Hrm...
FQM - June 21, 2002. Posted with the line: "I have made a mod! That's right, me, Imperator Fyron, the eternal procrastinator!" And man, was I ever right about that!
The mod was released after discussing some related thing with Atrocities. It was discussed on the #se4 IRC channel from day one. Well... mentioned, not really discussed until several days later.
The mod was definitely inspired after playing in the PBW game Mastering Shadow Games, hosted by Efran Randohar (Jevelyan). He had added lots of cool stuff to the data files to create a really unique map, with lots of moons and such all over the place. When I created my PBW game Adamant 003, I made my own modified files to create the map. Many months later, after Gold was out, Atrocities was having some problems getting the game STFF off to a good start. He had modded some files to have habitable moons. This lead to discussion on such stuff, and I mentioned what I had done for Adamant 003. He wanted those files, but they had to be converted to be Gold compatible first. All I had done was add more moons, upwards of 5 at some planets!, as well as made them possible to have other than none atmosphere, and all single-star systems had an expansive asteroid belt. Multi-stared systems did not. It was tedious updating it to Gold, so I had given up. Then he convinced me to finish updating it for gold, and upload it to Shrapnel. In my infinite creativity, I named it Fyron's Quadrant Mod.
It has been one long and wild ride... as far as modding goes, anyways.
USM - February 03 2002: A little used mod that I started. I had long, long ago made a formations file for personal use compiled from all formations I could find in all the mods I could find. When I created USM, I took it a step further and included strategies as well.
Adamant Mod - August 1, 2002: This mod originally began as a low-tech, primitive mod. I still have the Version of it laying around on my PC that I stopped this idea with...
The first person to see it was ZeroAdunn, whom I sent it to over IRC on the #se4 channel. Hmm... #se4 seems to be a common theme... drop by!
Anyways... I do not recall exactly when it was, but I decided to drop the primitive angle and start anew. Some of the ideas were kept in use though. The mod ended up being a hodge-podge of all my favorite modding ideas out there, plus plenty of my own brand of insanity. Then around November 08, 2002, I got this idea:
[17:42]
i was thinking that with my adamant mod, i might add some weird stuff. namely, there would be several basic paradigms for different kinds of races. there would be normal technological races, races where they ships are actually the creatures of the race, and possibly a race type that uses magic instead of technology
I think we can all see where this went. Due to my massive procrastination, the mod is still in beta.