Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Prominence oh Prominence, if you think that your 2 minute made kitchen sink pack is bad because it's barely configured, try looking at this pack! Because even with all the "balans", custom items, quest and everything, this pack does almost none of it right. Let me dissect it one by one

Problem 1: The RPG Itself

Prominence promised to be an RPG, which as far as it does it, tries so hard to be a mix of POE2 and Rlcraft with all the armors, classes, and talent tree that it has. The problem is... balancing becomes insanely hard once you start locking people to certain builds.

For an example, Ranged builds can be seriously strong here, it's high dps, attacks from distance which is generally very safe even in tight dungeons, and were generally faster to reassemble into a hybrid magic build compared to Melee builds that needs to balance their mediocre dps, sustain themselves from being hit by bosses, and generally has a harder experience due to just how most boss AI's are not build to comprehend multiclass loadouts.

This isn't being mended by the talent tree or level progression in anyways, which also falls in the same problem as POE2 where there's too many small skills, but at the same time, not enough big skills which POE2 does provide, which this mod fails to do so and you're basically stuck in this condition of small gains at big cost and big gains simply locked. This also ain't being mended by the weapon skill tree, in fact, it doesn't even matter if you don't upgrade your skill tree at all, a crossbow can just cheese everything.

Same goes for the leveling, enemies always overlevel you, and even if you overlevel them, their stat boost is still bigger than yours, and how do you fix this infinite tug of war? yep, a crossbow and 3 blocks up.

The artifact interactions, trinkets as we say it, is also pretty much bandaid plaster to the actual problem of things. It's just bad, +8% random damage at the cost of literally searching tens of dungeon, is just bad progression, even worse than RLCraft, atleast you got goofy Lycanites.

Problem 2: The Tech not Teching Itself

Oh my goodness, i love tech mods, but this modpack is the first time i disliked the implementation of it. Usually you would add tech mods to a pack for certain reasons... automation, resource generation, storage, or logistics. The tech mods added here does not really solve any of that and instead add in an extra layer of headaches, STOP NERFING POWER GENERATION, I WANT MY AE2 SETUP TO BE GOOD.

Tech Reborn, basically IC2 recreated has it's own progression tree and interacts with no custom items of the pack, no reason to even play it. Modern Industrialization, basically Gregtech recreated and by extension IC2 recreation, also has it's own progression tree and interacts with no custom items of the pack, no reason to play it too... Industrial Revolution- NO NO NO, none of these tech mods actually does anything of substance even though they really should have because of the configuration being so unbalanced.

Ad Astra, allows you to go to the space... is there a boss or progression in the space? NO! Powah... basically a bandaid for FE generation now, just extremely lazy as an implementation.

Problem 3: The Story Itself?

Yep, the whole pack has a story, you are the flameborn of Vaaz, and... and... guess what, 100 hours of gameplay and i still don't have the story actually touched me in any way or sense. Whilst it is a common issue with most packs... especially a story driven RPG like Prominence, they should atleast make it make sense.

I'm taking this from the description of the mod itself, where it said that:

**"You one of the Flameborn of Vaaz, a race created by S'kellak, the Creator of All Things to protect and ensure the balance of all realms.

After thousands of years of peace, a ravenous force known as the Void has started an invasion into the universal realms, worlds filled with life and death, are now threatened to being destroyed completely. Will you fulfill your mission and stop the Void's Invasion?"**

And yet it doesn't really feel like you're fighting an invasion, or if there is even ONE Void (Eldritch End) being that invades the overworld, or even really attack you that much, this feels like a lazier version of SR Parasites and the Void enemies themselves are just so so basic, i'm genuinely baffled when i found out that these crooks are one of the supposed final enemies of the VI chapter that's invading the world, is that it?

Ohoho of course not, the title of the pack itself is... Hasturian Era which already spoils itself to be a homage to Hastur the King in Yellow... Yet in this pack, the closest thing to Hastur... is that one end game boss is just a reskin of another boss that is "possessed" by Hastur... are we joking? is that all the influence of THE KING IN YELLOW? Is that it?

Yes, that's it...

This is the main gripe that i have with this pack, it tries to be story driven, without properly driivng a story. So the car crashes, and then by extension the only plausible way they could introduce Hastur just like the rest of the pack would be in a fight and a fight and a fight, and i dislike this direction so much, it's not even a kitchen sink now, a kitchen sink pack has the luxury of turning into a real RPG. This one has bandaid fixed itself so much, that the wound is untreatable, it needs a total overhaul for it to even be able to pull of a True Hastur and another mindless boss fight.

If you've seen the ARG regarding the world that didn't exist, you know what i mean. An intangible God who's connected to the play and the lost city, Carcosa. Should be executed in a way better manner than just simply possessing a boss and buffs the boss into 2x the pain. And suddenly our origin of Flameborn of Vaaz, created by Skellak, literally has no affect on this whole ordeal. You could really ignore the entire lore and think of yourself as just default Steve being tossed to Prominence world and it won't affect a single narrative...

Conclusion

Q: Is it a good pack?
A: yes, it has many unique items.

Q: What's the catch to the statement?
A: If you ignore all the bleeding problems, balancing issues, tech mods spam as bandaid, barely any immersion that lets you sunk deep to the story, and no real consequences, then it's a good pack.

Q: If i don't ignore that?
A: It's a pack worse than any kitchen sink pack that you can make right now, atleast your kitchen sink, can still be reconfigured, this one needs an overhaul of it's own overhauling.

Q: Should beginners play this?
A: Genuinely, no, but if you wanna try, go on.

Q: Can this pack be fixed?
A: Absolutely, all the problem in this pack emerges from an unbalanced game design, or rather, a game deisgn that didn't consider enough variables for balancing. Completely fixable by the config, except for enemy AI.

Q: How would you rate this pack if all the issue is fixed?
A: Overall 4.5/5. Gameplay 4.5/5, Performance depends on how far it got optimized then, Aesthetics would still be 4/5, genuinely a very potential modpack

Perhaps the longest standing unfinished (yet finished) mod. Twilight Forest has been one of the few mods that stood for so long, it's just absurd to think that this mod is still unfinished with barely that many content changes since it's inception.

The mod itself has a really good content atleast from the standpoint of 10 years ago. It's jam packed of exploration, boss fights, loots, minings, etc etc. Performance is somehow decent for a modded dimension, and the Aesthetics despite being old, still has a charm to it.

Now the main issue as we all know it, The Final Boss. It just wouldn't really come, because the final boss is a sign that the mod is ending itself. Atleast from the mod dev perspective, this mod has so many flaws that's need to be patched first before they can properly create a final boss, similar issue happens with Calamity mod, with both having nearly a decade since this same question has been asked.

With that out of the way, this mod still holds itself up to this day. A bit overglazed and a bit overhated, but atleast in my eyes, it's a mod that still has a way to go around before creating it's own ending. Friendly enough for a new player, and still good for us veterans. I'd rate a 10/10 if this mod reaches a conclusion one day.

In short terms, here be dragons, in longer terms, here be dragons, and cyclops, and hydras, and fairies, and sea serpents, and mermaids, and just about that.

The strong point of this mod is that it adds bunch of creature to fight and gain loots from. The weak point of this mod is that it requires you to find such creature or meet them in an unprepared situation and die miserably before you actually learn how to prepare for each and actually capitalize on the gains.

The mod has some good interactions and features, such as taming those mobs (especially the dragon), giving them armor, growing them to maximum size, or stunting their growth so they'd stay small forever. But with that being said, it does also take a lot of effort before you actually reach any of that and the mod itself is pretty much just a baseplate that requires a more built world before it can really run, such that this mod works best in a modpack rather than standalone.

With that being said, this mod is still beautifully good. There are varieties to the challenge from the different types of dragons despite a majority of them are damage sponges that drops once you have a decently decent bow and sufficient distance to snipe things out. And varieties of rewards that are mostly tied to the mobs and their drops.

Overall good mod, can still be improved though.

The mod starts with you collecting meteors, or rather the core of it that has weird ancient alien technology that allows you to interact with the "matter energy" of everything (from the lore standpoint)

Now this whole apparatus turns out to be a complex and beautiful interactable storage and automation solution. By literal meanings, from taking the chip mold in the meteor, to putting those to your press to catalyze your creation of silicon wafers, redstone paste, and diamond chips for the goal of making an engineering microcontroller for your computer components, which turns into a set of storage drives, cables, terminals, and of course the main controller of your system itself.

A single ME controller connected to a dense cable connected to 32 ME storage drives, with each of those containing 10 of 256k ME storage cells and exhausted all 63 types it can hold, you can theoretically compact 340 million items all into those 32 channels, yep, absurd amount of storage logistics. Then we can start touching with P2P and extract all the 21504 channels, you get the storage of 228 billion items, or about 0.006% of the entire Minecraft world, and this is still in a rather workable condition, some more advanced (addon maxed) AE2 setups can have things in the trillions, quadrillions, or even quintillions and somehow still work to supply your base, just to show how optimized this whole system is. This doesn't even mention that with all of those connectivity you can also connect this big storage of yours directly to your machines and control all of them through your AE2 system. Truly the king of logistics.

All of this information can shun people from actually using AE2 as it works in the same way as a router in your home with channels and so, but trust me, this mod is the literal best logistics you can setup for any size of base. It has almost zero presence in the early early game, but scales very fast.

TL:DR, this mod is extremely versatile, extremely useful, extremely optimized, and is simply the reason why people could even finish modpacks like GTNH, Deserves an 11/10.

This pack is definitely a good concept but i feel it could be better, for example:

SPOILER

[ Aesthetics ]

• The pack could feature a more dark atmosphere, would fit more with the pack
• the cities could blend better, having small or big outskirts of areas where trees have been cleared out

[ Gameplay ]

• Making the Horde buildings more rare would make the pack much more playable, i walked by 4 buildings and all of them were horde buildings

[ Performance ]

• Nothing here, perfect even

this mod feels alot more like real pshycological horror than many of the others, instead of putting a bunch of entities in your face, it kind of eases you into it, and when you do enter its dimensions, its your choice and your fault, you didnt have to go into the pitch black block but you did.

Great mod in my opinion

I played with this mod with my friend recently, and it just breaks everything, instead of actually being scary, it breaks my base, my torches, and opens doors, instead of being creepy it just becomes a hindrance

this just ends up being more annoying than scary, the only part where i was scared was when i couldnt see it while it was breaking my base

and if i could rate it any lower, I WOULD

For a modpack in beta this already has a lot more to offer than most modern modpacks that tend to go overboard with kitchen sink features instead of curating the modpack around a specific experience. For Fantasia, that experience is a Skyrim-like experience. I'd argue this does more to lean into the fantasy experience for minecraft modpacks with a more limited and curated selection than most prior fantasy modpacks that mostly rely on quests for pushing the experience. Meanwhile this modpack is more roleplay related (though I haven't really gotten into the roleplay aspect of the modpack quite yet since I'm not really used to MCA or how to really interact with the NPCs).

For the pros it starts off pretty simple, it's got an immersion that won't make you rip your hair out with how tedious it is. Like a lighter version of Terrafirmacraft (which I do enjoy as well). The Overgeared Smithing System has become one of my favorite ways of crafting armor through forging (and I think the Sewing Table is a part of Overgeared too). Speaking of armors, I fell in love with the Epic Knights mod thanks to this modpack. I'm BEGGING for people to make more addons for epic knights to add more types of armors. The combat is pretty good, though admittedly full block isn't a thing in this modpack, instead having a block/parry window. Though admittedly the biggest thing for me is the character customization. You can forge your own builds, your own armors, even create your own character through MCA's Character Creator.

Admittedly there is more that I haven't fully explored yet. But I want to get to some of the small downsides that are most likely to be resolved or ARE going to be resolved soon. First off is the dragon shaped elephant in the room, or to put it better, the lack of said dragon. Ice and Fire is noticably NOT a part of this modpack, mainly because the original mod is.... pretty much abandoned by its original devs. That and anyone who has played with the old mod will know that one teeny, tiny little problem the Ice and Fire mod had was... well... TOO MANY DRAGONS!!! Yeah, the old mod had a problem with too many super destructive village and base destroying dragons spawning all over, which kind of overshadowed all the old planned aspects of the mod that may or may not come in the new Ice and Fire mod. Speaking of which, there are confirmed plans to add Ice and Fire 2 to Fantasia when that mod eventually releases. Which for those of us currently playing in a dragonless world, we're probably getting the Skyrim before Alduin came back experience.

Biggest elephant in the room out of the way, now for the rest of my minor gripes that are eventually going to get resolved the more the modpack progresses in development. Such as the limited playability of fantasy races aside from trying to make your chosen fantasy race in the MCA creator, which does admittedly have its limits. There is also the fact that most of the late game tiers are locked off due to the fact anything diamond and above hasn't been finished yet. So, so far the highest you'll get is steel. Which I don't really mind since Steel has a LOT of customization options, and my only concern is what kind of customization will be available to diamond to netherite tier armor. Then comes my last minor complaint, the surprising lack of furniture. I mean I know Mr. Crayfish's stuff is an auto nope due to being mostly modern era, but I'm surprised Macaw's stuff isn't part of the modpack since it adds a LOT of furniture related items, including roofs, stairs, fences, and even bridges. Also I personally wouldn't mind even more Farmers Delight addons so I can be spoiled with food, glorious food.... now I'm wondering if there is a way to do a proper chef roleplay where all your food isn't just in storage but can be sold to villagers or be directly fed to them.

Other than those minor complaints, I'll whole heartedly recommend playing this modpack. It may be in beta, but it is one good beta.

This mod adds exactly one thing, like it's name. A better control for your keybinds. They did it by simply adding a search bar that allows you to search for keybinds. You can also search by category (modname), by keys, or just by name of the action if you want it filtered better. I rated it with gameplay cus many modpacks that has 1000 smth keybinds or has 300+ mods are simply unplayable without this mod, it's just that helpful of a mod, ridiculuously helpful. Aesthetically it does what it does best too, UI is clear, UX feels good atleast from my experience, literally just a search bar and you can still manually scroll your whole keybind page. No effect on performance too obviously. Must have for your modpacks, doesn't matter if it's just Vanilla+ or the second coming of GTNH, this is one of the best mod to exist.

This mod does everything you expect it does, mainly you probably would recognize that it's whole thing was about overhauling the enchanting experience. Instead of vanilla power levels, you get to instead interact with 3 bars of eterna, quanta, and arcana. Eterna is the closest one to vanilla enchant power. Quanta is the random variance of the enchant power level, it could turn a level 30 enchant to a level 45 or a level 15 one or something in between, etc etc. Then Arcana is about weighting the rarity of each rarity level. Honestly a better mechanic than the default enchanting.

The other half of Apotheosis is a bunch of things, that you can actually disable btw (the enchanting module too). But let's just say that the whole thing is a bit rather unbalanced (Adventure module). Apotheosis has gems that grants modifiers when placed on the available slots of your items. These modifiers are essentially just straight up either bad or really broken compared to even the stat boosts that you get from curios and baubles combinations of old modpacks, but with that being said, it's just up to you whether to interact with this or not, it's just one config to disable it, but by default, this whole thing trashes the balance of so many modpacks, and those who tried to integrate it (such as Ciscos) still has hard issues with balancing it, though right now, the mod itself does implement a World Tier system, which could help it's own balancing, even though it's still rather unbalanced.

Overall, good performance, this is also due to the fact that i mainly experienced the Neoforge version with data components and all. Aesthetically quite pleasing, i love the sprites of the gems, the bookshelves, and even the tooltips. This mod is a sort of a broken gem, completely fixable tho.