Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

I will keep it short: Enigmatica 2 Expert took heavy notes from the grandfather of the genre; Infinity Evolved Expert, and fixed many issues while introducing very scant few new ones. If someone is interested in trying a progression pack, I always point to E2E. I only give poor rates to aesthetics because the pack has very few custom art, music, etc. So I give I give it the middle rating of 3.

This pack is nothing if not brutally unforgiving. You are given a single day to prepare before things go south. Dying causes you to lose all bonus health and all skills. You have positional damage that can range from mildly inconvenient to flat out killing you instantly. There's a temperature system that needs to be dealt with and can prevent you from exploring certain areas. The cities are packed full of hordes of the undead, ranging from your traditional zombie to explosive chargers to poison spewers. Zombies can even break through your defences to get to you, or climb off each other to reach you.

Despite all of this, unlike some other packs (looking at you RLCraft), this pack never feels unfair. The pack never has to cheese you by dropping unstoppable mobs on you, or imposing arbitrary rules on you, or making things way harder than they should be without reason. The positional damage can be reduced by focusing on building good armor for those parts of the body. Temperature can be dealt with in a large number of ways, and becomes a non-issue mid-game. All the zombies have specific ways to deal with them in small numbers, and you can build defences around your base for larger swarms. Building your base off the ground lets you deal with most threats easily. On top of this, the dev supports playing the pack the way you want to (which should be the norm, honestly) and has guides on how to disable any aspect of the pack that you don't like on their Discord.

Overall, probably one of the best "simple" packs I've played in a long time. Giving this a 4.5/5.

its a cute modpack with decent early automation. was left a little frustrated with how the only real tech mods in the pack are mekanism and immersive engineering. another problem i had is that the clusters that you use to grow resources early game can only be crushed by the immersive engineering crusher and not the mekanism crusher once you unlock it. there are other options for resource generation but its just a little annoying.

Vault Hunters is a modpack primarilly focused around entering vaults, fighting monsters, and obtaining extraordinary loot from these randomized vaults.

There are elements of resource gathering, in that entering these vaults has a cost. The cost is a random assortment of vanilla items that can be tedious, or even difficult to obtain (wood, nether stars...). If you aren't one for automation/resource gathering, don't worry; the modpack is very customizable through many commands you can find in the book you start your journey with.

In terms of being an RPG: VH has it all. Customize your character through skills, talents & expertise. Mold your build with different pieces of gear, and choose that gears appearance through the transmogrification table.

With the explanation out of the way: here are the shining points of the pack.

Combat: 10/10 - the best PVE experience I've ever had in minecraft. Fight hordes of mobs with fireballs, thorns damage, poison clouds, glacial rain, thunder storms, or a simple swing of your sword. There are tons of viable builds available.

Resource gathering: 10/10 - this modpack made me interested in building farms like no other. The vaults give resource gathering purpose, since entering them is not free.

Content: 10/10 - You will never run out of things to do. In the vault, there are countless goals you can set for yourself; many things to find and explore, and outside of it; there are even more things to do. Cut jewels you've found, purchase from the black market, accept bounties, build up your farms, and so much more. I have 1,000+ hours in this pack for a reason, and not a second of it did I find myself searching for purpose.

Ends notes:

The modpack continues to update frequently, and more and more things are added. This is amazing, but also the reason performance & stability are rated as a 3. -1 because it's a rather large pack, and not everyone can run it, and another -1, because things can change, and sometimes documentation of these changes isn't the best.

There are many features and amazing things in this modpack you just can't know exist if you aren't actively watching other peoples letsplays. The quest book could be improved, as of update 12.

In the end, it remains the best pack I've ever played. If you liked Hack/Mine back in the good old days, or any modern RPG pack, you'll love this. No other RPG experience in minecraft compares.

Oh: and for the skyblock enjoyers --- this pack also has you covered. In world creation, you can make your playthrough a skyvault one. This world is also more performant for those with lower computer specs.

Brilliant quest design with clear and enticing endgame goals (the key and the mystery quests). Unfortunately on older quest mod so a little buggy/unintuitive. Extensive use of items, blocks, and entities unique to this modpack. Same old 1.12.2 mods but with a fresh feeling of balance and superior design.
However must be said this pack has possibly the worst overworld of any pack Ive ever played somehow worse than just vanilla. The rock types and surface gen is just horrendous.

Strictly in my own opinion, this pack has a distinct lack of tick acceleration. With no time in a bottle, tickrate commands, or even midgame access to expensive RF/Magic based tick acceleration.
QOL items like building gadgets and wands are for some reason gated well into the midgame. This combined with my above gripe makes the earlygame very sluggish by design.

You will without a doubt want to check into the packs discord so you can see all the tips, tricks, and get help for when you eventually get stuck or youre near to bricking your world in lag.

(I am one of "developers" of this masterpiece, being the one that invented Peaceful-only mode in most of ways, gave more ores to planets and overhauled Numismatic Dynamo to support every metal.)

There is a lot of ways to where to start with this...

The amount of custom content and mechanics and definitely a highlight. Just look into all new JEI categories, that provide additional great info on all your obscur-ish and favorite mods! The author of this even codes their own "mods" in crafttweaker's script for better experience!

The skyblock mode is also one of a kind, being technically active in normal overworld in terms of changes, which made a huge impact on how resources are obtained... with burning pieces in liquids, crushing unusual blocks, exploiting the weak animals for their drops and other things; it is very interesting once you get past gimmick-infused early game.

The questbook is amazing for mods where effort was done, such as Thaumcraft-verse; many bits and pieces are explained in a grid of quests, that even reward you with even more bits and pieces (curious, isn't it?), and ending with overhaul to Thaumic Additions' items that are no longer just "the OP item takes effort" alloys for TC.

Speaking of addons... there is a lot of them, for Tinkers, for AE2, for TC (as mentioned before), for IE... they expand on a lot of stuff that is set up by their parent mods.

Changes to mods themselves (via ASM modifying) are widespread too, mostly to get around limitations or to put it above and beyond what it was designed for, like accepting thousands of RF/t or dozens of items. The ability to do it at all is inspiring.

Non-linearity of original E2E is kept here and upgraded to heaven, with routes to get around needing to do technical or magical progression, or killing any bosses; this part is not completely finished, but the details and recipes needed to skip doing machines, if you are wizard by blood, is nothing short of astonishment.

Ore processing... oh the new ore processing line... you start with normal native clusters and then ascend to increasingly more complicated magical processes to get more powerful ore chunks that are smelt into various amount of materials, depending on how much effort you put into it. IMO, very good custom mechanic, that prompts as much engagement as you decide.

Computers. There is a lot of programming you can do, in any way you want. And it is all useful in some capacity. You should like robots and mechas as tech guy watching this review, isn't it?

Now for parts that I dislike:

• I do not agree with all gimmicks done to make early game more exciting; sometimes enough fun is enough, and manual work, that is automated by delegating this manual work to robots, could be tiring to handle.
• While skips done by dedicating your attention to obscure parts are exciting in their own, it can lose that charm once the way to them is discovered somewhere else and it just becomes 4.44x stronger way to get certain resources via this funny gimmick (that is sometimes incomprehensible, like IC2 crops).
• Despite how combat-focused the pack is at times, via TConEvo and buffs to TC and I&F, there is not many enemies to fight; your targets are mostly not-very-difficult bosses and enemies buffed by Scaling Health mechanic.
• Despite overhaul to UUM line and replication, the item values are still kind of unbalanced, with early game items costing a lot of matter and midgame materials costing almost nothing.
• The endgame in general is mostly the same, you go for same complex grind on top of ultimate table and get ultimate ingot to make ultimate utilities... There is a lot of things that speed that up like PackagedAuto and other AE2 extensions, so it is at least fun to set up.
• There is some other minor things I wanted to mention, but can't remember. ech.

Playtime: around 400 hours for Peaceful, 51 hours for Conflux IV%, ~30 hours on latest alpha in Peaceful.
9.5/10.

As a modpack dev, having mods be as configurable as possible is a massive help, if not a necessity for many mods. Quark really goes a step beyond and adds pretty much every single configuration possible, even adding a custom in-game menu for it.

The features Quark adds are comparable or just straight up better than other mods' implementations. The backpack is a favorite of mine. It's such a clean way to extend the player inventory, not just add a completely separate inventory (good for immersive packs, maybe not for tech or kitchen sink packs). Also love the totem of holding in place of other grave mods. It's simple, intuitive, and configurable. Quark really helps keep the mod list down and all it's features feel very balanced.

If you're on 1.12.2, highly recommend Quark RotN Edition for even more config features.

I’m playing this with a couple of other people and we haven’t gotten too far, but we’ve had a lot of fun playing it so far. Early game it’s a bit hard to get used to, the difficulty can be tough, but the pack is in constant development, and the developer listens to feedback. Once you get a grip of things and figure out how things work, it becomes really fun, and there’s a lot of ways to play. Aside from the combat, fishing has been reworked to some extent. You can now fish up enemies (and get good loot from killing them), crates, TNT and crate potions. The game features 12 custom origins which are all unique and play well together in multiplayer. The enemies are difficult, but if you make use of your abilities you can usually take them down. One issue that you might encounter if you run a server is the difficulty system, which means that you might get basically unkillable mobs if you leave it running for too long, but the creator seems to be aware of this and may fix it at some point.

Clearly very well made and thought-through. I am early on in the pack, but I've been watching and/or playing modded Minecraft for over a decade now and this is of the highest quality. I really enjoy the mixture of tech and adventure, as well as the cool environments. I hope to play this pack some more, and probably will primarily play this pack whenever I play modded. It is very large though lol so I don't know if I'll ever complete it, but I'm glad there will always be things to do. I look forward to more updates and seeing where the pack goes, and hope it becomes more popular.

This is a kitchen sink modpack with some changes to progression so that you don't get overwhelmed with the amount of mods you can mess with in the early game. Overall is pretty fun and there is something for everybody here but because of the nature of kitchen sink modpacks it makes it so that at times it feels disjointed and some of the changes to mods may raise eyebrows