Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

EMI is a revolutionary addon to JEI that I can no longer play the game without. It includes a powerful recipe-tracking system that allows you to not just view individual recipes but visualize the whole chain of recipes needed to craft an item from the materials in your inventory, as well as what materials you are lacking. Although it only allows you to track one recipe at a time, it's more than powerful enough to replace any crafting calculator type mods you are used to using.

Apart from that, it also includes several features not available in base JEI that you didn't even know you wanted:

• the ability to mark default recipes and materials for the quick-craft function to prioritize over alternatives
• a highly customizable interface with several convenient views such as one that shows only the items you can currently craft
• Settings that sync across different minecraft installations
• The ability to favorite a specific recipe in addition to items
• The ability to preview the recipe that will be used to craft an item before quick-crafting
• The ability to see all valid items for a given tag laid out nicely rather than cycling through them 1 by 1 like JEI does
• Indicators that show when a crafting ingredient is a tag or leaves something behind in the crafting interface

My only critique is that it lacks a shortcut for enabling tracking mode for a recipe. For something that's the primary purpose of this mod, it's a bit tedious to have to open the recipe tree interface and click the magnifying glass every time I want to track a recipe tree.

One of my favorite modpacks I've ever played. I feel like it's a balance between fun and silly things and very good multiblocks and progression. I never feel like I'm just farming. It also gives you very fun and powerful tools from the start, but they feel balanced. Even when fighting mobs, there is always a challenge.

Besides launch time, the performance is great! Stability is pretty solid as well. The endgame is crazy, definitely a push needed to reach it. I would highly recommend this to anyone, regardless of their experience with modded minecraft (although a few recipes might scare away really new people), it is definitely one of, if not the best modpack I've every played.

The gameplay is actually rather fun, its a bit punishing even given the forced hardcore which based off the wordage of some of the things in the modpack that was supposed to be optional. I had fun was stockpiling resources making sure i didnt have to worry about too much, but one of the major progression points forces you to wander from spawn to some cities, the cities are supposed to give you access to materials you otherwise cant get with some of the loot just being stuff thats harder to get, the first thing you really look for is stuff for a smeltry, normally this involves basically throwing some rocks together but the recipe is disabled to force city exploration, not terrible... unless it has only a chance to spawn in the cities.... and the cities aside from the starting one(ones?) arent even guaranteed. Like imagine if you had to get something from a village and it only spawned in one specific house variant. Now imagine that item isnt just something you want but something needed for progression, something you have 0 other options to get it through. Now imagine that before playing this you kept seeing propagabda of sorts (yt playthroughs of earlier versions of the pack) showing you getting tons of resources, sprawling cities packed with tough monsters as well as a good chunk of the exclusive materials you were looking for. Well congrats youve officially been set up for disappointment. Just about all the famous playthroughs dont play on the latest version you could theoretically have a similar playthrough because its the same pack but you will have a much worse time, youll get disappointment instead of wonder. If i had known what the pack was now, i wouldnt have started playing in the first place. I died probably honestly at least 50 times, 50 worlds deleted due to deaths. It was fun i loved getting to a point where it didnt feel like i was punished because the tree used just too much bonemeal or the dust you sifted gave you none of the things you were looking for. Only to have me killed because a 2 shotting enderman stayed aggroed and killed me 2 seconds after "respawning" (theres a mod where you can basically build clones so when you die you transfer to a clone instead of the worl getting deleted.) It feels punishing to play, you will get beat down repeatedly. If you like that youll probably have fun, but i dont think most average people would, that might not hold true for the kind of people that would play modded minecraft, idk. The atmosphere is tense you really do feel like you are livibg by a steing for a good while. Especially if you play on hardcore but when you go out of your way ti travel hundreds of blocks hoping to find something to help you progress only to find nothing and get insulted for literal cobwebs and empty bottles and smpty chests as the Literal only loot, maybe then youll see why this pack gets a 1 for balance and progression but a 5 for aesthetics for me.

Sophisticated Backpacks does what it aims to do and does so well. The textures and models are lovely and fit Minecraft's aesthetic, there's a lot of different upgrades to tailor backpacks just how you like, and in particular, making backpacks placeable in-world is a nice touch, making backpacks feel more like real things rather than "magic bag of holding" that many older backpack mods fall into.

My only point of contention is that the sheer number and power of upgrades can occasionally make Sophisticated Backpacks out of place or overpowered, akin to using a bulldozer to dig a garden. The level of customization provided via configs mitigates this issue, but unless you're willing to take a stab at the configs, other backpack mods can fill specific niches out of the box that Sophisticated Backpacks has to be molded to fit into. This isn't so much as a complaint so much as a heads-up; Sophisticated Backpacks is not a drag-and-drop backpack mod by any means.

Very enjoyed this Modpack. Truly appreciate the effort developers put in it.

First time I finished a modpack. It was fun, it was interesting, it was divine.

I played this way back in the day, so I may be looking back at this with either rose tinted or sepia tinted glasses, but I thoroughly enjoyed the pack despite not getting too far into it. Given the age of the pack, it feels like a sort of proto-progression pack, where there's still a bit of the old philosophy of mashed together mods, but at the same time there's also a decent amount of the modern pack making philosophy of making a cohesive whole from the added mods.
In that way, the questbook is easily a highlight given its scope and lore-included writing style, and the ideas present in the pack are really quite enjoyable. I fell off before reaching the true endgame, but for an old pack that uses most of the mods you would expect for the version, it still surprised me with how well things fit together and were mixed up.
If you enjoy the modern sensibilities but miss some of that old-school jank, it's worth at least taking a look and having a good time.
Plus, the art is cute. :3

The ages system is really well handled, introducing new mods, mobs, ores, and mechanics in a very enjoyable drip-feed of content. It really feels like a similar system to terraria, for the first couple of ages, and in a very good way. Some of the later ages (namely, most things post-plastic) are not quite so fun given the high resource costs and relatively inaccessible automation, as well as the fact that you begin to run out of places to explore and the content well starts to run dry.
There are some less enjoyable parts of the early game, namely most of the biome hunting that has to be done, though you eventually get through it and it's not so bad. Absolutely love the pack otherwise though, feels very cohesive!
Highly recommend playing this on a server with friends.

amazing well made pack with plenty to do and tons to explore.