Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Before I begin with my rating I want to admit, that I'm really new to modded minecraft and that I've finished these two packs recently: ATM9 and BMC 1.19

Starting with gameplay I must say its a really amazing zombie modpack, if not the best Ive seen in my life. They made a custom data pack which generates many structures and entire cities as well. Also every building / structure has its unique loot which is themed to the building / structure the chest stands in (for example in a sushi restaurant you got lots of sushi and fish).

As for balance and progression. This modpack was not intended to be grindy and I like it. You get around the mods fast. Exploring is always fun and challenging due to the zombies. Traveling from point A to point B can be really hard due to cold sweat installed. I used teleportation in the beginning and decided to cut down on that and to play legit. A problem I have with the balance is the biome called wastelands. In there there are factories and military bases to be found. In these structures you can find lots of high end stuff and useful stuff for building, yet the loot is too much to be called balanced. also to enter these wastelands you need a gas mask which crafting process is really challenging and fun to explore, here also the gas mask can be found in buildings which i dont like. i think the crafting process is something everyone has to do. another thing bad about it is that the gas mask doesnt get used as you stay in the wastelands. the factories always look the same, some more variants would be really nice.
also the modpack doesn't have a real end goal.

To sum it up: Nerf the army base loot and buff the army zombies a bit, dont put full high end armor in the chests instead make it damaged, add more factory variants, make it that the gas mask gets used while you stay in the waste lands and make it that you can refill the gasmask by using filters, make it that the gas mask cannot be found easily and add some kind of end boss to have a real goal besides quests maybe connect them two. then i would consider to put gameplay at 5 stars, dont think of the three stars as bad, the modpack is still in the starting position and if you compare with other zombie modpacks its 4.5 to 5 stars.

as for aesthetics, we dont have any custom texture packs or music but the city generation is really nice. the roads in the city could be a bit more open and wider and maybe a bit more variation with the buildings.

Performance is great. everything works fine and there is rarely a bug or glitch that messes with the game. also i know its not the performance of the game but i like how to creators of the pack interact with the community in the discord. suggestions and questions get taken care of in minutes.

All in all a very good modpack, im happy to be able to enjoy this and im really looking forward to future updates since were still in the beginning of the pack.

When I get in an can play in a world it's a nice modpack, however 95% of the time doesn't even start, crashes when loading world, lag, etc. Reinstalling doesn't help either.

I have played GTNH for a few months now, and am in very late MV. This pack can be grindy, but is very rewardable in terms of satisfaction. The progression is very good, and the quest book is helpful if needed. I find that JEI surfing is hypnotizing, but that may be just be me. One unfortunate part is that the magic mods are not required until late endgame, such as getting the infinity armor. The late endgame is still being worked on, so we shall see how it turns out. Kharax82 is an amazing GTNH youtuber working towards the stargate currently in UXV+. Watching him or listening to him while you play is useful, as his early powergen strategy is exactly what I am doing.

Extremely fun and adds great content to the game. Enchanting setups are fun to progress through and the affixes are just amazing

Now look I may be slightly biased, this is my mod after all. But I can safely say that both I and my friend that has played it both think it's really cool.

In one server that we played this mod we could obtain a lot of machines of mods easily with the Iluminati Pet, in our case it was with the Ender IO mod.

The good thing is that it has a blacklist that you can configure it to avoid this pet breaks your game.

This mod Increases the difficulty of the Ender Dragon:

• It doesn't allow to kill the Ender Dragon with beds anymore
• It summons Blaze every time that the player breaks an Ender Crystal with an arrow
• It summons Endermans on respawn

I like it but personally I would reduce the default difficulty a little, nothing that can be fixed changing the config file.

Some context: I played this pack on a community server with 10-20 people, usually less than 10 online at any given time.

Coming from someone who hasn't played much of modern versions and tech, E9 serves as a pretty good introduction to its mods. I mainly used Mekanism throughout the whole pack, with a couple other mods throughout. It's beginner friendly with good quest descriptions, not the greatest but it told me what I needed to know to get started. Late-game Mekanism, the quests started to degrade and I was forced to use the wiki and multiple tutorial videos. Quests weren't in the best order either and the quest rewards in the beginning felt super OP. However, for a kitchen sink pack, this felt rather polished compared to others I've played in the past but definitely not perfect. I still enjoyed this much more than E6, that's for sure. I recommend picking a specific mod in this pack and going through it fully, especially if you're new.

I will say the exploration, caves, and mobs felt pretty barebones. The modlist is fairly tame compared to most kitchen sinks, but it seems like it's intentional. Personally I think this pack could've used a bit more to spice it up (especially the caving) but it wasn't a big deal to me as I was inside my base working on tech 95% of the time. I rarely even went to other dimensions as there wasn't much reason to, aside from plopping a digital miner in the Nether and going back home.

E9 has a lot of potential for a polished experienced with great inter-mod compatibility but drops the ball on a few aspects. A big pet peeve of mine was the fact that there were multiple versions of the same ingot. Osmium for example had the Mekanism version and the "enigmatica" version. It was really annoying when going through recipes and having to find recipes and uses for a specific ingot.

I'm very curious to see how E9: Expert compares to this, but as a beginner when it comes to tech, I still had a blast learning all the systems. It felt open-ended with enough direction to not have me completely lost. EMI is a blessing and blew my mind when I first saw what it offers. Plenty of QoL in the pack but could use more (cough, Carry On). E9 could use more building blocks as well, definitely sad at the lack of chisel (i like the cool tech blocks 😭). You really gotta get creative to make some nice looking factories.

As far as performance and stability, the first half was pretty much perfectly fine. I would've rated it 5 stars if the server crashes didn't start coming in half-way through. Issues and crashes started to become common as more players got ahold of complicated tech, but I don't entirely blame the pack for that. Any kitchen sink would struggle with the amount of players we had, so I only deducted 1 star.

All in all, if you want a somewhat-polished, easy, and fun kitchen sink pack to play with a bunch of friends where everyone can be satisfied, give E9 a try :)

I went into this pack super excited, it has some really great (new) mods in it, including Alex's Caves and Mobs, the new release of Aether, End Remastered, Create, Botania etc. But honestly I found the pack a bit of a mess and gave up before I could get too into it. It always worries me with modpacks when you do your first bit of mining, and find 4 different versions of silver ore from 4 different mods, that's one of the first and easiest things to fix if you're making a modpack in my opinion..

The quests are all over the place, some are extremely lazy; collect every type of sapling, collect every type of seed... like seriously? Quite a few quests have typos, some categories have a crazy number of quests and others have almost none (even though you'd expect them), and I have no idea what the 'Story Campaign' is, I certainly didn't find any 'Story' in any of the quest categories. The modpack was also quite unstable, I played for probably 8-10 hours and it hard crashed every couple of hours or so.

There's some genuinely awesome mods in here, but the pack feels fairly minimal effort, I might pull the mods out and make my own custom pack with it though.

This IS the ultimate Expert Pack.
Split into multiple parts, some exploration in the beginning, then basic tech, advanced tech, magic, and then basically endgame, this pack slowly builds up. The pack goes throught all the well-known (and some less well-known) mods and uses pretty much all mechanics! But don't worry, if you are not a pro at every single mod. The questbook guides you through all of them with all the details needed! So in theory, even someone completely new to modded could complete this pack (even though some experience with an easier expert pack is recommended imo).
But yes, this is a hard pack. It is encouraged to automated everything! Well, not everything, but a lot! Mods and items build upon other mods and items and are intertwined so intensely, that it feels very complex (you might have seen the recipe tree in the big panel on the modpack page). But it is all made to feel organic with the 600+ custom items that are added. Some are ported items from past versions of mods, some complete a set where one item was missing, some combine features of different mods and some are just for gating.
Speaking of gating, the progression feels good! You don't get too op in the first few chapters of the questbook, but you are never underpowered against any mobs or need to grind anything for multiple hours. If you can get a new item manually, the ability to automate said item comes either pretty quickly afterwards or you are not going to need more than twenty of it.
Lastly, I need to mention the community on the Divine Journey Discord Server. There are people there who have played through the pack multiple times that are still on that server and help out other people. There is a forum filled with tips, tricks, setups, and explanations, if you ever get stuck on one.
And as of writing this, the pack is still tweaked and balanced every now and then, so any balance issue that comes up can be resolved.

That was the good part, now to the less good part. With all the automation you will want to do, it is quite resource intense. This can be mitigated if you spread out your base horizontally instead of vertically, but that isn't the most aesthetic way for everyone. So beware of that. Other than that, there is nothing bad I can say.

In conclusion: Better expert pack than FTB Infinity Evolved Expert, organic progression, complex and challenging recipes and recipe trees, beautiful custom items to tie mods together. If you like expert style packs, you're going to love this one!