Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

a great take on tech mods - especially the likes of rotarycraft and other mods that make use of rotational energy. FPS-wise it's not the best, and shaders tend to be incompatible but with some proper crafttweaking you can make modpacks last months on end with it alone. The Ponder feature allows quick understanding of any machine within less than a minute for the experienced, while newer players may inspect the workings of a Ponder scene to get a sense of what's going on.

NOTE: I played the first couple of versions (1.0-1.3) after this pack publicly released, and going off their changelogs up to 1.14 they've addressed a lot of issues already, so I may list outdated stuff in my criticisms.

• This pack is one of the only ones you'll find that has Epic Fight Mod at its core. The novelty of EFM integration alone is arguably reason enough to spend at least a day or two playing DawnCraft.

• At least on release, you could've called this a youtube-bait tier pack akin to Better Minecraft and no one would fault you.

On one hand you have

• EFM
• Custom bosses built with EFM in mind
• Puzzle structures
• Custom mobs
• Custom questing

On the other hand, you have:

• Many essentially untouched configs
• A lack of cross-mod integrations
• Horrid balancing of mobs and weapons and armor. Why do ice elementals spawn everywhere? Why do hollow knights teleport-chase you a million blocks away? Why is that dragon invisible??
• Usage of shudders the Champions mod. By the way, bosses were able to have affixes too. They didn't even think to blacklist them (fixed now though).
• Untouched loot tables
• Real head scratchers like not including mods for things like health bars and damage indicators... in a combat heavy RPG modpack. Okay then...
• The custom questing doesn't have a quest tracker GUI, the quests aren't rewarding or interesting, and many crafting stations were previously GATED behind these mundane and tedious quests... AND YOU HAD TO PAY EMERALDS AFTER THE CORRESPONDING QUESTS TO UNLOCK THEM. To my knowledge they are now just gated behind the main quest
• Very little optimization. Just FYI, these folks also made Mineshafts & Monsters, another pack notorious for how badly it runs
• Lack of reasons to use different weapon types beyond boring aspects like reach and damage output
• Dodge roll, arguably a core mechanic, isn't unlocked until after your first guild quest. You may be surprised how much of an issue this is for people who start the pack without knowing about...
• The villager reputation system. In theory, can be cool, In its execution, it's just a major annoyance. Basically if you loot, kill, etc. in villages, your rep goes down, and the only way to fix it is if you pay off your bounty. Your max negative rep caps at something like 8 bundled emeralds (64), which you pay to the guild in their little treasury box. Anyways, lots, and I mean LOTS of players learned about this too late, and end up spending the next few irl days grinding out emeralds for their bounty, or start their playthrough over entirely. Remember how crafting stations and dodge roll (also all other skills after dodge) are gated behind villager quests? Yeah.
• Patreon-gated content. Yep. Lol.

To summarize, a novelty experience worth playing just for EFM, but otherwise poorly put together. Keep an eye on the pack if you are also waiting for a holy grail RPG Terraria-like pack focused on combat and bosses, because frankly out of all the "medieval" "rpg" packs out there, this one is better than most of them DESPITE its flaws. With more development, this pack has insanely high potential. Looking forward to when I can rewrite this review.

A short but very fun modpack. You spawn in the overworld and have to travel to different structures and dimensions to find the 12 eyes from End Remastered. There are some base building and villager managing features but most of the fun comes from speeding through the different dimensions, grappling from building to building, blasting everything down and looting cool stuff to put on your gun.
There's lore and voice acting in the modpack too. It's mostly a humorous and childish type of humor which might not be for everyone but it adds a lot of personality to the game.
The pack is highly optimized. It's recommended to use optifine for some custom textures and other aesthetic things the dev recommended but the performance boost from rubidium is too good to pass up in my opinion. Runs great on my i5-6500. Mobs can spawn in large amounts sometimes which might affect tps.
The game has a couple bugs and unfinished parts, which is normal of a game still in development.

Overall, this is a one-time experience. There's really nothing else similar to Jetpack Cat. I rarely replay modpacks, but I replay this one a lot. It's just too much fun.

Let me describe an early game scenario. This is the intended progression, and the quest book doesn't tell you much of any of this:

Common occurance in any modpack. You need steel quite early, so how does one get steel in E6E? Via coke coal. Your best options are the induction smelter, or the Create mixer. The Create mixer uses less coke coal but requires superheating. The induction smelter takes RF which you may not have early on.

To get coke coal, you make a coke oven. To make a coke oven you have to, I kid you not - In-world lightning craft arcane stone, make multiple CONDUITS to get an Ars Nouveau enchanting crafter(A cooking pot requires a conduit to craft, wtf?), find a way to generate the source required for it, use the enchanting crafter to make sunmetal out of gold/silver, then lightning craft that to make a golden scarab, build an Atum 2 portal to go to another dimension and get a papyrus plant, use that to craft a petal apothecary(1 conduit per apothecary), use that to craft a pure daisy(1 conduit PER PURE DAISY), use that to get livingwood(which does not accept normal logs, only 1 special less common kind of log which is stated nowhere), make an Eidolon setup to get soul shards, make a blood altar(Needs another conduit lol also you can't make a self sacrifice dagger until T3 altar), infuse the livingwood planks in a blood altar to get Eidolon polished wood, which can be used to make Create brass casings, which you need to make the mechanical crafters, to make the Create crushing wheel, so you can grind Netherrack into cinder flour which can finally be turned into coke bricks with a Create mixer, then a Create sequenced assembly, FINALLY giving you coke coal. Which... As you can guess, isn't steel, you're just part of the way there...

And if you think that process now has you all set up for even the next step - you haven't even set up a Nature's altar, Astral sorcery altar, Runic altar, Eidolon altar, birthing altar, ritual of the forest, occult ritual, mana infuser, so on and so on. There's so many altars and infusers that the process to make that steel is just a microcosm of what's to come.

We know E2E was a rock solid pack, it ran with the 'Expert' style that started in IE:E - and I think many would hope E6E would be more of that. After all, it's of the same namesake.

That's not really how E6E is, though. It's trying to be unique and set itself apart from the standard 'expert' fare. Rather than separate lines of progression with the occasional overlap, magic and tech are deeply and forcefully combined in a relatively linear form of progression. On its own, that doesn't sound so bad but the scale of that intertwining and use of several "altar" type crafts creates a pack where recipes have more micro-crafting than GTNH but without the consistency of GTNH's (Screws, rods, etc). Recipes are highly arbitrary, and used as a gating mechanism or to overcomplicate the pack's early/midgame.

It forces Pneumaticraft without alternatives, greatly overcomplicates the Create Sequenced Assembler recipes (4,500x times through to unlock the decent IE multi's... Really?), pushes you into Blood Magic without being able to make a self sacrifice dagger, makes you progress into Eidolon which is an abandoned/unfinished mod, and much more tedium that just feels excessive.

Quests feel very unfinished and at times feel like they are leaving out quite a bit, and the non-expert E6 quests are included which do not account for the Expert progression chain. Major mods do not have quest series, and it feels a bit random which mods do/don't. I have around 10K hours in modded Minecraft but still had an incredibly difficult time finding out what I was supposed to do next in a crafting chain, I easily spent ~20% of my gameplay staring at NEI, feeling burnt out, and not really wanting to progress due to it being kinda un-fun to get roadblocked constantly.

Despite all of my ranting, pretty much every single recipe in the game is changed - and if you like altar and Create style crafting then the sheer quantity of it makes for a decent auto-crafting challenge. There was clearly a ton of effort put into tweaking every last inch of progression to fit what the developers intended, and to make sure that items unlock when they wanted. But I feel like there was nobody around to ask "Why though?" on some of these decisions.

In short, E6E doesn't feel like expert mode, it feel like extreme-spaghetti mode.

Some less relevant stuff:

That's the core of the pack out of the way. But I find a good bit of polish lacking, Apotheosis does what Apotheosis does and can spawn mobs that randomly one-shot the player in very sudden ways.

Valhesia, Roguelike dungeons, Guns without Roses, and many other custom structures have their generation frequency quite high (Default values I assume? Come on guys) to the point that you can't really stand anywhere without 2-3 custom structures in render distance at all times. It can be convenient in the early-game when running around looting, but everyone knows that the 30th time you see a custom structure it has lost its meaning and purpose.

There's a lot with this pack that's cool, but also a ton that's kind of awful. The balance of some of these mobs are kind of messed up.

A pack that's very different from everything else. Don't know how else to describe it other than Factoriolike!

I have been playing MeatballCraft for a while and so far its been great fun, it provides a great mix between magic mods such as Thaumcraft, Blood magic, Astral sorcery. Or tech mods like the Thermal series, tech reborn etc. while also having alot of exploration with Advent of Ascension.

The Aesthetics of the pack are a bit mixed because it has so many mods but the custom content usually has nice textures.

The community is great and helpfull and the developer regularly interacts with the community.

The performance of the pack is mixed because of how big it is but generally its pretty optimized

This modpack is horribly imbalanced, with overpowered armor and weapons able to be obtained very fast. But this is perfect. This truly is the sucessor to those meaty 1.7 modpacks held together with prayers and a mobzilla sized amount of superglue. You’re not meant to have a balanced play through, you’re meant to have fun with crazy mods.

Recourse trees are a cool idea, but not good in execution. They end up becoming more of a chore to use, and ends up just slowing the game down and becoming even more annoying than seives. You can do worse, but you can do a lot better

Probably the most fun modpack I have played for a while. For a guy like me who find tech packs quite off and like to play survival in a roguelike style, this is the pack I would recommend anyday. At first, this may seem annoyingly hard but will keep getting easier if you already have learnt the core mechanics of the pack. Also this is literally the only pack I never felt burnt out while playing.
Good stuff.