Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Great blend of exploration, magic, and tech. Don't sleep on this pack

I have been relentlessly searching for a modpack that can captivate me like "Dungeons, Dragons and Space Shuttles" (DDSS), but without being tied to the older Minecraft version 1.12.2. It has been a monumental challenge to find packs that offer a balance of challenge and enjoyment in Minecraft versions 1.18 and beyond.

I'm thrilled to say that after approximately 30 hours of gameplay, I've found a pack that truly draws me in. Refreshingly, it lacks the typical "crutch" mods like Allthemodium, Mystical Agriculture, Apotheosis, Ability Totem, and Curios bloat, which often diminish the need for half the mods in a pack. In this pack, I find myself constantly traveling, exploring, and mining, always in need of resources and, best of all, always with the looming possibility of death.

My only complaint about this pack is the handling of curios and trinkets upon death. When you die, all such items are placed into your body's inventory. This setup can be problematic, especially when playing in a group: if your inventory is full when you retrieve your items, your companions might accidentally pick up your things. Additionally, you must pause to re-equip your items, which has led to many unnecessary deaths for me and my group. This issue needs attention; many other mods have successfully re-equipped these items automatically for years.

I am very pleased with this modpack and would recommend it to anyone looking for an 'expert-lite' feel. The mod author is exceptionally responsive, enhancing the overall experience.

you can see the developers of the modpack is really worked hard for this in every aspect of the modpack and that worked flawlessly. Absolute banger of a pack if you want some challange and like the base defense.

Seriously. I gotta have it. Yes it is functional and convenient, but also it is hilarious when you randomly stumble across somebody's corpse.

I'm personally not a huge fan of modern endgames, with the deep dark and other new MC stuff, but as far as kitchen sinks with quests, this is not bad at all.

It really got stupid grindy to create the ATM star though. Not fun at all at the end, and has some weak mod picks.

100+ hours to beat

Great for beginners to the expert pack genre. Strong recommendation from me. I wish it was more linear and cohesive, but its balanced well and very fun.

Best Greg pack unless you are psychotic and want to spend 5k hours on GTNH.

Good entry level pack for people with no experience with Greg, good documentation, lots of QOL, good performance. Don't let it fool you though, this is easily a 500+ hour pack.

This is my top pick for best expert pack that's non Greg.

Unique linear progression that's fun, cohesive, and well designed. Heavy on exploring different biomes and dimensions in the early game, as well as slowly progressing through early tech. This is a pack you can easily spend 1000+ hours on, and It would be one of my first picks to do so, if I wasn't a serial pack abandoner.

Its worth your time, the progression is unique enough where it actually feels different to most packs.
Also runs surprisingly well if you use the included Java args (slightly degrades quality, its worth it)

If you're like me and you abandon packs, this one has a lot of uniqueness in the early game to keep you interested.

I don't like some of the mod choices however, and the quests aren't linear enough for it to feel cohesive.

So I guess that says something about it? Or maybe about my patience.

It does an okay job of keeping you going kind of like how Terraria does, but it falls short of actually challenging and putting you under pressure in the same way. That might not be the point - the quest page does say to "take your time," but...eh. There's a LOT of mods in here (300+) and it really feels like it starts to buckle under its own weight later on. I had fun in my 140~ish hours but also feel like it could've been a lot better. You need some patience for jank and internal server lag to play this one.

The pack is rather unbalanced - in my experience the difficulty curve was reversed, being very tense and unforgiving at the beginning but only getting easier as it went on. Mileage may vary of course, but despite the supposed Protection nerfs it gets increasingly hard to die, especially when you get lucky with Protection VIII armor drops from Dungeons Arise mobs (I really don't like this mod) and strip it to use on your own set - but even before then it genuinely gets kind of hard to die after reaching Neptunium armor. You also aren't really ever pushed to fight bosses until the third chapter and by then, if you were at all dilligent in upgrading your armor, they're all pushovers you can facetank.

There's also no real incentive to build any infrastructure or anything besides a wall of chests hooked up to a network. No NPCs to house, villager trading isn't really necessary so building with Villager Comfort in mind is an afterthought - like, Create's mechanical crafter was only ever used once or twice, the only time I know for sure it was necessary being for the Clockwork Eye. I feel like that was a missed opportunity. I never needed more than a randomly generated tiny house I stumbled upon that I added little necessities to and made a little walled up compound around. Protip: the only food you ever need is Sinigang cause it fills your bar and sat completely, gives all food groups besides sugars and uses very easily farmed ingredients.

There were also mods that felt pretty underutilized besides Create, or are only there for extremely specific progression. Blue Skies is only really there to start Expert Mode besides a few busywork fetch quests. Epic Samurai's stuff gets outclassed extremely early on and the mobs are pushovers. Brewin & Chewin just feels like an annoying pacebreaker and time-gater - by the point you're forced to use it, it's unlikely there's anything you can do to pass the time while you wait for alcohol to brew or cheese to ripen (seriously??) since AFAIK there's no chunkloader tools included. Some of these quest steps feel like they go against the tagline of "Minecraft without the tedium."

As for instability, man this pack was really starting to fall apart by the endgame. It heavily encourages exploration, but so many times I'd deadlock or freeze for several minutes with endless "hanging entity" errors in the log, or new chunks would take forever to load making the faster horses kind of counterproductive. Save yourself the time and frustration and just use /locate for some of the rarer structures if it's going to chug like this. It also uses a bunch of MCreator mods, some of which integral to the progression, and most of which just add a ton of clutter to your inventory. I don't like those useless Corpse Maggots from Born in Chaos. God, I really don't enjoy sitting for multiple minutes opening Iter RPG Geodes with a macro because they can't be cracked any other way. I also tried building a beacon and no matter what I did, it just wouldn't work. I don't know if it was gated behind a quest or something, but I just gave up on it and beat the pack without it.

Spoiler section; it was pretty disappointing how the adventure capped off with the Wither storm; the page talks about lore and there were a few mid-dev reddit posts with screencaps of NPCs which seemingly don't exist and the lore is pretty barebones with a pretty predictable "betrayal" from the mysterious voice that's been giving you heart containers. Then when you get all the eyes, this random character tells you "thanks for playing now go 1m blocks out :)". It's genuinely cool that it's gated behind the Dimensional Carver so all your stuff at home is safely out of range, but then it becomes a simple game of "put waystone near wither storm spawn, find another one a few thousand blocks away, warp between each until late phase 5, hope the world doesn't break itself harder than the storm can while running, facetank the symbiote and repeat." Worst part was that after all that and hitting the command block the final time...it didn't die. It didn't warp me out or anything like it was supposed to - it just left me in an empty Bowels with a "NaN" health command block and a still-alive Storm. Had to /kill to actually finish it. The framerate takes an absolute dump the further it evolves too even with shaders off, and I have a more than capable rig (RTX 3060 Ti, Ryzen 7 5800X and 32GB of RAM to spare) so I think there's just too many mods for the game to not buckle by that point.

Very odd kitchen sink pack. No real balance or sense of progression. A few busted OP mods nullify a ton of other mods. Myst. Agri., and ATM armor and weapons sh*t on every other alternative. Ability Totems -with zero downsides- outshine every ring, amulet, etc that would give a similar effect.

After a few hours and many busted items and ability buffs later... you may as well just put on creative. There is no challenge.

One of the worst packs I've had the misfortune of playing in the MANY years of playing modded MC.