Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

This is the best third person mod for Minecraft! It does a great job of giving many options for third person view type and setting up the camera to look the way players want! The combat camera modes work well and are highly customizable. My only complaint is that it doesn't have a free-look option. I want to look at my character sometimes without unlocking the camera in settings!

Inventory Profiles Next is a feature-heavy solution to any inventory sorting needs that might come up! I would argue, jokingly, that it's almost got TOO many features! I have to turn a ton of them off when I first install it, but once I get my settings tuned, it's the perfect complimentary mod for any modpack that needs sorting! Do you want to move over items of the same type? This mod does that! Do you want to sort horizontally? Vertically? This mod does that too! It's a great option and highly compatible with most mods, when other inventory mods tend to overstep and cause issues.

This is what I would consider to be old reliable! Used in most modpacks, JEI allows players to pull up any recipe they desire. This allows for simplified crafting, especially with packs that have a ton of mods and custom recipes! Not sure I could play a pack that didn't have a recipe viewer like JEI! My only complaint is that it doesn't include a Recipe Tree system in it like EMI does. Still, it's very performant in my experience and it does a great job!

This is my favorite recipe viewer! Inspired by other recipe viewers such as JEI and NEI, it takes the task of recipe collection to another level with the integrated Recipe Tree feature! This allows for recipe components and quanties to be visible at a glance, allowing for easier crafting in semi-vanilla and early-game modded Minecraft!

The JEI compatibility is the icing on the cake. I love having both mods installed!

I docked a point because EMI can be incompatible and slow with some modpacks. It's best to test it out first and then see if it works well with your modpack!

I think that Create gets a bad reputation because of how common it's used in modpacks, but I truly think that it's used this much because it's simply fantastic!

Create is a technical marvel in the modded Minecraft space, incorporating technology that fits the archaic feeling of traditional Minecraft. The animations are superb, the machines look incredibly intricate, and the recipes aren't bad at all!

I think the place where Create can be intimidating is how it all depends on physical force as a power source. This leads to everything needing to be connected, instead of other technical modpacks which allow power to be moved around more compactly. But I don't think this is a negative, I think it's just a difference in preference. This mod is still truly amazing!

Controlling is one of the best mods ever developed for large modpacks. It gives players the ability to search through the keybinds menu, sorting by key or category. Takes keybinding, which is normally a pain, and turns it into something fairly pleasant!

Huge what Iris has accomplished over the time that I've used it. Shaders have been an integral part of what I love about Minecraft, and without Iris we'd probably still be using Optifine! This mod enables the usage of shaders without too much bloat, and it does a great job at it!

I haven't had any stability issues personally. It's just been a perfect mod for my usage!

Here's a mod I can't play Minecraft without! Gives borderless windowed support to most Minecraft versions! This mod absolutely saves Minecraft for me and I owe it so much praise 🙏

The basis of the pack was incredible! And I had a lot of enjoyment with playing it during the early access period. The problem is that the team that developed the pack seem to care more about the concept of balance rather than the fun factor. Recipes got changed so much during early access and it became a real pain to craft stuff. Not to mention that the pack itself feels like a bit of an afterthought and incorporates tech in a bit of a rough and incomplete way.

There was a lot of automation missing when I last played, especially in regards to the cooking pot for Cobblemon items, and while the custom content was sick, it was way too difficult to craft a lot of stuff. I did have fun playing though and did complete it, although this was on an earlier version so the pack could really suck now.

Project Architect 2 is, genuinely, my favorite modpack in ALL OF MINECRAFT! This is coming from someone who has been playing Minecraft since Beta 1.7.3 and played modded Minecraft during the era of Tekkit Classic. This ISN'T the OBJECTIVELY BEST modpack, it's just my favorite!

Project Architect 2 gives the player ABSOLUTE control over ProjectE and challenges them to break the game by generating massive quantities of items to complete quests within a comprehensive guide.

This review is long, so I'm providing a quick tl;dr here for the average gamer who just wants a quick rundown.

• If you love tech/magic automation and ProjectE, PLAY THIS!
• If you don't know what ProjectE is, YOU SHOULD STILL PLAY THIS! And I'm jealous because my first time with ProjectE (Equivalent Exchange 2 back in my day) was magical!
• If you like a guided experience and challenges, PLAY THIS!
• If you hate any of the mods in this pack, YOU WILL BE FORCED TO PLAY WITH THEM. There are no alternative paths.
• If you love the challenge of combat, YOU MAY BE DISAPPOINTED. You get god-tier armor and weapons relatively quickly and the main focus of this pack is AUTOMATION. You will not be very challenged from a combat perspective whatsoever.
• If you hate automation or tech, DO NOT PLAY THIS!

With that out of the way, here's my review:

If you haven't played with the mod ProjectE I need to lay out the premise. ProjectE, at its core, incorporates the idea of items being converted into energy and becoming another item. Take, for example, dirt and diamonds. What if you could take dirt and turn it into a diamond? Dirt has an "energy value" of 1, and diamonds have an "energy value" of 8192. This means, with the help of a Transmutation Table, you could turn 8192 dirt into 1 diamond. This "energy value" is known as EMC. Players can only convert energy into items that have already been learned. You couldn't manifest a diamond if you've never seen one! Sounds OP, right? Not with Project Architect 2!

This pack grabs ProjectE by the collar and demands that it be thoroughly whipped into a well-oiled machine of EMC production. As the player, you are tasked with utilizing a variety of tech mods alongside ProjectE to accomplish various automation tasks.

Players start with an Transmutation Table from ProjectE and continue to build up their EMC knowledge from there! The quests guide players starting fresh and carefully leads them along the path to EMC mastery. This includes automating EMC generation using a variety of logistics/tech/magic mods! These mods are supported by Project Expansion; a mod that expands upon ProjectE and adds even MORE tiers of matter and tech compatibility! My favorite thing to do in Project Expansion was connect my entire Applied Energistics 2 system to my trasmutation knowledge! This means that if an item had EMC and was in my system, I could freely extract that item from inside of AE2; automatically spending EMC for me!

Once mastered, the quests push your game to its absolute limit by having you compress a variety of blocks up to 9X (that's over 387 million blocks compressed into one!) to complete "Under Pressure", hunting various mobs thousands of times to complete "The Wild Hunt", and crafting RIDICULOUS post-creative items to complete "Beyond Creative".

I had a TON of fun with this pack and having ProjectE integrate with so many of my favorite mods was an absolute dream! I always found that ProjectE was a difficult mod to integrate within a modpack because of how overpowered it is. The incredible thing about this modpack is that it acknowledges this and creates challenges that respect the power of ProjectE. I spent 476 hours playing this pack and at no point did I feel that quest progression was "too easy" towards the end. The pack consistently asks the question "How far can you push ProjectE before it breaks?"

Speaking of breaking, let's talk about the pack's performance grade. It gets BAD, but that's to be expected when you're working with automation producing this much stuff! The performance is really up to how the player is running machines. Layouts can be optimized, setups can be condensed, and mods can be installed (such as Observable) that can tell you exactly what machines are using up the most ticks. A big example was the Pipez mod, which while using the Creative Pipe Upgrade, would tank the server's performance with certain machines. Adjusting your setup to optimize these workflows is part of the fun in my opinion, but is not for everyone.

This pack was created by youtuber ChosenArchitect and he has an entire playthrough of this pack on his channel! If you ever find yourself questioning how to complete a quest, I would recommend finding the video associated with that challenge and following along.

All in all, this is my favorite pack of all time and I wouldn't be doing it justice if I didn't write a lengthy review for it. I loved playing it and I learned so many mods and automation tips from my experience playing. I highly recommend it 5 OUT OF 5 STARS!