Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

It IS modded SkyBlock as it goes: got the essentials experience, the history (as to how much it influenced others packs), and the core mods. That said, I can’t do any more Ex-Nihilo. Though maybe they change the milestones or the quest system.
It ISN’T bad; simply, you get what you see. At least for me, for a solo play isn’t something to sink my teeth, maybe either with friends or for a forever world.
It, of course, runs very well, and I didn’t explore all the mods, so I recommend doing the same as I, play 2 to 3 hours and see if you like it.

All in all the block placement logic is nice and a timer saver, especially once you get used to it. The main reason for me to like the mod, is that it can be used to prevent some repetitive clicking, you see: my fingers hurt, no idea what's up with them, but sometimes I've had to right click with my ring finger to alleviate strain (and pain) when building for too long.

So that's why I'd consider QoL feature as also an accessibility one.

Honestly, there isn't much i can say about this mod. It does what it is supposed to do and has good config options. The real question is: how would you use it though? I don't know, but i feel like it probably has some potential for modpacks. I've been trying to make a modpack with it, and so far it was very reliable at what it does, my only problem with it being that items specifically only run away when you look at them, and i wish there was a config option for them to run away from players even when not looked at. Otherwise yeah it does its job, so 4,5 stars

Disclaimer, I played this pack a few months ago. It is possible some of my issues have been fixed since.

The Good:

• Very good stability. Almost no lag, frame drops, freezes, crashes, chunk gen lag, TPS lag, or hangups at all. The one serious issue I ran into was some kind of desync, where I could not interact with anything server-side. This seemed to happen after using scrolls of identification from my off-hand many times in a row. The game could not quit properly, here is the log: https://mclo.gs/AtvAuWP

• Choosing a race was cool, and felt very impactful.

• The structures in the world are very impressive, and I didn’t find myself missing AW2 or ChocolateQuest very much since these are here. Even villages feel fleshed out and modern. Great job with these, though there could be more variety. The wizard structures were especially impressive and fun to come across

• Reskillable slowed down progression significantly, which I like.

• No passive regeneration is good, I like that

• The deepslate layer is good, and I liked the caves overall.

• No tech mods or mass storage: thank god for this.

• The MCA villagers are a nice visual upgrade from vanilla villagers

• The stamina system works well enough; I almost wish it were more integrated, like being used for holding breath, shield blocking, and weapon attacks.

• Random tool quality is fun and adds some depth to choosing equipment. I also liked the set bonuses, and would even enjoy more of them.

• Worldgen is pretty solid. It didn’t feel like a generic BOP world, or some slop worldgen. It actually felt pretty modern.

• Texture pack is nice. Between that and the worldgen, I even forgot I was playing on 1.12 for a while!

• The Questbook is pretty nice. Just an introduction to explain things, and then some open ended “kill stuff” quests; I can get behind that. The tutorial for using bauble slots was also appreciated.

• Dynamic lighting: a must have in any pack, glad to see it working well

The Bad:

• Races give no explanation, and you are forced to choose 1 first thing, with no prior knowledge
  The Goblin race (and I assume other small size races) have awful camera movement whenever you are in grass. Third person mode doesn’t help much. Basically, the game is visually unplayable in grassy areas as a small race. Horse riding also obstructed the view, and made 3rd person a must while on horseback.

• Ice and Fire-itus: this modpack suffers from the same issues as most modpacks that include Ice and Fire, where deadly endgame threats like dragons can be encountered within minutes of creating a new world. The default ice and fire config of keeping them 1200 blocks from spawn is nowhere near enough. I would recommend updating this value to something like 4000 minimum, but really the only true solution is using mob stages to gate off ice and fire mobs for some time. Reskillable locking you to low-tier equipment makes this problem way, WAY worse. Even some Mowzies mobs fall in this category (the Naga mainly).

• Also Ice and Fire: why do dragons have 128 follow range? This is 4x most hostile mobs and often further than the player can even see. I changed it to 32 in the config to make them more reasonable.

• Starting progression is broken: removing wooden tools is a great idea, but no alternatives are provided. If you lose or break your starting stone pickaxe before increasing your mining skill to stone tier, there is no way to progress. Village loot does not contain stone or stone tools, nor do any village trades offer it. Even if they did, REQUIRING a village to BEGIN progression is pretty awful.

• XP grind: my #1 issue with this pack is that so much of the pack is about progression by spending XP, but the best way to get XP is villager trades. The optimal way to play this pack is to find a villager or couple villagers that offer a net-positive trade loop, and spend literal hours grinding that 1 trade until you have maxed out your Reskillable and LevelUp skills. This… sucks. It’s some of the worst gameplay in the pack. And it defeats the whole purpose of the levelup mods, which is to feel like I am progressing. Note that IIRC, the pack creator said that he intended it to work this way. Villager trade grinding is INTENTIONALLY the core gameplay.

• Healing items were easy enough to loot, but their crafting recipes were bad. They require kelp, which only appears in 1 specific kelp forest biome, which I never saw once while exploring the ocean. Maybe add more alternative recipes for healing items, using plants found on land? Or just add healing campfires/beds.

• No craftable saddle? Really?

• The hostile humans, villagers, and MCA NPCs all look the same. I can’t tell if one is going to kill me, trade with me, or offer to follow me until I get up close and personal.

• ElectroBlob Wizardry structures are awful. The custom wizard towers from Recurrent Complex are great, but the default ones are pretty lame. Plus, the structures that have a chest, which trap you in an INESCAPABLE FORCEFIELD with MULTIPLE HOSTILE WIZARDS have always been my least favorite structure from any mod. There is no reason for this structure to exist. All it does it kill noobs who don’t know any better, and once you do know better, you have no reason to loot them, since if you are strong enough to 1v3 some wizards, you don’t need the loot. The only good EBW structures are the abandoned libraries, but even those don’t seem to work quite right in this modpack. They have Lootr chests replacing the bookshelves, most of which are empty. (This has since been fixed)

• Why do wizards ask for 3 difference currencies? Replacing villager emeralds with standardized coins was great, why do EBW wizards still ask for emeralds and sapphires on top asking for coins? After playing for over 10 hours I don't think I've even seen a single sapphire.

• (Nitpick) Why is there copper, bronze, and brass, but bronze is an ore, not an alloy? Pretty weird.

• Bountiful is a bad mod, and always has been. Meaningless fetch quests which never actually fit the progression. Harmless enough to ignore them I suppose.

• Animal spawns are lame. It's mostly vanilla animals. Chickens in the swamp, cows in the tundra, pigs in the jungle? We can do better than this. I know most 1.12 animal mods have 1 issue or another, but I believe in your ability to find a solution.

• The backpack mod didn’t seem to do anything. It wouldn’t go in the chest armor slot, nor any bauble slot. Wearable Backpacks is just not a good backpack mod. Use any other.

Some QOL mods I added for my own playthrough:

• Better Horse Movement and Callable Horses: both a must for any playthrough where you make decent use of horses.

• Xaero’s World Map: I just can’t play without some kind of world map.

• Anvil Patch Evil: removes XP costs from anvils. Imo this is a must-have, especially in a pack where XP is so important for character progression, spending it on naming or repairing basic tools is a terrible idea. If you grinded enough levels to even unlock the anvil, it might as well be useful.

• Better 3rd Person: just nice to have when 3rd person mode is so important for small races

• Passable Leaves: more a personal preference, and plays poorly with small races, but I always like to have it

PLEASE set the config option in EBW so that you can exit the Arcane Workbench by pressing ‘E’.

I have played this mod a while ago, first hearing about it when I was a kid (from a french youtuber, again; the same guy btw)

What is it ?

Exploration expansion is a mod which adds 4 new dimensions to explore as well as new overworld and nether content in the form of cave overhauls and extra biomes.
Both the overworld, nether and newer environments have received their fair share of custom structures, dungeons and mobs including some bosses.

What does it offer ?

4 new dimensions that I will go a bit more into details below, as well as overworld biomes and mobs.
The structures/content added for the overworld and nether mainly include decorations like stalagmites or custom small cave-like dungeons filled with mob spawners.
The mod's dimension each have their set of mobs, decorations, structures and one boss (two extra bosses are found within overworld caves, and one which is supposedly found somewhere else, idk where though).

The overworld-nether Dimension :
Reminding me of a mod I found about later (Nether overload), it reimagines the nether as an overworld hellish place, with several biomes made of magma blocks and netherrack trying to emulate trees or cliffs. The most remarquable biome is called "Slavery", it contains trees of netherrack pilled on to of each other and steve-like mobs which could be nether servants rotting in hell. The structures here are mostly small towers, broken nether bridge structures or larger nether castles protected with blazes and hell guards; I would say this has to be my favorite dimension within this mod, despite the random crash(es)

The overworld-end Dimension :
An overworld-like end with several endstone wasteland biomes and ender forest/jungly areas; outside of underground lava this dimension features a new liquid in the form of end water (which makes you levitate for a bit) as well as a dangerous quicksand block which can be mistaken for endstone if you are walking without paying attention to the floor too much. There's also a new ore called ender rock, which has mostly uses in decorative blocks. There are new mobs made just for this dimension, even if they feel a bit wonky and very generic in behaviors (most of them even being explicit overworld or nether mob equivalents), sometimes appearing within larger squarey houses due to spawners (you can rarely find large ships, towers and more).
Weirdly, the ender wood block can't be placed horizontally and its planks cannot be used in any way in crafting recipes.
I have not found the place where the boss is supposed to appear in, but I can confirm he does exist

Cave 1 :
A cavern-type dimension (Nether-shaped) with hostile plant enemies, large jungly lakes with weird fishes and illagers hidden in treehouses or rare jungle mansions, this dimension features some amount of plant-like structures and one new ore too; it contains a quicksand-like block which looks just like the misspelled foliage block. I think this dimension is a bit too bland : there isn't much to do or find, and it doesn't even look that lush (which seemed to be what the mod was going for there). The boss is a bit of the enemy-spam kind like many others, but the fact it is able to fly makes it extra annoying; you can tell this as to be the dimension I like the least

Cave 2 :
A mycelium cave very much shaped like the Nether, it contains huge mushrooms (including new ones, some even upside-down), mooshroom and mushroom humanoids (some hostiles) and various structures in the form of statues, ruins and even a woodland mansion if you explore a bit more; For some reason, the boss structure makes the boss mob appear with an already low health, which I find weird; there isn't much to add about this dimension

Cons ?
This mod has most of its custom mobs only use the vanilla mob sound effects or player default hit sounds.
Since it is an MCreator mod which was made a long time ago, you have to expect the game to run slower or even crash while you are playing (happened to me at least once within the first dimension mentioned).
Some textures do not fit with vanilla minecraft's texture while many other does, it create a form of inconsistency (seen it in the charged obsidian blocks which is more detailed than the regular obsidian block; if every block and mob had textures with smaller pixels it would be its own artstyle, here it feels unintentional).
Most of the new mobs aren't that interesting in their behaviors (even if some look goofy and do fit), and I have noticed an issue with about every slime-like mob as their model is always the same (tiny) no matter their actual real hp/size and they leave regular vanilla slimes behind which I find odd.
Every Dimension is pretty much unbearable without night vision, even the more hellish one, and a lot of blocks/items are purely decorative, with several crafting inconsistencies such as the green crystal not able to be crafted into green crystal blocks.
Some structures spawn above the bedrock ceiling quite often, or dig through it in order to generate, which can break the immersion of the cavernish dimensions.

In conclusion

This is clearly a MCreator mod, which has some nice ideas sometimes but I feel like it tries to do more than it is capable of : this mod while having a lot of content technically speaking doesn't keep its quality all the way up the whole time, and between the textures, the crafts and the mob behaviors this mod isn't all that good.
Since a lot of people were downloading this mod to get an early cave update it seems the author decided to leave it behind for a cave-only mod instead.
Outside of that he made other roguelike dungeons-focused mods (at least one that I heard from but never really tried).

I would recommend trying those instead of playing this mod, it is too unstable/unmaintained to use in a pack even if it exhibits cool concepts.

This mod is just awesome on so many aspects. There are too many features for me to go over all of them, so in a nutshell i think the systems, mobs and items introduced by this mod are very polished and go together really well to form a genuinely terrifying and diversified threat to the player. It even has its own soundtrack which is honestly gorgeous, and fits the feel of the mod really well. It also is open source (though their github is currently private at the time i'm writing this, as they are working on a a very big update), has a very extensive config file and wiki, and a channel in their discord server where you can contact the devs, so creating a modpack around Spore is also very convenient. This mod even has a couple interesting addons too which you should consider if you're playing with this mod.

While i do believe it is an excellent mod, one of my favorites even, it is not perfect. My biggest issue with it is that it can be a bit frustrating to play with vanilla world generation: the infection can develop in random caves, which can make finding infection clusters to get rid of them actually annoying instead of being a fun challenge. It isn't an unsolvable issue player side (if you have a custom worldgen without caves or with very large caves, or if you enable the Spore config to move its stuff at the surface), but still something i think you should be aware when playing with this mod. I have some other more minor pet peevee in terms of gameplay (imo it sometimes borders the unfair/grindy territory instead of being the fun kind of challenging, though the mod being configurable can help a lot with that), but this is probably the biggest one. EDIT: in my opinion an other thing that makes this mod very hard to work with sometimes is how hostile it can be to player progression: your bases, contraptions, chests, etc... will not be safe, and the potential Spore has to sometimes erase progress can just be super discouraging

It is kind of a wiki mod, as a lot of things about it are not really documented in game (ex: the tech blocks, one of which is intended to be the main way to repair Spore armors and weapons, the uses of certain special items like the reaver and the scanner, the weakness of spore mobs to cold). While some infos being ambiguous genuinely contribute to the atmosphere of this mod, the way the mod explains like nothing in game can make it kind of a pain to get into. Honestly you'll probably still have a good time if you jump into it blind, if you're into that kind of mod, but you won't be able to experience this mod at its full potential, which imo is really a shame.

On the more technical side, if you're a modpack dev you can run into issues as some features are implemented in a kind of quirky way, which occasionally makes making it work with some other mods kind of a pain. For ex, certain blocks only drop their drop if they are specifically destroyed by a player, the Bile is not properly implemented as a fluid which causes some compatibility issues, etc. However this is expected considering how complex this mod is, and since it is still in (very) active development i believe we can expect the mod to improve on the technical side of things over time. They even have a bug report forum on their discord server!

For an infection mod, in terms of performance it also does quite well though not very strong systems can definitively struggle with it. This is something they also are working on, though.

So, should you give Fungal Infection: Spore a try?
If you're a fan of infection mods, or even if you're just trying to find something extremely threatening to your world, then yes, absolutely. It is not without flaws, but it is still one of the best mods of its category out there in my opinion. Be aware it can be a very destructive mod though (although this is configurable).

I don't know what to say but I am happy that its on neoforge 1.21.1!

Little logistics has liven rent free inside my head for years now! I don't know what about it... its just cuteness overload for me. I don't really know how to explain it but I wished that more modpacks would integrate this mod into their progression. Heres a screenshot of my treggeck base the rails are for little logistic system! It's really cute seeing the trains coming in and picking up the items!

So, it isn't anything mind-breaking, but it shows effort. I’ll recommend it, though more tech is always welcomed (like a create-adjacent mod).
I did enjoy the pack, and the developer posted a short playthrough that helped with some sections.
The good: aside from some bugs, it's well optimized for the selected mod list. Some mods from said list are scarcely used in other modpacks. Another original feature is a reworked early game based in flint; it attenuates ludonarrative dissonance from the story and uses exclusive tailor-made blocks. So, from the questbook (that can be accessed with ') you can understand the modpack story, which I genuinely liked. Many modpacks would benefit from any type of narrative.
That said: the mentioned bugs, some are world-crashing (i.g. armours for me). I miss some mods features and I usually don't enjoy that much survival mods (like Tough as nails). The modpack's blocks are good but have some wonky interactions. The questbook could be a bit longer however as it is probaly a solo project, this is really a minor suggestion. Finally, the story isn't Shakespearean, but it exists.
I hope the author continues making modpacks; it was refreshing and I would generally recommend for everyone with some caveats (or callouts).

Gauges and Switches adds some very nice looking gauges and switches and also sensors. I would add this mod to packs i would play with my friends and it would work fine.

However, be warned. You do not need this mod, there are very few situations where you need these types of switches. In the packs i would make with these, they would never get used

Solid pack for a horror experience, not stupid unfair. There are quite a few entities with counters for almost all of them so they aren't cheap insta kills, i'd mostly suggest playing with someone instead of solo (it's substantially better with another person.)