Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

I played this pack at the request of a friendgroup - on a purely objective level, I do think the aesthetics of the pack are high-effort, with almost wholesale retexturing of a lot of base game stuff (I personally didn't care for it)

Everything else about the pack felt very low effort. Tons of duplicate content between mods, Cobblemon just randomly dropped in, lots of attempts at the Stardew Valley theme with little to no substance behind them, the list goes on. Some of these things are inherent in a kitchen sink pack, and I have no real issue with the concept of a kitchen sink pack, but the whole thing just feels like it was tailored to have every buzzword possible to get people to download it - no matter how much they end up not enjoying the pack.

Nomifactory is the updated version of my favorite pack of all time (Omnifactory), which means it's also my favorite pack of all time. Completely tech-focused, tons of custom content, forks of mods to optimize the game and fix longstanding issues, progression tiering and a questbook that are intuitive and provide a clear guide as to what you should be working on next.

Additionally, building tools and blocks are given to the player essentially free, which is a design choice more packs should make! Especially grindy 'expert' packs; building is the way I avoid burnout when I'm playing packs like these, and having a chisel with durability or needing to find rare materials just to build with just makes me burn out on packs faster.

KubeJS is the mod for modpack authors - it lets you customize basically everything about mods and even lets you add completely custom content, to a startling degree.

However, the documentation is in absolutely dire state and the only real way to learn how to use the more powerful tools available is ask for help in a discord channel.

This was an okay pack that I ended up dropping because of Abyssalcraft - it just wasn't very fun for me and shoggoths were incredibly annoying.

Aside from that, the pack integrated mods into progression very well and was fun up to that point!

Overall a very good and customizable recipe viewer - you can add subpanels to each side, customize as much as you want, and more.

As a mod/pack developer, I had a couple gripes with it based on edge cases; EMI's keybinds are separated from the normal keybind menu, meaning players who are used to JEI will change JEI's keybinds (as EMI layers on top of JEI for addon compatibility!) instead of EMI and get confused. EMI also does a strange thing with tag coercion (recipes with inputs that can accept multiple items get automatically combined into a tag, even if the underlying data is not a tag) which although VERY edge casey does end up being annoying for me specifically.

Overall though a very good mod, especially for lookup and crafting history which I use FREQUENTLY.

Beautiful animal models with great sizes that feel realistic, the animations and behaviors are also incredibly smooth. The animals behave how you would expect, though Jaguars are only hostile when they're completely starving. I wish this was configurable as more aggressive cats would fit my pack better.

There are place-able pelts and a craft-able decorative ivory block set. The ivory itself is obtained through a trust mechanic with the live animals, where you feed them to gain trust and they allow you to cut off a portion of their horns/tusks (with a chance of angering them and requiring more food to calm them). This may be a reference to the dehorning done by conservationists and is a nicer gameplay alternative to poaching the animals. There are also some armor, weapon, and utility pieces that can be crafted that feel very thought out and not overpowered.

They also have client-side config options for disabling some screen effects to reduce motion sickness, a very nice addition I appreciate! Spawn weights and whether an animal spawns at all is controlled by their common config.

At the time of this review, they had just wrapped up their first batch of animals in what is referred to as the Safari update. They have a very clear roadmap on their discord showing they have many more animals planned. I won't spoil them here, but it looks like they plan on adding around 6 animals per update (5 animals and one ambient bird), with each update being themed around a specific region. I'm very much looking forward to the future updates!

I spend most of my modded time in Create Astral, Arcane Engineering, Vault Hunters. I wanted to try something brand new and liked the thought that this was quest based and it does hold your hand a bit at the beginning, but as i got into chapter 2 i found myself using google/co-pilot to figure stuff out. Finally hit a breaking point after not being able to get sludge into the dissolution chamber for creation of cobblestone and spent **** near an hour troubleshooting and it was eventually giving me a headache. Tried using pipes, different placement, etc.. Once i reach this point i just uninstall the game/mod. Waste of my time as it is way too much research and less playing the game.

This mod has beautiful biomes with varied terrain. It includes not only the classic Overworld land biomes, but also cave biomes, ocean biomes, and some Nether biomes. The Prismachasm cave biome is my absolute favorite of the bunch! An amazing biome mod, I highly recommend it if you're looking for a lot of biome diversity.

While the original devs announced they are stepping away from the project, an experienced dev has taken over the project for 1.21+. Their additions so far match the feel of the original lineup, loving the new wisteria on 1.21.

While the concept of this mod sounds useful in theory, the bloated micro-transaction shop that tags along with the peer-to-peer gameplay causes problems. Often times it seems the shop menu is still invisible in the background while I play with friends, leaving floating text/icons or offset player models in GUIs/menus. Do yourself a favor and use one of the many peer-to-peer alternative mods. E4MC and Cloudflared are some great options.

What is it ?

A mod adding mobs which could have been, but were never truly allowed into the game as others took their place instead;
It features a close interpretation of each mob vote contestants who previously lost , alongside structures and extra items.

What does it offer ?

Mobs taken straight up from the various mob votes, with one or two extra features to go with some of them.

I will talk below about my thoughts on all the creatures added by this mod (from most recent mob vote to oldest) :

The Crab :
An ambient mob, which can leave a large claw after his death, which can be used to make a reaching potion to get extra range for both combat and mining/building

The Tuff Golem :
Acts as a way to display items through a mob. It does what you expect it to
The Rascal :
A creature that you have to find three times inside a mineshaft in order to get a bundled reward.
Specific issues with rascal -> when used in combination with mods adding their own custom mobs to mineshafts, the rascals are often the only ones actually witnessed there (I have noticed that when using Alex's mobs, which has its lot of issues, it seems I'm forced to make the ghostly creatures appear in general caves if I want to see them alongside rascals within the same pack)

The Glare :
A way to know a place is too dark to prevent night monsters from appearing, it's about it in terms of use for this mob
The Copper Golem :
This one is a bit of a special case as Minecraft brought them back in very recent versions with a different chest-sorting behavior;
Here they act as redstone randomizers, randomly pressing copper buttons around them while oxidizing slowly over time (they can be found within custom village structures as fully oxidized statues)

The Moobloom :
A flower-planting cow. On the side, this mob is linked to the addition of a new decorative flower (the buttercup) and a beekeeper villager profession, which buys some flowers and sell honey in various forms
The Iceologer :
I used to think they made him too resilient, but I've just tested the last 1.21 version of the mod and it seems they decided to reduce its health, I think it's better this way especially considering that it made previous fights with him feel slugish.
That said I still personally don't really like that they decided on keeping the Minecraft Dungeons artstyle instead of readapting it for Minecraft's, it feels a bit too smooth/bland compared to the other mobs, but maybe that's just me, and I really don't like that it has an instant-freeze attack which can't be avoided at all. On death they give a totem of freezing, which is just a totem of undying variant with slight differences

The Mauler :
A neutral creature only hostile towards small animals, they can be given magical items to eat which can be turned into experience on their death or if you use glass bottles on them
The Wildfire :
A Nether mini boss concept which never got to exist (in the main game that is), added in his own structure instead of the nether fortress it was supposedly going to be added to originally, this creature has a close quarters area attack (a groundpound which can push you into the lava collumns in its arena), can shoot fireballs and summon blazes to call for help (but not too often as some other mods do); Killing him grants you fragments of his crown, that you can be crafted back into its original form to get it for yourself (grants fire resistance, which goes down rapidly after taking a bath in lava similarly to the turtle shell underwater; Works a bit less though, since being on fire is a state which tends to linger a bit even after getting out of fire-damaging areas).
Making it so the Wildfire's shields get slowly removed as you naturally fight it instead of granting him Minecraft Dungeons-like shield which need to be broken first before you can deal any damage makes the fight more smooth (serving more as an indicator of how far you're into the battle instead), which I honestly prefer and makes this wildfire one of my favorite "nether knight" concept

The Illusioner :
Another special case, as it was never even proposed as a mob vote candidate but was discarded due to technical constraints, the one added by this mob is heavily inspired by its Minecraft Dungeons incarnation in its looks and the way it creates actual clones instead of fake mob renders, I feel like Minecraft could actually add the illusioner this way in the base game if they ever made an update for him; He has his own totem variant called the Totem of Illusion, which is a modified totem of undying, meant to trigger in battle to trick your enemy when you get cornered

In conclusion

I think this mod is honestly decent even if it certainly feels a bit generic in terms of the additions added to some of the mobs; outside of that, it does what you would expect from it, and kept improving over time.
Edit : The configs are quite nice lol, don't remember why I forgot to even mention them, I again wish you could configure illusioner and iceologer waves with more precision than just a yes/no answer to their presence within raids.
I personally don't think adding a custom structure for the Iceologer nor Wildfire was necessary as they would work better as naturally-spawning mobs within vanilla environments I feel, but that could just be the way I see it.

please ignore that I forgot about the Zombie Horse