Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Ok so this is going to be a bit of a long review, as this mod touches on a topic of game design in modpacks that really bothers me.
First of all, I love temperature thirst mods that make survival harder. They can be great fun when done right. It enhances survivalist modpacks and makes you really feel like you're fighting against the elements. It pairs especially well with season mods. Trying to find a cave to warm up in when you're caught in a snowstorm? It just tickles the primitive parts of the human brain that scream "Ug survive, ug make fire."
But the keyword here is "done right." Barely any modpack actually puts effort into testing and configuring TAN, which makes the experience insufferable. And that's due to the mod coming with terrible default configs. At the default rates, stepping outside at noon will almost instantly make you suffer from heatstroke. Wading across a river in the middle of summer gives you hypothermia. And getting caught in a snowstorm? Instant death. You're basically immediately taking damage. And so pack devs throw this mod into their pack without any edits just to "make it harder." And that brings me to the second issue.
This mod doesn't fit 90% of modpacks it's used in. TAN is great for packs that are focused on hardcore primitive survival. But this requires integrating mechanics that makes it enjoyable to interact with TAN's mechanics and make it relevant. On it's own, a thirst bar is really just a second hunger bar. It's not very interesting. But if water is scarce in an apocalypse pack, or in space where you have to harvest and manage water from asteroids? Now that's interesting. You've tied water management to interesting gameplay. Same with temperature. The greatest implementation of temperature I've seen is in Winter Rescue where they had a custom mod for stormfronts, and blizzards sometimes lasted for days on end. You had to prepare ahead of time your food and campfire fuel. It made temperature a core part of gameplay. But when you just throw TAN into any random pack because "difficulty good," it ends up being an annoying mechanic that players eventually circumvent by using the temperature controlling baubles, making the mod irrelevant. This is partly the fault of the pack devs, but also partly the fault of TAN's lack of advanced configurability and variety of temperature management that isn't essentially "full immunity."
Newer versions of the mod seem to have somewhat fixed some of these issues, but I find myself switching to Survival Inc these days for my own projects. And if I find this mod in a pack using default configs, I'll straight up rip it out.

This review only applies to the 1.12 version as I haven't tried it on newer versions.
Clumps can significantly improve performance in situations where an area is generating lots of XP orbs, such as in mob farms. This is especially useful on servers. But this mod does it by replacing the XP entity, which can break mods that also rely on them. For this reason, if playing 1.12, you should use Fixeroo instead, which does the same thing without adding a new XP entity.

I've always hated mapping mods. Not because I don't like to know where I'm going, but because topographical maps ruin exploration. In modpacks where there is no exploration, then it doesn't really matter. But in packs where exploration is a key factor, and you've got loads of custom structures, things like journey map and xearos ruin the mystery of discovery (the entire point of exploration! Not to mention it's comparatively MUCH more performant). It also makes balancing structures harder as they're easier to find.
Enter Antique Atlas. It's balanced, comes in item form, only reveals vague biome style drawings, and has a very nice aesthetic. No more using the map to see everything around you for a thousand blocks. It allows you to easily navigate without ruining the experience. Every adventuring pack should use this instead. It also has CraftTweaker addons and support for RecurrentComplex if you do want to make some structures automatically discovered for easier locating.
The only downside is that it's harder to share markers/ waypoints as you can't just type in the coordinate to place them, but it's not a big deal imo.

MoC was one of my favorite mods when I first started modding, but as people familiar with it know, it was murder on performance. It also relied on the mob spawner mod which broke mob spawning of every other mod. MoC Extended fixes all that. Well, mostly. It now uses the vanilla spawning system and the lag is mostly gone now, but I still notice a moderate tps hit in mob dense areas, so limiting ambient mob spawns with another mod might be a good idea. MoC Extended also revamped many of the models and textures, so the aesthetics are much closer to more modern mob mods. Still one of the best mob mods available for 1.12. Did I mention there are fairy pegasi? There are fairy pegasi.

If you don't want to play HC but play on hard mode. Be prepared to die... a lot. Digging zombies right away, hordes constantly rushing you no matter if you are quiet or loud. Killing them does nothing.

Build away from cities?

• Yeh it doesn't matter. Youll end up with 30/40 zombies beneath your base anyways.

Can you build a base?

• If you sky base sure. Mining zombies make it not possible.

Health system?
Don't get me started on this... armor or no armor head hits seem to be the most common thing to happen, next to chest hits.

All n all... it is fun. But definitely not suited for any HC play much less hard play. If you wanna die a lot go for it.

TL;DR if you came here and wonder "should I try this pack?" yes you should. "will I like this pack?" well this I can't answer lmao.

To put things into perspective: I played somewhere around 300 hours and got to chapter 19 (out of 30), then quit because of lack of free time and lag induced by Thaumcraft.

The pack starts with dimension exploration (Nether, TF optional, Atum, Erebus optional, Aether, Iceika and the End) followed by a short technical block, at the end of which ME Interfaces are unlocked in chapter 13 (around 80-250 hours into the pack depending on how focused you are). Then comes the key thing of this pack which is passiving, aka you have to set up lines producing every item in the game from raw items, and scale them throughout the pack. After a bit more dimension hopping in chapter you begin the magic block, which involves having to set up many processing lines in those mod's machines and altars, which then requires scaling the prior lines higher, and higher, and higher... Most of the pack's remainder has this gameplay loop: unlock new item, try to passive it, (sometimes) find out you're out of 100500 different components, upscale their production. This is further amplified in chapter 24 and beyond when Mystical Agriculture is unlocked, with apparently "hundreds of thousands of an item being used for literally one craft which you have to do a few hundred times".

Despite this loop, there is almost no time spent doing nothing and waiting on the recipes to complete. I probably only afk'd a couple hours total (+ however much time was spent dimension hopping if that can be considered afk'ing). There is like 1 recipe early on which takes 10 minutes to execute, and then not setting up resource generation will force you to be in the cave for a few hours, but afterwards I haven't ever ran into this again.

Also wow this quest book. This quest book is legitimately amazing. The best one I've seen in any pack (I haven't played GTNH as early game things like steam age GT is too annoying for me to go through)

Now for the bad parts of the pack in my opinion:

• Despite this innovative gameplay loop, the gameplay ends up pretty repetitive as you have to set up hundreds of automatic crafting tables from the mod of your choice, and then dozens (or hundreds) of automatic runic altars, thaumatoriums, etc.
• The pack also includes a quite basic collection of mods that are present everywhere, so if you're into "inherently more interesting" mods this is not for you (some examples of this include Extreme Reactors, Galacticraft, IE), although they're usually turned on their head which is quite nice.

First of all: I am a pretty slow player (while playing many different expert packs), I played somewhere around 90 hours (a large % of which was building) and got to the beginning of Mekanism (which is I think around midgame, although maybe I was still in pre-early game! not sure), then quit because of ridiculous amount of apparent grind required to go through the midgame.

Before I go through the downsides, I would like to highlight some cool things I really liked myself:

• Requiring the use of certain dimensions to do Blood Magic (undergarten) and Occultism (atuum) before lategame
• Minor amount of required bees (I kinda hated it at first but then decided it was actually ok)
• Lack of power storage until midgame (also both a blessing and a curse, blessing because it forces you to think about cool things)
• This was the first time I saw create and actually made me kinda like it (now you won't catch me download a create pack like, ever lmao)

Now, for the downsides...
Every time I hear people say anything about this pack I just bring a whole list of random bs that the pack does:

• Thing ZERO: Apotheosis mod in the expert pack so you randomly get owned by bees
• The first thing about this pack is that it keeps the quests from Enigmatica 6 (Non-expert) and only adds a few own quests. Since progression order is often inverted between E6 and E6E the quest book is only there to mislead you lmao.
• As a consequence, it's very hard to know about the existance of some recipes. Example: to complete the tutorial up to Steel you need somewhere around 10 Hearts of the Sea (see also review by Flandre that goes more in depth on this). There is a recipe for HotS that is done in a Blood Magic machine, which is usually available after you progress a bit into BM, so you immediately go like "yea nah" and then spend 10 hours looking for buried treasures. Yea I think that machine is the intended way to get HotS's, but requires some ridiculously rare ores only found beneath oceans (thankfully there is Scannable, but not going to lie, I had to google how to obtain that ore and the only thing that popped up was a reddit post). "Awesome" start already.
• The quest book for magic mods is also really bad. It does not explain anything at all and when the mod doesn't either (see: Eidolon)
• The pack includes Bountiful to skip parts of progression. For example I was able to make an Atomic Disassembler 20 hours in, even though Atomic Alloy is supposed to require Fission, and I've seen ppl get things like Dimensional Storage Stabilizers from the board. This also made me spend a lot more time then I should have since you need to get a power generator early, and I ended up buying parts of waterwheels from bounty boards before I could make one (then someone on Discord said there are solar panels from Engineer's Decor, which is very much not a mod I would think of checking, bruh, fml).
• Talking to more experienced players, apparently backpacks are the primary endgame way of storing items (also compacting drawer requires elven trade so your early-mid game storage is just ***); many also whined about RS being worse than AE2 (maybe, I don't have a lot of experience with the former).
• And more...

I think this should give a good perspective on how this pack actually plays.

The most fun I've had with modpack ever! Guns and more guns. Loot goblins dream.

so many features, bug fixes, utilities, ect. it contains pretty much everything, and keeps the mod count lower than needed.

I simply adore this modpack, been playing it with friends for months and i've been telling everyone about it.
It's so simple at first, gives you time to explore and relax until you wanna get into more complicated parts of the modpack. I would 100% reccomand to play with friends as it really makes it 10x better.