Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

The best mod ever made, from magic to industrial tech to all.

Thaumcraft is one of the best Minecraft mods ever made. From unique magic to cool mechanics like having your own golem helpers, it turns magic into a full progression system with research, discovery, crafting, automation, and a really unique atmosphere. Every part of the mod feels great and rewarding, from scanning the world and unlocking knowledge to building advanced magical systems.

There are also many amazing addons that bring even more content, mechanics, and progression, making Thaumcraft feel even deeper. It is not just another magic mod -- it feels like its own world inside Minecraft, and that is what makes it so special.

it’s just the GOAT

The ancient city portal is a matter of great discussion in the minecraft community - and this mod seeks to show us what lies beyond it with the Otherside.

This new dimension explores the home of the sculk, and tries to create an atmosphere on a similar level as the Vanilla Nether - dreary, creepy and hostile.

The mod is cool in concept, but is wasted potential. It suffers from illogical progression - To access the portal we need to kill a warden, and said warden is actually stronger than anything in the otherside?
The mod features a powerful boss in its own right, the stalker. The boss can be found in a hidden structure in the Otherside, but can also just randomly spawn from pots in the ancient city? It can be used to make one of two items which are of great importance - an armored elytra.
So there's really only one more item to get from this mod. What's the reward for navigating this desolate sculk wasteland? A transmitter which allows you to access a storage container from anywhere. Pretty lame, in my opinion.

The dimension itself also is just a bit mundane - vast swathes of land without much to do, only one or two interesting natural phenomena - and a variety of building blocks being the main allure. It suffers from a lack of content, and is comparable to pre 1.16 nether.

This mod doesn't even work properly half the time, and it's riddled with microtransactions

e4mc is RIGHT THERE guys

This mod is absolutely incredible. The performance gains that can be made using this mod on both the server and client are unmistakable, especially in combination with many larger mods.

I would go as far as claiming Ferrite Core as the most important optimisation mod, as RAM is often something minecraft is very tight on, alongside CPU. As a byproduct of reducing RAM, ferrite core often actually frees up CPU by preventing there being such a load on GC.

If you play Minecraft, use this mod. I've never encountered it causing any issues outside of other broken mods breaking it

Note: This review is intended for developers and not end users, if you have been instructed to install fabric loader please do that as it is critical for many mods.

I can't fault the performance of the fabric loader and the fabric API and definitely can't deny how much easier this API makes developing than just using mixins. However, this API is still missing some very useful features that loaders such as Neoforge has baked in like extra events, more data driven content support and a native energy system. Saying that, the fabric API has matured a lot over time and the collaboration with neoforge to standardise #c: tags was a very useful endeavour.

All around useful mod for fabric, but it would be nice to see some things brought in line with Neoforge's provisions. I would recommend this API for anyone trying to make lightweight mods compatible with the fabric ecosystem!

This mod really should be vanilla, exposing the confusing and oftentimes difficult-to-understand saturation mechanism is important to understand how the food system in minecraft properly works. This becomes incredibly relevant with mods such as Farmers Delight though it is still apparent in vanilla with food like steaks.

The only issues I've seen with this mod stems from modpacks including texture packs which don't retexture the saturation overlay. This however, is the modpacks fault and not the fault of this mod so I have kept a 5 star rating, this section is only here to inform potential users that if they see this it is not a mod issue and is because the resource pack does not support appleskin.

I would highly recommend this mod to be used in any pack, both for pack devs and for end users who want a bit more convenience in existing packs.

As someone who isn't a giant pokemon fan, this mod is really well made compared to other similar ones. The graphical style of Cobblemon suits Minecraft a lot more than similar mods such as pixelmon and the mod is overall pretty well polished.

What can hold it back is the fixed nature of the mod, with very little configurability, including that of the GUI which can potentially conflict with other mods. Additionally, the mod can be a bit boring when not in multiplayer, which is obviously not the intended use case but since Minecraft is a game which is often played single player I thought it would be relevant to bring up here.

Pokemon fans should definitely try this, for the casual player give it a miss if you'd like to play a larger modpack with other big mods.

Immersive Engineering has been a staple of tech mods for the longest time, introducing many machines and helping to define what tech mods could do in the 1.7-1.12.2 era of modding.

Unfortunately, I've never been the biggest fan of its multiblock structures and often janky systems for item logistics. This mod has always felt less fun to use for me compared to other tech mods, and I normally stayed away from it in packs where possible.

If you like tech mods, I'd still advise checking it out to try, but also give other tech mods a shot as well.

First off, Mekanism is mature and well made, the textures are very good compared to similar mods such as GregTech and Immersive Engineering and systems feel refined and modern. Unlike many tech mods of a similar age or older, Mekanism still feels like it fits in with the modern game, albeit not in a vanilla-plus way, textures don't clash and mechanics feel polished like players have come to expect from modern mods.

My only complaints are mostly shared by other reviewers here in that sometimes the sheer amount of materials can make logistics frustrating or cause performance issues. Server owners should be careful about the destruction potential of nuclear reactors as well, as radioactive fallout can be incredibly detrimental especially in multiplayer.

Unforunately, the scale of the mod means it often doesn't play well alongside other tech mods for balance reasons without being highly tweaked, however I would still recommend anyone who likes tech mods to check it out in a proper pack or standalone.

While many of the mods in this pack are actually very good, it is clear the developers are not willing to put in the effort to integrate the mods properly.

This pack is notorious for having performance issues, crashes and world breakages across updates due to how volatile the mod list is. What I say in my title is only barely hyperbole and I would genuinely recommend to anyone that if they want to play this pack they'd just be better off throwing their favourite mods together instead, because you won't gain anything extra from this pack except some bloat and potentially more crashes caused by MCreator mods.

The crux of the issue is the fact this pack appears to be barely tested between updates with crashes and issues found by the community. When issues inevitably arise, the offending mod often gets immediately removed, potentially causing breakages for people updating from older versions of the pack.

If you do decide to play this pack, choose an older version that was standing for a while and stick with it to keep the smallest chance of it breaking on you.