Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

DISCLAIMER: THIS REVIEW IS FOR AN OUTDATED VERSION OF THE GAME. SEE DEVELOPER REPLY FOR INFORMATION ON CHANGES.

It's a very cool premise, but it barely delivers on what it promises. One of the main problems is that 1 hour is FAR too long. You get bonus time after each area, but it's a pitiful amount. I think the system would be much better if you started with a lower amount of time, and got more time after each area. This would keep the game more tense, and would feel more fair. As it stands, you can mess up a lot at the start, and not realize you've run out of time until much later, which feels terrible. If you make lots of mistakes, you should lose sooner rather than later.

The skill system is very shallow, and abilities vary wildly in power. Some abilities are nearly worthless, and some are alright. There's a purchaseable dash ability that you'd think is pretty good, but you already start with a dash that you can do while in the air over and over, giving you absurd lateral movement, even across empty space.

This game also has tons of binds, and many of the binds conflict right off the start, so getting that working is a pain.

The moment to moment gameplay isn't too bad. Fighting enemies is more fun than vanilla, though that isn't saying a lot. Your main way to progress is mining ores to get better ores. Basically it's normal minecraft progression, but scaled up to have more tiers, and you're on a time limit. Also you're mining upwards instead of downwards. I was hoping that there would be more to the progression than this, but it seems like that's all there is. It means that you're reliant on RNG to decide whether or not you find the ores in time to progress. And as previously mentioned, even if you take a long time to find the ores, you get way too much time at the start, so you won't know you've spent too long until way later.

The item system is also not very interesting. It advertises itself as sort of a roguelike, but me and my friends only ever found 2 or 3 special items, which is an absolutely pitiful amount. That isn't to say we only got 2 or 3 items, we found plenty, it's just that we kept getting the same 2 or 3 over and over again. They also seemed to just drop from random enemies, there was no fanfare or way to find them intentionally. I much preferred Muck's system for getting items, where there are designated objects that give items. I feel like that system would work well in trepidation, you could have little platforms floating out above lava in the nether, and you'd have to bridge out and get them, and maybe give up some amount of XP to unlock the chest. Of course, for this system to be meaningful, they'd need to add more special items in the first place.

To wrap the review up, the mod seems unfinished, and not very well designed. It looks pretty nice, and the premise is cool, but a game that is cool in theory does not always translate to good gameplay.

I loved the quests and progression. The setting was awesome, and the easter eggs were fantastic!

I jumped in and played a few rounds for the first time, here's a badly written review (i'm assuming you've read the modpack description so you know the basics)
Unhide the spoilers if you've already played the game since it's best played blind.

MOVEMENT
Just like vanilla except you have a midair jump, dashes, a wall grab/jump and Step (you can walk up blocks like stairs).
I don't find myself using the wall grab as often as I should, but when I do, it saves a lot of time.
Double jump off the bat is just a tiny bit op tbh, you can use it to survive huge falls it speeds you up a ton but I don't mind it staying as-is.
Having step from the get-go is balanced, doesn't make you too fast but lets you outrun mobs if you choose to go uphill.
Pressing alt + a direction will make you dash. In it's current state it's extremely overpowered.
You can fly across entire lava lakes by dashing repeatedly and then using your midair jump right at the end to negate fall damage.
I'm sure the dev will get around to nerfing it at some point.

GAMEPLAY
Escaping the nether is pretty simple, you get the equivalent of wood tools -> stone tools -> iron tools then you mine straight up.
It would be nice if there was a guide book that tells you that you're supposed to mine all the way up to escape.
Okay let me just interject for a moment (lol) - I found out there are custom advancements right as I was about to publish this review. It's not really mentioned anywhere, I completely missed them. (maybe the dev could make them more promiment outside of the advancement button).
The main difficulty seems to come from:

1. Trying to stay alive (the mobs are rough!)
2. Finding pyridium (the equivalent of iron ore)
   It took me way too long to realise that humanoid mobs can dig to your location, they really keep you on your toes.
   Food is pretty easy to take care of as mushrooms are pretty much everywhere .

COMBAT AND SKILLS
You have extra reach by default (only for combat) and knockback seems to have been increased as well.
The increased reach + knockback means juggling enemies is way more effective than waiting for your weapon to come off cooldown. (dev has noted this and will fix)
Since spam clicking is the meta, and since you will rarely encounter swarms of 4+ enemies, the AOE sword attack is kinda useless.
In the skill book you spawn with, you can swap your XP and "Souls" into minimum wage skills!
I realise now that the skill book tells you to use the arrows on the bottom left and right to flip pages but I completely missed this (maybe add an outline to the buttons?).
I'm honestly not a fan of the skill book and rarely ended up using it. It's just not necessary since it's easy to escape the nether without touching it. This might not be the case for the other dimensions. (dev has noted this and said the skill book will only be available until you unlock something in the later dimensions)
I didn't play with the skills much due to this, but upon reading the skill descriptions, they seem really powerful. Especially ranged skills (allowing you to fight lava spewers without crafting a bow/arrows) .

PROBLEMS/COMPLAINTS
I found myself wandering around quite a bit trying to find pyridium, then i realised it can look just like neridium if it's in the dark (maybe change this?).
Step: it's useful but quickly gets annoying as i can't find a way to toggle it off when i don't need it.
Fire: No way to mitigate this early game which pretty much makes it a death sentence. inb4 skill issue.
Mobs drop loot which is nice but they drop a bit too much + it's enchanted, idk i feel this made it too easy (they drop lots of garbage loot as well which just clogs up your inventory).
Sometimes mining dirt with a pickaxe can result in a whoosh whoosh whoosh sound as if i'm hitting the air, it's just the sound that's bugged, mining works.
Flame spewers are OP af. Could be by design, requiring bow/arrow to counter but this makes bone harvesting very unviable since they take time to acquire.
Magma eggs and dark wheat are essential items for bone harvesting (30 sec fire resistance) but I have found no way to obtain them.
Dashing. I mention this in the movement section.
It's easy to be unaware of the advancements which give you hints as to what you're supposed to be doing.
That viney stuff that hangs underneath blocks, yeah it adds to the atmosphere but man it gets annoying fast.
Cannot view detailed info for skills until you buy them.

THE GOOD STUFF
Controls are pre-configured for you! Man, the polish that adds to a modpack cannot be understated.
The last thing you want to see when you install a modpack is a billion unconfigured/conflicting bindings.
The visuals are stunning. Glowstone and leaves glow a little too much but everything else adds to the atmosphere greatly.
This is one of the few packs that uses sound design very well, it's hard to tell if mobs are close or far away.
that + spooky music = :skull: :poop:
A quick "Reset Run" button to start a new run once you inevitably fail. You will become very familiar with it.
The level generation is great, it's not the modern nether, it's the old one but with lots of polish.
Balance. Despite what I've written in this review, the modpack is pretty balanced overall, mobs are fun to fight and it's action packed.
Novel gameplay! Finally, a combat-focused pack that gives you a timer, a goal, and leaves the rest up to you instead of slapping you with a guide book that has a billion crafting quests with the same old formula we've seen many times before.
Replicating the vanilla-like progression is something I really appreciated with this pack. I could realistically see speedrunners doing the rounds with this and optimising their strats just like with vanilla minecraft.

The pack contains many great quests that help players get through all the many different mods in the pack. However, due to the enormity of the pack, players will need a decently powerful computer to run it well. If you are looking for a modpack with a set goal to strive towards, this pack isn't for you. Gameplay without friends to compete against can be a little bland and once you get through blood magic, progress to better items slows down a bit. Overall, a good modpack, however you will need to bring your friends and have a beefy computer. A great tutorial to the world of modded miencraft.

Despite this mod being a ubiquitous part of Minecraft for a while now, I never really realized just how many features this mod adds, it is surprisingly vast, while there are only a few that stand out to me and fewer that are ground breaking, the sheer amount of quality content is awe inspiring. I'll also say if the client-side features were spun off into it's own mod, it'd be a daily use mod for me.
I honestly believe Minecraft as a whole owes a great debt to the Quark mod. It set an unrealistic standard for many of the features Minecraft would end up adopting, such as stalagmites and stalagmites which look so much better in quark, a believe I hold so strongly I went and made a resource pack about it. or ofc the famous frog who is the best frog in all of Minecraft and I'll kill for him.

I've now been psychologically conditioned to build every base as small as possible because of this pack.
This was actually surprisingly one of my friendgroups favorite packs. It's been a few years since I've played it so I'm not sure how much I can comment on, but I will go ahead and spoil one of my favorite features, as I'm not sure how it was done and it's someting I've never seen anywhere else.

Upon each chapter completion there will be a "bonus quest" which usually gave pretty decent rewards, they'll have you teleporting to a special dimension with minigame like mechanics.
Such as: a parkour world, a timed expert survival world, puzzles, and more.
It's super inventive and I love the way this one mechanic gives you a lil break from the confusing monotony of progressing in an tiny houser's skyblock.

A great pack, but I wish I liked it more than I do...
Antimatter chemistry holds a special place in my heart as the first modpack I really played, so to see this modernization made me SO happy.
The pack itself is great, it captures the same vibes anti-chem, and I think is a more than deserving successor to that pack while still being identifiably unique with it's own progression systems and unique features. If you were a fan of anti-chem I cannot stress enough you need to try out Encrypted_
I found the automation of colored encrypted blocks and the quest book currency to be especially satisfying, tho, a bit unclear at first and I did have to go to the discord to figure it out, it would be nice if there was an alternative to the deployer that could be used to automate right clicks.

Unfortunately, it couldn't quite hold my attention long enough to explore the whole thing, that said I'm pretty adhd so take this with a grain a salt, most packs, even the ones I love don't.
I hope this pack get's an update, as alchem and chemlib have been updated since this packs last update, so has apotheosis, and I'm sure a few others, I would love to see thoes updates (any that are compatible with 1.18.2 at least) brought to the pack, that bein said, when I tried my hand at it a few months ago things tended to break so it's so I understand it's no simple request.

Crypt1c's packs never fail to impress me, but this is another level.
Keeping in mind the mod is in VERY early stages, so while I've experienced some quest confusions and other frustrations, these mostly come from things that I assume are as of now incomplete.
This is one of the most beautiful and aesthetically pleasing packs I have played, period, with top tier polish, from the menu, the gui, even the quest book surprised me. The beauty is maintained throughout the whole experience, the textures for all the custom items and the items from UniversUtil, the design of the several custom dimensions, it is all very polished.
Nihil took my breath away, and has mechanics I never even knew were possible in Minecraft!
I'm also particularly fond of the "lore" within the quest book, really makes me excited and I feel like I'm not just playing any other modpack, I hope more packs do this in the future.

Spoilers for the first questline
When I realized I'd be making an mole of hydrogen by forming the protons and neutrons to make the atom, from the quarks and gluons I harvested myself, I was honesty giddy, it is such a cool feature and I wish this gimmick was used more than once as I think it's the coolest element.

That having been said I'm very excited to play a pack with alchem and project E, a combination I haven't personally experienced since alchemical exchange, and with all respect to that pack I believe this is going to take the cake by far.

The mix of aesthetics and exploration gameplay is great, the mod choice for world gen, and structures are phenomenal and it introduced me to many world gen and structures mods I hadn't encountered before.
I particularly appreciate the extra effort put in to all of the resource packs included in the pack!
Great for anyone looking to explore a beautiful world or get a new desktop background.

[er, self-reviewish sorta? i left the team before 3.0 was fully released]

Where do I even begin with this? RotN has been close to my heart ever since I started working on it in 2019, and what a ride it was. Though, I'm gonna (try to) refrain from discussing anything about my developer experience and rather review the pack for what it is. I will of course be a little biased, but also a bit harsh because I know the potential this pack has.

This pack has given me hundreds if not thousands of hours of just pure addictive fun. It makes you feel like a genius at times because it really forces you to think and be creative. It tries to steer you in the right direction without being handholdy. It lets you explore whatever aspect of the pack you wish to explore. Especially in a multiplayer setting, you can really focus on whatever it is you enjoy. You can literally spelunk forever if you wanted to (and you will want to), or focus on the in-depth cooking system, the long but rewarding crafting system, the base-building aspect with so many fitting cosmetics, the defense aspect with unique approaches and traps, the progression with incredible lore and thrilling boss fights, etc. Of course, many aspects of the pack are gated by conquest elements (ie, killing bosses and discovering dimensions), but the best part is you can tackle that at your own pace. Hell, I'm an advocate of playing this pack on peaceful if that's your thing because it's still fun and such a chill experience, mostly because of how god **** good this pack's aesthetics are.

RotN has absolutely NAILED aesthetics. The moment you spawn in you are tossed into a BEAUTIFUL world with such a diverse and immersive ecosystem with a variety of animals and fantasy creatures alike. The music couldn't be more perfect, the ambience, the recommended shaders, the custom textures and CTM, dynamic trees, villages that actually feel alive and part of the world, everything just comes together to make you want to protect this world and explore every aspect of it. Not to mention just how quickly the environment and ambience can change the moment you step into a cave and hear the echoes of hostile mobs, or when the sky darkens and coupled with the soothing piano backing track and falling stars... it just feels mystical, yet not free of dangers; you're still on your toes. If you haven't spent a moment to truly take in and enjoy this pack's aesthetics and environment, I implore that you do so.

Now, unfortunately with all that being said, this pack is held back immensely by it's instability. This is not a discredit to the developers, because dear god I know how difficult, painful, and stressful it is to deal with bugs in extra large modpacks. I can not even begin to tell you how many hours I've spent debugging and troubleshooting this pack. However, when a pack such as this is not patched for many months at a time, leaving very crucial and game-breaking bugs that were already fixed months ago, it's extremely disheartening. I recognize how difficult and time-consuming it is to keep track of all the issues and commits and to release a hopefully not broken build, but hundreds of new players are experiencing this unique pack for this first time likely every single day, only to be let down when they realize they have to modify their pack install to even be playable or have their hard work become corrupted because of an outdated mod that was updated internally 5 months ago. Many of these players are likely never going to play RotN again, not because they didn't have fun, but because it was broken. And that hurts me.

I truly believe that if RotN wants to be the underdog that rises into the mainstream to show the entire modded Minecraft community what incredible talent, creativity, passion, love, and attention to detail can do for a modpack, it must develop a more efficient release schedule that prioritizes small semi-frequent patches that will lead to a more positive experience for all players.