Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

me when cat is alyst. i played this modpack for a while and its very cool.

The modpack is decently immersive and challenging. Many aspects need more balancing.

I really wanted this pack to be good, and I really tried to enjoy it. I have tried to play and enjoy it both by myself and with friends, but it doesn't work.

Gameplay 1/5

The pack is built on the idea of 'Roguelike' runs, where you aim to get deeper into progression while the world becomes more and more dangerous. On the face of it, this sounds like a really fun idea-I love roguelikes, and I liked RLCraft, which the creator seems to have taken some heavy inspirations from.

You spawn into your world, start collecting the basic materials for a pickaxe, or weapons, or mining in general-And then a monster appears out of nowhere and kills you.

The pack has no consideration for the idea that you aren't already experienced with this pack specifically. It has it's own progression system with a lot of unique flavourings and custom modded content, and it does absolutely no work to guide you towards it whatsoever and gives you no time to breathe either.

It has a levelling system based on killing mobs over a certain HP threshold, but the only reason you'll discover this is because you saw someone else use it or you manage to kill several strong monsters without the buffs. This system in no way accounts for bonuses if you kill a mob significantly over the threshold by the way.

There's a whole tool levelling system which I can find no information on whatsoever. I went to the mod page for it and the information it gave me was of no help at all.

There's a rune and affix system but no guides on how to do it.

And most damning of all in my opinion-There's apparently a boss order. As in, there's a specific order to which you're supposed to fight the mobs in the game, and there's no in-game indication as to what that is other than summoning the bosses and looking at their HP Bars.

The developer of the pack, Union, promised to make a series showing how to play the pack/doing his own playthrough, and after nine months there's no sign of it. It's possible some of the information that's sorely lacking in the pack itself is available on the discord, but if I have to join a discord in order to play a Minecraft modpack, I consider that a failing of game design.

I did not have to join a RLCraft discord to progress in RLCraft.

Aesthetics 3/5

Fortunately the Aesthetics of the pack are more reasonable. It looks quite nice with caves that are fun to explore (if not for all the monsters) and varied in design, with prismarine caves, granite caves, stalactites, naturally generating stone stairs and slabs, etc.

The tooltips also add a lot of RPG flavour. The rarities assigned to the items and the borders that surround them feel natural and would be easy to dismiss as simply vanilla behaviour, even though they aren't. It doesn't reinvent the aesthetic wheel, but it does a good job for the pack it's trying to be.

Performance/Stability 4/5

Performance can be a bit tight on lower end computers, but all things considered I think it runs pretty well for a quite heavy modpack. I didn't notice any real significant stutters or frame drops while playing, nor did I experience any crashes.

Closing Thoughts

In the end, I simply cannot in good faith recommend for anyone to play this pack. I'm all for brutally challenging packs, but only if they actually give you a path to move forward. A modpack should be entirely self contained, and if the only way to figure out how to play a pack like this is to join a discord-That's just not good enough.

Despite it being such a short pack to complete (~60ish hours for my playthrough, including grinding out the last couple items for completion's sake), it was still one of my favorites. It's highly focused on quests of adventure and exploration rather than resource automation, starting you off with a fully functional storage system, power generation, and food. It has enough of a unique premise to stay fresh throughout the entire pack.

If you make it through the entire pack without finding some of the trophies, don't be afraid to look up where they are - they can be a bit out of the way at times, and this pack works best if you're only playing while you're having fun. There's at least one video on youtube that lists all of their locations.

GTNH is without a doubt the best pack I've ever played. Some things in the early game are grindy but the sense of accomplishment you get when completing big goals is unlike any other modpack. I have put more time into this pack than any other and its not close

TerraFirmaCraft on itself is a very attractive mod, for various reasons. But in my opinion, the TFC endgame is really lacking. TerraFirmaGreg has done a very good job on adding more to the engame, adding GregTech machines. As expected of a GregTech modpack, it is really grindy, but this only makes it a better feeling of acomplishment when concluding your objectives. I personally think that the GT early game in the pack could be a little more forgiving.

RLCraft Dregora is a continuation to the well hated and over hyped/downloaded modpack for minecraft. From the start you are greeted with new world generation and structures that would be fun to explore if it wasn’t for the whole environment wanting to kill you. After dying and some more dying over and over from literally doing anything like mining stone or being exposed to sun in plains for little too long, you quickly realise exp is needed for wearing or wielding and using anything. So you are forced to waste so much time killing weak animals or the harder way, making a grinding spot in dungeons with monsters that one hit you. When you are finally getting your stuff together, like leather armor you understandably die to everything, then you got to iron, you die to everything, then to diamond, suprisingly everything still makes you go back for your items. After that you made it to very powerful armor that took you some time to make, called manyullyn. The durability on chestplate was like around 500 and couldn’t be enchanted. My friend also made a very powerful armor, draconic armor. We one time went into freezing cold dungeon where we helped ourselves with lava buckets. From what my other friend told me at the end of the dungeon he found a battle tower boss that after killing it, he gave him ultra op weapon that mined stone 3×3 and dealt horrendous amounts of hp. (Your attack level was not needed to use this weapon)The final thing that made us stop playing was a particular tower with portal at the bottom of it. Me and my friend fell into it and got teleported into horrible dimension where the most horrendous monsters resided. They were the most unfair creatures we have ever seen, we couldn’t even outrun them as they were teleporting to us. After dying and losing our valuable stuff it was over. There was no way of getting it back from them. He begged our friend host to give him creative so he could get his items back. He was like “nuh uh”. After watching him struggle and laughing at our misery he finally gave us creative and said that this modpack is a total failure. We then proceeded to deeper layers of the dungeon where we had laughable fps to the mere amount of mobs that were spawning in one chunk. We bombed the entire place. Then we flied outside and with the power of commands, host dissapeared entire building, spawned tnt and… It was his first server that he deleted from his computer. As an experienced modded minecraft player with strong knowledge of old and new mods with likings to hard minecraft modpacks. I will never give fourth Chance for Shivaxi if it comes to RLCraft. I will still make fun of RLCraft, hate and discourage other players from playing it.

Starting off strong, the current state of this mod pack is impressive, laying a solid foundation for future growth. Not only is it a reverse playthrough experience, but it very much resonates with a single word: Escape. Once you play for a while you very quickly realize that this isn't a finished mod pack yet, which is completely acceptable considering what it currently offers and what it could bring to the table. It successfully builds a sense of challenge and danger with every step, encouraging risky maneuvers for faster progress at the cost of potentially losing everything.

The overall difficulty and balance I would say is a mixed bag. While there are enjoyable mechanics and adaptable play styles, some of the enemies currently feel skewed when it comes to gameplay. For example, the basic Flayed enemies are well-designed as swarm-type mobs, but their damage output makes them disproportionately threatening, even when encountered alone. On the other hand, newer mobs like the Revenants strike a good balance. They aren't overly fast but can blink to the player, staying close. Their low damage output combined with a moderate HP pool makes them deceptively dangerous if you allow them to swarm.

The look and feel of the Nether and other biomes provide a massive level of immersion. However, there are a few areas that could be refined, such as the Erebus. Transitioning from the brightly lit Nether into pitch darkness feels abrupt, especially when considering the presence of the Deep Dark. For a location that has a ton of plants and wildlife, it'd be nice to see even a bit of base lighting, even if only dim light. 

I will say that I was unable to experience the full potential of the mod pack due to the heavy shader pack provided, which can be demanding on system resources, particularly for AMD users (Nvidia users may have a smoother experience.) It might be worth seeing if the pack can't support a few different types of shader packs, ranging from the default one it uses now to a much lightweight variant of it. This would allow for a good amount of players to still get the feel and effects the shaders provide, which I feel is a major key to the level of immersion this mod pack can provide.

In terms of replayability, this mod pack seems best suited for speedrunners rather than casual players. However, I do feel that it's a good pack for everyone to at least try once or twice. Even for a casual Minecraft player, this could be viewed as a "Dark Souls" level speedrun pack, which can provide a different experience than you'd be used to. That being said, in no way does this factor detract the quality the mod pack provides. The mod pack's mechanics, such as death systems and the one-hour time limit, are perfectly tailored for speedrunning, achieving their intended purpose seamlessly.

The only other point of information I'd like to see touched up on is the documentation. While the existing guide book covers basic information, I feel that it misses some crucial information for progression, especially since newer updates introduce new mechanics, mobs, and routes. I do agree that some of the information can be discovered simply by playing the game long enough, I also feel that your standard player isn't going to want that trial and error experience, especially in a speedrun setting. 

Overall, this is a strong mod pack deserving an 8.5/10 in its current state. I can easily see it reaching a 9 to 9.5/10 with continued development. Though there are areas that need fine-tuning, the progress it's had so far suggests these can be fixed and/or improved upon in the future. Definitely worth taking a look at!

I played this modpack like 4 months ago with a group of friends and we absolutely loved this modpack. It's a zombie survival modpack with loads of good mods, incredible armors, but the best part about it is a world with interesting places that makes you actually want to explore to and do stuff at!

One the things I find really annoying with Minecraft mods, is that usually they expect you to make a base that you expand and add more to with the tech stuff or the building stuff, and while I love that, its kind of what Minecraft was originally about, but at the same time this modpack with it's focus on exploration and going to other structures to progress is so much more fun and an interesting change from other modpacks. This reason is the same reason why I love games like Terraria.
That being said this modpack isn't without it's issues, and the biggest one is the enemies and bosses, there's definitely some cool different enemies, but the majority of differences are not really interesting stuff like their speed and damage, which isn't all that fun as it makes it so there's pretty much nothing you can do against those enemies except box yourself in and fight where they can't hurt you, I wish there was something the enemies did to make them challenging in a different way that's not unfair to the point you have to resort to boring solutions like I just mentioned. I also kind of dislike how useless it is to actually work on cool new machines, which yes I praise this mod for it's incredible exploration, but I still want a incentive to create a permanent machine spot to support that exploration, all the machines really serve a purpose for is ammo production, since the materials you could get to get better armor is able to be gotten by just exploring, which I find fine, I mean maybe there should be some better balancing with that, but I thing there should be another reason to work on tech that isn't way too important to force you into tech, but still help you with the main exploration.

Either way if you want to try a minecraft modpack, do this one it's good compared to a lot of other ones.

I love this modpack!!, I have a cheap laptop and it runs perfectly fine!!! 👍👍👍 Would recommend getting this ModPack !!