Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Is is weird reviewing my own project? Maybe. Do I care? Don't think so.

Gameplay

This is another modpack creator mod. Imagine it as a much more powerful chisel GUI - instead of changing a block 1:1 you can craft items on the fly using resources in your inventory, offhand etc. Each crafting window can be opened by either an item or by a block in a world - turn any block into a crafting table. Each recipe category can have multiple trigger items and blocks, each with their own recipe modifiers, crafting time, consumption chance, you name it.

Performance

Has practically no impact on the game at all, especially without any recipes configured. Only reason to not give 5/5 is the lack of caching, which would slightly improve performance, while having a Crafting GUI open - still don't know if this would even be noticeable.

Aesthetics

Designs are up to the modpack author, but I provide multiple options for backgroud, borders, corners while also supporting custom textures. Furthermore I provide hooks to play sounds and spawn particles. So feel free to make your recipes visual appealing.

Note on playtime: The overall time is influenced by developing, play testing and experimenting with CraftTweaker and Groovyscript support.

Is is weird reviewing my own project? Maybe. Do I care? Don't think so.

Though maybe I should say that I didn't create the pack initially. I started maintaining it after the original author left the Minecraft community and did so for the past few years. I also rewrote large parts behind the scenes, so I know this pack inside out.

Gameplay

I mean the whole flatmap-skyblock map isn't new as the pack took heavy inspiration from Anti-Material Energy, which used the old MineChem mod to supply the player with elements. This pack uses Alchemistry - a spiritual successor of MineChem for 1.12 and the core gameplay loop contains collecting all types of antimatter (renamed concrete) to get access to the whole periodic table. To achieve this the player has to experiment with different mods to get access.

The first 2 questbook chapters are pretty straight forward. The mid-game is weird as the pack uses the Atum 2 mod and having a random generation in the progression of a sky block-esque pack just feels off. Once that part is finished the rest of the pack is more cohesive.

Performace

Skyblock packs have great performance, we have a tiny mod list with around 120 mods and we've stress tested multiple servers together with the Antimatter Chemistry Community. Still no cleanroom launcher - yet.

Aesthetics

If you like the dytopian and very bright flat map awesome. I hated it. Though the pack offers enough options to setup a pretty base only a few hours into the pack.

Note on the playtime: I lost count how many times I beat the pack. There was a time where I began to speedrun the first chapters and I crafted the Extreme Crafting table in under 24 hours playtime. If you don't include the grind in the end needed for all the infinity stuff, this is quite a short pack.

Is is weird reviewing my own project? Maybe. Do I care? Don't think so.

Gameplay

Depending on the packmode you choose to play this, you experience will differ greatly. I know that, it is intended.
The pack originated back in 1.10.2 as a small project for a good friend of mine to play during his stream. After having a server with almost 20 active players it was the first time I got recognized for something I made. What a great feeling.
A few years passed and I started to rebuild the experience for 1.12.2 - so the so called "legacy" mode is exactly this - a recreation of the adventures we used to play back in 1.10, but I always preferred modpacks that challenge the player with interesting automation mechanics. So over roughly 3 years and many, many hours I handcrafted a complete new path through almost all mods in the pack, featuring all crafting method, mob drop etc.
Overall the resonance, especially for the overhauled early and mid-game was mostly positive, but as in most "expert" (I hate this term) packs the end-game can get quite boring as you wait for resources and progress slows down even more. So I guess give it a try and just stop when you killed your first chaos guardian. :3

Performance

For roughly 300 mods it runs surprisingly good and yes this is without cleanroom-loader. This would probably improve things, but I simply don't have the time right now to publish an update for it. Also yes it runs on 4GB RAM, but users had issues on older laptops.

Aesthetics

The pack installs the unity resource pack by default and uses a bunch of addons to further build a cohesive experience. I mean it by no means can be compared to something like RotN, but it was enough to get it to a state that doesn't feel weird, when you fly through your base.

Note about the playtime: I finished the legacy mode like 5 times with roughly 200 hours each and beat the nightmare mode on my third attempt after roughly 700 hours according to FTB Teams, the first two attempts died around the 200 and 300 hour mark. This also doesn't include the time spend to actually develop the pack, that would easily add another 1k-2k hours.

Is is weird reviewing my own mod? Maybe. Do I care? Don't think so.

Gameplay

I mean it's basically the most important feature of the mod connecting mods together where it is needed. The mod chooses an "off-by-default" approach so the modpack creator can only enable the features they are interested in. This may seem like a weird choice, but this mod isn't made to be thrown in an instance and to "just play" it.
I'm quite fond of a few features, but according to the bugtracker there are a LOT of features that still need to make it into the mod.

Performance

Highest priority goal at all times. best example is my implementation of the old Neat mod, which has almost 3x less impact on the game and also comes with a bunch of new config options.

Aesthetics

I'm a programmer not a great one, but I am an even worse artist. Luckily this mod doesn't contain a lot of textures, but I hesitate give it more than 2 stars.

Quark Oddities, like Quark before it doesn't describe the features it adds on its mod page, leading to people jumping to reddit to ask questions about the expansion pack to the mod of mods. None of the features that Oddities adds are noteworthy or particularly game changing to warrant installing.

Oddities is also not a real addon to Quark. The content "added" by Oddities is actually inside Quark meaning the 936 byte "jar" you download (that pays the developers) was completely unnecessary.

This is emblematic of what i would call "big modding" where a team of devs (in this case Violet Moon) try to maximize the money they can squeeze out of their users, by making "pseudoaddons" to bloated mods, depending on unneeded vanilla wrapper 'librarys', and obsessively promoting a Patreon, Patreon integration, and, in Violet Moon's case, even t-shirts.

You could get the same content from this addon as you could with another empty jar that only tricks the game into loading a mod with the quarkoddities id

The gameplay is great yet VERY difficult
The visuals are Just beautiful
And it performs better than any modpack ive ever played before.

Absolutely perfect.

"Survival Mode as it Should have Been" is a incredibly bold claim, a goal that they aim to reach and a goal they, in many ways achieve.

The number one differentiating of this mod compared to many others is that it rewrites survival, another way to think of it is that its nearly as if the developers use Minecraft as an engine to make a whole nother game. This and some similarities leads to a lot of Vintage Story comparisons. :P.

Gameplay

The mod makes the game have a much stronger survival focus, while Vanilla has you somewhat motivated by survival (building farms for food) its the core of the gameplay now:
Crops take ages to grow - you forage for food.
Food spoils - make vessels and use other methods of preserving food.
Need water - build infrastructure or settle near some water: so on and on and on.

The mod's progression in terms of tools is based around more and more complicated metalworking. Casting copper and bronze (which you alloy) by heating with a pit kiln, all the way until using charcoal forges and (oh dear, very expensive...) blast furnaces to make steel. TFC tool economy is very interesting, stone tools have very short lives, but by the time you get to wrought iron, you realize that these tools have netherite levels of durablity. Forging modifiers replace enchantments, casting gives none and your result of the forging minigame results in tools with what is equivalent to more unbreaking and efficiency to them. It makes the involved mechanics satisfying and to learn and master since you are getting such a good deal out of it!

Large and rock type dependent ore veins make exploration worthwhile, your single deep cave no longer contains everything you need. (sometimes annoyingly, your surface at world spawn may not even contain all you need to get into the copper age)

Worldgen

TFC's world generator is cell based, each containing a continent or ocean in its center, clmate changes as you go east-west (rainfall) and south-north (temperature) (btw it loops, like a triangle wave).

In 1.21.1 it is incredibly impressive, karst biomes at carbonic rock types, glaciers and drumlins at the arctic, mighty stratovolcanoes and shield volcanoes, and various types of coast line. Exploration always feels engaging as the world around you is molded by so many factors. Its hard to explain, just visit the gallery section on the mod page!

Mechanics

The mod has a myriad of mechanics, I don't know how feasible it is to name them, but I will pick a few.

Glassworking, introduced in v3 (for 1.20.1) it provides a engaging (and very laborious, something that really needs to be addressed) process to create jars, glass, and bits and bobs.

Lifecycle and calendar: crops and plants follow a lifecycle, gooseberries may only grow in early autumn, and crops only require the right climatic conditions creating a sense of seasonality in how you grow food. In the newest versions, tree leaves better react to the passage of time, flowering, falling and dis-coloring throughout the year visually showing the passage of time.

Metalworking, the item heating, anvilworking mechanics create value (and some tedium...) in what you make, as metal is scarce and may require reconsidering what you are making and how much. This can be boring and tedious at time and I recommend that players engage with this as far as they feel, no shame in never getting a bloomery and iron, if bronze is working perfectly fine for you.

Integration

The mod integrates itself into and expands on vanilla very well, adding somewhat location based rain, and tilt (which differs by time and latitude) to the sun and moon (yes, afaik eclipses are possible), some vanilla stuff is craftable and usable like armour trims (made through sewing now), tnt/gunpowder, beds (straw beds also let you set spawn point, but you cant sleep on straw beds), and bamboo.

its difficult to integrate with other mods, largely of tedium as so many things need edits but its generally possible.

Extendability

The mod has documentation in game and developer documentation online, its extensive use of data driven mechanics makes it possible and easy to create custom content using its existing mechanics, fostering a large culture of addons. In its code it makes good use of stuff like interfaces and events to allow for addons to make their own stuff like rock and wood types without too much hassle (except, block entities...)

Another cool thing for developers is its use of placed feature tags to make additions to worldgen very easy. (biome modifiers not needed!)

Notes

• Performance is surprisingly good for such a big mod, some places can suffer a bit like chunk generation speed, but comparatively to other mods there are much worse generation speeds than what TFC has.
• Its built-in textures can be a bit rough, a mixture of programmer art and modified modern MC art. Many people prefer to use resource packs such as Vexxed Visuals.
• I alluded to this, but there are a crazy amount of addons for this mod.

It has good progression and well-designed quests that explain everything quite well. It also features custom recipes that ensure all the mods work together cohesively. Overall, it’s a really good modpack.

There is one thing which makes this stand out well, even when comparing against KJS: it has great documentation.

This contributes greatly to the developer experience of using this mod in your TFC modpacks. It provides builders for many TFC's blocks such as the plants and great utility features such as bindings for TFC classes, rock layer editing (I don't lean too hard on KJS, preferring Java and core mods for pack development, unless its the easiest option, and this frankly is the easiest way to add custom rock types.) and advanced features like "tree solving" (to create the nbt files TFC uses for trees in forests).

This is a one man project, there are typos, mistakes, and so on and generally the dev is accessible and kind when issues are reported to them.

Its inclusion of simpler features like ways to create TFC data and recipe types, makes it useful for users that are not knowledgeable in datapacks to be able to create stuff for their TFC modpacks.

Spectrum is characterised as much as by its content as by its journey. Its guidebook consists of a thought out, and commentary ridden step by step account of the journey the player takes. Its main reoccurring theme is the idea of revealing hidden things.

(it does so through revelationary API, which I note for modpack devs is data driven, though most of Spectrum's usage of it is in code, I haven't been brave enough yet to attempt to mixin this behavior to try to edit it).

Because of this, it would nearly be like spoilers to be specific, so ill try to be abstract with this review. Which might not work out as well as I want it to.

Your journey is characterized by puzzles and exploration, as you explore the world you "learn" more about it, this means you have a very continuous process of learning and applying your knowledge, and the discovery of these hidden things breaths life and intrigue into the overworld, nether (and not really the end, a bit though).

It has many unique mechanics, like potion effects, many, many tools and the structures you build (and are somewhat customisable) are reminiscent of the structure that magic mods like astral sorcery may have you build, serving a practical purpose. For a pack dev perspective, it has a lot of data driven recipe types which have potential to be used in creative ways.

Its art is nice, and this is true very consistently throughout the mod. Those storm stones look dangerous!!

Once you get to know the mod, the various steps can be a bit tedious though that's why this mod, no matter where you are or if you are a first time player or not, should be spaced out and not rushed, as you will get tired and frustrated (especially for the first time player!)

Also since I see performance as an optional rating, I just want to point out that in either Spectrum or Pastel (don't think this has been patched in either): don't place too, too, TOO much azurite, the particles can crash your game lmao. dont go crazy with the Create mod's worldshaper and you will be fine :P .