Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

The player animations look odd and unnatural, the Curse of Uwuification is BEYOND annoying, and some mutant mobs bypass claims and destroy everything. If it weren't for these, I'd rate the whole pack 5 stars.

The good parts are many, the pack is fun, theres something for everyone. For tech fanatics like me, theres Tech Reborn, Indrev, and Modern Industrialization. For magic fans, theres Archon, Botania, and Spellblades. The story progression is fantastic, the boss fights are fun, the new biomes are wonderful, and there's always something to do.

Pretty cool selection of mods with plenty of structures and biomes but the question is at best half baked.

My friends and I recently played this mod and loved it! I would highly recommend playing this mod with your friends. This mod offers a new twist on the average Minecraft infection mod based on The Flood from Halo.

Positives The models and animations are beautiful, especially with shaders. The gameplay is shockingly balanced for vanilla. There is a wave system & many different enemy behaviours that allows enemies to slowly gain strength with allows you to fight off the various Flood Forms. The guns in the mod are lots and lots of fun to use aswell.

Negatives From what I've seen, I don't have much to say about the negatives. I would love to see more Flood forms added, and maybe some distinction from the actual Halo lore. The existing Flood forms can evolve and adapt, but it would be very interesting to see more critters added. I would also like to add the fact that the mod offers no structures , biomes, or "gravemind-like" entity like other infection mods do. You could argue that the mod stands out by not implementing these features, but I thinkthe better option is to add them in a unique and fun way.

I really wanted to like the pack from the description given.

But went started rough and went downhill from there. Initially I was unable to join the world after creating it because xaero's map mods were out of date and crashed the game on joining then I was unable to pull up the crafting grid provided by the philosopher's stone because 5 other things were bound to the same key, I'm sorry but those fall on the modpack author to fix prior to publishing.

The first chapter of creating something from nothing of the void to be teleported to a superflat earth. The idea of gravity was cool but fell short from incosistent logic from fall damage and controlling the gravity of other entities.

I called the pack quits after dying in the not void and being teleported to the center of the map, several thousand blocks from home in some direction I don't know.

"Dawn of the Flood" is a Minecraft mod based on Halo, specifically the "Flood" which is an intergallactic enemy from the original halo lore and franchise. Given this fact, Dawn of the Flood executes it's task with quite some changes, whether or not being fantastic mechanics or unique ideas and easter eggs. Given the fact that I'm a Dev, I can't really give my whole opinion on this, so I'll just summarize it. "Dawn of the Flood" is a mod that shows the struggles of Steve and the world that revolves around him, trying to survive against this oppressing force, which is the fearsome flood, that thrives for total domination, In this depressing and world ending timeline, Steve tries to survive as best as he can and eliminate the Flood once and for all, but even he knows that this ain't just an Ender Dragon. No, the Flood is almost impossible to kill by himself, and he needs to get his arsenal high quickly, because the real Flood won't wait on him, it will slowly put it's hands on the earth even more as the waves pass by. As the world continues to fall apart, we see him preparing more and more against the flood, preparing to face them and so be it! Because it will either be total eradication or total salvation. Will he get to live another day? You decide.

Very nice and well made mod pack. For me I have played halo for most of my life and have enjoyed the flood specifically. This mod adds quite a bit whether that is different types of flood forms. Waves of enemies. An entire common enemy system (One of my favorite parts). And most of all some good old flood killing guns.

Playing with modded Minecraft is one heck of an awesome experience (or... it can be). But there is a bit of a problem... most mods add plenty of items to your game, usually both items as well as new crafting ingredients. For example techmods have a tendency to add all sorts of new metal ores to your world, magic mods might provide a plethora of magical items and tools (not to mention ingredients)....

Question: where are you going to store all of that? Because trust me when I say that a vanilla double chest is going to run out of storage space really quickly.

Matter energy networks

Fortunately there's a solution: matter energy. Applied Energistics 2 ("AE2") introduces us to an alien technology which turns out to be very useful for our logistic needs. You see, instead of storing your items in chests you're now able to "digitize" them and store them onto a storage unit instead. These storage units can be used in "ME chests" which give you access to one storage unit. Or you can use so called "ME drives" which provide access to 10 storage units at once.

Simply put: a full storage room filled to the brim with double chests can now be replaced with one single block: the ME drive.

Very satisfying mechanics

This mod tries to combine "real world" computer mechanics with those of Minecraft, and I really enjoy this part. You see... it all starts with finding meteors which contain strange "presses". You can use these presses with a so called inscriber which allows you to turn use a press to create a circuit. You do this by applying a specific material, materials like gold, diamond or certus quartz. Once you have a circuit you can now make yourself a processor; this is done by combining the circuit with printed silicone and one redstone dust. You do realize that silicone is the key element of most computer chips, right?

And that's roughly how you get started. Set up your network (make sure you got enough power) and from there on out you'll have easy and quick access to your entire storage.

The best part? You don't even have to bother too much with your existing storage either: just use so called 'import busses' on your current chests so that you gain access to them within your ME network as well, easy!

Ever wanted to have access to your storage from within other dimensions? Well... now you can.

I honestly cannot see myself play modded without this one.

Long before Minecraft gave us the official recipebook us modded players already had something much better: Just Enough Items.

The perfect crafting tool

Just Enough Items ("JEI") is all about giving you a full overview of all the items in your game, both vanilla and modded, and this includes their crafting recipes which you can easily look up thanks to some useful keyboard shortcuts. If you have opened a recipe while you also have a crafting grid active then JEI can check if all the required items are in your inventory. If they are you can click the "+" icon to place them onto your crafting grid, but if you don't have all the items then JEI will mark the missing ones in red as soon as you hover your mouse over this "+ icon".

Keyboard shortcuts

What makes JEI really powerful is its use of keyboard shortcuts. Do you have an item in your inventory and wondering how to craft it? Press 'r' and you'll look up the recipe. But wait! There's more: if you press 'u' instead you'll get an overview of recipes which use the item as an ingredient. So if you have an item of which you know that it's an ingredient... this is the perfect way to check its uses.

And keep in mind that this mechanic isn't limited to just items, it'll apply to liquids and gasses as well, which will come in very handy while playing with tech mods.

Fun fact: many mods actually rely on JEI to be present so that you can use its features to dive further into the mod at hand.

See, JEI also allows you to look up items on a per-mod basis. In the JEI overview you can search for mods by using the "@" character, but can also search tooltips, the ore dictionary and/or the creative tab. And of course these searches can be combined.

If you play modded Minecraft then this is a mod you don't want to miss out on!

In EvilCraft you follow in the footsteps of an adventurer who has discovered "dark gems", just like you. Deep underground there are now "dark ore" blocks which roughly behave in the same way as redstone: they start emitting particles if you step on them. If you mine them you'll get dark gems, and these items are very special and very powerful.

To get started with this mod from scratch you should combine the dark gem with an apple, this will spoil the apple. Seriously: don't try to eat that! Instead, feed it to an animal and make sure you bring a book with you. As soon as the animal dies you'll see some kind of strange "portal", hurry: and throw the book in! This will get you the "Origins of Darkness" manuscript, which is essentially the guide for this mod.

This guide literally reads as if it were written by someone who's been here before: they discovered the dark gems and started experimenting with it to see what it could do, and fortunately for us they documented everything.

From repairing items, to "raising" the dead!

What I really like about this mod is that it'll provide useful features the very moment you make your first device. That is... if you make the right decisions of course; it's perfectly possible to pick the "wrong" device to start with, thus making it much harder to expand on what you already have.

Seriously: you'll want a blood infuser as your first device, this chest allows you to infuse items with blood, but also allows you to repair items as well. Don't you have enough iron to warrant making an anvil just yet? Well.. maybe this can help keep you fix up your (iron?) armor & tools.

Capturing spirits

There are a lot of general QOL features which this mod adds. Obscured glass can help you build mob spawners: this glass lets light in, but blocks the sun which prevents hostile mobs from spawning. Or what about the dark tank which can hold any kind of liquid you need?

But things will become really interesting once you learned about vengeful spirits. You see.. when mobs (or players!) die their spirit remains in our realm for a few moments. And dark gems can help you create tools which can capture that spirit! This can help you when you use your "spirit boxes" ("the box of eternal closure") in a so called spirit furnace; this allows you to revive the spirit and kill it all over again, and again and again. Why? Easy: to get more drops out of your mobs!

Of course all of that only works with enough blood....

I just spent a long time writing a very long review for this pack, then accidentally navigated away and lost it all, along with my energy to write. So here's the short of it.

Gameplay: Very good, 4 stars. It is a very highly polished take on the classic modded skyblock genre. No crazy balance issues, lots of freedom in how you tackle objectives, and very good optional quests to guide you if you want to use them. The quests touch on a lot of different ways to get to do the same things, but you never have to do more than one way to progress the questline. Great for newbies and veterans alike. Due to the nature of kitchen sink packs, there are many mods you could be incentivized to completely skip if you like to gun straight for the endgame solutions. But for the most part, crafting recipes naturally guide you through some interesting mods you otherwise might not have used. If you treat it like what it is, a kitchen sink pack, you can enjoy it a whole lot. You can tell a lot of effort was put into the little changes that make progressing through the quests and different tech a very polished experience.

One other thing I did like is that flight isn't incredibly hard to get. I enjoy when a skyblock pack gives me at least some form of flight early on. It makes everything a whole lot easier.

Aesthetics: A solid 3 stars. Nothing to complain about. Most things are as they come from the individual mods. There is no general aesthetic theme or anything, just good ol' minecraft. There are some cool graphics in the quest menu, and the sky looks pretty. Standard modded minecraft otherwise, for the most part.

Performance and Stability: Perfect 5 stars. This pack blows many others out of the water in terms of performance. Of course, the fact that it is a skyblock helps, but this pack is still very optimized even among modded skyblocks. It's very light on RAM, and the FPS is through the roof. To be fair, I have not played many skyblocks on 1.20.1, but of the few I have played, this is one of the most optimized. Without adding any mods or changing any settings, I was getting a constant 144fps, which isn't common with large modpacks no matter what hardware you have, and very impressive. The server-side performance is just as good. I ran a server that had maybe 15-20 people on at the peak, and it was running at maximum TPS the entire time. It still is. This pack is so fast, when I first booted it up, a cop knocked on my front door and gave me a speeding ticket.

Overall: 5 stars. Like I mentioned, this pack is great for beginners and modded minecraft pros alike, as long as you are a fan of kitchen sink modpacks. There are so many options to choose when going up the tech tree. The huge amount of high quality quests help a ton with both figuring out what to do next to progress and setting small goals for yourself if you have too many options available at once. It's easy to play by yourself or with friends since it's an easy pack to run.