Career-oriented full game mods/mod packs

[sherkaner]

I've been away from Kerbal for a while now, more or less waiting for the core game to be "done" before sinking more time into a new career.  It seems like we are now at at plateau for dramatic Squad-driven development and so I'm ready to dive in.  However, I have to admit that the career game still feels like a bit of a placeholder. And as thankful as I am for the wonderful variety of mods out there, slapping on a bunch of mods is no guarantee of playing a career game that has a good progression and flow.

So my question to the community is:

What options are out there for the player that wants a more satisfying, complete career game that they can be confident will really "work" for them as they sink in tens or hundreds of hours?

Of course there are many forms this could take:

• A career game that sticks very closely to the stock parts and systems, perhaps just modifying the tech tree and maybe contracts
• A career game that both tech tree/contracts and some additional hand-selected parts mods that "flesh out" the career flow they are going for
• A career game that seeks to pull in the widest possible variety of parts and systems mods while still providing a well-considered flow of play

I'm interested in all three! To me the important thing is knowing going in that somebody has considered a complete career game as a top priority. Perhaps the goal is to create a compelling career that parallels the real development of NASA. Perhaps they want a game that is maximized for fun and feels satisfying taking a player out beyond current technology. I just want to play something more than the stock career which just feels like a sequence of tech nodes and contracts that "work", but that's about it.

So, any thoughts? Are there mod packs designed for this kind of thing (SETI comes to mind -- are there others?), or have any of you put together your own collections of mods that you've played through and thought worked elegantly together? What aspects of the career made it compelling to you?

[DStaal]

I'd start with CTT - Community Tech Tree - and work out from there.  MOLE is interesting and fun for some early-career stuff, and for mid-late game I'd pull in MKS.  Also consider if you want a life support mod; USI-LS will give you plenty to think about and work with for tens or hundreds of hours.

MOLE adds some science, but more importantly it adds some intermediate parts between the 1.25 and 2.5 parts, allowing your career to grow a bit more smoothly.  MKS adds in quite a few parts for base and station building, as well as adding some new mechanics, which you'll start to get into near the end of the tech tree - giving you something you can have as a goal once you complete the tree.

Adding in Extraplanetary Launchpads will give you some better goals and paths than 'build everything at Kerbin and launch it out', especially combined with MKS the idea of launching a starter settlement and using that to bootstrap to a full colony is easily a full end-game in itself.

[sherkaner]

3 hours ago, DStaal said:

I'd start with CTT - Community Tech Tree - and work out from there.  MOLE is interesting and fun for some early-career stuff, and for mid-late game I'd pull in MKS.  Also consider if you want a life support mod; USI-LS will give you plenty to think about and work with for tens or hundreds of hours.

MOLE adds some science, but more importantly it adds some intermediate parts between the 1.25 and 2.5 parts, allowing your career to grow a bit more smoothly.  MKS adds in quite a few parts for base and station building, as well as adding some new mechanics, which you'll start to get into near the end of the tech tree - giving you something you can have as a goal once you complete the tree.

Adding in Extraplanetary Launchpads will give you some better goals and paths than 'build everything at Kerbin and launch it out', especially combined with MKS the idea of launching a starter settlement and using that to bootstrap to a full colony is easily a full end-game in itself.

Cool, good recommendations!  Are there any contract mods that work especially well with CTT (and maybe other parts sets)?