Why This Exists

The Beginning

Around 2016–2017, my parents bought a cracked Xbox 360. I want to be upfront about that - it wasn't a legitimate console, and we weren't a wealthy family. But on that thing, I played Minecraft for the very first time. I was maybe five or six years old. And something happened to me that day that I genuinely don't know how to explain to someone who hasn't felt it. I just fell completely in love. Not with a game mechanic. With the idea of it. The fact that you could build anything. That there was no ceiling.

I've been playing Minecraft on and off ever since. Different versions, different devices, different stages of my life. But that love never really went anywhere.

Then in 2023, I stumbled across HBM's Nuclear Tech Mod. And it happened again - the same feeling. I couldn't believe something like this existed. The machines, the chemical processing chains, the sheer depth buried under what looked from the outside like just "a nuclear mod." I was twelve years old and completely, embarrassingly obsessed with it.

So I did the only thing that felt natural: I started building a modpack around it. The first version was nothing - just 25 mods thrown together with no structure, no vision. I was calling friends to play it with me, basically just sharing the excitement. But that was the beginning.

NTM RP was a roleplay concept - players would form countries, cities, professions, go to war, all built on NTM's foundation. I thought it sounded exciting. In practice it didn't hold together. After a month, I renamed the project to NuclearCraft Project. And that's when it started being real.

NuclearCraft Project was the first time I stopped just throwing things at the wall and started actually thinking. What experience did I want people to have? What made NTM special, and how do you build a modpack that honors that instead of burying it? I was still learning. I was making mistakes constantly. But for the first time, the project had a soul.

Six Generations

The project didn't arrive at Nuclear Tech: New Horizons in one step. It went through six completely different versions, each one a full rethink - different Minecraft version, different NTM fork, different vision. I want to write them down because they're all part of the story, even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones.

A note on versions: all 1.12.2 builds used NTM: Extended Edition by Alcater. All 1.7.10 builds used the original HBM's Nuclear Tech Mod.

Burnout. And Coming Back.

I want to be honest about this part.

By the end of Generation 5, I had nothing left. I'd been working on this completely alone for months. I had no clear idea where to take the modpack. And on top of that, there were a small number of people who just... existed to throw meaningless, baseless criticism at everything I made. Not useful feedback. Just noise. The kind that doesn't tell you how to improve, it just tells you that you failed. And after long enough, that kind of thing eats at you.

I disappeared for about a month. Stopped posting, stopped updating, stopped thinking about it. I want to say that clearly rather than smooth over it, because it's part of what the project is.

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 found 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. That project showed me what was possible when you approach NTM with real creative focus. It reminded me why I started any of this. It pulled me back.

But I came back with a different question. Not "how do I fix NuclearCraft Project?" - something 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?"

I'd heard about GTNH. I knew what it stood for - a modpack built entirely around one specific mod, taken to its absolute limit, with guided progression and real depth. And I thought: NTM deserves that. NTM has always deserved that.

So Nuclear Tech: New Horizons isn't NuclearCraft Project with a new name. It's something genuinely different - built with a clear identity and a clear purpose, from the very start. That moment of clarity, coming back after a month of silence, was the actual beginning.

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. If you want to support us on Ko-fi, I'll be grateful for every coffee - but it will never be required, and it will never unlock anything. No paywalls. No locked content. No advantages. It's a tip jar, nothing more.

You cannot earn money off other people's work and call it fair. I don't think that's a complicated idea, but it's one I'll defend every time.

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. It has a real backstory running underneath everything. It has 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. The engineering chains alone are more complex and rewarding than most mainstream mods even attempt.

Did you know NTM has lore? A whole backstory embedded in the world? Do you know how many easter eggs and hidden references are buried in this mod that almost nobody ever finds? Most people who play it don't even know 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 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

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. An AI bot someone built for it. A real development team. Three hundred quests.

And recently - this is the part that actually moves me - new people have started joining the project. Not just players. Contributors and developers who share the same vision. Who understand what this is supposed to be. Who believe in the same things.

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 cracked Xbox, 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.