Forward

Wither Storm's inclusion in modpacks tends to be underwhelming at best. It's really a mod that tends to try to force you to play it as the main centerpiece of your playthrough. You're intended to slowly gear up and progress alongside, all the while it gets bigger and scarier. So if you make a modpack, you really have to either do a lot of adjusting of it through config changes and datapack work OR elect to make it the main focus and build your modpack around it instead.

I'm not going to tell you Explorer's Eve has done either of these. I'm going to tell you it's done both.

I've dropped 68 hours into this modpack and because I'm an idiot who has decided to play on hardcore to emulate a classic roguelike, I've made it past the early game like five-six times. The fact that I still keep coming back to said early game meat grinder 68 hours in should say something.

That being such, I don't have first hand experience of the later parts of the modpack, but I can tell you what I've read about it in-game and that if the core gameplay loop I've loved so far continues, my recommendation won't change.

Overview & Summary

The Wither Storm is a malignant threat, the main antagonist pulled straight from Minecraft: Story Mode. You spawn at the beginning of your playthrough, and you're intended to hide underground, hide in other dimensions, run away from it, distract, and outwit it, all the while gearing up waiting for it to evolve to a size so large it leaves a weak point for you to enter inside and destroy the command block within.

Explorer's Eve fundamentally takes this formula, and upends it to turn the already oppressive threat into something much greater. The Storm has several new movement predicting shot patterns of skulls while it chases you. Hiding underground for a length of time ("bunkering") won't save you here, a new attack simply called the "drill" will shoot a solid line of exploding skull projectiles in a straight line if it detects you attempting to hide deep underground and not move, usually killing you if you don't immediately run on the sound queue. Dimension hopping isn't safe either, you'll escape for a time until you hear it slowly breaking through the barriers between worlds, teleporting in with a fear inducing crash.

Your only choices are to run like hell in an action filled chase or outsmart and outwit. That's good design, straight up forcing the player to act, no passivity allowed.

Gameplay

Moment to moment gameplay is something that's very hard to meaningfully impact directly. The Wither Storm being such an omnipresent threat means that it indirectly has a knock-on effect of intensifying those moments.

You don't have time to bunker down and funnel mobs into a blocked tunnel with a shield while looting a location, being still provokes it into chasing you. The time pressure makes you sloppy if you're not on your A game, getting hit means you have to eat food which to restore means you need to take a break to cook it. It's this very tense feeling of needing to keep moving mixed with the inevitability that you will eventually have to come face to face (or rather face to rear because you will be full sprinting away) with a threat that can oneshot you if you treat it as a joke. If you have an appreciation for difficulty, you'll realize this pressure is a good thing, it forces you to make mistakes and be put in interesting situations, and have a chance to rise above those mistakes.

One thing that may be hit or miss but definitely hits for me (mostly) is inventory management. Inventory space is painfully tight due to the intentional lack of backpack mods, primarily using uncraftable but lootable bundles. I like how underpowered they are they are making them not solve all your problems, but still strong enough and limited enough to be a very exciting find. Unfortunately, what I don't like is their extremely poor UI on this version.

A Note About My Choice to Play on Hardcore

A few days ago 1.6.0 came out dramatically smoothing over the early game and how it feels to die. The Wither Storm chases you for less, though more intense, amount of time to reduce how tedious chases could get, high stat horses were introduced to the Twilight Forest provide a consistent means of fast travelling and kiting the Storm (which is always risky), beds now keep your spawn point even when destroyed to lessen the impact of dying thousands of blocks out, and the storm now has a mercy mechanic that makes it ignore the area around your corpse for a while after you die.

1.5.2b, the previous version, lacked all of these. In honesty, dying felt pretty much identical to starting over as far as I'm concerned because I didn't have fun trying to get my stuff back, So I figured I'd make it official, in the process I fell in love with the sort of high adrenaline "risk it all to lose or win it all" roguelike game loop it provided with me, so I've stuck with it for 1.6.0. Of course, this also ups game difficulty making everything harder, and the modpack even has a baked in warning against being like me. So don't worry about having to play hardcore to get the right experience or anything, in fact I'd caution against it. It's perfectly fun without doing so, and has plenty of things to sand the rough edges off and make it fun now.

Progression

Like I said, I haven't made it very far, but I can give a general overview from what i've seen. You'll start in the Twilight Forest instead of the overworld, immediately putting you right into a dimension with wide open plains to run from the storm in, loads of combat treasures, and plenty of food and early game materials like Ironwood. Unfortunately, you'll have to leave sooner rather than later. All diamonds have been removed from the dimension with no way to get a single one (you'll leave using a rare Echo Shard to create the portal, found from either the Quest Ram or any of the non-Alpha Yeti and Naga bosses), and your fight against the Wither Storm is ultimately limited by stuff you need from the Overworld. Key parts of Wither Storm's progression such as Super TNT are locked behind different dimensions, often times with multiple alternatives of places to get them from, introducing replayability basically for free.

Even better, once you've beaten the storm once that's not the end of the pack. There's a whole postgame with a few new bosses, treasures, the ability to resummon the Wither Storm that evolves extremely quickly and do it all over again (once you've prepped of course) for more materials, all to build up to a final encounter that has to be seen to be believed, a 45 minute multiwave survival and boss rush of every boss from the modpack that has you fighting and damaging the Storm directly, finally rewarding you with the ultimate trophy of mastery, a single Elytra. (Oh yeah there's no flight in this modpack. That's a plus from me, flight can trivialize content easily so it's good to see it kept out of the player's grasp.)

The Chocolate

I can't talk about this modpack without talking about the Datapack that comes with it. It's responsible for all the new moves, it's responsible for all the new mechanics and items like one that forces the Wither Storm to chase you so that you can force it into an open area you can kite it in to bait a distraction (extended period of time the storm will leave you alone). it's responsible for adding custom mechanics to every single boss, at least in the Twilight Forest (as far as I've played) such as the Naga splitting in two, the Lich becoming a chaotic madhouse of a fight, or Alpha Yeti drowning you in autonomous ice crystals that slowly home in on you.

To fit the "Classic Action-Adventure" vibe, there are loads of unique, unbreakable treasures found in specific places. Items and weapons like the TF's Ice Staff, the Aether's Agility Cape, and Cataclysm's weapons have been shuffled around, a few like the Zanite Ring from Aether have been retextured to better fit the dimension they were moved to, there are even some custom ones, like the Twilight Sundial that lets you jump forward the overworld's day/night cycle. You get this real sense of not just your power but your abilities increasing but you never really lose that primal dread.

Oh yeah one of the bosses got put at the top of the Final Castle. Thank god someone did it.

Aesthetics

With custom content comes the need for custom visuals. Good news, they all look really good, special mention to the Twilight Sundial being pretty and the Miner's Ring (retextured and renamed Zanite Ring) looking like it really belongs in the Twilight Forest, I actually thought it was just straight up part of it. It's not a particular standout of the pack because that's just not what this modpack is about, it's all about the mechanics forcing you into new tense situations. What is a stand-out, however, is the music choice. There's accompanying music from Minecraft Story Mode for every single boss fight, a few musical tracks that play during during pivotal moments of progression, as well as a multiple phase track for the final, final encounter.

Performance & Stability

Being that the modpack is currently at stunningly low 37 mods, it doesn't install every performance under the sun, nor does it really need them. 1.20 had quite a few notable performance improvements, and without said suite of performance mods it's not as fast as it could be (though it does run almost always at full speed on my PC). It's on 1.19 with plans to update to 1.20, but since that hasn't happened yet there's a few painful things on 1.19 that I've run into a few times, most notably...

MC-92017

Consider this anecdote a "representative" reason of why I consider 1.19 to be a small pain point to influence this section, and I need to whine and get this off my chest. MC-92017 is a bug that has somehow killed me 3 separate times. Before 1.20, TNT's damage direction was considered to be the player that lit it, so in order to block it you'd actually have to face away from the TNT towards the player. If it's dropped from a dispenser, It's effectively unblockable. Which is why this bug has killed me three times. Tiny things like this are really unfortunate especially when you're on hardcore and that kills the run.

Summary

Explorer's Eve is my favorite modpack. I keep coming back for more and more of the same early game I've experienced over 50 times now and because I'm garbage at the game and hyper stubborn and only play on hardcore I can't get very far, but I keep coming back. Nothing makes me feel quite like it, I get pushed super hard all while staying within vanilla PVE constraints, and the artistry on display from a really tightly designed progression path is a joy to play through. Play this with HASTE. Publish it everywhere, the fact that it has only 5k downloads over all versions is a crime.