Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

The first modpack I ever saw on Youtube was RLCraft and It was also the first modpack I played. So I like RLCraft a lot so I can't place a rating on how good it objectively is. But dregora feels like the 10 thousand parasite biomes they added Unfun and ugly. I mean I get some bad biomes but having to look at a vomit green disgusting biome every 400 blocks and no good structures in between wore down my patience thin. With some balancing and changes to world and structure gen It could be cool but as it is right now I really dislike it.

I will not lie about anything in this review. This is the best modpack i've ever played. Not only does it have absolutely insane graphics, but the general playloop is good, and the amount of fun you can have with friends is crazy. I love this modpack. If there's anything bad i have to say about it, it's probably that i don't have friends to play this with, it's a little laggy, and the updates take a while (but are worth the wait). The progression is very good, starting by looting houses, moving on to making bases and factories, and ending by curing the infection.

Not the best, in my opinion. Ive played it with a group of friends and I got bored reeeally fast. Magic box tech is not my thing and I cant enjoy it as much as I do Create or Ars Noveau or Thrmal Series.

My biggest problem with this mod is the amount of different gases and/or fluids needed to create one thing. That is just overwhelms me reeally fast.

I would recommend this mod , but that`s just not my cup of tea.

This mod is just amazing, I personally think it can fit into every vanilla+ modpack. The mod fixes the inventory space problem very well and the upgrades are cool too. Maybe on the newer versions of the mod it is a bit worse, but on 1.16.4 it was a cool experience.

Just a nice compact and useful storage mod, and the textures are cool too. A nice one to have in your modpack

Game, peak. Gameplay, peak. Aesthetics, awesome. Performance awesome.

One of the first packs I've actually completed(although I'm not quite at the end lol, close enough!).
Unlike most similar packs there's no sieving or ex nihilo-esque stuff of any kind, there's a very unique early game that uses vanilla brushes, with a bit of villager slavery to automate it later.
The whole pack is centralized around crafting with and upgrading a device known as the World Engine. The texturing and theming for it is great, and it's not the most intuitive thing in the world at first but a very great questbook gives you enough to figure it out.
Speaking of, the questline feels great. It's got a sort of asymmetrical layout where you work on three different quest chains per chapter, and at the end of each questline is an upgrade for the World Engine(which unlocks new crafts to progress through whichever mods you want or need). Completing each quest gives a bit of money to purchase things at the spawn's shops. These shops are fully voice-acted characters which you talk to throughout the quests.
The quests are not fully exploration or crafting/techy stuff, I think there's a great balance. If you get bored of one or the other it's great to have two other quest chains to go through.
Mods are a nice mix of the ol' standards and some I hadn't really heard of until playing this pack. You've got your Mekanism, Ars, AE2, Apotheosis, etc.; Create is here but not super necessary like in SB3 or a lot of other packs, which is great. Two great mods that were new to me were Just Dire Things and Roost Ultimate.
Exploration is a mix of custom dungeons and bosses, mostly L_EC or Twilight Forest. The dungeons are all themed around one specific thing; there's a Create dungeon, a Portal dungeon, a puzzly MFFS(a forcefield mod) dungeon, etc. which are all very fun to go through.
Overall, progression never felt blocked in any way. It was like when going through a certain mod for the questline you'd watch a great cutscene as your World Engine grew and gain access to everything you'd need for that mod. The grind is minimal, and AE2 is very much buffed so once you get autocrafting it becomes even less tedious.

This pack's 100% worth playing, even if you're not a huge skyblock enjoyer I think it's worth it for the custom stuff alone.

I've never played a previous version of Slightly Flavoured (or as it was known, Slightly Vanilla Flavoured), but what I have played is an official variation of the modpack called Slightly Cinnamon Flavoured. Slightly Cinnamon Flavoured took the base of Slightly Vanilla Flavoured and added a few minor tech mods like Immersive Engineering and Botania. Didn't actually engage with anything SCF specifically added other than Botania all that much, but I liked the pack well enough. It was one of the earlier packs to go in on Tetra, providing a decent enough Tetra experience as well as unique features like seasons and a wall jumping mod that occassionally came in clutch. It was a very light pack, coming in at only 130 mods, and was a bit lacking in QOL because of that, but it was fine enough.

Fast forward to now where I was excited to see how the latest standard version of the main pack would fare. Unfortunately, the things that I thought were good about SCF are not present and everything bad about the pack design remains in addition to brand new problems that I would've never envisioned.

The pack is massive now, coming in at over 300 mods, and it weighs like that too; even on a low render distance with Distant Horizons removed and Java 25 CompactObjectHeaders this pack wants at least 5GB of alloc. It performs excellently, though its not entirely stable; I ate a LegacyRandomSource crash like five minutes in.

Even if the performance hasn't suffered for it, this obscene mod dump causes a lot of other issues especially considering it's a largely unconfigured pack. One example is mods with entirely conflicting goals; there's a mod that adds random RPG modifiers to crafted armor and tools, but it seems to only do it for vanilla armor and tools, and if you turn your tool into a Tetra tool the modifier will go away. It also likes to expose untranslated strings for its modifiers. I don't think this adds to the modpack, and I don't know why it's here if it messes with some of the core appeals of the modpack, being the wide variety of modded armors and Tetra tools you're likely to want to pal around with.

We are also running into overlapping mods. We have multiple tetra addons adding multiple variations of the same material, two mods that add Silver where the Galosphere recipes aren't unified and won't take Caverns and Chasms silver. Quark and Every Compat means if you try to use a log on a Mechanical Saw it's going to block cut and you're going to get a hollow log instead if you don't have a filter, while many other wood related recipes are not compatible with Create block cutting.

The mod selection itself gets a little funky; for example, AE2 seems to have migrated from SCF into the main pack for nebulous reasons considering the lack of most anything you'd need AE2 specifically for. There are a lot of single purpose mods I'd probably never be able to track down unless I meticulously scrolled through the very stuffed advancements. There's a mod here to make you take damage when you punch fire which is not appreciated. For some reason every time I get an advancement the modpack takes a screenshot in the background which I didn't really ask for?

This is not an exhaustive list of nitpicks, and nitpicks they are, but beyond the nitpicks, I just don't really see the results of this massive modlist? It doesn't feel noticeably richer than a pack like SCF was; we have two dimension mods which are both pretty old (Aether and Twilight Forest), the Nether is pretty much just BOP nether with some structures, and the most prominent addition is a new combat focused magic mod which takes a while to get going. We are still massively lacking in certain QOL mods like Appleskin, Fast Leaf Decay, or something like Carry On. It is a shockingly meager showing for a modpack which, again, has over 300 mods in it and the RAM consumption to compensate.

It is at the bare minimum a functional modpack; it hasn't crashed since that initial crash so I'm going to say that was a fluke, and it runs really really smoothly in spite of its resource consumption, but the rest of the actual content in the pack is a really disappointing devolution when I know I've seen better from this pack dev.

For a modpack that tries itself to be the Better Vanilla+ modpack, this modpack has A LOT of fall-off, that genuinely can be fixed!

First of everything, is that this modpack is not integrated, you'd expect a modpack to tinker with configs to perfection? well, don't expect that here, there's barely any balancing, barely any good amount of tinkering with the pack, and with over 300 mods inside? i hope this gets fixed, it just can't get worse

Second of everything, bad documentation on top of barely integrated mods, this is just horrenduous, because most of the time, new players wouldn't even experience the pack as it is intended from your side of the developer, there's this knowledge gap that the modpack should understand and embrace to close the gap, otherwise, more and more people would just play this pack, play another pack, and realise this pack is just bad at doing docs

Third of all, performance wise there's definitely a lot to be worked here, like freezes and everything, i don't know how the devs would optimize this with how many mods that are in this pack, fixing the first and second issue would in general make this more bearable, but i guess, consider memory profiling and remove junk mods that adds buggy things to the pack, and that would fix this so fast

Before i end this review, i do wanna say that the pack has good content and a really good potential to just be a good and popular modpack, not just a "Better MC" but not really better than Vanilla game. For players reading this, you either love this pack for the first time or dislike it all the way through. Let's just hope this pack gets a good quality fixes

...across multiple worlds and servers with a great many fun people :3 got the ATM Star twice and currently in the very last stages before the GregStar, which i wanted to complete for a while :3

The main quest line of the star, which is probably what most people focus on, may be a little janky and a little annoying at places (looks at you blood magic's foreman's key) but it's compensated by the fact you can do several things at once - especially if you don't just rush progression to the star but do cute things to the side, you won't get frustrated or bored until you ran out of things to do (which in this pack can be a very long time, look at me xD).

Here's my personal favourite things about the pack:

• Sheer breadth of it. In all the time i played it i always had something to do, there always is more to learn and explore and see. Tech, sure, magic, sure, but the little things too - for example the amount of different mobs it has is astounding, and we're making a zoo for all of them :3 Also to me (a relatively new player in modded) it served as a good introduction to the very existence of oh so many mods!

• Related to the previous one: decoration mods! It has a lot without being overwhelming and it works rly well together for cute builds! My faves are handcrafted and dyenamics. Also wood types! I like that you can just use the alchemy table to get whatever log you want, rly good for making specific palettes (though it could use a search function but that's a question to the dev of blue skies).

• Not sure what trick it is they employ or if modern MC is just like that, but in all the crashes and freezes i had with this modpack (a lot, see below) i never ever lost any progress! like, not even a single bit! i find it fascinating! and they even included periodic backups by default in case your world corrupts!

• Controversial take here, but, Gregtech! This was my introduction to it and i'd say, with the amazing work that went into bees and generally unlimited resources and power at your disposal this becomes way less grindy than i expected it to be - still took me weeks of long playsessions to get to UHV, sure, but setting that automation up was mostly fun - the only point i found myself waiting to accumulate resources was with europium in ZPM and at this point, well, the rest of the pack exists! you can go build something! or finish the star! (that's one of the reasons i recommend starting gregtech BEFORE the star, doing them in parallel, so you can distract from one into another if it gets frustrating. the power options ATM provides scale quite well, you don't need creative power before ZPM/UV).

Most of the frustrations I had are such questions to individual mods and via that to the kitchen sink genre in general; most of them could probably be solved by better integration, but ATM is not that kind of modpack - past the main questline of the Star every mod is just what it is without much changes. Over the years I keep thinking I need to find a modpack that's woven more tightly in that regard, but these are rare gems overall! Still here's some things I want to point out:

• The modpack has thirty-three dimensions (i counted! made a hub for all of them in one of the worlds) but there's little incentive to explore most of them past that individual mod's progression. Ad Astra is especially notorious here (having little variety to explore on its own which is expected from a mod about inhospitable planets) - other modpacks might add better ores to the Moon etc. but here it just stands to the side as everything else does. Twilight Forest and Blue Skies have way more cute things to find but also the frustration of the no fly zone and Blue Skies' tool limitations; the no fly zone is intended to make cheesing bosses harder but it honestly only matters for the Ur-Ghast; for long distance movement it can be bypassed with ars spells; but then building becomes a pain, and that's a shame, because these dimensions are pretty!

• Related to the previous one, the mining dim and the Beyond. They are specifically intended for building but they are not pretty >< subjective opinion, yes, but the ATM team's choice of colours is so weird! Red fog and dry grass of the mining dim, the eternally black sky of the Beyond with the sun and clouds still in it, all of that feels uncanny and dead. They are a lawn baser's dream, sure, but i'm here actively trying to have aesthetics around my machinery without lagging too much from the world around! Ended up changing it with a datapack. Out of the box i'd say the best dimension for that kind of building would be Alfheim (pretty, with relatively few things going on lagwise) but it's gated behind all of Botania... Chulak and Lantea would come second.

• Lag, in general, is a weird beast here. My game was prone to freeze the PC and crash every now and then, especially if run with other programs on the computer open; I found Journeymap to be the biggest offender here and it got much better after eliminating it which, hello, why do we have two different minimap mods here in the first place? Here i should also mention the existence of ATM9 No Frills, a lighter edition of this that runs much smoother - I had a bit of experience in it, not enough to judge how much the breadth is reduced in important to me aspects, but i still find it cool as hell that the devs do this! (they recently gave ATM10 the same treatment too with ATM10 Lite which is rad)

• The power curve gets a bit weird, if you play by the quests you can and are incentivised to become a nigh unkillable god with nigh unlimited resources in midgame and then lategame is a mix of specific automation challenges, doing a bite of everything, and big number go poof (looks at you 1.5 million nether stars). It's a vibe, sure, is it my vibe? It used to be, but i think i'm slowly drifting away from it! What's the fun of having two dozen bosses if half of them can be killed in seconds and another third become punching bags while you tank all the damage? (That's why we limited ourselves to allthemodium equipment our latest run and i'd say we could've even stopped before that, though having unbreakable things is nice). On the scale of 0 for nothing 10 for literal creative mode this pack can easily shoot you into 7-8-9 way before endgame and i think it's just past my personal sweetspot.

• The entire Alchemistry/Chemlib mod looks like a viable alternative for many things, but when you actually want to automate it, it's janky, slow, and breaks your setups when it feels like it (compactors on locking mode occasionally stop working at i think world reload, and the amount of times my entire bee processing line stopped because of it is too painful to recite - if you use alchemistly, plan your setups for this!). Some recipe integration with some other mod of better machines could have been made to avoid this problem, but see above, ATM is not this kind of pack.

• FTB chunkloading is restricted to 25 chunks and all other options for it are disabled. Awesome for servers, but a bit frustrating in SP (though it's partially my fault for never getting around to seeing how to change that in configs). The team includes server files separately from SP files, why not have diverging configs between the two?

Overall, I think I'd enjoy most of the content of this pack in a setting where that direction is the main focus (tech / magic / cozy building / bosses / dimensions and exploration / etc.) - which is why the next pack i play after this will probably not be a kitchen sink - but with the kitchen-sinkness of it given, this is a very good and entertaining pack, even if challenging to run on not high-end hardware mode occasionally stop working at i think world reload, and the amount of times my entire bee processing line stopped because of it is too painful to recite - if you use alchemistry, plan your setups for unlocked compactors!). Some recipe integration with some other mod of better machines could have been made to avoid this problem, but see above, ATM is not this kind of pack.

• FTB chunkloading is restricted to 25 chunks and all other options for it are disabled. Awesome for servers, but a bit frustrating in SP (though it's partially my fault for never getting around to seeing how to change that in configs). The team includes server files separately from SP files, why not have diverging configs between the two?

Overall, I think I'd enjoy most of the content of this pack in a setting where that direction is the main focus (tech / magic / cozy building / bosses / dimensions and exploration / etc.) - which is why the next pack i play after this will probably not be a kitchen sink - but with the kitchen-sinkness of it given, this is a very good and entertaining pack, even if challenging to run on not high-end hardware.