Given the difficulty and elaborateness of the relationship between Botania and the flowers and mushrooms made available by BYG and Biomes o' Plenty, it's painfully clear Astral Sorcery has not been subjected to the same gating and that needs to change.

Either I can gate some Astral Sorcery stuff behind Botania stuff, to intertwine them, or I can make more of a relationship between the tinkers construct alloys-- especially the post blazing blood alloys--and Astral Sorcery. I can also try finding a way to tie it to the Biomes o' Plenty or BYG mods.

It's not sufficient that it simply relies on a lot of starmetal, and that starmetal is rare.

In specific, the most important part of Astral Sorcery to gate is the Ritual Pedastle, which should be at least as difficult to get to as the Botania Orechid.

I have added some gating to Astral Sorcery, mostly centered around exploring the nether and the end.

Because I didn't want the player to ignore Botania and do only Astral Sorcery, I made the decision to gate the ritual pedestal behind Botania's Luminizer (ie, elven portal tier). I still don't know if this is the correct decision.

Ideally, both mods should be equally hard to do and equally rewarding for what you put into them, and they shouldn't be gated by one another. However, I am concerned that Astral Sorcery is much harder to gate because no recipe really requires anything other than crystals, iron, and aquamarine. I gated Botania in a very lengthy, luxurious, well-themed way behind mushrooms and flowers. I haven't stumbled upon the ideal way to do the same for Astral Sorcery. One thought is that I should make some of the structures and items require pixelmon-specific drops, such as, for example, metal coats and eviolite.

Anyway, for the time being, I'm restricting access to the better Astral Sorcery stuff until the player has also done Botania, while giving early access to low level stuff like, most importantly, the formation wand.