Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Initial Thoughts (before gameplay)

The description is really lacking, it mostly consists of the modlist of the pack (in paragraph form, the devs may as well just have written it in bullet points) and some java args, this tells me nothing special about the pack.

The changelogs for the versions are just "mod updates" which are not promising in the slightest, where's the custom content??

I downloaded the pack and it took maybe 15 minutes to load up, which is ridiculous considering it has less mods than my 1.21.1 Vanilla+ pack

From there, I was greeted with the standard 1.12.2 screen, with some ugly debug messages in the corners

Supposedly this modpack is sponsored by Bisect Hosting, why is there still a realms button lmao
Bisect literally offers free logo design yet the devs of this pack still went with an AI logo and a sloppy standard main screen

Gameplay

(This is more of just a gameplay journal than an actual review, but it'll give you a good idea of what the gameplay was like)
When I opened the new world screen it says "New Chronos" rather than "New World", this is the extent of custom content present in this pack

After waiting exactly 5 minutes 30 sec on the world loading screen (I timed this with a stopwatch starting from when I clicked create world) I left my computer to eat lunch

Came back the stopwatch said 7:27, world still on that screen
At exactly 8 minutes 20 seconds the world finally loaded the terrain and I am presented with all sorts of visual clutter in the form of tutorial toasts and chat popups

There was some weird visual bug (screenshot attached) that only went away after like 3 more minutes of trying to orient myself, in about 15 FPS

Finally the pack fixed its own visual errors, and I ended up getting a pretty solid 59-60 FPS for a bit, ignoring some lag spikes

Feeling that this pack was actually running quite well, I broke some dirt blocks (which did not drop anything due to server lag) and was rubber-banded back 10 seconds, repeated this and the block finally broke after doing that ghost-block thing where the block breaks after a delay

Got stuck in a timeloop when trying to climb a vine

Suffered my way through many lag spikes to a dungeon tower thing that had no loot, there was an iron door with a stone pressure plate in front of it but for some reason the pressure plate was having a day off and did not open the door

Found some dead chicken drops in a pond??

There seemed to be random structures pretty much everywhere that followed no cohesive theme - why is there a ruined medieval tower here, a dead dinosaur skeleton there (I assume that's what the inverted bowl shape of bone blocks is) and 2 radio towers over there

While walking to said radio towers my game kept stuttering, it's like trying to watch a youtube video while spamming spacebar to pause/unpause it

Found some weird-as tree that seemed to have given up growing past its trunk and just stopped

When I arrived at the radio tower it was literally just made of iron bars, there was nothing of interest there

Some how ended up suffocating in some leave block i got teleported into (screenshot attached)

mined the same leaves block 5 times in a row before it decided to break

Some more structures I found included some piles of polished granite/andesite with nothing of value in them (apart from some quartz ore) and also 2 gravestones on some podzol

Saw some grass that had generated underneath a tree, replacing its bottomost log block

Found a sheep, I decided to punch it to death (for wool for a bed) but it started levitating due to TPS lag, I couldn't punch it again while it just floated there invulnerably

Found some dude called "Green Archer" from Medieval Craft just hanging out under a tree not really doing anything, also found his friends "Green Knight" and "Green Soldier" standing by 4 lumps of Birch Planks in the forest

It's worth noting every single entity I had seen was completely still due to TPS lag

Uhh then one guy decided to come alive and shoot me, so I ran away from these hostile musical statues (one guy with a sword also ran really fast at me and took out half my health)

I wandered through the biome of floating reed items (idk why there were floating reed items, probably a worldgen bug)

I was going to make my way up a hill but then I realised I couldn't break blocks, but too late as I was now stuck in another time loop of being half-stuck in a block and trying to move away

At this point I thought i should probably try make some basic tools, but no apparently you can't craft oak logs into oak planks (I put it on my crafting grid and no output showed up, despite JEI saying i could do that

After falling off a hill, and taking damage when the game registered it (about 5 seconds after) I thought i might eat some of that raw chicken i had found earlier, given it was an emergency as i couldn't kill animals

However I couldn't do this either, as the tps lag prevented me from eating

Found some mixel flowers that i could see even when they were in ungenerated chunks (yeah did i mention the chunks loaded so slowly it's ridiculous)

Came across some random pile of grey concrete, grey concrete powder, and iron bars, and somehow took half a heart of damage from some unknown source (probably sunburn or something)

There was also this waterfall that had broken loads of the foliage in the surrounding area and all those items had collected at the bottom of the waterfall
In the waterfall there was a group of 9 ravens (they only moved a little bit every 20 seconds or so, so i could easily count them)

At this point i decided to just fly around in spectator mode to observe the world generation as it was clear survival gameplay was not an option under the ridiculous TPS lag

In some cave there was some stone type that was literally just stone recoloured red lmao

I also found this village that was a mixture of ridiculously large modded houses and normal 1.12 small houses, all of which had generated on a hill and overlapped with each other significantly

Oh and in JEI there was an item called "Valleyman beans Australia definitive edition" [sic] with a texture that makes me ashamed to be a texture artist

27 of the 297 JEI pages were taken up by content from Chisel, and 66 pages from TConstruct and addons

We don't talk about the 3 different copper ingots, or the 3 different silver ingots, or the 2 steel ingots, or the 2 "aluminum" ingots and the 1 "aluminium" ingot

There was also some backport mod called "Future MC" that couldn't decide whether they were backporting textures from JAPPA or making ones that fit programmer art

My game also just randomly froze and the screen turned white but thankfully (?) it didn't crash

I did find this structure made of sandstone that lined up suspiciously with chunk borders, but I couldn't really see any of its details because the visual bug from earlier had returned and everything looked awful

Eventually, I decided to just put the poor frozen mobs out of their misery and close the modpack, having experienced enough of this awful pile of slop

My game froze when i clicked save and quit to title, and considering I didn't care one bit about my world at all i decided to just force-crash the game and then delete the modpack

my biggest regret about the chronos is that it exists, and i feel like my playtesting of it was an hour of my life i'll never get back.

Computer specs

Dell Precision 3470 laptop
12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1270P (2.20 GHz)
16 GB RAM total, 8 allocated

Feedback

I honestly don't really know where to start, it seems like the devs haven't even played their own pack, and if they have, do they own a nasa pc or something??

• Firstly, this modpack needs a vision, if it's meant to be about prehistoria or integrating 2 prehistoric mods together, then you need to focus on that
• A visual overhaul would be really important, you also need to actually tie the modpack name "Chronos" into the gameplay - are you bringing back things from earlier in time or what
• You need to have a custom menu, better description, custom logo as the minimum
• the performance was AWFUL please add some performance mods and really focus on optimisation
• Cut down on bloat, consider every mod - why do you actually need what this adds? For example, you have enough flowers everywhere as it is - do you really need a mod that just adds even more flowers?? and why tf do you have valleymans beans in this modpack??
• Even within mods you need to cut down on bloat and just integrate things - all those duplicate ingots that exist, plus that one mod that just adds a bunch of random ingots with no uses
• Integrate the mods in this pack together, this separates a pile of mods from a proper high-quality modpack

I'd recomend to play this togeather with: (Anchient_Warfare_2_TWEAKED) and (Spartan_Warfare) for the best experience

Like for real.... if you ever get tired of vanilla and it's laughable lack of dragon variety. Then this mod is for you I swear. And be prepared to be totally bamboozled as a ropey. (This is one major reason why I'd recomend Anchient Warfare due to it having settlements that are capable of withstanding/ having ur back if you ever **** upp)

I'd recomend to play this mod combined with (Ice_And_Fire) and (Spartan_warfare)

And I'd also recomend to invade the desert people for the greather good of the roman empire. Afterall. They might have some oil in dire need for some LIBERTYYYYY 🦅

I saw this was one of the highest rated packs on the site, so thought I'd give it an honest try to see what it's all about. To preface, I am running this with an Intel i9-10900k, an RTX 3080, and 8gb of RAM assigned (which seems more than reasonable for a pack with 137 mods).

I was greeted with a very long load time, the default vanilla menu, and an even longer world load time (nearly 15 minutes total). As I spawn in I run around for a couple minutes and notice the TPS is abysmal, everything is a slideshow. Doing any action takes 2-4 seconds, with frequent FPS freezes. I really wanted to play more and see what it really had to offer, but I could not stand the performance.

Of the gameplay, I noticed nothing good. Chat spammed as soon as I spawned in, no quest line, no advancements, nothing directing me what to do. I noticed very few mobs as well. The structures were neat, but I could tell most of this was just mods thrown in with little configuration.

This pack was likely made for a couple of friends, and was not intended to grow beyond that. Further more, the logo of the pack is clearly AI generated, so that goes to show how much effort they care to put in.

It's fine to have a pack like this for friends, but I don't see any reason this pack should be anywhere close to the highest rated packs, along the greats like MeatballCraft and Divine Journey 2.

I'd like to start by saying this is my all time favorite mod, at least in it's 1.12.2 incarnation.

I have played lots of versions of this mod, like the early now deleted alphas for mc 1.4.7 (which were kind of buggy and limited but those are old and now long gone from official downloads of course), version 1 in 1.7.10, which was very great overall, version 2 in 1.12.2 which i have to say expanded greatly on version 1 and provided vary qol tweaks, and version 3 in 1.20.1, which, although i feel like is inferior to version 2, is still great and maybe a bit more balanced.

For gameplay, i gave 4/5 stars because although the gameplay is very fun and nice, it sometimes can be a bit overpowered (specially with certain materials added by certain mods).

For aesthetics i gave 5/5 stars because both the old textures and new jappaified textures are very beautiful in their own ways, and the whole seared stone bricks aesthetics was always very sleek.

For performance and stability i gave 5/5 stars because i never ever had any stability or performance problems with the mod, even in its buggy 1.4.7 alpha state.

Honestly, i suggest this mod to anyone.
Plus it replaces the enchanting system with the material/modifier system for its tools and thats a good thing in my book.

What is it ?

The dead sea is a Mcreator mod with a creepy and dark atmosphere, as it adds a whole new nightmarish dimension for the player to find.
This mod's dimension houses a couple of biomes (between 3 or 4 depending on the version you're playing in) which all have a few scary mobs and plenty of blocks.

What does it offer ?

A new dimension to explore and get lost in, which will make you feel fear the deeper you go.
Its progression is pretty straightforward, as it is told to you straight up once joining the dimension with the - key on your keyboard.
What I love about this mod are the details ; while the music seems to be a pretty generic royalty-free dark ambience which only plays once after joining the dimension for the first time, most biomes have a surprising amount of visual details (with the exception of one being the desert as it is pretty barren) - or at least surprising for a Mcreator mod on the older side : from the branches in the trees of the forgotten forest to the various scattered cars in the city of ashes , this mod knows how to render various basic environments more interesting;
Same goes for the creatures you'll find : while still often having simple or vanilla sound effects they do have detailled textures and models , and while they lack custom animation, they are good enough to benefit the immersion factor of this realm.

Unfortunately this mod appears to be discontinued , which means unless I stand corrected it won't receive any new biome, entity or other features; this is quite a shame as this mod seems to have some great potential and I would have loved it even more if it had more going on in terms of content or gameplay elements. Some of the mobs in the mod can also be quite loud at times and their sounds seem to linger for a bit no matter how far you run away, I would therefore suggest keeping the hostile mobs/master volume down for this one.
This mod also lacks a config file, which means you can't really tweak anything.

In conclusion

The dead sea succeeds in being a terrifying dimension to be trapped in, and while this mod is without any surprise not an absolute good-tier one, it certainly has its place among the list of one-off mods to play in the dark on October 31st while having your windows closed.
I would like to precise here that is recommended by the mod itself to play it alongside Optifine or a mod which adds some form of dynamic lighting, as navigating the dimension with absolute darkness can be pretty tedious.

What is it ?

This is a mod which adds a custom system of qualities to almost every type of tools, weapons and armor, which is compatible with bauble-slot items too.
This basically means that every item crafted, traded or simply found will now have a chance to get a randomly-assignated quality upon player obtention.
It is of note that this mod depends on potioncore, which means it also uses potioncore's custom attributes in order to add more interesting qualities to items.

What does it offer ?

Randomly-selected qualities on certain items obtained in the game, which might increase or decrease certains stats about said items,
making every item feel a bit more unique outside of enchantments.
The custom emerald ring and amulet automatically become baubles-wearable if it is present, which could serve as some example equipement to test custom configurations for these slots in your modpack.
It also adds a reforging station, which you can use in some cases to try your luck again with the qualities at the cost of a material tied to the tool (think of it as using iron on an anvil to repair your iron sword, its pretty similar here).

This mod however has some performance issues, as for some reason it makes your game lag regularly even when only it and potioncore are loaded, and I also don't really like how the only way for modded items to receive a change in their quality by default is more often than not to get your hands on several nether stars and hope you'll get lucky with the rolls as it can become worse than what it originally was (at least you can configure custom materials for specific tools yourself, I would have ranked it even lower if it didn't).
Some way of knowing the quality of an item after it has been randomly selected without having to select it with your mouse would have been nice too, but I guess that's a bit more a matter of personal taste and preferences here.

In conclusion

I quite like the concept of this mod, as adding randomly generated and easily configurable stats to items allows for more variety which could be a great addition to a more roguelike/dungeon crawling type modpack for example, but I think that this unfortunate negative impact it has on the default game's performances makes it hardly usable for most modpacks out there, I myself had to remove it from some packs I was working on due to this.

I would also like to mention for people looking for a port/fork of this mod or at least a maintained version that Quality Equipment exists on more recent versions of the game, and it's basically the same thing (I learned about this mod while writing this review).

When I first saw it, I though, "Hm, a 700 mods modpack? I'll test it and see If its any good.
Best choice, this modpack has everything I could ask for, just amazing, you can explore, mess with machines, and it works SO GOOD, without shaders I get more than 300fps, with 16chunks, that's better than some smaller mods I found. And it has a mod from a guy I know, I was amazed to find it there, it was funny.
If you can run 16GbRAM for minecraft, I recommend it to you to test this amazing modpack.
Oh, and it's a somewhat hard modpack, If you want to sit back and relax, maybe it's not for you.

Although a fun modpack I found the endgame over the top and just difficult for really no reason at all. It is common in packs to make the endgame difficult so the player has something meaningful to achieve by the end of it, but it seems like the dev just wanted to extend the playtime of the pack.

Quite liked how it handled resource production and some of the automation but still think the endgame was a bit overkill and doesn't really fit the theme.

Overall might play it again with friends, but not alone. 6.6/10

What is it ?

The betweenlands is a mod adding a derelict swampy dimension between worlds;
It has pretty and cool visuals using custom shaders by default, tons of cool building blocks and particles, has ambience/sounds effects which are unique and add to the immersion, cool soundtrack (boss music included within the mod by itself) and an overall creepy atmosphere.
It contains lore which is left open to interpretation through small notes or implied by the existence of structures and creatures.

What does it offer ?

A brand-new yet familiar survival experience with a progression system fully independent from the overworld, featuring unique survival mechanics such as the decay , tool corrosion and food sickness , challenge through its tough enemies, dungeons and bosses and a both pretty and eerie ambience.
It provides its own take on minecraft's systems (its own farming , brewing and repairing system among a few others, and even some brand-new re-thought weather ); and it is not hesitant to rethink its past ideas to better fit with the newer and updated mod features.
It encourages exploration, having multiple biomes with unique fauna, flora, and global generation quirks which make each area feel different enough while still keeping that swampy vibe; it also brings in new ways to travel the world through items ( Tongue grappling hook ) and vehicles ( Rowboat and Draeton ), and adds new companions to take with you on your journey ( Emberlings , Harlequin Toads and more !).

The cons of this mod would normally be the performance aspect of the mod itself, as even though it is quite well optimized for a mod of its scale, it has by default configs about shaders which can be too much to handle for a basic laptop, but those visual effects can be reduced or even fully disabled in the configs and it works fine (I would recommend disabling them if your computer can't handle shaders or visual effects in general, it really makes a big difference).
It is also of note that this is in general a pretty difficult mod which is not recommended to play for people looking for a more chill adventure (even if it can still be calm at times), and its focus on exploration might not appeal to some tech modpack enjoyers either, as most systems do require human intervention/maintenance and can't be automated forever (there are unofficial addons for that though, but that isn't the subject of this review).

In conclusion

It provides a haunting medieval swamp urbex experience, with a pretty yet dangerous environment which has content encouraging exploration.
Most things stay cohesive within the mod, as updates of the mod take into account what has been and what will be.
It is well documented as it has advancements hinting at the various areas, features and systems and an official detailed and up-to-date wiki, and that's not even counting all the little things such as how the mod tells you in which special block an item can be used in.
Finally, it has also plenty of niche details and hidden mob interactions, leaving the world full of surprises, to the point where I still discover mechanics and stuff about the mod, even though I played it for more than a couple hundred of hours at least (probably more).

I would like to add that this mod being my absolute favorite, its review might be somewhat biased, which is why I urge you to try it for yourself, after all, you might still like it despite its difficulty.

Looking for addons or extra content ? on a given moddex mod page going to the "Relations" tab then setting relation types to "Required" + selecting "Dependents" instead of dependencies then Project type "Mod" shows you every mod which requires this mod to function (which should correspond to known addons)