BorderCraft, Borderlands HD Minecraft Texture Pack (64 x 64) (128 x 128)
Bordercraft is an HD texture pack for Minecraft based on the Borderlands game. It's awesome and if you love HD at all you should download it and install it immediately.
Here's the weird thing about this texture pack. Although I installed it for the sake of review, I wasn't expecting much from it. HD texture packs are usually fine in theory but god awful in practice and they override your default settings and generally make your life awful in a myriad of ways. Basically I was expecting to load this, mention its good points, hate it and then uninstall it as I've done with every other HD texture pack I've installed.
Strangely enough, I love this texture pack. I mean, really love it. I feel as if this texture pack and I have a special cosmic bond that stretches through space and time. It has rekindled my positive feelings about Minecraft in a way that no other texture pack could. Why?
Well I suppose its the fact that it's just done so damn well. The textures, whilst being HD aren't 'realistic' which is where I think a great many texture packs fall down. They're game oriented, but they also have a solid edge of psychidelic to them. There are swirls in the lava that put me in mind of a hippy gone walkabout in the desert. Flowers are also unimaginably trippy. No plain red and yellow flowers in this texture pack, no, they've been replaced with strangely coiled purple blooms that are probably poisonous and bulb type blooms.
There's also the grimy feeling that they have. Stone feels downright filthy, as if it's been mined from the earth by someone who hadn't showered in weeks. Wooden planks have a slightly rough hewn appearance, making you feel as if you're always about to step into a Saloon and face a wise cracking man with a six shooter.
Doors are great too, they're very rustic, but also practical with a decent window to look through onto the creepers that will inevitably besiege you on all sides. And glass, well, even though it has a border effect which I normally loathe because it makes everything made of glass look as if it was created by someone who had some sort of mad OCD line drawing disorder, the ragged borders make sense and actually add to the atmosphere.
If all that weren't enough, there are the interfaces, oh the shiny shiny interfaces that actually work with simple object graphics, thereby looking slick and actually benig useful. Hurrah and hurrah again!
There's only one major issue with this pack that I've discovered so far. For some reason, Sandstone is not rendered at all properly and is invisible from the top down. Building with Sandstone therefore results in buildings you can see all the way through.
Installation and Trouble Shooting
Installation requires the HD texture pack fix which makes brick and other textures work. If you don't install the HD texture pack fix, you'll end up with brick that is half brick, a quarter fire and a quarter portal. It will make no sense and you will be a sad panda.
This also means that your default textures will be overidden. Do make sure that you have your game set to the default texture pack before you install this one, or you'll get a whole lot of gray screens and 'not responding' warnings. If you haven't heeded this warning and you do have these problems, opening the options file in your .minecraft file will allow you to delete the reference to whatever texture pack you were using. This will return the game to the default and let you enjoy the wonders of the texture pack.
DOWNLOAD BORDERCRAFT TEXTURE PACK