Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

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.

Not much to say about this mod except what I already wrote in my review for the original. This mod serves as an excellent performance mod with extra fixes, speeding up packs and helping to prevent issues. Being able to utilise the tweaks ModernFix provides across more versions is incredibly useful!

I've never had any issues or crashes from this mod and the patches and performance improvements can really help, especially when making modpacks.

This is a mod that I add to every pack I make now because there's no reason not to include it and I highly recommend it to other pack users.

For end users, you can install this mod if you want but there's a very small chance it breaks other mods in packs so be careful if you don't know what you're doing

AppleSkin does not need an introduction, I feel, since it is ubiquitous and includes in almost every popular modpack out there.

I will therefore cut the well-deserved praise short for this review: it's an excellent UI improvement adding vital saturation and hunger information, it is integrated seamlessly into the UI and it honestly should be in the vanilla game already.

However, I do feel like it could use some polish in the visual department.

The main issue is that AppleSkin just does not work gracefully with resource packs that change the hunger icon. The saturation icons rendered behind the hunger bar are just the vanilla 'chicken leg' hunger icon reduced to a yellow outline. This looks good in vanilla. But if you use a resource pack that modifies the hunger icons to be a different shape, AppleSkin will still behave like an elephant in a porcelain shop and render the vanilla 'chicken leg'-shaped outline behind the differently-shaped custom hunger bar icons, essentially clashing with and clipping into them.

It would not be too difficult a task to generate these icons dynamically based on the currently active resources. After all, it's just a simple yellow outline that you could generate for any arbitrary shape easily.

Additionally, the saturation scale behind the hunger bar is a simple dithered gray rectangle that in my opinion can look quite busy and jarring. A more modern style would do well here.

Overall though, AppleSkin is obviously still a must-have, and there are plenty of resource packs out there that add compatibility for AppleSkin icons too. It's just a minor annoyance that you can't really use some resource packs with AppleSkin because of the overlapping texture issue.

I have used this mod more than I can even put into words and cannot recommend it highly enough for pack creators. However, the reason I cannot give 5 stars is due to limited documentation on how to learn it.

I am a highly active member of KubeJS support (within the top ten) and can say that support is generally very good, but due to it being volunteer run and with a slightly lacking wiki I have seen this be off putting to new users.

This mod has served as the main factor in the ability for modpacks to add custom functionality such as its use in packs such as Create Above & Beyond and the ATM series.

If you are making a modpack, include this mod, then come say hi at the discord and we can help you learn it!

This mod is by far the most complete, visually appealing and vanilla friendly tech mod out by far. The only shortcomings are the at times poor performance compared to other tech mods caused by the impressive visuals and emphasis on building large factories.

Some people argue this mod is overused in packs, but that isn't a detriment to the mod itself and instead serves to reinforce how ubiquitous it has become in the modding scene. The building possibilities combined with the accessibility of the mod makes it a must-play. Highly recommended!

(P.S.) I highly recommend playing at your own pace and avoiding giant schematics so you can properly learn the mod, the built in ponder mechanic should be sufficient to learn

There is really not much to say about this mod! But for a mod like this, that's a good thing, right?

Emojis does exactly what it says on the tin: it allows you to type Unicode emojis in chat easily using the colon (':') shortcuts, similar to how messengers like Signal, Element, Teams or Discord work. The names are the ones you are familiar with (e. g. :pensive:). Since the mod just inserts a standard Unicode emoji character, everyone can see the emojis you send, whether they have the mod installed or not.

By the way, if you don't like the standard, black-and-white fallback style of the emojis, that's because Minecraft's default font does not include colourful and fancy emojis. I recommend using resource packs that add an emoji-capable font! I personally use one called "Cheerful", which adds little pixel-art emoji that fit very well with the Minecraft style.

Let's be unconventional and start with the bottom line: I enjoy Autowork a lot!

It is the only automation mod that I am aware of that really leans into the redstone-like toolbox philosophy where it gives you a bunch of relatively generic universal tools and allows you to do your own problem solving with those.
It's what people commonly describe as the opposite of the "magic block" design pattern: instead of providing you with a block that pre-solves your task (e. g. the IE Garden Cloche for an automatic tree farm) if you pump enough resources/energy into it, it provides you with a bunch of cheap, generic tools that you can arrange cleverly to solve your specific task yourself.

It's something that Create originally set out to do and is often praised for, but ultimately ends up failing due to the addition of tons of blocks and items with a really specific purpose. Shafts and cogs are just cables, water wheels are just generator blocks, and the processing blocks are magic 'ore crusher' type machines, right?

Autowork instead takes cues from vanilla automation, and simply expands it.
If you are the kind of person who complains about 'magic block' tech mods, but does not like Create because you feel it's also ultimately a 'magic block' mod with pretty animations, this might be right up your alley. It also performs much better, so no more laggy factories!

The Autowork aesthetics are excellent and fit in perfectly with the vanilla game. Most of the blocks are inspired by the Crafter and similar existing redstone machines, and they are all very well animated and themed. These look exactly like what Mojang would do. The author is nice, active, takes both suggestions and criticism very well, and updates the mod quite frequently.

So, why the slightly lowered review score?
Well, my problem with Autowork is that some of the utilities it adds are already easily possible using vanilla redstone. The most obvious offenders here are the pulsating timer, the AND gate, and the chute. (I am not going to count things like the Minecart loader/unloader here because while they're technically possible in vanilla with things like amethyst crystals, they involve quite in-depth glitches and unexpected physics behaviour that just aren't too clean to use.)

This might not sound like a big deal, but if the whole idea is to expand creativity-driven redstone-style automation without 'magic blocks', it does not make much sense to replace existing redstone circuits and mechanics with single-block versions. Additionally, some of the blocks already slowly being 'magic block'-ified with some more recent updates, with auto-filters and such included despite filtering already being a fun problem to solve using vanilla redstone.

These minor nitpicks however are just that – minor nitpicks – and do not impact my enjoyment of the mod much. I definitely still recommend Autowork for anyone who likes Redstone-style automation and simply wants a better way to break and place blocks, use minecarts in automation, push entities around without water and all those kinds of shenanigans.

(Transparency disclaimer: I volunteered to provide localisation to Autowork so technically I contributed to it; however, I had no creative input and I am not related or associated with the mod's developer otherwise)

Item Descriptions quickly became a mod I just do not play without anymore as it's so lightweight but does so much.
As someone who started playing all the way back in 2011, I am intimately familiar with every aspect of old Minecraft, but I often forget about so many new features they added to the game since ~1.2.1 or so. Item Descriptions genuinely helps a lot learning about all the new thingamajigs and recalling what stuff does.

It also just makes the UI feel a little bit more "complete" and I can imagine it being very, very useful for new players to the game.

The descriptions do not get in your way because they're toggleable, they are customisable and have mod support out-of-the-box simply using regular locale files in resource packs, and they integrate fabulously well with other mods like Spyglass Improvements or Field Guide.

I recommend also checking out the Mod Descriptions resource pack that adds a plethora of descriptions for all kinds of mods. "Hey Wiki", the mod that allows you to open the Minecraft wiki article on items using a hotkey is a great companion, too.

The only 'downside' to Item Descriptions is unfortunately something that isn't their fault at all: namely that many many mods do not support it and that even the aforementioned Mod Descriptions addon – while extensive – is still missing a ton of popular mods. I really wish more mod authors would add Item Descriptions support. A lot of mods do add descriptions, but they all reinvent the wheel and do their own thing and do not integrate with Item Descriptions even though it's right there.