It's an interesting looking mod. A lot of thought went in to making the ores and crafting process a lot more detailed and sophisticated, which I like. But at least for now, there doesn't seem to be any explicit payoff. Sure you can make some strong alloys, but for all that work I would expect something more interesting than your basic sliding scale of durability. Still, it captures the imagination and gives you the feeling that you are making something quite impressive. I'm expecting great things from it in the future.
Futurecraft is going to be a bit different. While we will also be making use of in-world structures for processing materials, the scope will be shifted towards the industrial level. At the same time, the amount of material needed to produce things will make it prohibitively expensive to collect via pickaxe. Instead you will begin using heavy equipment and vehicles to gather resources. The goal is to make a system that is easily approachable for basic necessities, but then give the option for additional levels of sophistication and scope, requiring an ever narrowing band of specialization. This, in turn, will encourage players to work together in multiplayer, either directly or via the in-game economy, to reach the highest levels of technology. This theme of specialization rather than straight leveling will be reflected in nearly every facet of the game, and provide a lot of replay value for players who want to try their hand at different occupations.
One of the challenges, though, will be in managing the huge amount of resources and intermediary materials and finished products expected by a game this size. And since we're not in the business of staying between the lines, I had some ideas for how we should approach it. Rather than have every item and block hard-coded like literally every Minecraft mod to date, we will instead put the materials in a client-side database. Not a fully fledged SQL database or anything like that, but something with a filesystem, directories, and stats stored as xml. More importantly it will have the ability to be downloaded and updated on-the-fly and interfaced in-game in much the same way that Modloader hooks in new classes beginning with "mod_*", only this will work in realtime.
This database will include recipes, stats, tech trees, descriptions, and even sprites (which can be merged into active texture atlases). A similar system could be used for storing planet information, like noise generation parameters, ore and biome distribution, and even generated structures if we develop a markup language to describe them.