lists Advanced Rocketry, Applied Energistics 2, Thermal Expansion and Flywheel among the included mods, with FTB Quests for guidance. The stated direction of the tech tree is toward space travel.

Two design choices stand out on the project page. Players can earn coins through errands or professions and spend them at a market, and some recipes change depending on the world seed, so one world’s solution does not carry over exactly to the next.

Who it suits

It suits players who enjoy building physical factories and want a pack with a clear finish line. Because nearly everything routes through Create, it works well for someone who wants to learn that mod in depth.

It is a poor fit for players after magic mods or free-form kitchen-sink play. The pack is focused and its recipes are deliberately demanding.

Before you install

The wiki says to use Java 8 for this pack, and it names the CurseForge app, GDLauncher, MultiMC and ATLauncher as launcher options.

The authors do not publish a client RAM recommendation on the project page or the wiki home page.

The pack is finished rather than actively updated. CurseForge shows the last release, version 1.3, dated December 15, 2021. On shaders, the project page says OptiFine appeared compatible to the author but that shader use is at the player’s own risk, and it suggests setting PlanetSkyOverride to false in the Advanced Rocketry config if the sky flickers.

When updating, the wiki advises installing the new version as a fresh instance and copying over saves, options, the server list and the local and schematics folders.

Playing with friends

Official server packs are published on CurseForge. Version 1.3 is the latest, and an older 1.1 server pack is still listed, so check the version before downloading.

The wiki’s setup steps are: extract the server pack, run the included Forge installer against that folder, then start the Forge jar with Java 8. The launch command shown in the wiki sets both minimum and maximum heap to 8 GB.

The wiki also warns that 1.3 moved to a newer Forge build. Servers upgrading from an earlier version should delete the old Forge jar, the Minecraft server jar and the libraries folder, then run the installer bundled with the 1.3 server pack.