Elick320

Giving this one a score is hard because I did like it... for a bit.

I chose a fire fighter as my first build, and then switched to an evocation mage. Problem was, the mage gameplay got pretty stale. I was cleaving through bosses easily and the game had basically become a boss rush. I had spell abilities that made it so my spells froze bosses so I just stood there spamming Tiro Burst and other evocation spells and then killing them. To make it more difficult, I activated the cursed ring or whatever it's called.

And instantly sapped all the fun I had from the modpack.

Bosses became insane damage sponges. Often requiring me to cycle through all my big damaging high mana cost spells to kill just their ads. Dungeons became utterly infuriating to explore because the individual mobs dealt huge amounts of damage and had bonkers health. Oh, and fall damage because excessively lethal, too.

Normally I would have just gone back down to the intended difficulty, but you literally can't. The ring is unequipable and permanently modifies your game. Now, with apotheosis in the pack, it probably wouldn't be that difficult to modify yourself in a way to brute force yourself through the modpack. Problem with that is apotheosis does not benefit the magic mod in this pack in really any way. So I would have to switch my entire build away from magic to beat this modpack, and that is made infuriating by... Create!

Why the hell is Create in this modpack? Why the hell is it necessary for material progression? You made an RPG modpack and then had CREATE be necessary? I wouldn't be as mad if the mechanics were built around full scale automation, but they aren't! 1. You can bypass basically all of Create's own progression using the coin shop. 2. None of the materials are needed in high enough quantities to necessitate any scaled automation. 3. Who wants to build factories in an RPG modpack?

Create means that while switching my skills is as easy as right clicking an item, switching my build is an excercise in futility because I would have to craft so much stuff, and level the new gear I just made, or transfer the levels from my previous gear, which requires orbs that are dubiously hard to get.

But the most major sin of the modpack isn't any of that. I could excuse most of that. But it's instead the paid content. Paid content in a minecraft mod? Who the hell do you think you are?

I'm working on a more detailed review of RLCraft for another platform, but I'll leave some cliffnotes here.

• RLCraft is really weird. Like I've played a lot of modpacks for a lot of years, and I've really played nothing like it. This is also viewable from the fact that "RLCraft" is now its own mod genre on the various platforms.
• It is frustrating. For different reasons at different stages of the game. The early game you are extremely vulnerable, mostly directionless, and underleveled to use a lot of gear. The midgame you are spending a lot of time nigh-invincible grinding for XP for god enchants for endgame. The endgame you are hoping your build can hold its own against the Lycanite's bosses because if it doesn't, you're just gonna have to make the whole thing again.
• Heat/Cold is infuriating, oftentimes doesn't make sense, and can be entirely negated with two items.
• Lycanite's is Lycanite's

These are all negatives, but I actually really like RLCraft. It just has a lot of questionable design decisions made by someone who clearly didn't realize their jokey modpack made for friends would become one of the biggest piece of Minecraft media on the planet. The fact of the matter is that if you play RLCraft, and you like it, there are... basically no other modpacks like it. Shivaxi genuinely made a novel modpack based on a kitchen sink framing with internalized, non-quest-based, progression (the questbook doesn't count, it's basically just a compilation of different items from all the different mods with useless rewards). I hope one day to discover a modpack that builds upon the frame that is RLCraft into something truly good.

But it really doesn't deserve all the hate it gets. And it definitely doesn't deserve all the praise it gets. If you're like me and you spent most of your modded Minecraft time hating this modpack, give it a shot yourself. You might be surprised at what your opinion metastabilizes into.

The big kahuna itself. Honestly, I just can't get past it. I tried it a long time ago and made it to steam and then quit immediately. Then I tried it again and made it to MV and then quit again. Honestly my biggest gripe with it is the inventory management. I'm normally alright with some grind: I put serious hours into RLCraft and Pyanodons, and the grind here wouldn't be so bad if I had the means to actually automate it, but to automate it without AE2 requires such a ridiculous amount of materials (mostly steel) that I spent multiple days trying to automate just LV circuits (look, I got to 300 hours in a Pyanodons save in Factorio, beat bobs+angels, and beat other modpacks as well. I'm alright with grindy automation normally) and that wasn't from not understanding how the automation works, it was just from the sheer resource gathering and crafting for all the assemblers, pipes, covers, and other various machines. It just wasn't fun, and I don't see myself sticking around until I finally can get to AE2. Hell, I'd settle for just having autocrafting gated off, just... give me a bigger inventory. Diamond chests weren't enough: I had like 12 of them filled up before I quit, not to mention the 10s of drawers also fulls of materials I couldn't even use.

The depth is insane, the optimization is insane. The sheer breadth of content is awe-inspiring. But ******* if there isn't a 10 mile high wall between me and it. Just give me AE2 for the love of god.

I'm not dropping it yet, I imagine I'll come back to it and continue ramming my head against my automation projects, but for now, I'm going to try some modpacks I know are actually completable within a year, and won't take me 300 more hours to unlock the one mod that would make it bearable to play.

I had a lot of fun with E2E. It's implementation of just about every mod was amazing across the board, and I had a decent throughline until the end.

...There are a few problems though, and they pretty much all manifest around the late mid-game/early endgame.

• Blood magic never wants to play nice with AE2. I'm kinda a blood magic hater in general, it's a mod that is exceedingly tedious until you get one mechanic (the well of suffering) and then becomes a waiting simulator. But I never got it automated beyond just having AE2 put stuff in a chest next to the object I needed to use, and manually doing it. The documentation in game is exceedingly poor and unfinished, and most of the wikis online are for other versions. So I just made all the endgame stuff myself with it.
• If you build most of your infrastructure using mekanism pipes, it will destroy your save, and likely force you into a value proposition between reworking your entire infrastructure or dealing with the lag. Mekanism pipes are the easiest to use but absolutely destroy your tickrate. Ideally, you want to do as much through AE2 as possible, but you might not even realize that before it's far too late.
• Industrial foregoing also suffers from the aforementioned problem, but also is the source of some critical infrastructure such as mob grinders and wither builders, that you can't really sideline.
• ... To add even more to the tickrate problem, there are no tickrate-friendly methods of generating enough mana to satisfy a midgame botania setup. It seems as though the mod is encouraging you to get through to mystical agriculture as fast as possible in order to make it so you can do terrasteel and manasteel without sucking up valuable mana. Mana generation itself isn't that hard, though.

It's hard for me to give an actual detailed review of this modpack because the modpack itself seems hellbent on not letting me actually see enough to get to it.

I'm just going to make a part of my game design philosophy known immediately: unless your game is fully built from the ground up around it, like a roguelike or roguelite, permadeath is straight just a bad mechanic to have. It actively discourages the player from playing in several ways they may find fun. If you play risky in Dead Cells? You might die. And if you die, you can just start up a new run and get back into it, and the progress from that last run very likely gave you some cool stuff or improvements to use in this one.

If you play risky and die in Desolate Planet? It's just over. You lost your character. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.

This modpack has hardcore set up to be default on any new created world. The dev discourages removing hardcore mode, saying that the modpack is built around the sync mod. This is mostly a lie. It is just a modpack that has hardcore set as the default and then has the sync mod in it. Which allows you to build copies of yourself to respawn at. Sync is a cool mod, but I wouldn't know that here, because I never got far enough to use it. I made about 6 different saves, died at varying levels of progression, and then promptly didn't make a 7th after a creeper dropped down a hole in the ceiling of my spacecraft made so that I could grow food in a place that wouldn't kill me from heat exhaustion and killed me instantly.

Maybe this is a cool skyblock-esque modpack. Maybe It has some neat ideas. But the permadeath looming over my head in a modpack that could potentially take hundreds of hours to beat? Absolutely not. No way. Even if I chose the "easy" route (a slap in the face to your players to name it that, you're insulting them for wanting to sideline a frankly extremely questionable design choice added for seemingly no reason?). What if the your backup body is in an unloaded chunk? Or it gets destroyed by a errant machine? Or a boss monster gets loose and breaks it? Or a mob spawncamps you and removes your body? Or you run out of power during a brown out and die twice? The answer to all of these are contingencies, but I should not have to have 7 different contingencies to alleviate one mod in a multi-hundred hour modpack, and the punishment for not doing so is to have my save deleted. That is just bad game design.

I'd love to be able to comment on the implementation: I've never played a pack that meshed Pneumaticraft and Create, but I am not going to get put hundreds of hours into a modpack where I could lose my save to pure happenstance.