Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

I love EB Wizardry, it's probably my favorite magic mod. It's one of the few magic mods that focuses only on the spells, and has a similar vibe to Ars Magika from 1.7.
Eb Wizardry uses wands to cast its spells, and it has a ton of spell variety in all the generic fantasy spells people are used to, which makes it great for roleplaying. This also means the spells aren't overpowered (mostly), so melee and ranger setups can still square up against it (speaking of roleplaying, it has a ton of addon spell packs. Check out WinDanesz's addons, they're the best! Especially the Apprentice and Fates addon. Great for RP).
It does lose one star because, last I played, it still had a pretty critical exploit that ruined multiplayer which allowed binding multiple of the same spell to different wands to spam them, since cooldowns are tracked per wand instead of across ALL wands (idk if this has been fixed in recent versions or not). While it doesn't seem like that big of a deal, it allowed healers to spam spells, making them immortal (something I'm against any mod doing). The default values for some spells spells (especially healing and necromancy) were also really broken, and I had to spend several hours editing configs to balance them for PvP.

Draconic Evolution is certainly a cool mod. It has OP gear for the late game, an OP reactor to generate near infinite energy, and various OP tools. And that's just the issue. I hate overpowered mods. It is nearly impossible to balance DE against other mods because it blows them so far out of the water, they end up in the stratosphere. The DE armour is also so overpowered that most other mods can't even get though its energy shield. It basically makes the player immortal, something I'm principally against.
The only thing balanced in this mod is the fact that the reactor will obliterate the biome it resides in if misused (not even an exaggeration, the explosion will wipe everything off the face of the earth). It is aesthetically pleasing but the novelty wares off in practice. Call me salty; I actively avoid any modpack which includes it.

MTS is definitely the greatest vehicle mod for Minecraft, and almost scratches the itch that MCHeli left behind. Its mechanics are modeled after real world vehicles, and it has the most realistic flight physics of any aircraft mod in MC. It has mechanics like flaps, trim, airspeed (stalling is possible), individual engine thrust (flat spins sort of possible), etc. My only gripe with the mod is that all of these features make for terrible performance. You need a relatively lightweight modpack environment for the heavy math calculations to function properly, otherwise any tps lag (especially during worldgen) will cause you to lose control of the plane as it over-corrects and inevitably crashes. Boats also tend to have buggy controls, and so only one addon pack even has them. It does force you to optimize the hell out of your pack to use it though, so I suppose that's good?
There aren't many addons which add functional military vehicles, and those that do tend to be buggy (gun projectiles hitting the vehicle's bounding box, not working at all, etc). So it's mainly civilian stuff for player transport.
MTS is otherwise an awesome mod.

I believe this was one of the first ports of NTM to 1.12, so it deserves a special mention when talking about the various ports. NTM is definitely my favorite nuclear mod, and easily the best nuclear technology and general "weapons of mass destruction" mod for MC. It quickly fell behind the official 1.7 version, however, and the various bugs were never fixed before it was eventually abandoned. While good in its time, it is now superseded by NTM Extended Edition (Alcater's port).

(The Ferret Business pack did shops before this, and did them better, but this modpack made the shop more accessible in the early game).

The modpack entirely revolves around the shop. You can raw resources like ingots and more refined items from both tech and magic mods for money. You can trade that money for ores (especially rarer ones like Ardite/Cobalt), difficult to obtain resources (mob drops, potions, food), or semi-creative items (Thaumcraft Nodes). It lets you exchange the effort you've put in one place to get progress/resources in another place so you can do more of what you enjoy and less of what you don't.

There's a "progression" mode which is an expert-lite that changes only a few recipes to get a chain of progression. It's not a proper expert pack that'll challenge you, but rather force you to go through all sorts of mods to get to the ones you want to. Rotarycraft is in the pack, but is locked behind Enderium whether you play on progression or normal, which is supposed to be a kitchen sink mode.

I came back to this modpack years later, and the progression and rotarycraft blocking is a little disappointing. But the shop still does its thing of helping you play more of what you want, and that's what's important. I should make a sequel soon. (and yup, I'm the modpack developer)

They kept the aesthetics and grandioseness of Project Ozone 2 and cranked it up to 11. But in doing so, they also added a lot of mods that really don't fit into the modpack and only add annoyances and frustration. Embers (debatably), Landcraft, and Lordcraft are big examples of this. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the last two were because their mod devs paid the pack maker to include them for that curseforge ad revenue.

The expertness of it is honestly great in the early game, and Ex Nihilo isn't that frustrating as ore drops are very common so you sifting gives you that dopamine rush when you rack up all of those ores early on. And the mods you use starting out are quite fun and interesting as well.

But it all falls apart once you get to the midgame. In Project Ozone 2, you had Logistics Pipes to help you automate much of the microcrafting, but in Ozone 3, all you have is Project Red. It's a nice mod and does plenty, but there are no auto crafting tables it works well with (There are EnderIO ones, but each individual one is incredibly expensive as opposed to LP's only costing wood and cobblestone and NOT requiring power). So you're stuck manually microcrafting just about everything, even into the late game since that's where AE2 is locked.

Combined with the fact much of the modpack felt like the developer just threw in as many big content mods without actually thinking if they'd fit (eg. shoehorning magic mods in a way that felt like they were for filler content rather than integrating well with the pack), I have to give Gameplay 2 stars.

Aesthetics were decent, though the custom shop coins looked pretty goofy. The shop also felt poorly thought out.

And with so many mods, the performance, stability, and startup time were atrocious. There's even a mod that adds PONG to the loading screen, to give you something to do, but that apparently DOUBLES the loading time. I'd rather browse my phone or step outside while waiting the 20-30 minutes needed for it to load.

All in all, this modpack was incredibly disappointing, especially with the lightning in the bottle that its predecessor Project Ozone 2 was. Ozone Lite, despite being much smaller in scale and incredibly generic in design and mechanics, was more fun than this.

The idea behind this modpack is that it's all about automating everything with Create. It's an idea that's been done well by Create: Above and Beyond, but there have been too few modpacks that have tried to do something similar in a way that is good. This modpack tries and gets far, but falters in a few ways.

My main gripe is that the way the tech tree/things you can automate grows much too quickly in the early game.

For example; ore automation. Mining is an absolute chore without vein miner or tools that make it much faster than base vanilla. Haephestus (aka Tinkers Construct for Fabric) is in the pack, but its pickaxes aren't particularly faster than vanilla ones in the early game. It still takes half an hour of mining to get the materials needed to build a single automation line. I just want to build the automation, not mine for so long! But good news, there's a way to automate ores! However, each ore requires a long and very complicated process to automate which is in no way beginner/early game friendly. If someone very experienced with Create were to go at it, I'm sure they'd be able to cobble together something even in the early game! However, I'm not that experienced with Create, so it's something that will require a lot of time, space, resources, and tools I haven't unlocked yet to set up. So now I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place; either spend my time doing boring tedious mining, or flounder around to set up automation for a single ore and inevitably fail because of the complexity and resources the setup requires.

I'll admit, it's only a single thing and the rest of the pack is probably wonderful. But it's also a MASSIVE pain point that I consider bad game design that robbed all the fun out of playing the pack. I know it's called MINEcraft, but modpacks don't have to stay true to the original minecraft formula/gameplay cycles. Just let me build my factories, start with a few easy challenges that SLOWLY lead up to more and harder challenges, like a narrow cone instead of a stupidly wide one. Don't overwhelm your players with too much to do so early on, and especially don't front-load the tedium. You want them invested in the modpack first before you start introducing challenges that have it.

It's a classic expert pack from an older era when expert packs were becoming the norm (Infinity Expert and Ozone 2 had only come out a while before this). The mod choice in the early and mid-game is unique, especially with Calculator which I haven't seen used much anywhere else.

The only issues are that the tedium can be a lot both early on, and after you set up UU matter replication. All of my runs stopped after that. In fact, I heard that the tedium continues to increase, thus my 4 starts for the gameplay. And that's AFTER I manually added Ore Excavator/Vein Miner to the modpack. I have no shame in doing so, it brought me more fun where it mattered.

Otherwise, there's plenty of clever setups you can make using the mods available (Calculator, Actually Additions, Tinkers 2, Super Circuit Maker, Extra Utilities 2, etc.) These clever setups and inter-mod compatibility is what really defines expert modpacks imo.

Also, stability is so-so, but that's because it's on Minecraft 1.10 than because of the mods themselves.

This is and likely forever will be my favorite recipe mod, and it should be yours too.
Compatible with JEI, almost all JEI plugins, and most add-ons (though in my experience the alternatives built for EMI tend to work better with it) this is a true drop-in replacement.
If the modpack you're playing doesn't already have it installed, you likely can simply add it to your mod-list to get the full experience.

So, why switch?
Aside from there being no reason not to given the aforementioned compatibility.
The main feature is the crafting tree, it's like a crafting calculator that you can easily customize, reads your inventory and the inventory of your chest, and will help you semi-auto-craft your pinned item(s).
I'll include an image of an example crafting tree for the Dimensional Seed from ATM9, keep in mind that Very Large recipes can cause some lag and start eating up your ram, however, I'm able to view the recipe for the ATM star from the same pack without issue, tho a screenshot would be pointless because it barely fits.

Additionally, it offers so much customization, while the standard layout will look familiar to all modded mc players, you can change the multiple panels to appear wherever you want, personally, I like to keep my "craftables" always available under my favorites.

There are a few features I miss from REI such as drag and drop, and recipe cards, other features like favoriting specific recipes and easy craftables toggles are present. However, it's very possible I simply missed these options. While the config is clean and navigable, even I still find it overwhelming and there are to this day features I've seen others use that I don't know how to access, really this is my primary critique, I'd almost like a sort of tutorial if I'm being honest, but for a utility all about customization and qol, I don't think having too many features/config options should detract any points in a review.

While the average player will likely never know or care, I also want to appreciate the customization options when it comes to resource packs. I've maintained a UI resource pack (Overgrown Flowery GUI) and overhauled all three major recipe viewer mods, and EMI was easiest to work with and gave plenty of space for customization, overall I like the look of EMI the best with or without a resource pack.

Easily one of the coolest mods ever, I've made so many troll-y adventure maps for my friends and art projects with this mod, I think most people now-a-days are aware of this masterpiece as a result of content like that, the wave of "non-euclidian Minecraft" videos that took off in 2021 is a blast and this mod really does provide something you can't get anywhere else in or out of Minecraft.

But I really think it's under-used as a vanilla+ expansion to Minecraft, it truly does make portals more immersive and I think you should always consider adding it to your pack.
The first time I played this mod, my girlfriend surprised me by putting it in our 1.12 modded world and when I lit up a nether portal it was genuinely so beautiful and awe-inspiring I cried tears of joy.
While it wasn't an option to use it all the time back then, modern versions actually run very well in my experience, even in modded environments where, let's be honest, most players are chunkloading their portals anyway.