Played on Cosmo's CSMP a few months ago. Menagerie was a lil cozy zoo building pack with a lot of wildlife (wow) and light adventuring addons, but didn't have much that stood out to me. I played this back in November 2025 but can't remember much besides the small animal pens ppl had. Admittedly I played just because, but the pack didn't really inspire me to build or make infrastructure, there weren't any tycoon elements as far as I knew but I think those would be interesting to see. I can't say the aesthetic was particularly different from other packs either. No Create mod or figura, lacked a storage mod outside of backpacks I think. Ran well for me with Distant Horizons on a Ryzen 5800X, pack was quite light.

Really the premise sorta fails on it's lack of incentives and that's my main gripe, but I can't place anything that actively hurt the experience (except for seagulls F those birds). tbh I build when I have a reason or an idea that sticks out, I'm not the type to play like, the Sims or build villages, so that might be me.

I don't typically enjoy tech packs, but this is an exception. This pack made me get automation online and enjoy doing it. I spent about 193 hours in this pack.

Here are my thoughts!

Praise:

-Ambient sounds are so cool in this pack. Aesthetic is on point

-Thank god there isn't a wire monster. Would've been very easy to market the pack to children and focus really bad horror mods for clickbait. Opting to not do this was a fantastic decision.

-Mod integration is very well done. To make progress in one mod, you need the others, which I appreciate

-The mods for the most part progress together and the scaling for what mods you get access to and when was really well done

-Almost no recipes are left untouched, and I love that. These mods are integrated super well with the environment

-I like that there are a so many different ways to do certain things. I got to design farms as I pleased and do whatever I felt necessary, with only some minor nudging in the quest book. Things like "it may be best to automate this process" or "do not progress further without some automation otherwise the next chapters will be hard" are really nice to have as someone that doesn't play many tech packs and would've squeezed by with the minimum necessary resources. This pack pushed me out of my comfort zone in a lot of ways while not making it an unpleasant experience.

-Locking water wheels behind more of an expensive recipe + not buffing their stress units was a great way to prevent water wheel spam. This plus making copper blocks, pipes and tanks spawn in the rooms really pushes the player to get a steam engine online

-The pool rooms are cool as hell, love that the ability to get some more difficult to craft items like AE2 controllers and crafting terminals lowers the barrier to entry with the mod and may push players to explore it instead of sticking with create storage or drawers. Same for the cake eating flower from Botania. I wasn't lucky enough to find it, but I like that it's possible

-This pack's version of the nether is incredibly creative, and portal linking being such a useful form of navigation was really fun. The nether never becomes irrelevant to progression the way it tends to in packs

Critique:

-Sculked mobs are a cool idea, wish they were executed better. Having them be so few and far between was a great decision, I wish they were more than retextured and buffed vanilla mobs

-Magma cubes can only be spawned by a bucket of magma being specifically placed down by the player. Deployers and dispensers don't work. The only solution I was able to find was using auto-placers, which isn't actually mentioned anywhere in the guides. I don't know if this is intentional, but I feel it should be communicated or fixed so dispensers and deployers work as well

-I would like more Botania integrated into the main questline, or explained a bit more as an option in this pack. Maybe not more forced progression with it, because I know a lot of people dislike it, but I would love to see it shown off more here. You can get by with just using the endoflame if you're patient enough, and given that the pack tackled water wheel spam pretty well, I'd like to see a solution to endoflame spam from them at some point.

-Need more clear communication about the Ender Chests and how they work. I had to do external research to figure out that they can be independently linked if you dye the bands on them. This probably isn't an issue for people that know the mod already, but would be good for people that don't (aka me)

-Not sure how I feel about the igneous extruder and the infinite resource mechanics in this pack. I think they're okay for now and for progression reasons, but I'd like to see this part of the pack revisited to avoid the "mc block that just does stuff without any input" thing.

-Eidolon feels a little out of place in the later game since it is such a crazy challenge to automate the crucible in comparison to the other mods present. I would like to see the mod revisited or maybe replaced with Botania mechanics in some aspects

-GIVE THE SCULK TENDRILS AN ASSIGNED DESTRUCTION TOOL PLEEEEEASE

-Light blocks. Wish the devs would make it so they're overridden by plants growing and deployers placing things, or include a disclaimer about them in the quest book. It took me quite awhile to figure out why some bamboo just wouldn't grow, and why my deployers couldn't place blocks on certain spots. Plus my elven gateway wouldn't activate because of one being in the way. It's not major, but it is super annoying.

-Chapter five was a bit of a let down. It went back to more conventional magic box tech mods which I don't typically enjoy. This pack taught me I reeeeally don't like Ender IO and Mekanism. Most of the quests at that point don't have descriptions or guides, so I really struggled here as someone that was unfamiliar with almost every mod in play. It needs work, and doesn't flow near as well as the previous chapters in my opinion. Plus, I feel like I'm just messing around in GUI after GUI, and making a million tables that just felt like reskins of each other. I believe chapter 5 is unfinished because of these things, so I'm a lot more willing to give leeway, but it was not as good as the rest of the pack.

Disclaimer: I attached photos of the pool rooms and nether. Keep in mind I'm running Complimentary Reimagined shaders, which I don't believe come with the pack by default. They look nice, but they break the antiblock effect in the pool rooms. I recommend disabling shaders in the pool rooms as a result. They also break some stuff with the 'overworld' so disable them before going though your end portal. If you want to run shaders in the main backrooms level I've found no conflicts or issues so far. I added Create Better FPS and Entity Culling to my client to help with performance when running shaders

Reclamation is a very simple alt-skyblock modpack with heavy progression gating that takes place in a dead dimension that only generates with 10-24 total block types, most of them being a block that's exclusive to this pack, Dried Dirt.

For as far as the eye can see, and even further with Distant Horizons if you so choose, anywhere where you'd normally see dirt, grass, podzol or other grass variants, it's just dried earth. A largely useless block that exists to supply a couple of early game recipes.

Other packs that are in the same vein are Liminal Industries and of course, this pack's main inspiration, Regrowth.

Positives:

1. Well Designed - I never got locked out of a quest or hit a wall where I didn't know what I had to do next. While there's usually only one solution to each problem, the pack doesn't usually struggle to tell you how to get there.

2. Lots of Quests - They only give you XP as a reward most of the time, but this links into my previous positive. Where the guidebooks for the mods in this pack may fail here and there, the quest book is excellent at giving you the exact solution that's expected of you. While some things like "the best way to automate aura" are left up to you, the critical path is designed so that you never get lost. That XP is also great for repairing some low-tier but enchanted gear you'll find from one of the handful of structures out there.

3. Lightweight - Like all other skyblock/skyblock-adjacent packs, it runs fantastically with minimal intrusion or hacky type mods that could crash your game. I don't think I've ever had a crash that wasn't because of the mods I added on myself.

The mods I added for my playthrough are LiteMiner, ClientSort, DistantHorizons, Right Click Harvest and a few aesthetic mods like ParticleRain, Subtle Effects, Punchy and Highlighter.

Negatives:

1. No Breadcrumbs - To actually begin the process of re-claiming the world, you need to perform a ritual with the Enchanted (Witchery) mod in Chapter 3 of the quest book. This is easily a 20 hour job even if you know exactly what you are doing. While most modpacks would drip feed you bits of what that progression could look like, true biome recovery and removal of that ugly brown filter that tinges even the grass you grow, is fully gated off.
   This is NOT Chunk-by-Chunk. You are not a snowball rolling down a hill. You either have it, or you don't. And no, pumping an insane amount of Aura into the environment and praying that it spreads between chunks isn't viable. It's slow, inefficient and doesn't actually let you grow the green grass you're expecting. It's gated hard by Chapter 3. Speaking of gating.

2. Aggressive Gating - I hope you like Enchanted and Nature's Aura. For the majority of your playtime, before you have the ability to automate, you must manually fill that cauldron with three buckets of water. You must perform tens of rituals, many of the same type. If I could give you any advice, it is to focus Mystical Agriculture as soon as possible. It's almost hilarious the sheer amount of stuff the early game requires of you, and rather than reward you for playing clever with hidden quest lines or something, the pack demands you grind out every fiber, flower and line of chalk. Entire life-saving rituals, that you likely could have created early, have been blatantly patched out and paved over with an advancement requirement.

3. Does Not Lean In - You'd be surprised to see how the lore of the pack doesn't match up with the reality of playing it. The water isn't poisoned, the land isn't hot, the enemies are normal husks, skeletons and cave spiders rather than normal spiders, but they may as well be filler. The wasteland suffers from the Space game design problem. There's nothing out there but the same 8-12 small abandoned structures that may or may not have an ender pearl in a chest, and then the countless walls that hold one block of oxidized cut copper. There's no temperature, thirst, or other mod that actually pushes you into desperate straits. In fact, one of the first 5 quests give you a fishing rod. You could set this pack in the Bumblezone and genuinely get a very similar experience playing it. That's how divorced the wasteland is from the gameplay you'll actually experience.

There's plenty of nitpicks I could add here, too many building blocks clogging emi, one of the more disliked bee mods (complicated bees) being present, the fast travel system being via romana instead of waystones or something else, lacking variety in the structures you find or the useful loot available, the drip feed of copper unless you stumble into the house with a basement, an entire chapter in the questbook about photographing mobs, and plenty more, but these are insignificant in comparison to the core of the pack and how it is designed for you to play.

In the end, I think Reclamation is best enjoyed as a slow and zen-like experience. Something more like Sunlit Valley rather than Liminal Industries. It's horrifically dull, but that can be suitable. It's balanced aggressively with no room for you to breathe. If you have 50 hours to burn, and would prefer not to think beyond what the quest book tells you, you could do worse.

Very cozy modpack that makes tools unbreakable but removes durability on death, its definitely different form most mods. Extremely good for rping purposes, I myself made a wine cellar for cash, however, the amethyst nerf made it so end mining is less profitable than desert mining, which is kinda sad, but makes sense bc of how much more dangerous desert mining is. Good to play in a server or to rp with, but making cash can sometimes get tedious unless you like making factories. Fishing mastery giving you a reward that puts your skills to the test instead of making it easier is kinda funny ngl.

In every expert modpack i have played before - there was a advanced questbook which shows how to progress and go on. Threre are only quest of particular mod but it isn't anything like progression.

Creators of this modpack should learn how to progress from atm10 or even gregtech nh where even there i wasn't spawned exactly twice random seed on spot where i was killed instantly after generating new world.

Difficulty is okay, not too easy but also not too hard.
It could have work better on modern machine where modpacks which has 500 mods + shaders have worked without any drops.
The most frustrating things are schemes of crafting which not tell why this kind of type thing won't do in this recipe - you have to guess which kind of wood it has to be made - name is the same like every stump which was made of wood.
Also guessing how to use kiln and fire is another level of magic thinking.

I had expectations which this modpack didn't meet at all.

I have played the 1.12 version of this mod the most, that said this review will also take into account newly-added improvements and content added over the years

What is it ?

Biomes o' plenty is a mod adding new biomes, blocks and decorations to your world;
This means new trees, flowers and mushrooms, all found in vanilla biomes, newly-added biomes and even the nether and end.

What does it offer ?

New biomes to explore integrated with vanilla minecraft's biomes. The new biomes add trees which resemble the way vanilla trees generate, and the decorations including custom tallgrass, mushrooms, thorns, flowers and more are also added to the vanilla biomes for consistency, which makes all of them look a bit more detailed when traveling on foot. Most of the added biomes emulate real-life environments adapted to minecraft's style, but there's quite a decent amount of interesting outliers such as the new rare safe haven islands such as the Flower Island or the Origin Island , and the magical biomes which include the Mystic Grove and the Ominous Woods .
This mod also houses unique nether content which also includes whole new biomes/blocks/decorations, even all the way back in 1.12 which lacked nether biomes other than the default "hell" one. All these biomes are often compatible with other biome mods in versions past 1.12, but there still were some amount of intended compatibility back then such as with NetherEx for the nether generation.
The newer versions bring more end content as they have reinterpreted this dimension as some sort of dead ocean featuring ghostly-jellyfish structures, algae-covered forests and large empty buildings reinforcing the weird wasteland vibe. (in 1.12, there is some amount of end content, but it is mostly ores and a custom end glowstone block; the spectral moss doesn't actually naturally generate same for the end plant(s)/tree)

Flaws ? Loss of content :

Since a long time it seems biomes o' plenty has lost content update after update and it seems a lot more focused with being available on as many versions as possible than keeping everything in place. While it is true new biomes and blocks were added since it's 1.12 version, we also lost a bit of both .
Another thing which was present in 1.12 but is lacking in recent versions such as 1.21.11 is the highly-customizable config; While the config files are still here, we can no longer tweak major aspects of the world generation through them nor through the interface before starting a world since this one no longer exists (that means no more easy biome-height tweaking, no continental worldgen option, among other things).

In conclusion

This mod is genuinely a good one on a lot of fronts as it adds new biomes, blocks to those biomes as well as decorations which can be found both in vanilla and modded biomes; That said, the world generation with this mod is pretty basic in comparison to its current competitors in recent versions, and when comparing the mod in its current state to its 1.12 or even earlier iterations it seems there isn't a lot of new and interesting content added, I would even go as far as to say it lost a bunch of exclusive content (biome-specific gems, biome finder, worldgen quirks such as the nether hives, and even more when you look at older versions of biomes o' plenty). It is still important to admit that some of these losses are due to minecraft directly implementing them in the base game (such as mud, bamboo and fallen leaves).
If you want a mod which adds new content and make sure it fits with the vanilla word generation, then this mod might be for you, but if you're looking for more drastic changes or more interesting new content added to biomes, then you may find this mod's additions a bit boring.

The short of it

Project Ozone 3 looks to echo the success of it's direct predecessors as well as contemporaries in the Skyblock subcategory but falls short due to simultaneous over and under tuning of core mechanics.

The long of it

Gameplay - (don't waste your time on me you're already the voice inside my head)
There is an innate problem with a lot of modpacks that seek to find the much fabled "perfect pace of progression". That sought after feeling that you're making good progress but not too fast. That problem being, that in order to slow down the ever acceleration found in Vanilla Minecraft where you can go from sticks and stones to diamonds in under an hour, mods often set limitations and extra steps in order to bring us down to a leisurely speed. That's admirable to try to do but the truth is, incredibly difficult to get right. Most modpacks feel like they are just wasting your time, perpetually spinning the wheels like a drag car right before the race. Unfortunately, Ozone 3 is no exception.

Example? The early game starts off familiar but strong. All our old pals are here! Here comes that rascal Ex Nihilo. Oh and look it's Tinkerer's Workshop! And oh my! We're using composters to make dirt. How quaint and familiar. Then we hit the wall. We realize, hang on...yes I'm using all these familiar faces but is there no other paths? No. There aren't. There is no other way to get diamonds other than Ex Nihilo so have fun with the loot table. Tinkerer's Workshop's smeltery is now behind a porcelain smeltery which takes the better part of a Lord of the Rings film (extended of course) to actually make the bricks for the real smeltery and guess what? There is literally no other way to produce dirt for the first 10 or so hours. I'm not joking, composters only, so better get those hoppers and leaves farms ready. These are all in place to prevent that priorly mentioned super acceleration but instead of giving a rewarding feeling of progress it comes across more so as enforced dilly dallying.

I know it sounds like I despise this Modpack's gameplay but I didn't. I just can't ignore the amount of times it made me roll my eyes. Perhaps the best indicator of this is the faithful iron bucket. In vanilla minecraft this costs three iron ingots. In Ozone 3 this costs three iron ingots. However, whereas you can just instantly craft this in Vanilla. In Ozone 3 you need to turn the ingots into plats by manually smashing them at a seperate block with a hammer. There is no additional resources used, no challenge in the station needed to be crafted to make the plates, it just takes time. 3 seconds in vanilla but 30 seconds in Ozone 3 with no test other than on your patience. Tedium for the sake of it.

Aesthetics - It's 1.12.2 what do you expect.
It looks good. Like 1.12.2 has always looked you know? I'd call it a fond memory. There are no grand sweeping changes to any of the textures of the included mods and even though there is something janky stuff in the tokens you get from quests having a rather bizarre texture. There is nothing bad nor nothing exceptional here. It just is.

Performance - Nearly as much waiting as in the gameplay
This modpack runs horribly. Very odd thing considering there is no way this can be more intensive than Meatballcraft but somehow it is? It takes longer to initialize, is more prone to frame drops yet is distinctively less ambitious busy as it's well known for being intensive, 1.12.2 competitor. Very odd. It doesn't crash or shoot my dog so I suppose it cannot warrant a 1 star but I simply don't understand why it's such a heavy breather.

Almost everything is so well made, so well thought out, and beautiful. The ending stage drags on if you don't start working on the Eyes early, but up until then, every chapter is well-paced, and each gate of progression felt amazing to break through.

I didn't know Create very well, and this pack has made it one of my favourite mods. Not getting to use the tools I'm used to being so easy and available in other packs, having to rethink how I do factories - it was so much fun!

I had to learn KubeJS and make nine automatable recipes for items that weren't pleasant to make in bulk, but beyond that, the recipes were reasonable, and I'm happy this was my first expert pack - even if I had no idea it was an expert pack until maybe the second chapter.

The secret chapter was my favourite part, but I won't say any more about that.

What struck me the most was how the sculken mobs made me feel genuine fear. I haven't felt afraid of Minecraft in years, and it was so refreshing to feel my heart pounding.

Even with its flaws, this is the best pack I've played yet, and I worry I won't be able to enjoy packs that don't stand up to it.

İt was have ever i was wanted in and it was well optimized and it was felling so apocaliptic like i was really in Zombie apocalypse