Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Clearly a labor of love. Level design is consistently great and (almost) every spatial cell has a few fun secrets to uncover.

Balancing was touch and go, and the difficulty was largely in swarms of mobs with knockback or explosive attacks. The worst was if I died in a way that I couldn't easily recover my grave (one of two death options alongside keepInventory) , so I'd be trapped in a loop of dying trying to retrieve it until I got lucky or made a painstaking cobblestone tunnel to reach it.

The story was serviceable, and the quests were well done except for a few that said they were repeatable but weren't and some spelling mistakes.

I didn't end up finishing the monument because some of the requirements were just too much and some of the trophies were super well hidden. Even still, I had a good time and would recommend if you're looking for a ~40 hour adventure map experience with some teeth.

Spawn is so safe also the half naked anime girls are the best and def ain't the worst thing that happened to the server. We even have lore for the server that someone did with ai wow ik

This is a mod I have mixed feelings about. It is useful for development, and has some pretty useful features like fancy waypoints, map-to-png export, loaded chunks mapper, etc. But at the same time, It's held back by some bad design decisions and poor performance/ bugs.
Every time you open the world map for the first time in a world, you get hit with a wall of donation links. I honestly dislike this sort of thing, so it loses a star for that.
Performance also takes a hit, and the mod can straight up crash the world when used with certain mods (e.g Warpdrive. The constant ship jumping forces constant mapping updates, which leaves ghost ships everywhere in the map, and just causes massive amounts of lag). Loses another star for that.
I don't ever actually use Journeymap for survival gameplay. I recommend using Xearos or, my personal favorite, Antique Atlas.

This mod allows you to ship default keybinds with your modpacks, while simultaneously not overwriting the users options.txt file if it already exists, which means you don't have to worry about breaking players options and keybinds with every update. This is a godsend because I no longer have to listen to players complaining about it xD. It also increases player retention, as some players will actually drop a modpack if keybinds don't come pre configured (I know because I'm one of those players). It does lose one star, however, as there is now a better alternative called More Default Options for including default mod options, such as for Journeymap (which this mod doesn't support). If you only want to ship keybinds though, then this mod is easier to use.

I love this mod. I was in the middle of writing up a draft for a mod commission to add custom plants to the game until I came across this. Basically, it allows you to add custom plants that naturally grow, and it even supports underwater plants (with native support for Fluidlogged API for extra sexyness). Now I can populate all my custom planets with alien plant life :D

One of the few modpacks I've actually enjoyed. As a person who's not a fan of tech based modpacks but loves quest heavy ones, this one just hit the spot. Does everything it says on the tin and more.

Honestly one of the best experiences I've had with Minecraft.

Did add some mods on my own though, but that is to be expected with all modpacks.

Yes, I will die on this hill. Sure, the default structures are nothing to gawk at, but as a dev utility for adding your own structures, what this mod is capable of is insane. Jigsaw blocks don't even come close. RC's greatest feature is the structure script block. Randomize portions of a structure on generation? Check. Create dynamic mazes? Check. Create dynamic towns with theoretically infinite unique layouts? Check. Compatibility with nearly every modded block and entity? You bet. It does lag the world a little with larger structures, but pregenerating can fix that, and most people aren't creating structures with 200k blocks.

The best (if only) esolang experience you can get in Minecraft, it immediately confused me and permanently crashed my world when I tried copying some code from the internet.

This is the hardcore mode of Minecraft computing, this mod is to ComputerCraft as RLcraft is to vanilla mc.

I don't think I'll ever understand how to use this mod and I'm honestly not sure if I'm meant to, however, some other stolen code from the internet DOES run as expected so it does, for some reason, function. I assume.

I think this is a really fun skyblock pack that doesn't overstay its welcome. The pseudo-economy of "selling" essences for EMC with which you can "buy" raw resources is unique and feels more engaging than just spamming sieves or bonsai pots as is common in other skyblock packs. Automation chains can get somewhat complex, but never so much that it gets overwhelming.

My only significant complaint is that Create doesn't really mesh well with the Watch of Flowing Time's tick acceleration, which is pretty much the only way to speed up late-game processes that aren't a Thermal Expansion machine. Having an alternative processing method (maybe a custom multiblock?) for things like Final Star Shards would have been nice.

Ultimately, if you like automation and don't need something super long term you'll probably enjoy this one!

P.S. when you're crafting Power Flowers at the very end, rush for one so that you can plop it down to get easy Final Stars via EMC for the rest. I wasted like 10 hours crafting the Power Flowers in parallel until I realized that :')

Vault Hunters is an absolutely amazing pack! The Progression being different from Vanilla Minecraft at first makes it start out very fresh and unique compared to other modpacks which have very "Vanilla" progressions right at the start. Unlike many other Modpacks, Vault Hunters actually excels in how well it compliments Vanilla Minecraft. All the Limitations of Vanilla have been thrown out the window. Now there's a rewarding and satisfying way to progress and reasons to push above and beyond where Vanilla players never need to go. You're able to unlock other mods through the progression of this pack. At the start, you can only have Vanilla Items + Vault Items (maybe a few more here and there, but its Vanilla+ if you disregard the Vaults). But through clearing Vaults, you can get the ability to unlock mods like Create, Mekanism, Thermal, Botania, and others! The progression is where I think it really shines.

The Vaults themselves are randomly generated dungeons that you go through and complete objectives and loot for treasure. This treasure can often be incredibly lucrative (It's technically possible to get enough netherite for full gear after just running a few vaults, although the vault gear massively outclasses netherite so theres not much of a reason to). The Vaults themselves are fun, and you can break up simple or repetitive tasks by running a vault in the middle, or you can run a bunch in sequence.

I have pretty severe ADHD and although I deeply love modded minecraft, I often struggle to play through minecraft modpacks all the way through due to losing interest or there being an uninteresting "grindy" section. Vault Hunters isn't without grind, but the grind is done through running through dungeons instead of waiting for something or strip mining and that has been able to keep my focus. I'm about 200 hours into a single player world and I'm showing no signs of stopping so far. I can only imagine its more fun on multiplayer!

This modpack is also updating, and there's a surprising amount of complexity to the core gameplay mechanics of The Vault mod. All in All, this is a solid 5/5 stars modpack. It's still in Alpha, so expect changes to be added that may affect gameplay, but at least currently, I love the pack and am very excited to see how this changes in the future.

I also have not experienced any issues with performance. The Game takes awhile to load, but that's pretty typical for large modpacks so I can't fault this pack for that. I play with shaders and get a pretty consistent 60fps. I could see performance issues on other computers though.