Successfully put together Terraria-esque RPG modpack

Prodigium Reforged is an RPG modpack. It has many of the prototypical follies of RPG modpacks such as pretty abysmal performance and random enemies spawning directly on top of you that instakill you, but the rest of the pack is so surprisingly refined that none of that really ended up getting to me? The pack has strong cross mod integration with its custom content, a surprisingly coherent aesthetic and a very clean progression line that only really falters at the points where the pack is notably and explicitly unfinished. It's a pretty high effort project from a solo developer that's definitely not Terraria, but does inject some of the better ideas that game had into making this project a reality.

The pack is more liberal in its use of gamestages to sequester resource progression than Terraria is (or at least, relative to its length) and I think that's important to the appeal of the pack as it helps to balance and space out mining sessions especially where Terraria has additional things that Minecraft doesn't to space out its content in other ways like seperate underground biomes. Once dimensions are introduced into the mix, they are introduced in very small number; the only additional dimension here is the Aether, and certain pieces of content have been moved from the Overworld to the Aether to bulk it up. The pack is very focused in its execution, and the main quest line is linear; just a straight shot of bosses. Due to the mods themselves, not all of these bosses are winners, although the worst ones are definitely the Ender Dragon (due to the additions being kind of buggy) and the Elder Guardian (due to YUNG's Better Ocean Monuments both not having a good layout for the fight and whatever mod disables all surrounding mining when the Elder Guardians are alive going poorly when the structure spawns inside the floor). They don't all have to be winners though; the ones that are nice make up for the weaker fights.

I can only really dot down issues respective to the modpack and not the mods in bullet point format, so in no particular order; I wish there was some way to get recall potions outside of doing quests, I wish the custom town NPCs took more precedence, I wish SOL Carrot wasn't configured to have low thresholds with on death loss so if you die and don't change that config setting you have to spend ten minutes sprint jumping around so you can get your hearts back (a high threshold would encourage actually engaging with the food mods), and I wish the End wasn't so anemic although that will hopefully be remedied in future versions.

I noted the performance earlier; you're not going to run into any weird server tick issues, but your framerate will absolutely shit itself sometimes; most frequently in the overworld where you can dip from a stable 220 to a stuttery 40-50 in nighttime combat, structures dipping into the twenties with the lowest number I saw being 9 fps during Nether traversal. From the sounds of it, this is better than the other modern RPG modpacks though, which would just straight up get a 1/5 from me, but I'm comparing the modpack to all other modpacks. In terms of bugs, I also had to use commands sometimes to compensate for stuff like the Ender Dragon fucking off to Narnia (yeah that fight is really broken). For ram usage, I would recommend allocating a minimum of 4.5GB in singleplayer if you're using Java 25 and UseCompactObjectHeaders.

Funny note as I'm typing this part of the review; I just realized I had installed the modpack basically right before a major update came out and didnt update it when I started playing, so I'm a little behind, but I doubt it would've changed my rating or anything I said in the review after quickly going through the changelogs and default config files (i.e the issue I have with SOL Carrot on death loss is unchanged although there's now a 4 hunger minimum for any food item to count which wouldn't be my first choice for an adjustment here). Just know, it seems to be a big rework of existing systems, and the modpack might have more cool things in it now. If you have any interest in trying an RPG modpack for your next playthrough, you should play it.