Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Welcome to Antimatter Chemistry! Here's a questbook where we'll railroad you into doing a linear series of extremely specific not necessarily required things but not tell you about anything else. Don't worry, there's some really good stuff waiting for you at the end of all of this after I drag you by the scruff through vanilla nether, and then the cave dimension, and then vanilla Atum, interspersed with fun quests like making a fishing rod and then telling you to not use the fishing rod. Were you expecting to do something tech related? Don't worry, you will, maybe a dozen hours from now. While you wait for other functional machines to use, have a pink generator. Trying to fuel this is definitely a good use of your time. What do you mean you dont want to go into the vanilla cave dimension to gather ore blocks of ores you already had a bunch of? We love meaningful quest rewards so here's a bunch of useful things and also 8 pieces of bacon that are inferior to the three stacks of cooked potatoes you're probably carrying around. Don't worry, you can go do something else, you certainly don't have to worry about things like end of chapter timewalls and gamestages to pressure you to not take your time.

I think I'm probably just going to go and try to get my alchemistry fill somewhere else.

Break Out is an immaculately designed beginner xblock experience; it's short, it's simple enough that you are never going to get lost while allowing you to get to the goal in your own way, every mod is thoroughly well explained through the quest book. It definitely falls into some modded stereotypes, but that's for the better of the goal of the pack in my opinion, and it successfully balances having a traditional modpack mod flow while still being it's own thing.

If there's anything I noticed on this replay, it's that there's generally not a lot to do sometimes; it's very much pure progression and that progression is relatively simple, which is what helped make it the first modpack I beat all those years ago, but you're likely to get timewalled by Botania or something unless you have full recollection of the progression flow, and if you are not new to modded, it might become a little bit of a bore. I think that's the main reason I didn't put this up at 5 stars; not to make it sound like it was an insufferable replay, since everything bad about the pack is absolutely assuaged by the runtime and the other freedoms it allows to you.

Other notes;

• It's very optimized. The optimization mods are maybe a little bit aggressive by today's standards, but the rock bottom resource utilization here is gonna mulch any newer pack.

Early Game

For context, I played with this modpack on a server with a small group of friends. Throughout my experience, I never researched anything about the pack, and I had never played an FTB pack before.
The start of Oceanblock 2 was great. You choose a starting ship and explore from there. The gimmick of the world being only a large ocean was actually a fresh take on early minecraft progression that focuses more on exploration. I didn't expect to enjoy the ocean world as much as I did.

Mid Game

I had a lot of fun problem solving with the multitude of tech mods in this pack such as Mekanism, Oritech, Immersive Engineering, Refined Storage and Applied Energistics 2, and Nuclear Reactors. This pack introduced me to a lot of tech mods and mechanics I had never seen before, while also integrating them together in interesting ways. It does feel like a kitchen sink pack at times since there is little thematic elements except for some ocean-related mods like PneumaticCraft.

Late Game

For me, the weakest part of this pack was the end game. Spoilers: The end goal of the game is to beat a boss and reach the overworld. To reach the dimension where the boss resides, a lot of setup and tedious grinding is required. The dimension itself is pretty cool build-wise, but the builds are empty apart from the same mobs and barrels scattered around. In general, the dimension felt slightly soulless. The final boss fight was super easy and uninteresting. By just completing the questbook progression, the final boss barely lasted a minute. Finally reaching the overworld was pretty underwhelming too, as it seemed basically unchanged from a regular modpack. The ocean world was far more interesting, and it would've been cool to see something different about the overworld. The ending was anti-climactic and didn't feel like it was worth the effort.

Overview

Despite my feeling about the ending, I had a lot of fun with this pack. There is hours of content to explore and the questbook ties a lot of the mods together to make a fun, cohesive experience.

It's GregTech without the Greg

please note that this review is made while I'm in midgame - I have not finished the pack yet

If you're unfamiliar with what that exactly means: it's GregTech without all the tedium, nanocrafting (as I've come to call it) and overall labor that goes into it. It's not New Horizons, which you shouldn't even think about finishing, nor is it Omni/Nomi/Monifactory, which streamlines the torture of GregTech. It's something else.

StaTech Industries removes the "Greg" from the "Tech" completely, creating a much friendlier and approachable version of a factory-sim. It's still extremely complex, having multiple tiers, advanced processing lines, a deep, deep quest book and a lot of mechanics that are almost the same as in GregTech. If you're familiar with the distinction between rougelikes and rougelites, it's kinda exactly like that - it's a Greglite, not a Greglike.

But all the recipes are a bit simpler, the machines are easier to get, nothing explodes in your face, there aren't a million byproducts to every recipe and every single processing chain is about ten times faster by default. For me, this is awesome - GregTech has always been extremely overwhelming and way too punishing for me, especially with the prices of new machines and the time it took to get to the "meat" of the pack (optimizing and setting up production lines).

The downside is, of course, that the meat isn't as well seasoned as in GregTech. Challenge invites satisfaction (yes, I did quote Hamilton, what are you gonna do about it?) - and less challenge brings a little less of it. There are points in the pack where I felt like automation could be skipped completely by someone with enough grit, which feels like a cardinal sin of a factory modpack. I also missed some of the parts of GregTech, namely the advanced ore processing and extraction and a few of the more complex crafting chains.

The biggest flaw of the progression has been, at least to me, a very weird split of unlocking AE2 in half. You get a bunch of cables and interfaces first and only unlock the storage a siginificant amount of time later. Since the pack already has an early-game storage solution, this feels needlessly convoluted and misleading (and it's the star taken off from gameplay).

A big benefit over GregTech is also that the pack is beautiful and much more stable. All the textures are from Modern Industrialization and there are a bunch of industrial-style deco mods in the pack as well - not to mention a bunch of really cool multiblocks that take away from the "magic box tech pack" feeling a lot.

Overall, a huge recommendation for people who always felt like they would love GregTech, but felt overwhelmed by it, as well as for anybody who fees like giving factory modpacks a shot.

HELLLLLAAAA good progression and TONS of customizations just for builders alone. it is a very chill modpack in my opinion that could lowkey be a good way to familiarize yourself to big mods.

The progression line is lowkey not it, most of my journey was doing my own gameplay and less of following the quest book because the quest book just ain't it. However, the modpack has everything you want from beginner to advanced mods

I have played with 3 friend in a hardcore world, it was very fun and imessive, have only one try helps a lot with the "terror" part of the modpack, each of us experimented with playing a different role. I used the Born in Chaos mod quite a bit, while my friends used Hexerei and Biomency. We spent a lot of time playing that mod pack.

Spectral Creation is a small modpack consisting of Create, Spectrum, and a handful of tiny content mods, performance mods and QOL mods. Beyond that, there is a small custom guidebook that's kind of rough to use due to poorly formatted entries. The few mods in the pack are surprisingly buggy, like Scout and ExtendedDrawersAddon (all related bugs to which are fixed in the 1.21.1 version). It can be a genuine bother, and why I would say this is probably not the ideal way to experience Spectrum, much less Create, and also probably not that suitable for building your own Spectrum focused pack off of.

it was a smooth steady gameplay for my friend and I, its a little rough early game. However, the "gambling" system makes it a little easier for early game, until mid game gets way easier and more enjoyable if you were to follow quests.

Alot of people say how unfair and boring rlcraft dregora is and I think there entirley wrong for the sole fact that its actually difficult over the time you learn and adapt to all the annoying mobs that appear to give you random effects and just cook you in general when me and my friends played it we had no idea what we were doing and we were raging and it was kind of boring, but once you get settled into the world it becomes a godly amount of fun become a noob to a god by raiding all sorts of structures for any possible amount of loot which has made me play it for over 5 months straight with my group of 2 other friends. My main issue though is mainly the end game and the wasteland biomes. In the wasteland biomes like you can expect theres nothing there except for lava which sucks that defeats the entire purpose of exploring for something new, and in the end game getting prepared to go to the lost cities and the brutal tower its mostly just enchant book farming and searching for villagers, champions, and bookwyrms. When me and my friends looked at rlcraft it looked boring mainly because it didnt have the mods everyone uses like create, mekanism, that one farming mod (forgot the name). but it completley flipped our expectations upside down by introducing new and engaging mods that brought alot to the table especially lycanite mobs and scape n run parasites