For several weeks there has been a lot of speculation as to what is going to happen in 1.5 with regards to mods packs and mods. Most of the speculation has again revolved around Redpower 2 and whether or not it will be included. The reason that comments have been kept to a minimum is because essentially we didn't know and at that time we had not yet reached a point where the decision had to be made. However that time has passed and we are now at a point where a decision has to be made.



Over the last couple of weeks I have had many conversations with various people from members of the FTB team to mod developers and just watching threads to get a general feel for how the community feels. So today I want to end the speculation. For right now we will be staying on 1.4.7 as our recommended builds. This is as things stand likely to continue on till probably the 1.6 update from Mojang. We will be releasing a 1.5.x pack, although this pack will be added as a Private pack so people will need to add a password to have the pack show up on the launcher. Right now we plan to keep this as a Beta Pack and it will be loosely based on the Ultimate Pack. Redpower 2 will not be included in this pack as, as things stand we do not know when an update will appear. If during the 1.5.x period an update appears we can take another look at the situation and maybe add it in at a later date. However the pack will see some awesome new mods added in. including the revamped Mine Factory Reloaded, Tinkers Construct and others. We are recommending that this pack is only used on new worlds and I expect to release 2 versions of this pack. (1 with gregtech hard mode included and then another one that will either have gregtech totally disabled or more like with gregtech included but the configs switched out so that recipes from other mods remain in their original mode (aka easy mode)).



I know that there are a lot of people worried about the loss of features from Redpower, however I do not ever want to go back to a situation where an entire pack is left waiting on one mod and I am pretty sure Eloraam or any other modder would feel exactly the same. I also never want to create a situation where a developer feels they have to work harder or faster than they normally would in order to meet the demands of FTB. That is not the way it is meant to be. It is our job to work around them, not the other way around.



So lets talk about timetables. Right now we are going to be putting out (it may already be out by the time you read this) a final version of 1.4.7 Ultimate that includes the final versions of all 1.4.7 mods. This is essentially in the hopes that it clears up some final nasty little bugs that were lying around. Whether or not the DW20 and Mindcrack packs update is up to Direwolf and the mindcrack guys and I will be in touch with them to clarify what they want. (It should be noted both of these packs are considered stable, and the bugs we want to clear up in Ultimate dont affect either of these packs). The plan is to get a closed beta version of the 1.5 pack onto the launcher in the next couple of days and then assuming that everything goes OK and the mods are deemed stable, we hope to make these packs available to everyone either this monday (April 22) or the following Monday at the latest (April 29) It should be again made clear. These 1.5 packs are recommended to be used on a fresh world and there are no guarentees made to their compatibility beyond 1.5.x. Our understanding is that worlds should be compatible with 1.6, however it is to early to tell for sure.



Finally Version 2 of the FTB Launcher is scheduled to be released with the 1.6 update, however again this may be put back, it is a little to early to tell for sure. I hope this post goes some ways to answering some of the questions from the community at the moment.