The team at FTB is proud to announce a formal partnership with the team at Nerd Kingdom, the team behind the PC game TUG ( www.nerdkingdom.com ). Exact details have still to be formalised, however in principle our goal is to help the guys at Nerd Kingdom with the direction of the game and to aid in the development of the modding scene. As part of this partnership I have agreed to take a role at the company as Mods Director. This will allow me to have a direct input in the firms policies when it comes to how mods are going to be integrated into TUG.So what does this mean for Minecraft, short answer is nothing changes. The current team will all pretty much remain doing what they do best. Eyemaz and Jadedcat are already working hard on the 1.7.10 packs. Prog and his team, continue to make imrovements to our existing launcher, whilst it remains as well as keeping on top of the Unstable 1.7.10 Beta Test Pack and we are also preparing for our third tournament a Pax Prime 2014. My current plan is to supplement the existing team with new members as and when needed for TUG, so as not to lose any of our existing focus on Minecraft related content.So why TUG? This is a great question. TUG as a game is something that I and other members of our team have had our eye on for over a year now. I was first in contact the team at TUG in June/July of last year where we had informal talks regarding TUG and where it might go in the future and the integration of mods into the game. It seems that a lot of what was said back then was taken on board and TUG may very well develop into a modders delight.For those people that have yet to come across TUG. Very briefly, like Minecraft and other games it is and will evolve into a open world sandbox environment with survival aspects. However it is a direct design decision that whilst Nerd Kingdom will provide a core gameplay experience for users. The game is best served by opening itself up to the Modding environment for content. To this end the core game for TUG is in of itself a mod built on top of the game engine and every aspect of it will be open for modders to improve upon or change to their hearts content. It is my hope that this will allow us to see a whole new level of modding than what we have seen up to this point enabling us to create even more fantastic content for everyone to enjoy in the future.Right now TUG is still in a Alpha format and is available for early access on Steam and whilst creative mode is in now for people to start experimenting with the building tools and the game is sufficiently along for people to start to look at modding the game, an update is due in the next month or 2 that will provide a massive update to things like world generation and other parts of the game that will allow modders to really start to work on developing and adding new content.Finally, I am sure that some of you will have questions for Myself, members of FTB and people from Nerd Kingdom. I hope to have a AMA set up within the next few days on Reddit where you can come along and ask questions relating to TUG. You can also ask questions in this thread and we will try to answer what we can here as well.