I'd like to preface this by saying that as much as I wanted to give this pack a chance and truly enjoy it, I tried 3 separate times and just couldn't get over it. I never made it very far at all but the gameplay was so unbelievably grating that I could not bring myself to deal with it.
I really wanted to like this pack. I had heard great things about it from the community and figured that I would give it a shot.
To start with the things I liked:
Replacing stone gear with copper was a progression change that I was certainly not expecting, but ended up being something I actually liked a lot. Stone gear always kind of felt like an instant acquisition, and although this change doesn't really help to keep wooden tools relevant, it does help to prolong the lifespan of that wooden pickaxe of yours. It also makes copper actually relevant, since not only is it your first upgrade into better tools, but it's actually a straight upgrade to stone! It feels awesome that you can go straight to copper from wood, and it's honestly such a breath of fresh air to be able to mine this quickly early on in the game. It is absolutely miserable to mine in bulk with stone tools, so I actually really like this change. It's simple, not too obtrusive, doesn't add ridiculous extra steps, and makes sense in the game.
I'd also like to say that the game has a very nice atmosphere in this pack. The new textures for certain things (such as tools, ingots, and some blocks i.e. logs) don't stray too far from the vanilla textures, while adding some flavor and detail that make them that much nicer to look at. I actually really like the retextures, I think it adds a lot to the pack while being fairly subtle. There are also some new sound effects in UI that add a nice feel to the pack, and the ambient sounds are a pleasant break-up of the standard, silent backdrop that Minecraft usually has. Another big plus.
There are a few small QoL changes, like tree chopping and saturation/hunger visibility that I like a lot. Something else that I'd argue qualifies as a QoL change is the fact that beds no longer skip the night entirely, and instead simply speed up time considerably. It seems to take basically the same amount of time to actually get to dawn, maybe a little longer, but it allows for finer control over the time of night so that if you needed to do something around midnight, you aren't stuck waiting forever. This change kinda grew on me and I actually liked it a lot.
As for performance, there's really nothing to write home about here. I run fairly high-end hardware, and got fairly high-end performance. The pack seems to be pretty well-optimized, but its not like I was completely blown away by how well it ran.
Now for the bad aspects:
Bizarre changes to progression left me scratching my head, and while I liked that it replaces stone gear with copper, I have to wonder what Blueversal was thinking with Sterling and Chainmail armor. Exactly what reason is there to craft these armor types if copper armor works just fine and the only actual roadblock to getting proper iron gear is some arbitrary shoehorning-in of the Create mod? Why would I not just jump straight to iron armor if it's not even that difficult to obtain?
The only thing you accomplish by implementing the Create mod here is making the game more tedious for the sake of making the game more tedious. It's just adding in extra steps for something that does not need extra steps in any universe. This isn't challenging, it's just annoying. This is a theme you will see frequently throughout this modpack.
I don't dislike the Create mod in a vacuum - in fact, I actually enjoy building contraptions a lot - and I don't even dislike when it's integrated well with the rest of the game, but here it just feels like it's unnecessarily shoved in just for the sake of having the Create mod be intertwined with progression. There's no thought to it and it just feels like it's there to act as a roadblock so that it takes longer to do anything. I do not enjoy mining huge amounts of andesite just so that I can make a **** chestplate. I do not enjoy setting up the gigantic wastes of space that are Create machines, just so that I can craft myself some basic armor. This isn't interesting and it doesn't do anything to meaningfully change progression.** It just adds roadblocks for no **** reason.**
The implementation of diamond termite shards into the creation of diamond armor is another thing that confounds me. Why do I need to find this obscure mob in order to make some diamond armor? Is it not enough that I had to find enough diamonds to make it and I had to make rose gold armor? It just feels completely unnecessary and I struggle to think of anything that it meaningfully adds to the game.
The next thing I'd like to talk about is PvE combat.
First of all: What are these spawn rates??? Why are there this many mobs spawning so close to you on night 1? I get that it's supposed to be a "challenging" modpack, but I cannot stress enough that this isn't challenging. Nothing about this is challenging. The mobs don't have any interesting mechanics to make them more engaging or thoughtful to fight. They don't have counterplay. They just walk towards you and deal 4-5 hearts of damage per hit, even on easy difficulty. And there will be 10s of them swarming you all at once on the first night. This isn't challenging. It's just annoying.
It doesn't help that you'll frequently have high-level monsters such as fallen chaos nights and nightmare stalkers swarming you within the first few nights of gameplay. During my third attempted playthrough, I got locked in my base by a chaos night and couldn't escape without risking death. Then a creeper blew up the door and the knight got in anyways. This was all on easy difficulty. On every other modpack I have ever played, I almost exclusively played hard difficulty or sometimes normal if I was feeling casual.
My final gripe with this aspect of the pack is the fact that most enemies seem to have their difficulty artificially inflated without actually meaningfully changing them to be more difficult. Just about every monster in the game can detect you through walls, which I find to be completely nonsensical. This also causes mobs - including creepers and the aforementioned high-level enemies - to swarm up on your doors and effectively lock you in your base. I sincerely hope that you can get a bed on day 1, because otherwise you're gonna be spending a whole lotta time waiting for night to pass and then you're gonna have to hope that there are no creepers posted up outside your front door. Most enemies seem to have weirdly high attack reach, and deal an insane amount of damage on each hit.
I'm sorry but you cannot convince me that this isn't just bad design. There's nothing "challenging" about nighttime in this modpack. It's just cheap, annoying garbage that feels unfun and unfair. It wouldn't even be difficult to fix; cut the annoying bulls%!#, reduce the spawn rates, and block high-level enemies from spawning before night 10 or so.
This is a general theme with the modpack. A lot of the things that are "challenging" about this pack, are just annoying tedious garbage added for the sake of saying "see? The game's more annoying to play! That makes it difficult!"
Artificially inflating stats/spawns and adding random blocks to progression does not make the game more difficult, it just makes it more annoying.
Update: I've been playing this pack for the last couple weeks now and I am now absolutely certain that this modpack f%#@ing bites. The spawnrates and balancing are completely f#@#^ed. Almost all of the early-game gear available to you is absolutely NOT worth the effort it takes to obtain. Nighttime is such an annoying slog that it's not even worth trying to conquer it. The constant onslaught of random mobs with extended reach and artificial stat boosts makes the game unreasonably annoying to play and I cannot get past it. The best part is the random, unavoidable horde events that spawn, oh, every TWO OR THREE NIGHTS. Unacceptable.
The spawnrates also make basic surface caves unbelievably annoying to navigate. Sure, it is more dangerous, but that's only because of the constant DOOM: Eternal-style fodder hordes poking you with sticks as you try to get anything done.
I really wanted to like this pack. Really, I did. I wanted to enjoy it and I wanted to play it for a long time. But I just can't get past these issues.
In all, Beyond Depth is a colossal slog that makes progression unrewarding and gameplay unbearable. The most enjoyable part of the pack was building a little cabin with the new textures and atmosphere. The pack makes it such an unfun slog-fest to actually engage with the game that I just couldn't bring myself to keep going.
Save yourself some time and don't install this pack.
