Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

It’s a great, solid pack and one of the first expert modpacks I played. Although, in retrospect, the endgame was a little lacking. Maybe it was truly great for its time, but with the benefit of hindsight, I think it could have had more content, specifically, by actually requiring players to use the creative items instead of simply obtaining them as trophies.

Beyond Cosmo is a pack I've had a love/hate relationship with so far.

Early game was best described as a nightmare. No death felt like it was the result of a mistake on my end, but rather some change that was neither telegraphed nor foreseeable, like "Creepers disguise themselves as zombies" or "some zombies can break cobblestone. which ones? guess." The bronze/iron/diamond upgrade template system is interesting for a few moments, and then frustrating forever.

The quest book seems half-finished and doesn't adequately prepare the player for upcoming challenges. Most pages are just "here's the vague progression of this mod" with no indication of why to care right now. I didn't find out the Nether was gated until I tried going there.

Call from the Depths is... not a great mod. I won't go into too much detail here because it's not like the pack author made it, but gating the Nether behind it is... not ideal.

That's not to say I haven't had any fun with the modpack, though. The "gun dungeons" felt mostly tough, but fair- the mobs are powerful, but have exploitable weaknesses that are relatively easy to find and feel AMAZING to discover. (Cave Hunters are still annoying, though.)

My biggest complaint is that it doesn't feel clear to me what Beyond Cosmo is trying to be. Does it want to be a tough but fair exploration/tech pack, or does it Wanna Be The Guy? Nothing really feels cohesive. I constantly feel underpowered and unprepared, and the pack doesn't seem to have any indication of how I COULD prepare. Every time I think I've found my footing, I get walled by OP mobs with no clear way to proceed besides unforgivable cheese.

Some of the mechanics also seem to actively reinforce this, with the worst offender being the total inability to place torches near spawners. This makes pushing in dungeons through actual combat non-viable, since you have to break the spawner just to make the number of mobs finite, and often that's not reasonable due to knockback, forcing the player to tunnel creep.

I will give it credit for one thing, though: it provides the player with an excellent motivation to go to space to begin with. (Namely, that I don't want to live on this planet anymore.) It's also, to my knowledge, the only modpack which has significant implementation of Cosmic Horizons at ALL, so credit where credit is due on that, too.

I have heard about this mod a while ago too through a video by "I am Naveed", its been some time now that I use it in Biblically Accurate MC as a mod to add somewhat-cursed illagers in 1.12

What is it ?

A mod adding new illagers ;
This mod was made in 1.12 some time ago, which is a time where most illager concepts revolved around the ones we had : the vindicator and evoker (illusioner too but its still unused as of writing this review), so do not expect concepts which are more original than summoners or fire aspect axe wielders, still some variants deserve the spotlight.

What does it offer ?

Vindicator and evoker variants which have custom abilities involving projectiles and new creatures to summon, all of the evokers are sub-bosses having more health than regular evokers and sometimes more than two attacks to use.

Here are the vindicator variants of this mod :

The Blazicator
A vindicator variant which wields two golden axes, his melee touch acting as if they were enchanted with fire aspect. He deals a decent amount of damage and can be seen as a Nether Vindicator, there's not much more to him expect the fact that he gets attacked by and actively chases all other vindicator types for some reason (its not Wither AI I've checked)
The Snowicator
A vindicator variant with less health than the two others which throw a snowball every time he attacks in melee for some reason (doesn't seem to do anything, sometimes he even throws them at himself by accident). He does a decent amount of damage similar to the previous one but inflict slowness instead. He wields an iron axe
The Endcator
The strongest vindicator of all, uses a diamond axe and holds a shield (which he doesn't actually use its just for decoration I guess, they should have removed it I think), he can teleport like endermen (basically an hostile enderman which also attack villagers)

Here are the evoker variants of this mod :

The Blazvoker
This evoker variant summons little blaze-like creatures with vex AI and attacks with lightning strikes (which are very noisy and will turn all of your villagers into witches, he is also a bit too resilient, I would recommend not using him for serious custom raids)
The Stonevoker
This fire-resistant evoker can summon sometimes stone golems or attack with fangs (which look like gray cubes instead and tend to throw their target high in the air), like the others he is too resilient to really do anything with him and attacks every creature it sees alive or undead
The Burn Voker
This evoker generates lava source blocks on enemies, shoots fireballs (both regular and explosives) and falls slowly just like chickens. He will lift himself above the ground when targeting and attacking other creatures
The Skelet Voker
This evoker variant will attack by shooting arrows or summoning skeletons, he is probably one of the easiest one to deal with especially during the day and probably one with the most potential for serious use (don't like his texture though)
The Nature Voker
This evoker summons hordes of fast and resilient trees which will rush you and will kill you. He can also instantly summon dirt on his enemies to kill them through suffocation. He's also fire resistant for some reason
The Wither Voker
This evoker variant will levitate, generate areas of wither effect like lingering potions and shoot wither skulls
The End Voker
Probably my favourite, this evoker looks good, can cause the target to receive a levitation effect and can summon an enderman to aid him. He still gives you the levitation effect without any chance to miss as it is not tied to a projectile or anything else, its just applied, and I would prefer if it had a way to avoid it
The Frostoker
Decent in looks and strenght, this evoker variant can shoot lumps of snow and ice balls, attack with fangs (retextured to be white snow-ish blobs). He can also summon snow and ice golems to aid him in battle

While some mob variants are could be used in interesting situations, most of them if not all feel redundant or poorly-executed . The same goes for the textures used which look a bit diluted and vanilla sound effects are being reused for every creature added, there's also a complete lack of config files anywhere, which means you'll have to rely on other mods to tweak the mobs's health and damage or spawning.
I also really don't like that some attacks by the various evoker sub-bosses involve unavoidable things like lightning strikes or lava suddently appearing where you stand, it feels a bit unfair, and I prefer when strong creatures are more than damage sponges with instant damage abilities. I did not notice any major performance issues while re-playing with the mod again today.

In conclusion

This mod is falls in the category of "elemental creatures" type mods like Elemental creepers or Elemental witches but for vindicators and evokers instead. It's name might give out the impression that it will extend the illager family to incorporate new concepts for enemies and portray crime through new creatures, but most of what it does is add direct variants of vindicators and evokers which are often times a bit unbalanced.

Its not all bad though and this mod might still have its place if only some of the illagers are used in a pack, or if it is used irronically as a joke mod with little to no regards for overlapping mob concepts or unfairness; it can also be among mods to use combined with Raids Backport, just be careful about which mobs appear and when to avoid raids become an impossible chore, and also take into account that they often fight each other.

Specs: 32Gb DDR5 RAM, Intel Ultra 7 155h, Nvidia RTX 4070 Laptop GPU

The gameplay is decent and the aesthetics are okay (not a big fan of the continuity mod personally), but holy hell the performance is god awful on this version of the pack. Constant random frame drops after 20 minutes of play, ridiculously high RAM usage even at 8gb allocated, and you have to restart every hour or so to prevent the game from crashing. Completely unacceptable.

Oh, and I hope you don't plan to load any new chunks, because it's gonna slow your pc to a crawl if you aren't running a NASA computer.

Other than that, it's the create mod. Hard to go wrong with it.

I want to first say this pack has an amazing premise, and the satisfaction from completing the pack is greater than what I've experienced from almost every other pack I've played. Having said that, the modpack has tons of problems that make it hard to recommend to anyone but massive skyblock fans and I certainly can't recommend this to beginners.

First is the fact Botania is legitimately a miserable experience in this pack. The grind for mana is a pain, because you simply don't have enough space to make the really interesting methods of mana generation. This isn't a knock against Botania as a whole, but the mod is not properly leveraged here beyond being a cool way to craft some stuff you need for other items. Botania being replaced with a different mod would've made the pack flow better.

The other main issue is that Thermal Expansion is so much better than the other options at the crossroads, that picking any of the other options first will lengthen your completion time considerably. I once tried this pack years ago when it was new, and dropped it because I picked Botania first and had no idea how massively I messed up by doing that. I just thought the pack's progression was like that. Whereas this time I picked Thermal Expansion first and had a vastly smoother time playing the pack.

AE also feels pointless being here. You both don't have enough space to make an ME system make sense and because it seems that Sky Stone is finite I was paranoid I wouldn't have enough to make a proper system. It wasn't a big deal regardless, because I had plenty of other compact ways to move things around. However AE is somewhat required due to a custom crafting recipe, and it was a real slog to make the 64k drive I needed (the Inscriber is effectively manual only, which sucks). I think the drive should've been given to the player so they could skip AE completely if they wanted to.

However the biggest reason I can't recommend this pack to beginners (despite the pack description claiming it's "accessible to new players") is because the quest book is not very helpful. The book fails to mention several really important things that would make a player's experience smoother (such as crafting Invar tools, upgrading machines, using enchanting, and using the mods included to their fullest). Thankfully I was very experienced with all the included mods and was able to make the pack easier than perhaps intended, however a beginner would not know these very important things. My advice to anyone playing this is to focus on getting enchanting and an Igneous Extruder as soon as possible, they are both a big help.

There are also some smaller complaints that don't ruin the pack, but added friction that doesn't need to be there. Small things such as the quest rewards often being weak, the obsidian at the bottom of the sphere being annoying and just padding the playtime (I literally never bothered to clear it), many blocks not being compressible for the heavy sieve, the cube's final layer being round (when it being flatter would've made making animal pens and Botania setups less frustrating), the Munchdew quest giving the player an Openblocks block placer but not instructions on how to use it (I never bothered to set it up, was too buggy for my tastes), BetterFPS caused several rendering issues so you might want to remove it, no way to see animal breeding cooldowns (I suggest adding WAWLA to the pack), nerfing food just making food frustrating, cows having a milk cooldown (for some reason), the Botania orechid being way worse than the ore lens, and the Empowerer not having a progress indicator (not a big deal with the machine normally, but this mod uses the block a fair amount).

For all my complaints in this review, I still had plenty of fun. The water strainers made dirt farming a breeze (compared to most other skyblock packs, where dirt is annoying), the game has a good selection of mods (with Thermal Expansion working amazingly in this pack), the sense of constantly wanting more space even when you get more is a great feeling, and I appreciated just how useful agriculture was for the pack's progression (many modpacks make farming and ranching a waste of time).

Overall I did have more fun than not, but the pack had many papercut issues that made it less enjoyable than a hypothetical sequel would be. I really hope someone does make another pack that leverages a lack of space, a couple have tried but tend to make space a non issue during the midgame. I think a pack similar to this but with better midgame pacing, less Botania, and some better quests would be a phenomenal pack to play.

I think this modpack is great if you want far views and great fps and visuals would recommend 100%

What is it ?

Zoesteria is a biome mod which adds a bunch of new biomes and related blocks to the world.

What does it offer ?

New biomes to explore which are added to the default worldgen, with a bunch of flowers to go with them. It doesn't seem to contain any notable issue in performances, and some of the biomes actually look pretty nice (I quite like the sort of woodland-ish biomes even if many would find them generic).

Where it falls short is in its global looks : a lot of biomes feel a bit generic and unoriginal, even if to me unoriginality isn't something which is enough to disqualify a mod as one always takes inspirations from the outside world and other people's work even subconsciously (just like matter you can only transform not create, choosing where transformation becomes creation is arbitrary), but a lot of the mod's ideas have been done and redone in much better ways .
A lot of these biomes could have passed as purposely trying to emulate a certain vanilla-friendliness if they didn't rely on a bunch of new trees with bland textures , and for a mod which adds custom contents outside of just biomes there's a surprising lack of ground decorations outside of a few new flowers here and there among the overly-bright bushes; That means in terms of gameplay that actually traversing the biomes doesn't really feel that interesting nor challenging if that's what your looking for.

In conclusion

I heard of this mod a looong time ago, I'm almost surprised it was left to rot away after all those years (technically, there's Zoesteria 2 but its just a similar situation in 1.15 instead). It only having about one version (excluding the alphas) with what to me seems like placeholder textures makes me feel it never was intended to be something more though, if you want similar features done in a much better way there's Terrestria , which even seems to be somewhat tied to Zoesteria but I could be mistaken.
It could still work in a modpack due to it having a whole separate config folder outside of the config files which allows to tweak and disable biomes among other stuff, even if it doesn't go too far in possibilities.

I was already cautious when I saw "carefully curated" next to an AI image that wasn't even proofread. Upon generating a world, I found that it simply wouldn't. It was certainly trying, the logs make that clear, but if loading Create recipes into JEI takes 7 minutes on a modern PC, you don't have a modpack, you have a PC torture device. I rate this pack a Mercy Kill/10.

I have played this mod in 1.19 with friends on a modded fabric server a while ago, I didn't know anything about the mod before that and it was selected as the main worldgen mod a bit randomly after I watched a horror video using it; My experience and point of view towards this mod is mostly tied to this experience, even if I just tried for a bit the 1.21 version before making this review

What is it ?

Regions Unexplored is a mod which adds a lot of new biomes (about 70 as of the 19th of July 2026) to the usual overworld and nether worldgen, with a lot of blocks to go with them.

What does it offer ?

New biomes with extremely detailled flora, rocks and aesthetic thingies which brings them to life. The environments are both realistic and of the fantasy type, with a lot of variety in the blocks and decorations used depending on the biome.
When I say "new biomes" I mean that with this mod there will be breathtaking overworld biomes, lushier cave biomes (list : Ancient Delta, Bioshroom Caves, Prismachasm, Redstone Caves, Scorching Caves ) and weirdly-alien hellish biomes for the Nether too (list : Blackstone Basin, Glistering Meadow, Infernal Holt, Mycotoxic Undergrowth, Redstone Abyss ).
There's also one new aquatic biomes as well.

In terms of flaws I had noticed all the way back in 1.19 that having this mod generate biomes in your world seemed to reduce greatly the frequency of vanilla biomes (which can be a problem if you have content, modded or vanilla, that is only tied to specific vanilla biomes); It seems to no longer be so much of an issue in more recent versions of the mod, and the configs are also pretty easy to figure out, which is great since you can decide inside them which biomes appear and chances of replacement of a biome by another selected one.
A second issue that I found besides some missing crafting recipes which have been added since is the fact that the new biomes often seem so detailed that the vanilla biomes not receiving any changes in look whatsoever makes them feel out of place :
Thankfully I have just now heard of Regions Unexplored: Expansion which seems to fix that issue (Look at the reviews for this separate mod for more info on the goods and bads, and a datapack-alternative that another reviewer wrote about called Regions Unexplored - Expanded), and it seems there is still some amount of decorations which gets automatically added to some vanilla biomes.

In conclusion

This mod is as of now my favorite in terms of worldgen mods which add new biomes, with the biome concepts and decorations being the main reasons why (check the mod's page for prettier pictures). One of its strengths may come from the amount of addons which exist to create compatibility bridges between this mod and other well-known ones.
It is pretty similar to biomes o' plenty in the sense that if you want a mod which adds new content and makes sure it fits with the vanilla word generation, then this mod might be for you, but if you're looking for more drastic changes , then you might find this mod's additions less interesting and would probably favour mods like Terralith or Oh The Biomes We've Gone instead.
Globally I find this mod much better than biomes o' plenty but I still wish the various decorations had more utility, I always find it interesting when even the most ambient of blocks and entities have alternate uses outside of the vibe they participate in creating. Still, this is an amazing mod , goes well in a larger pack.

Yes Im going to give my own mod a good review. Has everything implemented from 26.1.2 apotheois mods and gateways to eternity.