Why This Exists

Back to the Past

When I was maybe seven or eight years old, an Xbox 360 appeared in our home. Legendary, and at the same time kind of a failure of a console - yeah, yeah, red ring of death, I'm talking about you. Those were the days. No real problems: kindergarten, school, you come home and it's warm and cozy, you change clothes, do your homework, and then you play. And that's when I tried Minecraft for the first time.

Unforgettable impressions. An unknown world. A feeling of possibility, of creativity, of solitude. A feeling that you're home. Everything is strange, but always calm. And you're completely alone. You sit in front of the TV and realize that Minecraft is your friend - that it speaks to your soul. That it understands you. And you don't - not yet. So you press every button on the controller one by one, and you learn. Oh, I can look around. Oh, I can hit this tree. Oh, I can pick it up. And then what?

I never got as much pleasure from games as I did from Minecraft. Those blocky fields, forests, rivers - all that seemingly insignificant nonsense meant more to me than anything else. The game spoke to me in a language I understood: it showed me just enough, and the rest I had to figure out myself. And it was genuinely interesting. That's why I fell in love with it, and that's also why I don't like the new versions - they threw out the friendliness and left only a speedrun to a bed. But that's probably just the "old days were better" syndrome.

Then, in first or second grade, I got my first computer. And here I want to say a huge thank you to my dad for not holding my hand. He showed me the browser, the keyboard, the mouse - and then it was up to me. He installed exactly one game: Stalker: Call of Pripyat (great game, by the way). Everything else I had to figure out myself: what files are, how to google, how to watch YouTube. It wasn't neglect. It was an attempt to teach me independence. And it worked.

I installed Minecraft, discovered there were tons of versions, and eventually stumbled onto a Minecraft YouTuber named Delniy - almost no editing, speaks openly, like with a friend. His playlist "Yuny Tekhnik" opened a door: I had no idea what mods and modpacks were. Through guides, trial and error, I figured it out, and then it took off. I made such elaborate modpacks that I just flew around in creative testing everything - I think I tried half of all Minecraft mods out there. Mutant Creatures, Galacticraft, MineColonies, Flan's, Twilight Forest, Tinker's Construct, Ice and Fire, the Aether, and whatever else you can imagine.

And then I found it: HBM's Nuclear Tech Mod.

The Find & First Steps

At first I thought NTM was a mod about nuclear bombs. Then I noticed the building blocks - tons of them, interesting ones - and started building. Bunkers, houses, complexes. It wasn't perfect, but I loved it. Then I realized you could actually survive with it. I'd just learned to use Aternos, so I made a simple server and invited friends. There were only five of us, but we had as much fun as if there were a hundred. Back then the mod had no Glyphids, no smelter, no welding machine, no soldering station - just the old chemical and assembly machine, old weapons, the old oil derrick, old structures. Microchips had to be made on a press. It was super cool and fun.

Then I thought: why not make an RP server? Players as citizens of different countries, wars, ratata and kaboom. And so, on September 11, 2023, the first trailer for my first project came out: NTM RP - a mix of RP and Anarchy. What you've been waiting for. It was awesome. NTM, JourneyMap and Flan's - that was already enough to have a blast. By the way, I think that's when Glyphids were first added, and I blasted them with a HE shell from a KV-2. Proud of myself.

And now for probably the biggest event in the project's history, and in my personal development: before releasing that trailer, I was streaming on Twitch, and that's where I met Dima. He was bored, wandering around Twitch looking for unpopular streamers, and he found me while I was setting up an NPC trader. I don't remember how it happened, but we became really close. It wasn't just an internet friendship - it was a real one. I pulled him out of real problems, and he supported me at every step of the project's development. To this day. I genuinely don't know if any of this would exist without him.

NTM RP was a roleplay concept - nations, cities, professions, war. The concept had heart; the execution didn't. After about a month I scrapped the direction entirely and renamed the project to NuclearCraft Project. And that's when it started being real - the first time I stopped throwing things at the wall and started actually thinking about what experience I wanted people to have.

Changes & the Silver Age

At some point I changed my mind and dropped the project. I got tired of doing everything for five people. There was no talk of YouTubers or sponsors back then - I didn't even know anyone besides me knew about this mod.

But a week or two later my hands got itchy, and I whipped up a new project. Called it NuclearCraft and started playing with Dima. And people slowly started joining: Bomba_NotDied, Nalsas, MrAkrilon, Modest Mafia, OmegaSgushenka, Rt194646, Lyagushka - they all came during what I consider the silver age of the project. No quests, no custom recipes - just a bunch of mods thrown together. And it was incredibly fun. Every morning during summer break I'd wake up, turn on the server on my computer, and we'd play through Radmin or, God forbid, Ngrok.

Here I want to specially thank Lux - a random person from the internet who just up and gave us a server host. For free. Before that we played through stupid VPN programs and constantly had issues. Lux gave us one server, and later a second one. I don't know where you are now, Lux, but this project exists partly because of you.

We jumped between versions - 1.7.10 with the original NTM, or 1.12.2 with NTM: Extended Edition by Alcater. And at one point I went completely nuts and ran TWO servers and TWO modpacks at once, 1.12.2 and 1.7.10. One of the files is even still on Modrinth. Sadly, almost nothing else survived - no screenshots, no videos, just seven YouTube trailers for different seasons.

And I also remember when NTM: Space by JameH2 came out. It was fucking awesome - so awesome that I rolled out an update for the 1.7.10 modpack the same day, replacing regular NTM with it. Felt bad for the 1.12.2 players - they hadn't gotten updates in a long time.

Burnout, and Coming Back

I want to be honest about this part.

During one of the wipes - caused by a corrupted world save - several people started coming at me. Me, the administration, other players. The complaint, specifically: I'm a disgusting admin, I wipe the server too often, the project is a piece of shit, and I can't do anything at all.

That really threw me off. To spend so much time on something that can be so easily torn apart? I completely disbanded the project and let development go for a good three to five months. Playing and developing became uninteresting and boring. I just played video games.

I'll be upfront: I wasn't a good developer back then. And I wasn't a good community admin. I was figuring things out in public, making mistakes in public, handling things badly in public. That's the truth.

And then I stumbled upon Nuclear Tech: Integrated - a modpack by someone called Skippy. I want to say this directly, in writing, where he might actually see it: thank you, Skippy. A real modpack with NTM. WITH QUESTS. With mods actually tied to NTM. That project showed me what was possible when you approach NTM with real creative focus. It pulled me back.

And I came back with a question I'd never asked before:

"What would happen if someone made GregTech: New Horizons, but with Nuclear Tech Mod at the center instead of GregTech?"

The actual thought, in my own personal language, went roughly like this:

"Me think - there GTNH. GTNH good. GTNH good focus on one mod. GTNH hard. Me like. NTI very good quests. Good. Too easy. Bad. GTNH plus NTI - good. Me like, me like!"

And that's roughly how the golden age began. Nuclear Tech: New Horizons. GTNH, but NTM. I realized - that's it. That's what I've been aiming for from the very beginning. That's my final project. This is my hobby, and I'll dedicate my life to it.

What I Believe

These are things I actually believe, not things I wrote because they sound good. They come from who I am and where I came from.

On money

I grew up in a low-income family. I know exactly what it feels like to want something and not be able to afford it - especially online, when your parents are skeptical of internet payments in general. There are kids in that exact situation right now, today.

NTNH is built entirely on free, open-source mods that other people made and gave to the community for nothing. It would feel genuinely wrong to take that and charge money for it. I'm not going to do that. Not now, not ever. Ko-fi will never be required, and it will never unlock anything. No paywalls, no locked content, no advantages. It's a tip jar, nothing more - and honestly, I lost the withdrawal link and I'm not going to look for it, because I don't want to.

On HBM's Nuclear Tech Mod

This mod has been in active development for over ten years. It has deep, layered factory gameplay. It has lore - a real backstory running underneath everything, easter eggs and hidden references that most players never even stumble across. And almost nobody outside of very small modded Minecraft communities knows it exists. Most people who've heard of NTM think it's just "the mod where you blow things up with nuclear bombs." That description misses everything that makes it great. This is not a bomb mod. It's a full industrial simulator with a storyline - if you know where to look.

That bothers me. And NTNH is, in part, my answer to it. Every player who discovers what NTM actually is through this modpack is a real win - not just for us, but for the people who have spent more than a decade building the mod. They deserve that recognition.

On tools

I use AI as a tool - I always have, including for this very website. I never ask it to build things for me; I bring it a specific task and then go through what it wrote line by line, hunting for bugs and holes, correcting and polishing. Three years ago I didn't know what ZenScript was, and now I write quests and custom recipes. It's a learning bridge. A tool is a tool - what matters is how much you dig into what you're doing.

On what this project is for

If NTNH can do for NTM what GTNH did for GregTech - build something so compelling around it that people can't ignore the underlying mod anymore - that would mean everything to me. That's the goal. Not "make a popular modpack." Make a modpack that shows people something they didn't know existed, and makes them grateful they found it.

Today

Before NTNH, I basically worked alone - the only help was Lux with hosting. Everything else I did completely by myself: administration, development, promotion. Six months ago, one person joining was already a celebration. And now there are more than five of us, and I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who decided to help.

Today the team includes Rerserder (Nikita), who pushes for the quality-of-life improvements we debate and sharpen together; HiVerse, who shaped several of the ideas behind the current direction; and Xekitan, a skilled Java developer working on the deeper technical layers. On the creative side, Tinn (TinnPott) joined as our video editor and delivered a complete visual refresh - a new logo, title card, and icon.

A project I started at twelve years old, alone, with no real plan - has turned into something I'm genuinely proud of. A website. A large active Discord. A multiplayer server. Translations in over twenty languages. A real development team. Three hundred quests. We're like a family running a family business, except we don't charge anyone for anything. I think there's something really rare and worth protecting about that.

Is this what happiness looks like? I think it might be. I started this because I fell in love with a game on a console, and then fell in love again with a mod that almost nobody knew about. And I just kept going - through the bad versions, through the burnout, through all the months of building alone.

I'm glad I kept going. I'm not done.