Reading about the server it looks as if things may have settled down at last and I'm getting tempted to start playing again

There are still a few niggles to tweak but for the most part we seem pretty good.

I'm kind of thinking of staying off Minecraft till at least Autumn though, I'm trying to catch up on stuff I neglected.

Its probably a good thing, I might have broken the Monster map just a little bit when I was playing.

I do wish I'd been able to build my epic AE machine on a CF server though, and maybe I'll get a chance to rebuild it someday.

You should live with someone tech oriented, that way there's a quicker industry curve when you're starting up

Well AE has changed quite a bit so you might find your designs will either not work or will need quite a bit of tinkering to discover a new way of doing it.

Yeah I get that, from what I've read the main problem will be the new parts and materials. Apart from that I was mainly just concerned with the difficult-to-automate stuff like the TE parts that need liquid redstone and glowstone, and those annoying multi-port machines. I'd mostly managed to work around it by being sneaky with itemducts, and I'd avoided the need for AE liquid handling-another time maybe.

Actually the whole point of taking a long break is so when I coma back I can move away from having such a fixed game-plan and play with the new stuff instead. Having said that I'm a sucker for item transport mods, is Logistics Pipes still around as I ought to try that if it is.

When I first encountered the Mindcrack pack I didn't have a gameplan at all, just blundered through stuff, so I had three bases (four if you count the chicken farm, five if you count the nether "pump house"), two epic rail tunnels, a bunch of Thaumcraft, BEES, a lot of gregtech, a bunch of redpower power sources and a lightening rod. Since then I've slipped into a single-objective gameplan and it is definitely less fun that way.