Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Specs: 32Gb DDR5 RAM, Intel Ultra 7 155H, Nvidia RTX 4070 Laptop.

The gameplay is decent and the aesthetics are okay. Performance leaves a lot to be desired. Be prepared to restart the game and launcher every 45 minutes because after a while the game starts to randomly freeze like crazy.

Modpack developers are way too comfortable optimizing their packs like AAA developers.

(accidentally left a review on the wrong version of this pack. Why does it have 2 entirely separate pages anyhow?)

Technically-speaking, this is my first review on ModDex since all the other ones made before used Modded Minecraft Community Reviews

What is it ?

This mod features a new guard illager to the mix, which is both found in raids as well as in illager structures.

What does it offer ?

A new illager-type fighter mob, which is both found in raids as well as in outposts and mansions too.
This mob is a pretty simple but efficient concept of a swordsman member of the illager group, meant to defend locations and bases with pride. They look quite nice, with a custom helmet that the player can acquire from them rarely, their global look reminding me of Zelda's guards in the Legend of Zelda : Ocarina of Time, and they also have nice custom-made sound effects to go with this.
The most interesting thing which sets them apart from other illager knights is their reliance on potions : they can use healing and speed potions if required, and they usually aren't alone in the fights they engage in.
I like the implications of the witches working with the illagers that this creates but maybe I'm looking too much into it idk.

This new mob gained a functional shield at some point after its 1.12 incarnation, even if I've seen small visual bugs where it doesn't show when the mob is attempting to block attacks while swimming. In recent versions (1.20) I've also sometimes seen that their helmet appeared with no texture as an item (while it still looked fine when worn).

In conclusion

This illager concept albeit quite generic is executed well enough to actually work alongside other illager-adding raid mods such as Hunter's return or Enchant with Mob, or as the evil counterpart to the smarter Villager Guards.
I would like to add to this review that there's a config file for this mod (in 1.20.1 at least), allowing you to decide exactly at which waves of raids you want the guard to appear and if you keep him in vanilla illager structures.
It's 1.12 version can also work really well for making custom raids using the Raids Backport mod.

Think of a hard game, think of the hardest difficulty or that game, does it make the enemies faster and does more combo? or does it... put you in a 500 hours stat grind where you have to outdps 60 billion hp enemies that oneshots you?

Well if you're playing this modpack, you WILL be hit with the latter, congrats!

Now let's get more in depth, Cisco's ultimate certainly tried it's... best, i think... to mimic the endless grind of RPG dungeon crawler games except it does it very badly because it does things exactly like those other endless grind RPG dungeon crawler where enemies has tons of dps checks and you generally has no fighting chance in the early and midgame...

Except you do! it's Minecraft, you can do guerilla tactics, block off dungeon paths, and just go straight to the chest and get the absolute best early game gear (Brightsteel) 10 minutes into the pack... yeah, a bit insane isn't it?

And look, stat checks can be turned into something fun if it was something very gradual and forgiving and not damage sponges type of dps checks, but when your pack does it like this simply for the reason of making it very hard and then have nothing else to entertain the player, it's just a bad RPG choice, and as unforgiving as other semi-RPG pack is (RLCraft, Abyssal Ascent, Ascendra, ATM (kitchen sink), GTNH (it has difficult mobs in it, not entirely rpg but tangent), etc), they all work because they have other things to make your players entertain themselves while still being stat checked by the bosses and so

Not to mention the performance of this pack honestly feels really bad, even for 1.20.1 packs which many has bad performances too, this is just on the worse ends, aesthetics feels very bland like there's just no identity to the pack, nothing much to the immersiveness either, and then, you're hit with this kinda gameplay, it's just like that one meme...

play our game at the hardest difficulty!
"is it numbers difficulty or mechanics difficulty?"
what?
pull out detailed chart explaining the difference between the two
its a difficult game sir
its numbers difficulty again

THIS PACK IS JUST NUMBERS = DIFFICULT, and even though it's still really bad, i definitely see the potential with it, just, Ciscos Ultimate has just been pretty bad for the time being, i dropped this a few months ago, i do wanna say that the next iteration of this pack (also known as Ciscos Dragonfyre) does it's stat check a bit better compared to Ultimate, but that's for another review, poor modpack, hope it gets better

To put it simply, carry on is a makeshift backpack mod except for blocks and entities, you can now basically be an enderman! sounds cool right?...

And while i would really want to end my review there, i do have a thing or two i wanna talk about this mod and it's issues

First of all, it's a good mod, it's very convenient for basic vanilla+ experience and maybe some more in-depth storage mods as this can be helpful if you don't have backpacks, wants to transport villager, etc, it does it's job...

However....

Second of all... this mod has a really really bad compatibility with a lot of mods/blocks sometimes, i don't like saying it's game breaking, but when you have a kitchen sink pack and this mod, and you accidentally picked up something like interdimensional chronospherical spacetime singularity multihatch perfect overclocking convertible digital controller, your whole game just gives up and you may or may not lost your block and has to redo everything to craft it again, and will eventually just tend to make people end their runs or cheat, and as you may or may not see with the other reviews, this mod breaks in a lot of cases, not just kitchen sink custom kubejs block, it breaks with a lot of tech mods, it breaks with certain custom renderings, it breaks with machines, it breaks with this, it breaks with that, like, this mod is just not worth it to fix it's compatibilities because it has so many, compared to Mekanism cardboard (which still has certain issues but it works better somehow)...

And while that's really all i can say with this mod, it has been a part of a lot of my older playthroughs, compatibility issues does made this mod hard to be added to my new and newer modpack experiments that doesn't like having it's machine broke, so yeah, unfortunate

Exosphere 1 or BM Exosphere 1, is a modpack that does almost the exact same with about all other adventure/tech/kitchensink 1.20.1 modpack with exactly one twist, the entire world is an old Minecraft-type sky island type, fall down and it's all void, that's it

Now you might be wondering, why would i rate it this high compared to most other 1.20.1 modpacks when the only most notable difference is the world type? like, i can just play skyblock or whatever, but here's the thing

The whole modpack is actually pretty much designed around this, and as generic as all the mods that were being put into this pack, they all blend surprisingly well for the world type at hand... now let me just get into the points of the pack

The Good

1. This pack's world type adds so much verticality to the game, in a regular Minecraft world, you wouldn't always be changing the height of where you look, not even in the mines, in this pack however, you will not be seen at once or ever be at the same vertical level whenever you are exploring, and although it sounds like something's that can be bad for exploring, the pack gives you a soulbound grappling hook at the start, so you can pretty much explore easily, and it isn't that hard to be repaired either, PLUS it finally gave a good meaning to Elytras as now you have some sort of things to crash into instead of just occasional mountains and then flat lands everywhere else like in Vanilla

2. The pack has quest that does a surprisingly good job for people to read and learn about the pack or even Minecraft in general, like, i can see people actually start out on Exosphere instead of regular Minecraft, but then again that's from me, this pack seems pretty introductory for everyone starting out on modpacks and goes easy on veterans

3. Balance, every mod is still generic in here, but they all work in conjunction to how the world itself looks, ore creepers would be absolutely busted if not for the fact that you're playing on sky islands where finding diamonds = risking void death, and that's just one of many implied interactions that i get from this modpack, it's just so refreshing

The Bad

Genuinely i don't think i can exactly pinpoint the actual bad part as many forge (or even fabric) 1.20.1 modpacks has this same issue with fps/tps stability, there is a very heavy lag when you start out with the Complementary shaders settings until i tone it down (it was at 45 fps, now runs at 90 after i reduce shadowres, runs at 150 fps without the shaders at 8 chunk render dist), lag spikes happens once every few hours and noticably gets worse with more backpacks you get but this is more of a mod fault rather than a pack fault, there are times i see villages without villagers which could either be due to the worldgen made it harder for villagers to survive or other underlying system issue to which i don't know the exact thing is, but overall, none of this is actually that bad compared to other 1.20.1 packs which also has the same problem and doesn't address it's standing point/balance either, so yeah

Overall i want to conclude by saying that this is an actual banger modpack from my personal standpoint, from a more objective one i would say that this pack does have it's own charm and i can see people enjoying it rather than grind endlessly like what an rpg/adventure pack would do, i haven't experienced Exosphere 2 (the 1.21.1 Neoforge version) and as much as i would like to assume that it should put Aeronautics to use and expand on the concepts of this Exosphere 1, still, props to the devs for making such a wonderful pack, i would recommend this to anyone

Finished the pack, with about 95% of the total quests done. I was hyped on the trailer and I really dig a lot of the aesthetics. The first dimension and boss are pretty great!

That's when things start to fall apart.

There's a lot of custom recipes and items in this pack you have to use, which fit in somewhat thematically, and then all of a sudden you get a bunch of tech mods thrown at you with a lot of very powerful additions that are just... useless and overkill. I felt the theme got thrown out the window for streamer's favorite mods (ProjectE, AE2, Actually Additions, Thermal, etc.) It made some of the other mods and methods feel obsolete (TiC, Ars, Blood Magic, Occultism) -- which is a real shame because the pack would have done really well with leaning harder into those mods for the more tech-ish side of things.

I do like how apotheosis is somewhat nerfed, you can't make ridiculously high level enchants, and infernal mobs drop a few ingredients instead of constantly spamming items to disenchant and break down. Until end game (using Woot), you have to use your upgrades sparingly. That being said, power spikes pretty immediately following the first dimension. I basically went from soul stained to living armor, and never replaced it after that, because it was just so good. I basically used the upgraded scythe and infernal bow until post end game.

The main bosses were very cool thematically, and then the usual boss mods thrown in as mini-bosses (Mowzies, L_Ender, and the newer Qliphoth) -- but nothing outside of the instakill mechanics of one of the Qliphoth mods really gave any challenge. Still, I appreciate the work put in with these custom bosses and their arenas, very high quality for Minecraft.

Gating and pacing in the pack felt off. You unlock all these amazing tools for automation, just to have to abandon them for some really nasty manual crafting to summon the final boss. It felt like my hard work setting up any kind of passive and automation (AE2, Mystic Agriculture and ProjectE are all in this pack!) were just worthless. Another good example of this is after you fight the final boss, you're rug-pulled with an additional quest to do a generic boss battle Chaos Guardian fight from Draconic Evolution before getting to complete the final quest in the game.

Speaking of, having to go back constantly and interact with Embers... I'm a certified Embers hater, and it was awful, but not un-doable. For some reason one of the tech alloys is locked behind Embers, and it doesn't make any sense. But thankfully the plethora of tech mods added to this pack are a little bit of a double-edged sword. Having LaserIO so I didn't have to deal with embers pipes was the only reason I didn't quit. Embers is also the reason why I didn't 100% the quests, you just have to dive deep into the alchemy part of things and it was... not fun.

So all and all, very cool thematically as far as world building, boss design, sound, and custom content goes, but the pack falls flat on its face with pacing and the inclusion of powerful tech mods. I think leaning into the more fantasy nature of Norse Mythology would have worked wonders for this pack.

I probably took a little longer than the pack was made for, because I wanted to go through and make the Mk 15. Power Flower, passive some MystAg Seeds, build a max side Deep Disk Drive and Assembler Matrix.

On 1.12.2, this is a pretty awesome mod that works correctly

On 1.20.1 i had major issues with Carry On. About 90% of all server crashes were caused by bugs with Carry On

On 1.16.5 we had to remove it cause it didnt play well with magma (honestly understandable)

I didn't really get past the pack's early game, but I still feel it's important to document my experience

I'm a beginner when it comes to tech mods, so I decided to try this since I saw a lot of people praising it for being beginner-friendly and creative

The start is fine, just harvesting the alien world's "stone" to make the basic stuff you'll need. The textures of the custom content is kinda rough, the two types of stone I found, for example, are way too similar and the colors lack contrast. Moving on, after this you're basically just trapped in a loop of gathering stone, pulverizing it, melting it into bars, and trying to make the pack's singularities. This process is really slow, took me 2 hours to get to the point where you get the transmutation thingy. There just aren't many ways to automate anything yet since, to my knowledge (if there is then it's not very well taught to the player), you can't make item pipes at this point in progression. You also can't build, since blocks are so scarce.

That's when I quit. The early game just takes waaay too long to get through with practically no fun things to do in the meantime, you just kind of mine and wait and make food if you need to and that's it

One thind I did like was how at one point you start using things from your base to craft new things, slowly taking away the infinite energy sources you have at the start, I think this could've been really cool if after half an hour of grinding you had to get rid of all your energy sources and start to generate stuff yourself, but that's not really what happens

I'm sure once you actually get to the mods in the pack it gets more interesting, but honestly it seems to me it would just play like a kitchen-sink skyblock pack, with a few differences in the setting

This is the best modpack i have ever played in my life. I have played the 5.5.5 version in 2025 and 5.10.16 in the beginning of 2026 and now i even play the closed beta. Im unsure off how many hours i have played this modpack. But well over 500, and i have spent even more hours just trying to find a equaly good modpack, but couldn't. You can explore, build, do tech, build the defence, get the oil, make the electricity. Everybody in the friend group has something to do. I have done 1 5.5.5 playtrough, 2 5.10.16 ones, and 1 5.11 playtrough (closed beta)

AI Slop mod. Both its assets, mod page, and code are fully AI generated. Any mod that uses enough AI where they need to add specific instructions to their little water hungry worker is not worth your time of day.