Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

The good:

• Good quest book, explained enough to help understand mod, and didn't railroad you too much.
• Good mod line up, hadn't played Ember before this pack, really liked it. Agricraft and the other food mods were useful too.

The bad:

• Very unstable, particularly related to the Nether. Getting set on fire in the Nether would lead to a crash, sometimes entering the Nether would crash. It's why I haven't finished the pack, I entered the Nether, it crashed and loading it again crashes.

Overall:
I had fun. Honestly, if the save hadn't been bricked by the Nether, I would have gone to finish the pack.

Waila has been the gold standard of “what block is that” mods for as long as it’s existed. Hwyla was an updated fork that solved a laundry list of edge cases and odd bugs and was an autoinclude in every pack until TheOneProbe arrived to split the market, the only functional difference between the two bring their APIs and how much info is available without addons. Later, Jade arrived on the version as well, creating a “use the one you like for your use case” situation. For three nearly functionally-identical mods that compete in the same space, there’s a refreshing lack of drama about which is “better”.

Hwyla does exactly what it says on the tin: it serves a specific function without feature-creep, bloat, or drama. For proof of its stability, look at how long it’s been since it updated without anything new showing up on the issue tracker!

Hwyala inherits both of these qualities by virtue of being a Hwyla fork, and as it simply adds one extra bugfix, it serves only to help the gold standard maintain the standard of excellence it’s rightfully earned a reputation for.

Disclaimer: this is my fork and I’m hyping it, but I’m not denigrating the og: go look!

Waila has been the gold standard of “what block is that” mods for as long as it’s existed. Hwyla is an updated fork that solved a laundry list of edge cases and odd bugs and was an autoinclude in every pack until TheOneProbe arrived to split the market, the only functional difference between the two bring their APIs and how much info is available without addons. Later, Jade arrived on the version as well, creating a “use the one you like for your use case” situation. For three nearly functionally-identical mods that compete in the same space, there’s a refreshing lack of drama about which is “better”.

Hwyla does exactly what it says on the tin: it serves a specific function without feature-creep, bloat, or drama. For proof of its stability, look at how long it’s been since it updated without anything new showing up on the issue tracker! A track record that long is a well-earned reputation and a standard of excellence that all mods should strive for.

I mostly played through this mod in was most likely the All of Fabric modpack (The 6th one ? I'm not sure myself), most of what I recall about the mod might be a bit old, so I replayed it for a bit recently just to be sure

What is it ?

The Bumblezone is a beautiful and cozy dimension mod featuring a secret realm which can only be accessed by teleporting into a bee's nest ;
It looks like an infinite hive with the endless sound of flying bees with a couple of different biomes and places to find.

What does it offer ?

A whole new secret place where bees are everywhere, with good amounts of pretty blocks to build with, small structures and larger dungeons scattered across canyons of yellow hexagons and fields of pollen;
If you start wreaking the place, the whole hive will get alerted and bees will become hostile for some time which is a really neat mechanic.
There is some amount of stuff to do like exploring said dungeons for rewards, fly through hoops on the back of a big bee or maybe even find the queen ?
This is a really nice place to build a house, fool around with the new banner patterns and listen to new tunes while eating new food, and it manages to feel distinct enough from the nether despite being an underground space too.

The main con ? it doesn't stand alone as of now :
This dimension mod while great can almost only work as a secret realm inside a larger pack filled with external content, as this mod's dimension and related features aren't enough to keep someone satisfied forever. It works well, but its not perfect and could use some features to make living inside the dimension and staying there more interesting outside of pure exploration and house building (agriculture ? fishing ? there are probably many answers to this question that I am not even considering and I am just waiting to see what comes next for this mod).

In conclusion

When discovering throwing a pearl into a nest gets you to a whole new place to explore the feeling of wonder is amazing, it kind of reminds me of discovering the Hive in Hollow Knight for the first time, a whole new area you can entirely miss if you aren't purposely doing a 112% playthrough of the game; Perhaps this dimension is directly referencing this area of this game ? Maybe this makes my review more biased than I thought.

I usually tend to think cozy dimension mods feel too empty with not enough things to do, but this one is still solid, not too important not too unimportant for what is supposed to be hidden to begin with.
There's a wiki at https://github.com/TelepathicGrunt/Bumblezone for anyone interested (spoilers), and while I did play mostly the Fabric version of the mod I would like to point out a Forge/Neoforge one exists.

I would recommend it despite its flaws, it's a great mod to hide inside a larger pack.

I used to have lag with trains, so much lag experience, but with THIS Create addon, my trains literally runs smoothly than ever, this guy who created this mod is the GOD.

The other questing mod... On modrinth

FTB Quests isnt available on modrinth, you could say it WAS a monopoly until 2023... Same goes for the other ftb mods, ftb chunks ftb ultimine etc etc etc. Until what was known as "Heracles questing" popped up. Available for both 1.20.1 forge and fabric... It got updated for a few versions and then what I would call abandoned. As of writing this is hasn't been updated for 2 years. And there are bugs that still haven't been fixed for both DEV and PLAYER, but also as of writing this it's being ported to neoforge 1.21.1 (the 1.20.1 versions are abandoned I think, don't quote me). And it's having really nice features and I really do hope the absolute best, being a questing mod for BOTH modrinth and curseforge. It allows modpack developers to publish their packs on both platforms.

For a Modpack Developer

Am going to be honest, get ready to deal with some nasty stuff. It's crazy how I've been able to deal with these bugs. The most notable one is when you create a quest, you MUST exit and reopen the menu. If you don't do that its going to glitch out, positioning will not work, dependency lines will be broken among many others. It's also very minimalistic, so it's missing some features such as sizing quests, longer titles, longer subtitles, renaming "chapters", images, background, subchapters and a **** ton more. What am just saying is get ready to be annoyed by stuff.

With the negatives out of the way, there are a WHOLE bunch of positives that I love the hermes syntax in the quest description. You are able to display items, crafting recipes (some recipes outside of minecraft work, for example EXTENDED CRAFTING). I like the tasks page being simple to set up (although I think the rewards and tasks should all be in the same page). It's really easy to just add stuff, add dependencies to quest via the linking tool. The quest types are also very good, you are able to check for item tags, statistics, uh lootable, biome, dimension and many others.

For a player

Uh, I don't really have a say in this... But It works fine I guess? I mean at random times, it will move the viewer to the top right and you have to drop your item and pick up the item to complete the quest when grabbing it from a casting table from tinkers construct. It's functional... Get it?

In conclusion, it works if you are a player, if your a dev just remember to open and close the menu. I like the mod and cant wait for the 1.21.1 neo rework

The 20 new dyes fill in much needed gaps in minecraft's palette, with both new dyes and new blocksets. Many of the dyes have unique ways to obtain them: from plants, beetles, crystals, archeology, and coral to name a few. There's 2 new trees: peach and wintergreen. Only wintergreen has it's own wood type, but madder, a unique root plant, adds another. The mucktuff and corrugated metal blocksets can be dyed with any of the 36 dyes, and they are great for their unique textures and tints. The new dyes mean 20 new glazed terracotta blocks, and these have some very neat textures and color combos, plenty of possibilities for builds. The subtle and useful additions to the overworld generation make exploring more interesting.

The new dyes are very well integrated with vanilla mechanics, they can be used on banners, fireworks, leather armor, and can even be seen on many new tropical fish variants.

This mod has a lot of compatibility, automatically generating items and recipes when it detects a dyed set, which then can be textured by a resource pack. Many mods compat textures are built in, like Create and Supplementaries. One I really appreciate is Nature's Spirit, as its chalk and kaolin blocksets are great for pastel and desaturated colors respectively. It also has paper lanterns in all colors, and many of its flowers can be crafted into the new dyes when El & L's is installed.

My only negatives about this mod are that not all of the dyes have new content, that strawberries don't grow without bonemeal, and that the end of development left a few outstanding bugs, like a crash with create:e's beds.

I'd recommend this mod to anyone making a 1.20.1 modpack that wants to expand on building and nature.

Health and damage scaling is a real problem for most of the bosses as you progress through the modpack. Every “Medium” and higher difficulty boss I’ve encountered has some variation of an instant kill move, which basically forces you into a respawn scumming strategy respawn, deal your ~500 damage, die, and repeat until the boss is dead.

The bosses themselves are amazing, and you can really see how much love and effort the devs have put into their mods. But combining extremely high health pools and damage scaling with unavoidable or near instant kill attacks just isn’t a fun combination. It turns what could be really engaging boss fights into endurance tests where dying and repeating the fight is often more effective than actually learning and mastering the boss.

Although I'm an author on this project, Ive really only helped on the documentation and some of the ideas. It's Lucky who's really made this mod shine.

Foundry Engine is pitched as a mod to bring together scripting from mods like KubeJS with a built in editor GUI, tools for editing the world like axiom and the ability to run serverside only for mini games. Even in this early state it does succeed at that, we have Gcat testing it for his current project!

I've tried to be as unbiased as possible in this review, as you can probably see from the rather low performance and stability score at the moment, but thats only because the project is in alpha and constantly changing!

I've made this review to hopefully bring awareness to this newcomer in the scripting mod scene. Id genuinely recommend it to anyone trying out new experimental content for 26.1+, come over to our discord if you want any help or want to influence the development!

I loved everything about this modpack the one thing i had a problem with was that i was getting extreme memory leaks and laggs when i was playing full screen if i played windoved i could easily handle 70 fps 2k with shaders