My personal favorite of the skyfactory line, and one of my favorite mods of all time. this mod will require some searching online sometimes and some repetitive gameplay, but it has given me hours and hours of gameplay as i have 100% it multiple times. this review is likely biased, but im yet to find a skyblock style pack that i enjoy more than this.

Absolutely phenomenal mod for modpack developers. For complex packs it is very important that you can program stuff in a sane way, allow code reuse etc. and Groovyscript supports that much better than every other scripting mod, while not making learning the baseline hard. Having builtin support for every major mod is icing on the cake. I also had good amount of fun contributing more support stuff. The only issue is that sometimes old stuff is incompatible because the mod periodically breaks its public API, but even then the lead dev often would go out of his way to contribute an update to another mod updating its API if possible

Completely replaces crafttweaker among other things, can do anything. Thing that definitely makes it superior is ability to reload scripts while ingame.

This is a compatibility layer for Fabric mods that use Fabric API so they can run on Quilt that generally works 'fine'. You thankfully don't need to also install QSL as this has it packaged.

The perfect mod for transit enthusiasts! Probably even better for designing your own metro than any game out there, since Minecraft is already a sandbox game.

Inspired by the Hong Kong MTR, Minecraft Transit railway lets you build a realistic-looking, customizable, and fully functional metro system in Minecraft. After a small learning curve (see YouTube for tutorials), your system will be continuously operational even without chunkloading. A block palette is included for designing your own stations, including signs with customizable labels which can be made to great specificity. It even includes a live symbolic system map online that can calculate the fastest route between stations in your world, like your favorite GPS app!

Note that this probably works best as a standalone mod for those who want it to be the focus of their gameplay, or as an aesthetic addition to a modpack. Like in real life, metro systems are best for moving thousands of people at once between common locations, so for kitchen-sink or progression-based modpacks, teleportation, speed, or flying buffs eclipse the functionality of this mod by far.

MTR is an incredible passion project with a very dedicated creator and community which is constantly being updated and given add-ons. This mod deserves much more attention imo, so I hope to see more big projects on YouTube in the coming years!

I have played the 1.12 version the most, that said this review will also take into account newly-added improvements and 1.16 exclusive content

What is it ?

Atum II is a mod centered around an arid and dangerous war-torn desertic dimension;
It has a nice foggy desert vibe to it as if the sand itself was blurring your vision and has quite detailled nature/structures at times, making it probably one of the most detailled desert dimension mod out there. It contains some amount of lore too I guess.

What does it offer ?

Sandy lands with alternative ways for getting your hands on vanilla items and features (such as how brewing ingredients are still available within the dimension but are now different items, or how dyes can now only be obtained by using a quern , among other stuff etc.).
Challenge through swarms of enemies appearing both at night with undeads as well as during the day with warriors and bandits, with the one dungeon added by the mod which comes with mazes, traps and fights, and the need to look for food as it tends to be scarce .
It is also a quite decent-looking dimension for being desert one, as most of deserts even in plenty of video games tend to feel lacking in terms of aesthetics, while this one with its constant yellowish fog, dead trees, villages and building blocks has enough going for it to be more interesting than most.

In terms of flaws :
The enemies feel a bit generic in terms of AI, as they mostly come up to you and hit you, with little to no new mechanics with the exception of the dimension's boss giving you a status effect depending on its related deity , the assassin poisoning you on every hit or the mob infighting going in between the dead and the living. In fact I would go as far as to say the gameplay provided with the 1.12 version's boss is more interesting within the context of the structure it spawns in ( it not taking any knockback and attacking in melee forces you to sort of attack and run while avoiding the traps located in previous rooms, which is more interesting in my opinion than just having to block its projectiles with your shield ). I am not going to talk about the unused second boss as it is unused and not that interesting
The Dimension could have been more interesting in terms of looks (even though I know making a desert interesting is an hard task), and while it has several biomes they sometimes feel a bit repetitive .
I find it also a bit lacking in terms of sound design , as it mostly resorts to using vanilla sound effects, with also a lack of custom made music (regular overworld music plays inside the dimension), and there is not even something like a desert wind or ambience of some kind to follow you on your journey.

In conclusion

While not as good as other mods out there, it not having many issues in terms of performance in its 1.12 version makes it an interesting mod to be expanded on by modpacks (like adding custom structures with reccurent complex, or new mobs from other mods to spawn there using multimob or craftweaker's spawntabletweaker addon).
It ends up as a decent mod, which is good enough tutorial-wise as the original curseforge mod page gives you enough information about what the mod adds in its latest version (And the custom crafting related to the mod's new workstations are fully compatible with JEI), but some information might be missing from that. For example I don't recall the mod telling you in any way how to get the boss to spawn, you basically have to look up a tutorial for that
A shame it is now discontinued, due to this some better desert dimension mod or revamp of this one might be made one day, always be on the lookout for this kind of thing.

It is of note that dying in this dimension also respawns you inside the dimension itself in 1.12 even if you don't put a bed down, making it a good dimension to exile and banish people to (making an exit portal from within the dimension is also made harder by the fact that the surface of most biomes is too hot to keep water in its liquid state) ; take notes modded server dwellers !

Written from the perspective of someone who likes tech mods, resources grinds, and create

I played this with a friend and we got around to a little bit after logistics and had a pretty good time

It's definitely challenging in that tech modpack sort of way, always needing resources, always needing supply lines for most things. That's part of the challenge of course and for the most part, it's so well designed that it's weird coming back to regular create after playing this

This is, in my opinion, one of the most cohesive and well designed create centric tech modpack overall. Almost everything feeds back into create, everything you do revolves around it, and everything you want to do involves it in one way or another

P.S. It performs surprisingly well on my potato home server (4gigs of ram) so no problems there, and the visuals and audio just blended into everything (nothing ever felt jarring or out of place) so no notes there either.

North American Fishes is very underrated. Over 150 fish is nothing to scoff at, and they are all beautiful. The mod's designs are in a style that is close to vanilla, and often feels exactly like it with the smaller fish, but diagonal cubes and generally more cubes and planes than the vanilla fish definitely separate it from the vanilla style. This is particularly noticeable with the mob's largest fishes, the White sturgeon and paddlefish. I personally love this artstyle, and its done extraordinarily well here. This mod also adds a lot of vegetation to the waters, and it looks stunning, particularly in the swamp.

In the Gameplay department, this mod adds some new food from the fish, a new sword crafted from the Sawfish, a new stone type, 'Creekcoble', and a new small block set crafted from freshwater sponge. However from here the mod suffers a bit gameplay-wise. Some gameplay features involving the Fish aren't implemented, which hampers my enjoyment of the mod. Fish have the exact same behavior as vanilla fish, which makes sense for most of them, although I would have preferred some variety for particular fish, such as making the walking catfish walk on land rather than flopping, or have the sawfish fight back. But definitely the most damning is the lack of fishing support. None of the 150+ fish are able to be caught with a rod. To the mod's credit, it adds a fishing trap that allows you to passively get fish from the trap after putting in bait, but it really isn't the same, and even then only includes some fish. The lack of fishing support could be solved with datapacks, but this feel like such a vital feature to a mod about fish so often caught with a line in North America that it feels a bit disappointing. Also, the mod has a fair few spelling errors, likely a result of the author not being an English native. It's minor but noticeable.

TL;DR: The fish are lovely, and the plants and algae are stunning. It adds a lot of fun new items, but the integration of the fish into gameplay is lacking.

Raspberry Flavoured is a modpack so great that I married the lead developer. You may think that this would make me a biased reviewer, but fear not, for I fell for her due to how amazing her pack was, not the other way around! That's how you know it's good.

I have extremely high standards when it comes to Minecraft mods and modpacks, as I am a game designer, Minecraft is my longest running hyperfixation, and I am a perfectionist, sometimes to a fault. But when I first played RF, it pleased me in a way that no other pack had done before. Mind you, it has been a while since that first playthrough, and both my tastes and the pack itself have been refined for a couple of years since, but even then there was something special about it. And refined now it is, you will not find a pack as cohesive or with as much polish and attention to detail as RF.

Despite its tags, it's hard for me to say if I would really call RF vanilla+, or even vanilla-, as it focuses more on what raspmary believes would be good design, rather than emulating what Mojang would believe to be good design. Though in my opinion, vanilla+ is kind of just used as a blanket term for mods that are intended to be well designed for the game, so it's not exactly incorrect. Whatever the case, this design philosophy is what makes the pack great. There's no arbitrary restrictions, it's well designed, and there is a clear vision; to make Minecraft not suck. Some of my favourite designed parts of RF are the tool progression, advancement tree, crop & fish selection, and general lack of content bloat, though it's very hard to list everything great about it concisely.

The only criticism I've seen for this pack that I believe is valid, and that hasn't since been addressed in an update / is being addressed in a future update, is that it can have poor performance. This has never really been a problem for me personally, but I have seen other people struggle to run the pack. I'm not really sure what could be done about this though, RF has a lot of mods so it's not really a surprise.

The most controversial part of RF is its feature removals. It removes a lot of stuff from vanilla, such as the end and villagers, and guts almost every mod integrated into it. I think this is a great thing that makes the pack a million times better, which shouldn't be a shock at this point of my review, but I do understand that it can be hard to accept for some. Personally though I think the pack doesn't remove things enough! I would love to one day see Create gutted of even more features, but that would take a lot of work.

Ultimately, RF is a modpack for people who like to take the game slow, and for those who are cursed with the knowledge of how to design a game good. There's nothing crazily flashy or out of this world, it's just a version of Minecraft that is cohesive and passionate. And passionate about it I am, it got me a wife after all!

Iron's spells and spellbooks is fantastic

the spells weave into the game seamlessly, no spell is too powerful unless you try to make it work in a way that is powerful, progression is great, the spritework is top-notch, and of course, to top it all off; the mod is extremely configurable, so you can balance your modpacks and kitchen sinks to your heart's content.