Break Out

I want to first say this pack has an amazing premise, and the satisfaction from completing the pack is greater than what I've experienced from almost every other pack I've played. Having said that, the modpack has tons of problems that make it hard to recommend to anyone but massive skyblock fans and I certainly can't recommend this to beginners.

First is the fact Botania is legitimately a miserable experience in this pack. The grind for mana is a pain, because you simply don't have enough space to make the really interesting methods of mana generation. This isn't a knock against Botania as a whole, but the mod is not properly leveraged here beyond being a cool way to craft some stuff you need for other items. Botania being replaced with a different mod would've made the pack flow better.

The other main issue is that Thermal Expansion is so much better than the other options at the crossroads, that picking any of the other options first will lengthen your completion time considerably. I once tried this pack years ago when it was new, and dropped it because I picked Botania first and had no idea how massively I messed up by doing that. I just thought the pack's progression was like that. Whereas this time I picked Thermal Expansion first and had a vastly smoother time playing the pack.

AE also feels pointless being here. You both don't have enough space to make an ME system make sense and because it seems that Sky Stone is finite I was paranoid I wouldn't have enough to make a proper system. It wasn't a big deal regardless, because I had plenty of other compact ways to move things around. However AE is somewhat required due to a custom crafting recipe, and it was a real slog to make the 64k drive I needed (the Inscriber is effectively manual only, which sucks). I think the drive should've been given to the player so they could skip AE completely if they wanted to.

However the biggest reason I can't recommend this pack to beginners (despite the pack description claiming it's "accessible to new players") is because the quest book is not very helpful. The book fails to mention several really important things that would make a player's experience smoother (such as crafting Invar tools, upgrading machines, using enchanting, and using the mods included to their fullest). Thankfully I was very experienced with all the included mods and was able to make the pack easier than perhaps intended, however a beginner would not know these very important things. My advice to anyone playing this is to focus on getting enchanting and an Igneous Extruder as soon as possible, they are both a big help.

There are also some smaller complaints that don't ruin the pack, but added friction that doesn't need to be there. Small things such as the quest rewards often being weak, the obsidian at the bottom of the sphere being annoying and just padding the playtime (I literally never bothered to clear it), many blocks not being compressible for the heavy sieve, the cube's final layer being round (when it being flatter would've made making animal pens and Botania setups less frustrating), the Munchdew quest giving the player an Openblocks block placer but not instructions on how to use it (I never bothered to set it up, was too buggy for my tastes), BetterFPS caused several rendering issues so you might want to remove it, no way to see animal breeding cooldowns (I suggest adding WAWLA to the pack), nerfing food just making food frustrating, cows having a milk cooldown (for some reason), the Botania orechid being way worse than the ore lens, and the Empowerer not having a progress indicator (not a big deal with the machine normally, but this mod uses the block a fair amount).

For all my complaints in this review, I still had plenty of fun. The water strainers made dirt farming a breeze (compared to most other skyblock packs, where dirt is annoying), the game has a good selection of mods (with Thermal Expansion working amazingly in this pack), the sense of constantly wanting more space even when you get more is a great feeling, and I appreciated just how useful agriculture was for the pack's progression (many modpacks make farming and ranching a waste of time).

Overall I did have more fun than not, but the pack had many papercut issues that made it less enjoyable than a hypothetical sequel would be. I really hope someone does make another pack that leverages a lack of space, a couple have tried but tend to make space a non issue during the midgame. I think a pack similar to this but with better midgame pacing, less Botania, and some better quests would be a phenomenal pack to play.

This pack has many conventional upsides that make it the ideal beginner modpack: it's light on memory, short, playable in peaceful, no exploration, and acts as a tutorial for many mods standard across other packs.

But there's something about this pack that makes it stand out to me as a special experience that no other modpack has ever replicated (to my knowledge): it acts as a modded adventure map.

Almost since the beginning of Minecraft, people have been handcrafting downloadable worlds to act as playable games in their own right, such as The Dropper, Herobrine's Mansion, or even the original Skyblock. These transform the progression of Minecraft from the standard (punch tree -> ... -> kill dragon) to whatever the creator wishes, whatever it takes to reach the end of the map. But they're ultimately limited by being in Vanilla Minecraft, requiring extreme lengths to even add custom functionality to items and blocks.

In theory, a modpack should be more than just a pack of mods. If the player wanted to just play Create and Botania, they could just play Create and Botania, no modpack needed. We download modpacks for a reason: the expectation that the creator has weaved them together into a cohesive and unique experience. Effectively, though, the "progression" of the pack usually just involves getting through the questbook by acquiring different new items. The physical world you spawn in never really changes from the Vanilla standard: a procedurally generated world with different biomes, ores, dungeons with loot, and new dimensions gated behind portals. Or a skyblock pack, which requires the bare minimum of construction.

Break Out! represents to me a proof of concept for what an adventure modpack should aspire to. The creator has built a custom map for us which we must physically escape, but doing so requires progressing through the mods to break through layer by layer. Each layer feels like its own "tier" or "age" in the world, but it doesn't just unlock new chapters of the questbook and give you more space to build. Scouring the environment will reward you with hidden goods to aid your escape, each time relevant to what you need.

An incredible experience. This was my first modpack, and it's the reason I love modded Minecraft.

P.S.: Don't pick Botania first at the crossroads. Trust me.

Break Out is an immaculately designed beginner xblock experience; it's short, it's simple enough that you are never going to get lost while allowing you to get to the goal in your own way, every mod is thoroughly well explained through the quest book. It definitely falls into some modded stereotypes, but that's for the better of the goal of the pack in my opinion, and it successfully balances having a traditional modpack mod flow while still being it's own thing.

If there's anything I noticed on this replay, it's that there's generally not a lot to do sometimes; it's very much pure progression and that progression is relatively simple, which is what helped make it the first modpack I beat all those years ago, but you're likely to get timewalled by Botania or something unless you have full recollection of the progression flow, and if you are not new to modded, it might become a little bit of a bore. I think that's the main reason I didn't put this up at 5 stars; not to make it sound like it was an insufferable replay, since everything bad about the pack is absolutely assuaged by the runtime and the other freedoms it allows to you.

Other notes;

• It's very optimized. The optimization mods are maybe a little bit aggressive by today's standards, but the rock bottom resource utilization here is gonna mulch any newer pack.

1. "Getting Started" 5/10, normal skyblock progression
2. "Getting Desperate" 5/10, normal skyblock progression
3. "Getting Going" 5/10, normal skyblock progre... I'm tired of getting normal skyblock progression, so i give 4/10
   3.5. Some more getting with "Getting it Together" Just a lot of chests, skip
4. "Crossroads" 8/10 finnaly interesting progression whrere you can choose 1 of 4 mods
5. "N, S, E, W" 5/10 Just normal mod progression with Thermal Expansion, Botania, Ender IO and AA
6. "Moving Out" 7/10 four easy quests to "Break Out" Good final
   Final score is 6/10, easy mod pack for begginers

Great small scale modpack. I've restarted it about 4 times just trying to figure out better ways to optimize my set ups to complete the pack. With 4 main mods to it, it's a good entry for folks that are new to mods and veterans looking for something simple between harder packs. However, I wouldn't say it'll prepare you to take on ANY pack given it only has a few popular mods. It's more that it'll give you the basics for thinking about how mods work together. It's also lightweight, so it should run on computers that lean more toward the potato side of things. The only problem I've really had is lag generated from fluids moving quickly in and out of TE portable tanks. That's easy to circumvent with other options in the pack. The story is pretty simple and based on limiting your space, but it's fun to work out how to fit everything you need into the space provided. Top tip though, make sure to break any block that looks obviously out of place. Trust me, it'll make your life a lot easier.