Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

the pack feels like a good successor to Above & Beyond. just that though: good, not great

all the locational resources are done excellently, they were interesting to set up and gave an excuse for a big train network.

the tech chapters are relatively simple, with long production lines. the magic chapters are weird, with things like quark corundum automation or automated wither killing.

the chapter balancing is iffy. magic chapter 3 (out of 4) is easily the hardest one, with a convoluted system of multiple loops dependent on each other. this chapter is made significantly easier with AE2, but it's only unlocked after the chapter is finished. magic chapter 4 is hilariously easy by comparison, which was quite underwhelming.

many things in this pack are filled with needless waiting. so much waiting for no good reason. wait on trains, wait on corundum, wait on crop farms, wait on source time crystals, wait on PCBs, wait wait wait wait wait. the recipe costs at the end of the pack are exceedingly expensive and suggest you should multithread your factories, but that's horrid design in a pack centered around create. you have to choose between either building your complex factories again (really boring and unfun, plus you'll tank your TPS), or just wait.

the pack author in the discord straight up said players are expected to just wait for about 8 hours after they finish automation of one of the final challenges. do yourself a favor and poke around in the kubejs files to edit annoying recipes if you find them too frustrating (i suggest changing the obelisk crushing recipe and increasing flight orb liquid output).

but that feeling of finishing a factory, especially in this pack, is amazing. things get weird and fun, especially in the magic chapters. do yourself a HUGE favor and learn Integrated Dynamics, you are given it early on and it is an incredibly powerful tool with its readers/writers and all the logic programming. if you learn ID the pack will become easier and much more fun.

the scope of this pack is far too large, which worsens everything else about the pack.

balancing is absolutely abysmal. if you're not a mage then give up. mages get many different curios to boost their spell damage, and the pack provides a way to increase your curio slots, letting mages scale infinitely. every good armor set is a mage set. there is no reason to not be a spellcaster.

numbers overall are bad. the earlygame is enjoyable with some balanced fights, then it quickly falls into the usual RPG pack standard of "one-shot the boss or get one-shot" which isn't fun.

because of how much content there is, nothing is balanced or gated all too well. if you poke around in JEI you can very easily get super overpowered gear with minimal effort. enchanting is easy, combat is easy, everything is easy, until you hit bosses with specific resistances and infinite armor piercing (ignis, nightwarden, ender guardian).

the custom content is amazing, the shop and orbs are truly unique and make progression more enjoyable. but those aspects are nullified by how terrible everything is balanced after the earlygame. once you complete one or two paths, you have effectively played the entire pack and will now be repeating that for another 30 hours. there is nothing unique or interesting after the first dozen bosses.

the custom classes are also balanced incredibly poorly. some are giga OP and scale you to infinity (spellblade with its spell projectile duplication) while others have mechanics that are frustrating to work with and provide basically zero benefits (monk's super jump is tedious for zero reward, and meditation is only useful against bosses that can actually land hits, which is also when it becomes unusable cause you can't stand still).

it doesn't help that whenever the author updates the pack, there are 10 new memory leaks and 50 new bugs. i started on version 1.7.9 and the pack got updated to 1.8.2 as i was playing, the performance worsened immensely with almost every update, especially after 1.8. there were also a few bosses that did not function or just crashed my game and i had to cheat to continue progressing.

seriously, the performance was so bad that by the midgame i had to frequently restart my game entirely to purge memory leaks, even after i set up extensive garbage collection with java arguments and gave the pack 8-10gb of ram.

TL;DR
too much content, abysmal performance. let the author work on this for a few years. come back in 2030

A great mod, and has been for a very long time. Sometimes the "refurbished" or "refreshed" or "remade" versions of older mods for newer versions are a bit weak, but this is not one of them. None of the furniture is too complex, unrealistic, or weirdly difficult to use or craft, and all of the furniture fits in (most) modpacks and any vanilla world.

The variety of furniture never feels sparse nor does it feel overwhelming, and the textures look and feel great.

There isn't much more to say about this mod. Try it out if you haven't, I highly recommend.

Superior RPG promised a lot: custom classes, finely tuned recipes and integration... It looked on the surface like it would be a labor of love.

But here are the core issues it has, which almost every RPG slop pack has:

• Early game progression: non-existent. Once again, we are told to not even bother engaging in the pack's core gameplay until we have, ONCE AGAIN, gone through the vanilla progression. Wood->Stone->Iron->Diamond with zero change or customization. This is an instant fail for an RPG pack in my book.

• Early game balance: non-existent. I call this problem "IceAndFire-itus", since it is most commonly seen with that mod: the modpack makes no effort to configure or gate strong enemies; you are just as likely to run into them on day 1, in the spawn area, as you are on day 100, thousands of blocks away. This too is an instant fail. RPGs NEED progression, especially in the enemies you fight.

• Zero keybind configuration: every good modpack should go through and disable unnecessary keybinds, and resolve conflicting ones. This pack makes no effort to do so.

• Custom classes: I wanted to like these, I really did. The concept is there, the effort is there, but in practice I did not enjoy them very much. The ability descriptions are clean and short, which is good, but still I rarely found myself understanding them or being interested in them. Although there are tons of class trees and skills, most trees are just 1 skill repeated over and over, until you branch out into 1 more. For a total of like 4 or 5 per class. Maybe this would work fine if the skills were less niche and easier to understand.

For example, I chose the scout class, since I saw it gains access to a flight ability eventually. For the first few hours of playtime, all it did was give me a chain ability, which was decent, but buggy. Some chains had no collision (I guess they were too long?) and all of the chains had problems interacting with horses (horses get stuck and desynced in them.) Plus using the ability was complicated and difficult to learn.

Also, the beastmaster class was in a separate skill tree for some reason? And though the summons were helpful in combat, they killed wandering traders, my horse, and any innocent animal around them, which ruined that for me as well.

Then I found that they are locking certain classes behind a patreon paywall: that's a scumbag move, sorry.

Overall, the one thing that separates this pack from every other RPG slop-pack is the class trees, which were buggy and not very fun to play with in practice. I have played worse, but I've played better. Not really "Superior".

This modpack really stands out for its atmosphere: the cities and buildings, the climate/temperature system create an immersion that few zombie packs manage to pull off. The progression system rewards players who enjoy automation and building, though it can feel overwhelming if you come in with no prior experience with those mods.
I'd recommend starting with a "scouting" run to understand the quest book before committing to a definitive world.
Performance is pretty solid for what it offers.

Is it smelted? is it for tools? is it used in some mod specific machine? JEI has the answer for you!
It's grown into a community standard so most mods have compat with it. And unless you want the hardcore experience of knowing/figuring out all recipes added by mods all by yourself, this mod is a must. It's available for a lot of versions as well so no worries there, and is even compatible with some of its alternatives (mostly thinking of EMI)

I'll preface by saying I'm writing this after completing Chapter 2, which isn't very far into progression.
As someone who doesn't really like how automation (tech) packs are done in Minecraft, the beginning of this pack managed to keep my attention for the entirety of my play session. Everything is stripped down to the bare essentials, just you and an infinite resource you have to manipulate to progress (Being a weirdo that enjoys incremental games on ROBLOX, this really entices me). You can get the first few automated parts going in just a minute or two of gameplay, which is fantastic, and all the basic components are incredibly simple and cheap to craft so you're spending your time figuring out how to actually automate things rather than tediously collecting the items needed.
If there is a point of tedium it is the power logistics. For me, the energy cables just did not do anything and I had to use machines with outputs set (manually for each block) to transfer power.

It adds bhops and strafing from source games like tf2 and counter strike to minecraft faithfully, feals great to use and does exactly what it says it will

Apotheosis is a really fun mod if you want Minecraft to feel more like an RPG.

The affix loot, stronger enemies, enchantment changes, and progression systems can make normal gameplay feel much more exciting. Finding gear actually matters, and it gives you more reasons to keep fighting, exploring, and improving your setup.

The downside is that it can become overpowered very quickly. If the pack does not balance around it, you can go from normal Minecraft to completely ridiculous gear pretty fast.

I would not put this in every vanilla+ world, but for RPG, adventure, or combat-heavy packs, it is a great addition.

Better MC is an okay vanilla+ style modpack, especially for people who want Minecraft to feel bigger without jumping straight into a giant tech or magic pack. That being said, it leaves a lot missing, and could do with a massive config and optimization update.

It adds a lot of the things people usually wish vanilla Minecraft had: better worldgen, more structures, more mobs, more dimensions, more building blocks, and more reasons to explore. It is very easy to understand, which makes it a good pack for newer modded players.

My main issue is that it sometimes feels like it is trying to do too much at once. There are a lot of cool mods here, but not always enough direction tying everything together. It can feel more like a huge collection of mods rather than any specific modpack style. More of a kitchen sink pack at this point, with not enough optimization and work done, they seem more interested in popping out new versions and fabric/forge differences rather than optimizing or tuning just one pack.

There are better modpacks (and vanilla+ modpacks), I don't recommend.