The Good

• The start is perfect
• Character creation is fun
• The introductory story text is very nice
• Choosing a starter kit is great, and the options are flavorful and exciting
• Choosing a starting location is amazing
• Guns (musket and flintlock) are very well balanced as an expensive but powerful early game option
• Mugging Illager caravans to loot their gunpowder is awesome
• 0 starting mana makes choosing to become a wizard with Irons very interesting
• World Gen is generally very good. Pleasant to look at, and reasonable to traverse
• Healing overhaul is well done
• The method of getting to the Nether and back is excellent and immersive
• Immersive Gateways is amazing
• No natural mob spawns is an inspired choice
• Soundtrack is one of the only ones that feels fitting and sounds good, without playing too much
• Realms RPG skeleton blocks are great for an optional easy fight
• Illagers are balanced well to provide a challenge in the early game that can be overcome
• MCA is implemented well, especially with Numismatic Overhaul
• Natural structure spawns include a nice variety
• Dynamic lights is a must, and integration with the lantern curio slot is very nice
• FleshZ, saddle recipes, etc are nice QOL
• The tree-felling mod plus fast leaf decay works great
• Traversable Leaves is excellent
• Smelting broken tools and armor down works great
• World Gen and server tick performance seems very stable
• Callable Horses, Horseman, Carry on…

The Bad

• Progression tied to exploration
• Specific nether tree required for Hexerei drying racks (why can’t we just use normal drying racks?!) Hexerei in general is always a huge pain in the ***…
• Material tiers tied to buying a blueprint from villagers
• Map to the main quest must be purchased from villagers
• Mid-late game recipes are overly complex and mutli-staged
• Maybe some people like these, but I prefer single step crafting like vanilla. This ruins the pace of late-game for me.
• Diamonds were bad enough, but the Arcane Cloth recipe is a sin against game design.
• Recipes are generally designed from attempting to make random rare items useful, but without alternatives, this turns many recipes into annoying fetch quests for particular items, relying on luck to get the world gen needed for the right items.
• Hexerei recipes are tedious and cannot be automated. You will spend many hours sitting in front of a mortar and pestle or cauldron, manually refilling slots one by one.
• Please remove Hexerei, this mod is never good in any modpack
• Mild case of Ice-and-Fire-itus: some enemies that can be run into immediately are far too strong to fight in the early game. Enemy progression should be gated better to prevent running into enemies like this until the player has reached mid game at least.
• This includes: some desert kobold minibosses, shrimp miniboss that spawns on beaches
• Frequent crashes
• FPS is not always very stable
• Game often hangs for a minute when joining a world
• Aleki’s Nifty Ships is too involved and tedious, and not very fun to use.
• This should be replaced with Small Ships
• Structures and POIs too rare (you can travel for hours without running into anything notable in certain biomes, especially forests and jungles)
• Alex’s Mobs has not been configured enough
• Everyone hates mosquitos, disable these.
• Anacondas are a bit too strong to run into early game, and realistically shouldn’t attack people unprovoked anyway.
• Disable Seagulls stealing items
• Why do jungles spawn creepers constantly? And why do they look like weird deer?
• Backpack mod literally cannot be accessed without removing it and placing it on the ground? Useless.
• This should be replaced with pretty much ANY other backpack mod.
• Minecarts are left vanilla, meaning they are slow and not a viable method of transport
• Some mod to add faster tracks would go a long way here
• Bountiful is a worthless mod and should be removed

The mid

• Overgeared: in depth blacksmithing.
• Map atlases requiring a constant supply of paper is a bit tedious, though immersive
• Luckily, tree felling + stripping bark from logs + paper recipe from bark means its always doable
• I personally would probably just prefer to have Xaero’s minimap tied to having a map in a bauble slot, or have the Map Atlas not require constant paper
• Currently, you can turn paper into maps 1-to-1 using a compass. There is also a config option to allow Map Atlases to accept paper directly. You could cut out this pointless middle step by enabling that config option.
• “You cannot sleep in such a horrible place” mod is fine
• Knapping stones to get stone tools is immersive, I may slightly favor it over vanilla. The mechanic is never used again, however
• Enchanting gems are whatever. The recipes are a bit tedious, but the concept is neat.
• The questlines are nice enough, but I do hope to see them expanded in the future.
• Epic Knights adds a bit too much bloat. Too many armors that do the same thing, and too many aesthetic-only options. This makes it difficult to figure out which armors are better than others, and which ones come with a load.
• Without some kind of nutrition or Spice of Life mod, Farmer’s delight and its addons feel somewhat like bloat here. I have no incentive to eat a variety of foods instead of just spamming the most efficient option.
• These alternate horse controls are nice when traveling long distances to be able to keep moving while in an inventory, but otherwise can be much more inconvenient. Horses keep their last momentum, so if you dismount when a horse is going full speed, the next time you remount, the horse will immediately take off in whatever random direction it is now facing. Not very immersive, mostly just an inconvenience.
• Torch recipes are odd. The main recipe now uses straw, which is a bit tedious to collect considering how many you need. The other recipe, just placing a stick on a campfire, is practically free by comparison. Overall, I’m not sure these recipes really add much to the gameplay. The vanilla recipe would work just fine.
• Better Combat is once again failing to provide any value compared to vanilla
• The partial keepInventory setup is nice, however the enemy progression is still nowhere near good enough to prevent deaths that feel unfair. Until that improves, proper keepInventory is a must.
• Seasons still don’t fit very well into Minecraft