An incredible experience held back by instability

[er, self-reviewish sorta? i left the team before 3.0 was fully released]

Where do I even begin with this? RotN has been close to my heart ever since I started working on it in 2019, and what a ride it was. Though, I'm gonna (try to) refrain from discussing anything about my developer experience and rather review the pack for what it is. I will of course be a little biased, but also a bit harsh because I know the potential this pack has.

This pack has given me hundreds if not thousands of hours of just pure addictive fun. It makes you feel like a genius at times because it really forces you to think and be creative. It tries to steer you in the right direction without being handholdy. It lets you explore whatever aspect of the pack you wish to explore. Especially in a multiplayer setting, you can really focus on whatever it is you enjoy. You can literally spelunk forever if you wanted to (and you will want to), or focus on the in-depth cooking system, the long but rewarding crafting system, the base-building aspect with so many fitting cosmetics, the defense aspect with unique approaches and traps, the progression with incredible lore and thrilling boss fights, etc. Of course, many aspects of the pack are gated by conquest elements (ie, killing bosses and discovering dimensions), but the best part is you can tackle that at your own pace. Hell, I'm an advocate of playing this pack on peaceful if that's your thing because it's still fun and such a chill experience, mostly because of how god **** good this pack's aesthetics are.

RotN has absolutely NAILED aesthetics. The moment you spawn in you are tossed into a BEAUTIFUL world with such a diverse and immersive ecosystem with a variety of animals and fantasy creatures alike. The music couldn't be more perfect, the ambience, the recommended shaders, the custom textures and CTM, dynamic trees, villages that actually feel alive and part of the world, everything just comes together to make you want to protect this world and explore every aspect of it. Not to mention just how quickly the environment and ambience can change the moment you step into a cave and hear the echoes of hostile mobs, or when the sky darkens and coupled with the soothing piano backing track and falling stars... it just feels mystical, yet not free of dangers; you're still on your toes. If you haven't spent a moment to truly take in and enjoy this pack's aesthetics and environment, I implore that you do so.

Now, unfortunately with all that being said, this pack is held back immensely by it's instability. This is not a discredit to the developers, because dear god I know how difficult, painful, and stressful it is to deal with bugs in extra large modpacks. I can not even begin to tell you how many hours I've spent debugging and troubleshooting this pack. However, when a pack such as this is not patched for many months at a time, leaving very crucial and game-breaking bugs that were already fixed months ago, it's extremely disheartening. I recognize how difficult and time-consuming it is to keep track of all the issues and commits and to release a hopefully not broken build, but hundreds of new players are experiencing this unique pack for this first time likely every single day, only to be let down when they realize they have to modify their pack install to even be playable or have their hard work become corrupted because of an outdated mod that was updated internally 5 months ago. Many of these players are likely never going to play RotN again, not because they didn't have fun, but because it was broken. And that hurts me.

I truly believe that if RotN wants to be the underdog that rises into the mainstream to show the entire modded Minecraft community what incredible talent, creativity, passion, love, and attention to detail can do for a modpack, it must develop a more efficient release schedule that prioritizes small semi-frequent patches that will lead to a more positive experience for all players.