Played through the early game a couple times but haven't finished it yet, have seen a few videos though so I know all about the later game stuff.
Recently got a friend into modded Minecraft and began replaying this and, man, the atmosphere of this pack is unmatched.

The quests are all meaningful and give new info in each one; from what I've played through, there's never any points where it slows down as long as you've got your automation done. The real gripe I've seen is with that automation; if you don't plan ahead and automate everything by Chapter 5 you may have a tough time completing the pack, however in the early and mid-game it's a consistently smooth experience.

The main way you get resources is by looting whatever miscellaneous items you can find around the seemingly infinite stretch of space that is the backrooms. Furniture for wood, silverfish hiding in the floor for food, damp carpet on the floor for water, concrete under the carpet to get lava, and even various real-life tech like microwaves and pipes to get metals later. No(well, minimal) mobs spawning means it's easy to get lost in the looting frenzy. It drives you crazy the way you think, "Well, maybe if I just go down this way there'll be something good..."

Create is the main gateway to the early automation; the buffed steam engines are a lot more fun than spamming waterwheels, which you only unlock later.
This may not seem like it, but it is in fact a Create pack like Arcane Engineering or Above & Beyond, so that's a big focus until close to the end; even then, there's a lot of recipes involving spouts, presses, and mixers. Whether that's a positive or negative is up to you.
Pretty much every crafting recipe is redone to have something to do with the items you find scattered around the backrooms, adding to its cohesion.

As I mentioned earlier, the aesthetic design is unmatched by any other pack. It's unnerving without being completely jumpscare-y, no dwellers or "noodle" monsters like many other versions of the backrooms have.
Visually, the textures are all really nice-looking and consistent. All the mods with "vanilla+ textures" like Farmer's Delight or Create feel very consistent together, and the later-game stuff, although unchanged visually, also feel like they match with each other.

Performance is pretty decent, I had no problems or anything. I've heard gripes with some of the loading in stuff and the sculk mobs , but I had zero issues personally.

I'd recommend this pack to everyone even remotely interested in tech; I don't think it's a good beginners modpack, but if you have a friend who plays modpacks and knows at least the basic mods, I would definitely recommend it for multiplayer. It does assume you have a bit of basic knowledge on how some stuff works, especially Create as I was saying before, but nowadays with pondering, guidebooks, and the pack's great quests, there's not much you can't figure out in-game.

TLDR; if you know anything about tech mods, play it. It's worth it.

What could be a neat unnerving liminal exploration experience is utterly ruined by a plethora of zombie mobs with the aesthetic taste of a dweller.
What I feel is lost on many latecomers to the "backrooms" liminal space trend is the idea of liminality itself. Why have a monster around every corner when the whole point of the genre is the space you are in.

As for the pack itself, forgetting the theme, I chose what I thought was a more difficult start (Nod Scientist) and found a block of diamond within 20 minutes of gameplay, and did not struggle at all against the far too common enemy mobs, finding them more of a nuisance than anything.

Been looking to play the OG Sky Bees pack(or perhaps its sequel Sky Bees 2) for a good while but haven't gotten around to it until recently. When I went to try it out, I saw there was a remake for modern versions which excited me as I'm more of 1.20.1 or 1.21.1 player lol.
Actually playing it has... disappointed me a bit. To sum it up in a word, I felt pretty whelmed.
The AI profile picture should have been my first sign but, annoyingly, I wanted to l look past it.

It's not necessarily a bad pack, it just feels... kind of lazy. Questbook is decent and there is a sense of progression to be certain, but crafting recipes and stuff are for the most part unmodified.
Apart from some mildly intriguing Ex Nihilo(or rather Ex Deorum) at the beginning, it's your standard modded Skyblock with a bee mod thrown in.
You've got your drawers and backpacks, crouching for crops, botany pots, Productive Metalworks, and although I haven't gotten quite that far yet there's your standard Mekanism, IE, AE2, etc. No Create though, which as much as I love the mod is always a plus.
Questbook is present and at the very least better than Skyfactory(not that that's a high bar lmao) but it's still sort of the bare minimum, once early game ends you have to fight for yourself.

I'm really focusing on the negatives here but for the most part it's just, as the title says, a standard modded Skyblock pack. Performance is obviously perfectly fine, even with shaders(I used Euphoria Patched Complementary), as most Skyblocks tend to be.

Visuals are fine, they're not particularly bad or anything, just default textures; no real consistency there.

All in all, if you want a fairly barebones modded Skyblock I would recommend it, otherwise go play ATMTTS or something.

Absolutely great pack with good questlines and storytelling

Should be used in most Survival Packs

Have played this mod alot, and it does exactly what it says it does

Key parts i loved:

• The early game is much more complicated with this mod, being perfect for a survival pack
• compatible with alot of other mods such as dynamic trees (was not sure this would work, thought that it only used the vanilla tools at the time)
• The gameplay is nice due to still having a small layer of simplicity that adds a way for newer players to figure it out

A few things to keep in mind for pack devs using this mod:

- Using this mod may require that you make quests specifically for the new features added by this, some players may not get it as soon as they start
- Specify within the quests i mentioned: What materials are usually needed, and How to get said materials
- The new saws may make progression slower, take this into mind if creating a pack with faster progression

This mod is intentionally misleading and does nothing.

Made by a person with youtuber with 366K subscribers, it uses peoples familiarity with -ium performance mods to trick people into download a mod with no effect on performance. It also uses to two exclamation marks in its name to bias its ranking higher.

What does it actually do?

I decompiled the 1.21.11 fabric version.

When the mod is loaded on the client, it mixins into LivingEntity and Player to keep track of what the user is doing, then registers a overlay to show a fake higher fps count. Thats it!

If you can, avoid using it. The only reason people use this mod is if they don't know mods like E4MC exist, they want to be able to play with their friends in the easiest way possible and this does that. But so do plenty of other mods.

And unlike Essential the rest of them don't try and pressure the player in to paying for Microtransactions..... yes you heard that right.... Every time you open the escape menu you be presented a special offer to buy a cosmetic...

Now as much as I dislike this model is get 2 stars as it does work, you can use it, the cosmetics do look decent and looking past the microtransactions the functionality is there. And I can MAYBE understand then need for funding for the mod... but even then every other mod out there does without...

If you want to play with your friends.... use E4MC or better yet! host your own server locally.

If you want cosmetics.... download a cosmetics mod....

Reviewer's PC Specs:
Windows 11
AMD Ryzen™ 9 7900 @ 3.70GHz - RAM: 32 GB
AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT - VRAM: 16 GB

If I had to offer a single bit of criticism, the art really isn't the greatest, not my thing,

BUT

This mod has been, since 1.7.10, one of the definitive mods in virtually all modpacks, adding a sense of actual depth to your tools, your weapons, the things you use to interact with the game.

Minecraft has long, for well over a decade had a issue that nobody really realizes until they use this mod.

• you get a wood pickaxe
• you get stone until you find 3 pieces of iron
• you use iron until you find diamond
• you now get to farm villagers to get mending so your tool doesn't break
• may as well get netherite, as of more recently
• time to farm enchants until i get perfection

ALL OF THAT SUCKS.

Tinkers Construct replaces all of this with custom, upgradable, infinitely repairable tools that you own.
In Tinkers Construct, you create a stone pickaxe, you work to smelt your metals, creating a large multiblock furnace, before creating a Tool Head forged out of a metal of your choice.

The Tool Head you make takes Attributes from the metal you use, and there is no "best material" to optimize with, it's just pros and cons. There's also an Upgrade system, allowing you to apply secondary materials to the tool to add modifiers like Luck or Fortune (an enchanting replacement)

I struggle to figure out a way to describe how gratifying this feels, how much better than vanilla this is, but truly, if by some terrible twist of fate you haven't yet played this mod, get it, you're even provided with in-game documentation.

Such a horrible mod. I won't talk about the microtranactions because i feel Alro did a good job talking about it in there review, so i will talk about all the other things that make Essential bad.

Installer

The Essential.jar you download is not what ends up being ran by your modloader. Instead, Essential runs a installer and can install whatever it wants! This content persists after the Essential.jar is removed

[17:24:30] [main/INFO]: Updating stage1 to version 13 from jar:file:/home/smeagle/.local/share/PrismLauncher/instances/1.19.2/minecraft/.fabric/processedMods/essential-loader-1.3.2-ee8364190873c568.jar!/gg/essential/loader/stage0/stage1.jar
[17:24:30] [main/INFO]: Updating Essential Loader (stage2) version 1.7.4 (fd9925651d7d2a7c4382209f86cf67c6) from jar:file:/home/smeagle/.local/share/PrismLauncher/instances/1.19.2/minecraft/mods/Essential_1-3-10-9_fabric_26-1-2.jar!/essential-loader-stage2-fabric-1.7.4.jar
[17:24:30] [main/INFO]: Starting Essential Loader (stage2) version 1.7.4 (fd9925651d7d2a7c4382209f86cf67c6) [stable]
[17:24:30] [main/INFO]: Downloading 52718KB of updates...

By Other Mods

Due to the installer essential has, it is possible (and encouraged) for other mods to just install essential with no warning.

Privacy Policy

Essential collects your data!

Information collected includes:

• Geolocation information
• Usage Information
• Behavioral Information
• Metadata (from screenshots or files)
• Third-Party Information (that they buy from other company to 'supplement' what they already collect)

This mod was created for one reason, and that was to be a feature-complete port of 1.7.10 NTM and that's what they set out to do. Originally forked off the buggy mess that is Alcater's NTM:EE, they managed to optimize the main features, as well as get the content correct for once. A huge problem that appears in the forking scene is that developers will usually add their own fluff, some good, some bad. This dev team, on the other hand, made sure to keep in line of bobcat's vision.
There was a lot of original suspicion of it when it was first being talked about, due to most forks/ports being absolute failures. When I first heard of it, I had the same thoughts. However when I did spend some time with it, and even talked to the developers about it, I grew a lot more confident of what they were accomplishing.
Now to answer some questions:

What makes this different from Alcater's NTM:EE?
Contrary to popular belief, Alcater added a lot of useless and half-baked features in his port. Good examples of this was the cross-contamination mechanics (when carrying a radioactive item, it would spread radiation to all of your other items, causing a lot of performance loss), contaminating drop (added a mechanic where dropping radioactive items would destroy it and spread radiation, being more of an annoyance if anything), nuclear cats (????) for some reason, etc. Not only that, but the framework it was built off of was extremely poorly optimized which caused all sorts of lag and tps issues. What NTM:CE has in comparison is a lot more comprehensive progression, with an entirely new weapon system, all sorts of new machines for each tech stage, extremely fast nuclear explosion optimization, and more.

1.7 VS 1.12.2
I feel like I need to mention about this at least once since it has been extremely prevalent ever since Golem left development of the reloaded port. Basically ever since the original porters left, and people like Alcater took up the scene, there has been consistent conflicts over content and differences between the versions. When I saw the success of NTM:CE, I had a very naive assumption that would finally end the conflict, since it is basically 1:1 with the original. However, there seems to be a lot of angry sentiment coming from both the NTM:EE community and the NTM 1.7 community. On the NTM:EE side, they are frustrated about the removal of alcater's changes. On the 1.7 side, they seem to believe its outdated. I'm not even fully sure where this 1.7 sentiment comes from, as when comparing the two there is very little difference in content. There are two reasons why I think why this poor NTM sentiment still continues:

1. Some of the NTM developers for years have always tried to claim that doing ports past 1.7 was impossible, and any attempt would be either out of date, or include ridiculous features. NTM:CE contradicts this and rather than shifting their perspective, they are still in full belief it is impossible.

2. Since these fans usually spent a lot of time in 1.7, they end up getting attached to that version and struggle to consider doing anything outside of it. Normally I wouldn't care as that's their opinion, but these are often the same people that share blaring misconceptions about NTM:CE and often times try to poison the well regarding any information of that version.

NTM:CE Space?
One of the few good forks that came out of the 1.7 sphere was NTM:Space, and often times people have asked about space being in NTM:CE. Luckily, with there being less restrictions on 1.12.2, there is the ability to make your own addons. One of the devs behind NTM:CE has been working on making NTM:Space its own functioning addon, with some success. From what I heard its still in development, however playable in survival.

Conclusion
Mr. Norwood and his team have done an immensely well job porting NTM over to 1.12.2, and I wish them success with their other ports like with MCHeli:CE. I started playing NTM on the reloaded port back in 2022 when Golem was still running it, and when he left, I always hoped that there would be a faithful continuation, which is finally what we have now.