Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

This mod it's a significant improvement to the advancement screen GUI in vanilla and is a must for packs that focus on using the advancement tree to track progression. This mod is also just nice for playing vanilla or in servers with custom advancements as it can work entirely client side.

This mod still does lay out advancements in the same way as vanilla however, always from left to right, meaning if one advancement leads to many more it'll take up a lot of vertical space. It would've been nice to have an option to view advancements radially so they took up less space.

I would recommend this mod for packs that do want to use advancements, but if you want more features you probably need a full questing mod.

Jade is a mod that I really struggle to play without when learning new mods. Being able to just look at a block and be told whether I can mine it and what it is is invaluable.

Jade presents this information in any incredibly simple and easy to digest way and the configuration options it has are more than sufficient to tailor it for any use cases I have needed. The only issue is it can reveal blocks that are supposed to be hidden such as infested blocks, but then again so can f3.

Jade is a must have when playing with new mods or packs and I'd highly advise using it!

This mod brings a good load of utility to my aeronautics world. I find myself climbing ropes all the time and using ropes in lieu of ladders. While this mod does not add much, it does what it set out to do, and does it perfectly. It doesn't impact my performance enough to justify a rating. The animations that go along with this mod are fantastic as well.

Reactive Music is a lightweight mod that brings a unique feeling of immersion into Minecraft. It has great tracks that are well composed and fitting for Minecraft. I would listen to these tracks by themselves. However, this mod lacks variety in its music. It get's a bit old after hearing the same couple of songs over and over again. This could be attributed to me spending a majority of my time in the overworld building, but many other players do that as well. I also find the pause between a track switch a tad bit too long and I believe a config menu could be helpful. Overall, this mod brings a good amount of great music, with a few minor issues.

This map mod does definitely work more than well enough to mean it doesn't feel like too much of a hassle. Its inclusion in Raspberry Flavoured is a good example of how a mod like this can be used effectively in a setting where a more vanilla styled map mod feels thematically appropriate.

The inclusion of a minimap when the atlas is in your hotbar is incredibly useful, and is a feature a lot of similar map mods are missing, and that gives it a giant bonus over the other immersive options, or just using vanilla maps. The inclusion of vanilla map features such as waypoints with banners and being able to adjust scales is also really nice, however if you have an adequate supply of paper there is often no reason to not just leave it on 1x scale.

What I don't really like is how much of a hassle waypoints can be, requiring banners or beds and to actually name them you need something like an anvil, which gets annoying quickly. I also had some minor issues where banners wouldn't work, which I couldn't track down the cause of. I also had some issues with the map not properly filling in across the seams between multiple maps but this was mostly solved by just exploring the area for a bit longer.

Overall, good vanilla themed mod, but I prefer mods such as antique atlas personally.

I finally got around to playing Raspberry Flavoured and I have to say it's a great pack so far, you can play it however you feel and progression feels steady throughout the pack. I will say it's advertising as vanilla+ is (in my opinion) entirely incorrect, and this pack plays more like a complete overhaul, it does very well at overhauling almost every aspect of the game though.

The mods included in this pack are thoughtful and well integrated into the progression and the texturing means they all seamlessly blend together as well. If it wasn't for enabling advanced tooltips I sometimes wouldn't have been able to tell which mod everything came form (which is a good sign that they're well integrated). This is one of the only packs I've played which includes create but doesn't feel like all of your time is spent making create machines, even though it is necessary for progression. And talking about progression, it just feels like vanilla but better, starting with copper makes way more sense rather than having it feel useless, I do wish bronze was more useful in this pack though. My only issue with this progression is the jump to steel does feel rather large, taking longer than basically any other progression stage in this pack due to requiring a blaze burner, lead and either a blaze cake/blaze powder.

The removal of normal enchantments is honestly one of the largest bonuses to this pack and although some people might not like it, I feel that the vanilla enchantment system is honestly so overpowered. I love the fact that rose gold tools have built in silk touch and this actually helps you get more value from ores somewhat early game. Lead being found so deep does feel fitting for progression, and the extra mobs combined with tweaked difficulty actually made me feel somewhat worried in caves, I even dropped to half a heart on multiple occasions.

The mechanic to enter the nether is interesting, but can be a bit frustrating if you get unlucky finding crying obsidian or the tears in chest loot. I do think the decision to remove the end and let the ender pearls find structures such as ruined portals does help here though. Nether exploration can be frustrating at times, especially with so much gated behind finding a fortress for blazes and with the pearls often locating bastions and towers instead. Maps being so finite also means it can be easy to get lost even with an atlas if you run out of maps, this isn't too much of an issue once you have a tree farm however.

One annoyance I did have is some recipe changes that make some blocks feel far more expensive than they should be. I'm unsure why the portable storage interface now requires brass, redstone, many intermediates and only produces 1 item. Slime being slightly harder to craft was annoying when I had to make my radial chassis sticky but wasnt too much of an issue as jam is easy to make.

Overall, in the limited time I've played this so far I think this pack is great and I wish I had checked it out earlier. I would recommend everyone to try this pack, even if it isn't vanilla+ as it claims it is still really easy to learn and enjoy. I'll probably edit this review once I've played this some more!

This is a very fun game just hate being ganged up on by 50 zombies on day 11

Alex's mobs is one of those mods I used to really enjoy as a player. A good chunk of the mods are incredibly well designed and textured and when I was playing packs they played really well. Even a lot of the modern mobs still have great textures, and if you just want to build a zoo or play in creative that's all that matters.

In survival however, configuring this mod is a mini nightmare and the amount of mobs that have been added, some of which don't live up to the quality of others makes this mod very hit and miss. For a mod that describes itself as incredibly customisable this isn't good enough. Making a pack with this mod can be a chore.

Then, the performance, many of these mobs have quite complex AI and spawn so frequently that this mod can be a nightmare on servers, it can bring entire packs down to a halt especially if spawns haven't been significantly reduced. if you are a server owner, I'd advise turning all the spawns down significantly.

Try this mod out in creative, maybe try it in a small pack in survival, but I wouldn't recommend this on servers.

As many other reviewers have said, this pack is an outstanding example of what integrating mods means. Almost no mod hasn't been configured to fit within the structure of the pack. I remember playing this pack and being amazed at how fluid the progression feels at the start. This pack was one of the most important packs of its time and showed what was possible through mods such as game stages.

Unfortunately, this pack does suffer from some execution issues, with later ages feeling a bit like a slog and some changes, although cool, ending up more as a time waste than an interesting mechanic. While it can get frustrating sometimes, this pack is far better than anything similar to it that came before it, and it is still one of the best examples of stages in a pack ever made.

I did end up dropping this pack after progressing quite far because I just couldn't find the motivation to keep going, but the start of the pack was still an incredibly enjoyable experience and I find myself playing it sometimes to get more ideas about what I could do in my own packs. if you're a pack maker, I would definitely advise playing this to see what is possible.

I would advise everyone to try this pack, some of its mechanics hold up incredibly well even with it being over 8 years old as of this review!

This mod is present in so many packs, and for good reason. The utility it offers is immense through magnet rings, ender rings and mending mixtures. This magic mod has a lot QOL with an arcane coat of paint and it does it very well.

This mod can be a bit overpowered at times due to how easy it is to get your hands on a lot of the items it introduces, however this can be easily balanced by pack creators and I don't think this is too much of a detriment to the mod.

If you're making a pack that this thematically fits in, I would advise adding it, the QOL is incredibly useful and it's just an all around well-made mod.