Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

I played Vault Hunters with a friend, and while all the special made content (vaults, skills and so on) feels well-made and high quality, we ultimately stopped playing. This was do to a feeling of even though you spent some 40-50 hours in a world, you don't feel like you made any major progress. You rarely get a feeling of: "wow, this is a milestone". Of course you level up but except from the first few level, that doesn't feel very exciting.

Another problem with the pack is the recipes.
I usually play more classic expert modpacks, like DJ2 and E2E (which i have completed) and some gregtech modpacks, so I'm used to having difficult recipes but as you progress, you usually get the means to makes does recipes less demanding. In Vault Hunters, many modded recipes require gems found in the vault which in the beginning are pretty demanding. But the thing is, the recipes don't really get easier.
Before you even get access to a mod, you have to unlock it, which takes a good amount of grind but you this is actually one of the few parts of the mod I felt gave a sense of: "you have progressed". A mod like storage drawers takes quite a grind but when you finally unlock it you're happy, but then you see the a single compacting drawer takes the same amount of grind as a netherite chestplate in vanilla. Of cause a compacting drawer shouldn't be easy, but the cost of the recipe doesn't go down as it require alot of vault gems.
Vault gems are only found in randomly spawned rooms in the vault. Of cause you get fortune and so on, but the amount of gems you get increases very slowly. Way slower then the demand increases, which in the end means you got to run more vaults. Of cause that's the point of the pack, but having to grind for six hours for single drawer isn't fun, especially as the cost of the vault increases. This leads to you having to go out and grind for resources, sometimes for pretty long time when you need a chest worth of beetroot seeds and cocoa beans, which you don't have the means to automate, as that would require vault gems.

This pack starts out as a pack very firmly focused on exploration, with many dungeons and dimensions to explore. This pack makes Alex's Caves separate dimensions, as well as adds several other dimension mods. One of the interesting things is that to get Thermal Expansion ores, instead of mining, you have to run specific dimensional dungeons - a nice twist that emphasizes the exploration at the heart of the beginning of the pack.

And then you hit the crafting portion of the pack. Lots of Create, a bit of Thermal Expansion, tons of time spent in one place, crafting. This is the expert portion of the pack, and in my opinion, it felt like running into a wall at a sprint and coming to a dead stop. All the time was spent between two locations - my oil pump and my Create base. There were two more dimensions I had yet to open up, but by that point, I had lost interest.

I'm not a huge fan of expert packs, but I have enjoyed them in the past. This one just felt like a tonal whiplash, switching between the exploration focus to the 'stay in one place and craft' focus. If you think you can handle that better, I really enjoyed the first half of this modpack.

Time to complete: ~200 hours

StaTech Industry is basically just Modern Industrialization, plus some QoL mods, plus some weird extra mods added on to the side. Generally speaking, whether or not you like this pack will depend on whether or not you like Modern Industrialization.

For me, this meant it was a bit of a miss. I was intrigued by the idea of a modern-GregTech-but-different mod in Modern Industrialization, but I found the way that it handled overclocking to be very frustrating. I'm not familiar enough with MI to know if any substantial changes were made to the recipes in this pack, but it seemed like many of the recipes were probably default. The quest book primarily walks you through MI progression.

In addition to MI, there are some QoL mods included, such as Applied Energistics. Unfortunately the way MI's overclocking works, and the fact that most crafts required assembling in a machine rather than a crafting table, meant that trying to do any autocrafting via AE was more-or-less a nightmare.

The progression of the pack inexplicably uses Create for the first chapter and then more-or-less just leaves it behind immediately afterwards. This felt like a rather weird choice; I think it would have been better to just omit Create altogether, or to integrate it more in the pack's progression.

Finally, there were a handful of mods included that just felt out-of-place, or tacked on for no particular reason. These were generally not integrated into progression in any meaningful way, and served more as a distraction than having any useful purpose.

Time to complete: ~500 hours

DJ2 takes you on a tightly-tailored journey through a wide variety of mods. Progression is carefully structured to ensure a curated experience through each of the modpack's 30 chapters, with most chapters building on the work done in previous chapters. This progression applies not only to the tech aspects of the pack, but also to the exploration aspect, with various dimensions being gated behind achieving certain tech milestones, and then further tech advancement being gated by needing materials acquired through exploration.

The mods featured range from ubiquitous mods like Mekanism to less-frequently-seen mods like Bewitchment and Divine RPG. Many of the mods, especially those in later chapters, pose unusual-but-not-insurmountable automation challenges that helps to break up the typical endgame recipe-encoding-simulator portion of many expert modpacks.

If I had to choose a weak element for the pack, it would be the exploration segments, particularly those featuring the Divine RPG dimensions. The custom-made structures are really neat, but the mobs in these dimensions range from annoying-behavior-with-unbelievably-annoying-sound-effects to incredibly-frustrating-and-now-I-hate-all-ents. Practically speaking, though, these represent a small fraction of the time most players will spend playing the pack.

The username says it all, so just, I dunno, play it? It's fun as hell and the progression is real clean, config files are custom and fair, unlike the base game, the owners amazing, helping out when huge bugs like SIV beckon dupes happen

As I'm sure comes as a surprise to no one this is certainly not "the biggest modpack," however, it still falls into the many pitfalls of giant kitchen sink packs.
You have your standard annoyances, being spammed with books and inventory junk when you spawn in, your chat is filled with warnings and messages from various mods, redundant ores, loot tables clashing and filling up chests incredibly quickly, and overlapping hud elements in the GUI. Though I've seen worse, it's not pleasant.
However, what really bothers me is the lack of QOL features like controlling or a mods menu button, these are essentials in almost any modpack, much less a kitchen sink with the goal of high mod counts.

Gameplay wise there really isn't much to talk about, it took me all of 20 minutes to search for jei, find the recipes and emc values of projectE are unaltered, get a transmutation table, and of course, from there progression and balance are a non-factor for many mods.
Of course, if you simply want to use kitchen sinks like this to experience what the modded community has to offer, doing so through a pack with lots of mods that lets you become op through projectE and ae2 and the likes in my opinion is actually a great way of doing so, and I don't judge you for wanting to play this way.
However, I don't think this pack actually lets you do that very well, mods like projectE and ae2 are typically expected to come with a host of add-ons that allow them to be compatible with other mods, and generally make your life easier which are not present in this pack, something that hurts what I view as the one good purpose for "just throw it all in there" style kitchen sink packs with little to no customization.

On that front, as best as I can tell almost every mod is in its default state when you boot up your world, while CraftTweaker is present in the pack I couldn't find any recipe changes and the "scripts" folder looks to be empty.

The one goal, namesake feature, and stated purpose of this pack is its size, while the title "The Biggest Modpack" is transparently hyperbolic, where does it really stack up?
The version I played had 302 mods (according to Curseforge's Related Projects tab)
This is decent and it is more than the stated 250+ in its excerpt, but I personally would only barely consider it a big pack.

Here are some bigger packs that I would recommend instead, and how many mods the latest version has:
The Enigmatica Series - (E6) 367
The All The Mods Series - (ATM9) 422
Monumental Experience - 610
BeanPack: Regurgitated - 619
Starpack Titan - 650
The TNP: Limitless series - (TNP 7) 719
Mystics Monstrosity* - 1,091

• I've not played this pack myself

I love big kitchen sinks, I think packs with lots of mods, even with little to no customization can be a great way to learn about different mods and find out which ones you like and dislike while keeping the core sandbox feeling of Minecraft alive. However, when done poorly the result can be a buggy low-effort mess that runs the risk of making your experience worse than if you just played a small pack with the few mods you like.

Cuboid Outpost is a Psuedo-sky/stoneblock pack where you start in an outpost (that's more of a rectangular prism, to be honest) with the goal of escaping the endlessly superflat pocket dimension you're stuck in, with the help of posthumous instructions from a team of scientists. It's primarily focused around technology and building resource generating infrastructure.

Tutorialization is a strong point of the pack, especially as a lot of it is done through an entertaining narrative. All the core mods have extensive documentation on the basics and how to use them to progress - If you want to learn about mods and don't feel like playing FTB Academy or University, this is a great alternative for new players.

I wasn't feeling up to the end game creative item grind, but it's clearly optional and not presented as a FOMO "If you didn't do this did you really complete the pack?" obligation. I can't speak to the total time investment for that, but without going for the creative items my playthrough was probably around 50-60 hours long with a little goofing around.

Overall I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot if any of this sounded interesting!

Not a whole lot to say! The brunt of the pack after achieving omnipotence through ProjectE is exploring dimension mods, which vary in length and quality - lowest point of the pack was searching for a specific aspect in The Betweenlands, as well as hunting for a specific relic in Atum. Novel storyline told through quests.

It has lots of scripts and custom stuff made for it. Over 2000 lines of zenscript in only a single file.
Ice and Fire could be a bit more fair by spreading the danger dist to over 10k and setting random respawn range to 10k max distance from 0 0 0. Lycanites can be fun, but also seems to make life difficult when doing cave exploration early game. (no speedrunning and no 'pro' tactics)
Aside from that it can be a fun pack, especially after adding Journeymap to the game. But that would be modifying the pack, which I see as fine, as Minecraft is meant to be played how you want, not how others want. (for singleplayer at least) If its MP, I recommend teaming up with some peeps and going at it.
It has tons of changes since release that adds more fairness and some other unfairness too. (like nerfing xp farms)

Pack is still being updated. Im excited for the new update.

A generally well thought out collection of integrating existing mods and using custom contraptions.