AppleSkin

I always use this mod whenever I can for viewing my player's saturation values. Works perfectly as advertised, been using it for years and never had an issue once. Honestly surprised it isn't incorporated into vanilla because it's just that good!

This mod really should be vanilla, exposing the confusing and oftentimes difficult-to-understand saturation mechanism is important to understand how the food system in minecraft properly works. This becomes incredibly relevant with mods such as Farmers Delight though it is still apparent in vanilla with food like steaks.

The only issues I've seen with this mod stems from modpacks including texture packs which don't retexture the saturation overlay. This however, is the modpacks fault and not the fault of this mod so I have kept a 5 star rating, this section is only here to inform potential users that if they see this it is not a mod issue and is because the resource pack does not support appleskin.

I would highly recommend this mod to be used in any pack, both for pack devs and for end users who want a bit more convenience in existing packs.

AppleSkin does not need an introduction, I feel, since it is ubiquitous and includes in almost every popular modpack out there.

I will therefore cut the well-deserved praise short for this review: it's an excellent UI improvement adding vital saturation and hunger information, it is integrated seamlessly into the UI and it honestly should be in the vanilla game already.

However, I do feel like it could use some polish in the visual department.

The main issue is that AppleSkin just does not work gracefully with resource packs that change the hunger icon. The saturation icons rendered behind the hunger bar are just the vanilla 'chicken leg' hunger icon reduced to a yellow outline. This looks good in vanilla. But if you use a resource pack that modifies the hunger icons to be a different shape, AppleSkin will still behave like an elephant in a porcelain shop and render the vanilla 'chicken leg'-shaped outline behind the differently-shaped custom hunger bar icons, essentially clashing with and clipping into them.

It would not be too difficult a task to generate these icons dynamically based on the currently active resources. After all, it's just a simple yellow outline that you could generate for any arbitrary shape easily.

Additionally, the saturation scale behind the hunger bar is a simple dithered gray rectangle that in my opinion can look quite busy and jarring. A more modern style would do well here.

Overall though, AppleSkin is obviously still a must-have, and there are plenty of resource packs out there that add compatibility for AppleSkin icons too. It's just a minor annoyance that you can't really use some resource packs with AppleSkin because of the overlapping texture issue.

It functions kinda... perfectly? It's such a simple mod, but also one I hate to be without any more. I'd actually bet that it will be added to the vanilla game someday.

I didn't intend to write a review, so this is all off the dome, but when leaving a rating, I thought "I can't give appleskin 5 stars..." yet... out of the many, many attempts, I can't think of any other mod that does it better. If that doesn't make it a perfect mod, I don't know what would.

My only gripe is that the black checkerboard is... pretty hard to look at... but that's what resource packs are for.