Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Entity culling is a mod that can significantly improve client performance in almost any scenario, but excels in built up areas with mob farms or pastures. When combined with other optimisation mods like Sodium and Ferrite Core, there is less of an effect but it is still a noticeable bump.

The only time I've ever had issues with this mod is in combination with other mods that do strange stuff with the camera, resulting in incorrect culling (e.g. Reign of Nether). The issues I have had with this mod are minor however and aren't much a problem with this mod as they are the other mods that change the camera so significantly.

Overall, great mod that should be in almost any pack.

Unique resource generation loop with farming singularities, generally a lower power and wiring requirement than other modpacks, so good for beginners to various tech. The blue color does get a bit boring, which is good incentive to add more trees and grass.

Added exploration beyond the standard skyblock adds depth to the gameplay. The initial option of a happy ghast would have been great, if only the speed was increased significantly, otherwise it takes jetpacks to really open up fun exploration. Multiple resource generation options leading to some flexibility of play.

Exploration felt atypical and rewarding in the water world. Good mix of tech mods and resource generation. The quest book helped guide building the right items, although nautec felt finnicky for using. Most exploration was enjoyable except for the final dimension boss was a bit of a slog.

Does what it says: it culls entities. Entities and block entities that you cannot see (be they behind a wall or in a direction you're not facing) are not rendered. In crowded areas this is especially helpful. It is also easy to toggle using a keybind that's unbound by default called debug toggle culling. I usually set it to comma ,.

This plays nice in cases where another culling mod might overlap, such as Brute Force Rendered Culling (and it fork Revived).

(Note, most of this is extracted from my review on a fork of this mod, Brute Force Rendering Culling Revived, for 1.20.1.)

Brute Force Rendering Culling (and its 1.20.1 fork Revived) is the sole reason I can play the modpacks I love with a playable framerate. We're talking from 6-18 fps to a whopping 25-85 fps increase. (And yes, my laptop performs that poorly.)

What it does is simple: brute force rendering culling. If it's not on your screen, the mod will prevent it from rendering before it even reaches the CPU. This applies to entities, block/tile entities, particles, and even chunks. The result is less RAM, CPU, and GPU usage across the board. The chunk culling is especially impactful, but it's worth noting that it can cause pop-in if you turn really hard really fast.

These are all toggleable and configurable in the mod's config or with a lightweight popup menu in-game which is bound to R by default.

Do note that this can sometimes cause crashes, especially when used with other mods that affect rendering pipelines. It does seem to behave with overlapping culling mods, though, like EntityCulling. On 1.20.1, Revived fixes a bunch of hard-to-diagnose crashes caused by the original.

This is also generally a drag'n'drop you can add to any modpack. Probably.

Brute Force Rendering Culling Revived is the sole reason I can play the modpacks I love with a playable framerate. We're talking from 6-18 fps to a whopping 25-85 fps increase. (And yes, my laptop performs that poorly.)

What it does is simple: brute force rendering culling. If it's not on your screen, the mod will prevent it from rendering before it even reaches the CPU. This applies to entities, block/tile entities, particles, and even chunks. The result is less RAM, CPU, and GPU usage across the board. The chunk culling is especially impactful, but it's worth noting that it can cause pop-in if you turn really hard really fast.

These are all toggleable and configurable in the mod's config or with a lightweight popup menu in-game which is bound to R by default.

On other game versions, the original Brute Force Rendering Culling is supreme. On 1.20.1, Revived fixes a bunch of hard-to-diagnose crashes caused by the original.

This is also generally a drag'n'drop you can add to any modpack. Probably.

**TLDR.: Dont bother, its a buggy mess **

Time played: ~265 hours

What i liked

• The setting of beeing stranded on a desert planet is cool and having to fight starvation, temperature and hordes of mobs is quite a nice idea.
• Some mods in this pack are some of my favorite mods (enderIo, pam's, immersive engineering)
• nostalgia

What i disliked

• bugs
  • advanced rocketry satelites are loosing power, despite 2 big solar panels + battery. this left me with no choice but to go to creative to get the data for space exploration.
  • 1M dirt quest cannot be triggered.
  • if quests dont activate/ bug out you will have to force them through commands :(
• frequent crashes in older versions
• multiple mods doing the same thing
  • void ore miner/ ex nihilo/extra utilities
  • powerd spawner/ soul shards the old ways/ dark utilities/ woot
  • nuclearcraft/extreme reactors/draconic reactor
  • integrate dynamics/enderio
  • spartan weaponry/ tinkers construct
• some crafting recipies/items are unobtainable, locking me out of whole mods
  • forestry
  • extra utilities miner
  • quantum flux: unlocked after advanced rocketry, only found this out once i was almost done
• grindy, hard to automate endgame quest:
  • dirt 1M (followup quests fortunately much easier)
  • avarita stuff has no real reason to be there, feels like filler
• other:
  • snowballs impossibly hard to automate for making smoothies
  • railcraft has no place in this modpack, there is simply no situation where you need a train
  • compact machines cannot transfer redstone and quite frankely dont belong in the pack
  • ae2 is buggy and needs extra effort (over 1.12 experience) to get things to work

Reign of Nether plays more like a highly polished RTS game than a Minecraft mod and offers a really unique experience I haven't seen any other mod pull off.

This mod has all the features you'd expect from an RTS mod, a resource system, multiple teams, a new management interface. The top down camera works incredibly well for the game and it is clean and somewhat easy to learn. The resource system makes sense and Minecraft has been adapted well for this mod.

It isn't all perfect though and this mod does work poorly with any culling mods due to it's orthographic camera, if you do choose a mod like embeddium you should disable block face culling to prevent rendering issues. Furthermore there is some issues with items dropping which just get left to despawn.

I would recommend this mod to anyone who likes RTS games!

This is honestly a really solid mod without any major issues and remains one of the main mods people remember from the 1.7 era of modding.

Spider Queen entirely changes how the game plays, and does a pretty good job at providing an alternate game loop. While this mod likely won't hold your attention for hundreds of hours it is still incredibly solid and is very fun to try.

Some of the textures are a bit rough around the edges but that's to be expected for a mod of its age.

I would highly recommend people try this if they haven't, it is still fun despite its age!