Reminiscence

(completed at 17-ish hours? had to make a new world because of the update) Reminiscence is a fantastically put together experience with some of the best thought out vanilla minus reworks in a pack I've seen. Even after having a massive update though, I think it still has a little bit further to go until everything really fits together.

Thematically, I think the modpack fits well more with the description of "beta with a bunch of mods installed" than any other goal or genuine appeal to some sort of pure beta experience; where Better Than Adventure isn't trying to be Beta because it wants to experiment with some un-betalike mechanics, Reminiscence isn't trying to be beta because it has a clear and extended progression line combined with a bunch of weird stuff that's slightly out of place like funny looking mobs and ores. Basically, imagine the vibe you get when you install DrZharks Mo Creatures, with the mob models fitting in slightly better. As you can tell by the rating and this review's vibe though, I think this goal works and this pack works fundamentally.

Big reworks; While foods still heal instantly as in beta, the food system still plays a lot differently. Farmer's Delight is in the pack, and stackable foods are in the pack, but big meats don't stack and a massive amount of ingredient type items while stackable are almost universally nerfed to only healing half a heart. While nothing is technically stopping you from playing it like Beta and going with Cooked Porkchop, you will definitely want to cook as the prepared meals from Farmer's Delight heal a lot and stack well. The armor system hasn't received a BTA style total makeover, but sets now have effects, either having small stackable per piece bonuses like Copper's mining speed, bonuses that only come with a full set like Meteorite's double jump, and bonuses that are unique to each piece of the set like Silver pieces having various status immunities. This basically renders every player preference towards armor sets viable in some way; there are reasons to be going with mixed armors, standard full sets of the highest tier, or quirky off meta armors with special set bonuses. I think the only real obstacle to this system as is is that acquiring some of these armor sets is slightly too difficult to be worth it so your choices will be more limited in practice.

I think the main issue I had here is that the progression line breaks down halfway and as what feels like a pretty progression heavy modpack it doesn't feel great to get stuck on. First, the oversights with the End Remastered eyes are baffling since all but one of these eyes have been specifically poured over and had their crafting recipes or obtainment methods tweaked, so I don't know how the Exotic Eye (there are no coral reefs to get the corals required) or the Guardian Eye (beta oceans are too small for ocean monuments to spawn; you can still obtain prismarine because guardians are now random ocean spawns ) got in here. And the remaining eyes are still very negatively affected by the beta generation and lack of Cartographer maps making their related biomes or structures very hard to find depending on your luck. There are no fun shortcuts here to make traversal fun; the Aether moas are End gated, and there's another issue with traversal I'll mention in the performance section. Second, the Aether is fun and cool, but it makes the largely unmodified Nether stick out like a sore thumb in comparison. There's no new ores except for Silver which also spawns in the overworld and the only other things to look out for are the Quark mobs and the fact that it's now double height (for which you have no tools to navigate). I don't think it works sitting next to the Aether in terms of progression and I wish there was a little more to do there. Finally, as more of a nitpick, the Dragon fight has a few weird secondary attacks like the Dive (deals massive damage if it the dragon himself hits you directly) and the Lasers (I don't even know how those work) that deal unreasonably outsized damage and will probably kill you without warning several times that put a massive damper on what is otherwise the best dragon fight I've seen.

I also think the modpack just needs maybe a hundred more custom EMI description entries and other assorted guides. Most ores are described, but not all ores. Lots of weird mod specific mechanics go unexplained and its rough when something like an eye recipe requires a Quark stone. The pack will entirely rename and retexture something and still not have a description for what it does. The modpack is really dark which is true to beta but the standard brightness slider is simply non-functional and hasn't been replaced with a gamma slider like BTA did which means you need to figure out that you have to go to a specific section of the Nostalgia Tweaks config to brighten stuff up. This pack had me googling a surprising amount which I really wish was not an issue here.

Finally, performance is almost there. It was kind of there in the 1.5.0 pre-release that I installed and started playing on (before 2.0.0 released literally the day after without me noticing), with fast load times, Crucial 2 level memory consumption and high framerates. The load times are drastically worse, the memory consumption is slightly higher, and the framerates are still about the same, but the main issue which may or may not have been in the pre-release is that the pack has a pretty severe memory leak problem: base memory consumption doesn't really matter when frequent dimension hopping or an hour of straight traversal can force a restart. I hope this can be fixed but I don't even know why this happens; this seems to be plaguing 1.20.1 packs in general so it might be unavoidable.

Basically, in conclusion, as notes for the developer; add something else to the Nether, go back over the eyes, add ten million EMI descriptions, fix the terminal memory leak that's highly contagious and is spreading throughout 1.20 modding like a virus. For anyone else reading, if you're not a modpack developer, these might seem simple enough, but it is genuinely kinda hard. I have faith in the developer though cause I had like a bunch of things to complain about from the 1.5.0 pre-release that just magically disappeared when I upgraded so I trust he can do some miracle worker shit and cook insanely hard. Also the end is really cool I didn't have anywhere else to mention it but it's really cool