Disappointment Soufflé

At first I was completely fooled and filled with hope among other reviews and the promotional material shown. I couldn't find a lot of other info with this pack but genuinely was excited to try this out with my friends. After a pretty challenging early game we finally managed to get our bearings and set our spawn after initially screwing up our one use spawn setter item. My group always prized exploring as a very top priority for enjoying a pack and unfortunately this pack barely has any exploration content at all. There remain very few structures and while you do need to go to certain biomes in order to find gems for your higher tier equipment it still ends up being almost completely barren. The loading screen even talks about how exploring the Underdark (dimension after nether) to find treasure within ruins. There do exist ruins but only with sub par enchantments and diamond gear, even then it is never worth it to ever go find these ruins. I even asked the discord about this and only got told that people go here for ores, I asked about the loading screen and if there were any plans to have anything here but there was nothing. This got me curious about the pack and looked more into progression of the mod, especially the lategame which i try to avoid since spoiling yourself generally isn't enjoyable. I found that the grind would be beyond tedious and that this pack genuinely offers you almost nothing other than an admittedly good soundtrack. Many mechanics introduced aren't that fun or engaging even though i tend to like difficulty and the hordes are absolutely terribly designed. I had constant hundreds of block tunnels just all over, under, and nearby my base since the hordes would spawn anywhere and stay without despawning pathing their way to your base, you could wonder why I don't change my spawn but this mod gatekeeps bed making (and spawn setting as a result) into much more grinding than what would be normal, this is extremely poor design choice since you have no way of knowing if there is a tiny cave somewhere near your base especially in the early game which is the only time you can realistically set your spawn. The hordes aren't even an engaging mechanic and seem to exist only to annoy the player, they are somewhat tanky and damaging but can be easily kited as they are more or less just standard zombies with big giant ones that get broken and stuck on the simplest of terrain and can be ignored for months of ingame time with very little result. Next is the amount of time the mod has been in development, this mod was released around 2020 and has jackshit that makes it feel genuinely unique. There is progression in the sense that you have to beat bosses to get into other dimensions and sometimes get unique items but the amount of unique items pale in comparison to any other modpack. RLCraft as badly made as it is has FAR more content of many kinds and probably has since its release, this is inspite of it being literal youtuber slop being the reason it owes its popularity but still manages to outdo ROTN in nearly every part it tries to even be competent in. The only saving grace of this modpack is performance, which I would sure hope is good considering that there is hardly anything at all to differentiate it from any other modpack, even as a machine hater I would prefer a machine heavy modpack than what is introduced in this one .

TLDR barebones content, forever early release/beta, no exploration, horribly unengaging and easily gameable mobs who also destroy your base and never despawn, Guidebook is terrible, and then just tons amounts of grinding for very little. please do not play this, I was in delusion when I did.