Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Botania is one of the most well-designed magic mods in minecraft. While the gameplay and mechanics are slow (although rewarding), and some people may not like the design choice to have non-numerical mana, it has some of the most unique and fun mechanics in modded minecraft. Absolutely recommend trying it if you haven't already.

A few tweaks here and there would make the pack better but overall its the most fun ive had in Minecraft in a LONG time. It adds something that I felt was missing. Difficulty. Zombie can dig, you have to prepare and create machines. You WILL die a lot. Its a hard pack

Modded Minecraft can be difficult to get into. Popular modpacks often include tens of content mods, each fundamentally changing how Minecraft is played, which can get overwhelming. FTB Academy aims to bridge the gap of lightweight, beginner-friendly modpacks.

The gameplay is not stellar — it's a kitchen sink pack with a short mod list, which questionably includes Draconic Evolution, leading to some machine spam in the late game. What's special in this modpack is its rich guidance. It has the standard FTB Quests, which cover more items than usual, and pretty much all mechanics associated with that item is explained. Then it has a Guide, which is an in-game wiki complete with images, and Tutorials, which are annotated images, mainly for showing how to use the UI. Finally, before you even start the first day, you'll complete the School dimension, an interactive tutorial where you get to learn the very basics. The modpack makes no assumptions that the player knows anything about modded Minecraft, so it teaches mods like JEI and The One Probe as well.

Whether that's enough for a new player to finish this pack, I'm not sure, as I have some experience in modded already when playing this pack, and I think a lot of things in modded cannot be taught and must be learned from experience. But regardless of how much prior experience you have, this pack is great if you want to learn new mods. I had fun playing Astral Sorcery for the first time here.

Create is an innovative mod that promises a lot of potential, but because it's so open-ended, its progression can feel lacklustre. You're offered all these machines, but you're not sure what to do with them. Create: Above and Beyond is an official take on linear Create gameplay to showcase what Create is capable of. It's so successful that it has inspired countless other spinoffs.

The recipes for machines have become more expensive and complex, such that automation of their production would utilise almost all mechanics Create has to offer. All the different types of machines finally serve an overarching purpose, encouraging you to learn the intricacies of the mod, which is not difficult thanks to the ponder scenes. As a result, the modpack is beginner-friendly, yet you'll end up with a comprehensive understanding of Create, and a large factory that serves as your proof.

This modpack has an emphasis on the process of building the factory itself, which feels engaging. You'll fit together cogwheels and gearboxes to power belts, presses, and mixers along different axes of rotation. You'll figure out which combination of machines can interact with each other the right way to do what you want. If you like solving puzzles, this pack might be for you.

What I adore most about this modpack is the developers' relentless drive to improve it. After more than 5 years since its inception as Omnifactory, it's receiving not only bug fixes, but content updates focused on the quality-of-life of the modpack. They listened to players' experience to decide what to add.

It used to be that the endgame of Nomifactory required spamming tens or hundreds of the same machine to reach the required processing speed to finish the game, so they added Processing Arrays and eventually Gregicality Multiblocks. A single multiblock can now run up to 256 copies of the same recipe at once. AE2 without channels used to cause great amounts of lag, so it was forked to implement the optimisations and became AE2 Unofficial Extended Life. Players disliked the sided inputs and outputs of Deep Mob Learning, so again it was forked and became Deep Mob Evolution.

These forks are now used in other popular modpacks such as MeatballCraft and Antimatter Chemistry. Nomifactory is a gift to the 1.12 modded community.

One of my favorite pack. It has several things you can do in this pack. Building the factory, going to space, or even crafting creative items.
Oh, and there is a quest that guide you for each mods (although not all mods have quests).

Life in the Village 3 is the third Minecolonies-focused pack by dreams01. It's low tech - no RF/FE, no machines, and has no magic mods, either. It does utilize Create, and weapons are done using Tetra, so there's plenty of progression there.

There are tons of locations to discover, and you can use Productive Bees to help get resources to build your colony. (Necessary if you don't want to wait forever....) There are also a lot of decorative packs to make your colony look nicer. (Beautify, Chipped, a bunch of furniture mods...) I hadn't used some of them before and had a great time adding little (and big) touches to my colony.

There's a ton of quests, almost all of which give levels or coins for a shop, or both. Some items (such as waystones) are rarely found in the world and are uncraftable, instead being purchased from said shop. The first half or so of quests have good descriptions, but later quests get less and less, often just having the advancement text and nothing else.

There's a lot of focus on having companions - both human ones and animal ones, as well as being able to use the Minecolony guards as companions, too. Doggy Talents Next is in there.

Overall, it's a fun pack that has a nice combination of exploration and base building. It's great to have a pack that's focused on Minecolonies instead of it just being tossed in there. However, there are some downsides.

The Human Companion buildings are waaaay too common - it felt like you stumbled on them every 300 blocks or so. They also get pointed to by signposts, as they apparently count as a village? Which sucks when you first start out and are searching for villages. The various mods add tons of new enchanted books - dozens, in fact - and there's no way to cycle through villager trades. There definitely should be at least a cycle trades mod, if not full on Easy Villagers or similar. Trying to get the books I wanted (some of which were for a questline) was incredibly frustrating until I finally gave up and added a mod so I could cycle the trades.

Additionally, and a bigger issue imo, is that several of the quests in the book are unachievable. Changes to the modpack (like removing certain animals from Alex's Mobs or changing how mineshafts generate) make getting the items/locations you need impossible. Other quests have no descriptions and no JEI, making it difficult to figure out what to do for them (Phantasmic aka Netherific - look in the advancements for some hints).

I did report these issues on the discord, so hopefully it'll be fixed with the next release, though I believe most of the focus of the dev is on the next modpack, not this one.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing this pack, putting in about 200 hours. I completed most achievable quests, though I skipped some of the Alex's Mobs ones. Despite the issues I had with it, I overall thought it was an excellent pack and a great choice if you want to play Minecolonies.

Avoid this pack if you need technology or magic mods, or really love mechanical automation. Try it if you enjoy Minecolonies or want to try it out, love exploration, and don't mind a bit of mistakes in the quest lines. If you prefer more technology, the pack creator also has Industrial Village, which is Minecolonies + Immersive Engineering, by the way, though I can't say how good it is. (I am burned out and going to avoid Minecolonies for a little while, haha.)

Overall rating 5/5 because I enjoy it a lot I gave Gameplay, Aesthetics, Performance and Stability a 5/5. Gameplay is great but sadly it sucks u cant make high carbon alloy with create or immersive engineering but I get it, it is an important material for progression so it does make sense that u can get it from mini bosses and bosses themselves. Aesthetics everything is perfect nothing to say about that. Performance and Stability u can't play singleplayer if u have a weaker pc but that is no problem u can host a server and play there by yourself so it wont lag your PC. So I recommend it a lot but of course play it with friends cause it is much easier to progress and etc.

I really like the mod and have played it on multiple Modpacks. The different dimension and the aspects it adds work flawlessly. When finished it'd be a great mod, big issue is it has remained unfinished for way too long.
Spoilers about the last part I'd guess they just can't seem to finalize on an idea of what ending boss they would want and so they are stuck on a loop of fixing or smoothing other things instead of the "ending".
In my opinion they should stop updating it to newer versions, pick one MC version, finish it and then update it for preferred versions instead of chasing the newest compatibility. Having a completed mod would be nicer than it working smooth on "x" version.

With new combat system, this modpack is definitely great to play along with your friends, though it's pretty hard to fight the hordes in very begin of the game. However, the performance is a little unstable