Kiena

Life in the Village 3 is the third Minecolonies-focused pack by dreams01. It's low tech - no RF/FE, no machines, and has no magic mods, either. It does utilize Create, and weapons are done using Tetra, so there's plenty of progression there.

There are tons of locations to discover, and you can use Productive Bees to help get resources to build your colony. (Necessary if you don't want to wait forever....) There are also a lot of decorative packs to make your colony look nicer. (Beautify, Chipped, a bunch of furniture mods...) I hadn't used some of them before and had a great time adding little (and big) touches to my colony.

There's a ton of quests, almost all of which give levels or coins for a shop, or both. Some items (such as waystones) are rarely found in the world and are uncraftable, instead being purchased from said shop. The first half or so of quests have good descriptions, but later quests get less and less, often just having the advancement text and nothing else.

There's a lot of focus on having companions - both human ones and animal ones, as well as being able to use the Minecolony guards as companions, too. Doggy Talents Next is in there.

Overall, it's a fun pack that has a nice combination of exploration and base building. It's great to have a pack that's focused on Minecolonies instead of it just being tossed in there. However, there are some downsides.

The Human Companion buildings are waaaay too common - it felt like you stumbled on them every 300 blocks or so. They also get pointed to by signposts, as they apparently count as a village? Which sucks when you first start out and are searching for villages. The various mods add tons of new enchanted books - dozens, in fact - and there's no way to cycle through villager trades. There definitely should be at least a cycle trades mod, if not full on Easy Villagers or similar. Trying to get the books I wanted (some of which were for a questline) was incredibly frustrating until I finally gave up and added a mod so I could cycle the trades.

Additionally, and a bigger issue imo, is that several of the quests in the book are unachievable. Changes to the modpack (like removing certain animals from Alex's Mobs or changing how mineshafts generate) make getting the items/locations you need impossible. Other quests have no descriptions and no JEI, making it difficult to figure out what to do for them (Phantasmic aka Netherific - look in the advancements for some hints).

I did report these issues on the discord, so hopefully it'll be fixed with the next release, though I believe most of the focus of the dev is on the next modpack, not this one.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing this pack, putting in about 200 hours. I completed most achievable quests, though I skipped some of the Alex's Mobs ones. Despite the issues I had with it, I overall thought it was an excellent pack and a great choice if you want to play Minecolonies.

Avoid this pack if you need technology or magic mods, or really love mechanical automation. Try it if you enjoy Minecolonies or want to try it out, love exploration, and don't mind a bit of mistakes in the quest lines. If you prefer more technology, the pack creator also has Industrial Village, which is Minecolonies + Immersive Engineering, by the way, though I can't say how good it is. (I am burned out and going to avoid Minecolonies for a little while, haha.)

I love this modpack. It's clever, it rewards exploration (despite being a fairly small custom map), it uses spatial cells really well, and it's a lot of fun. There are many items to collect (several trophies) that are hidden around the entire map. It's also good at explaining the various mods it uses through quests. This was first modpack with a storyline questline I played, and it remains my absolute favorite.

That being said, there are some issues. While it has Tinker's, you can't make any smelter and can only get metal tool parts from random chests. I found this very frustrating. If you go with the grave mod instead of KeepInventory, it's hard to get your corpse back - and given there are unique items, it's more important than usual to get those items back. Finally, there are optional achievements - and a couple of them are just a huge grindfest. (Or, more accurately, an afk fest.) There's not really a good place to build or decorate - you live in a precreated structure.

Even with those small issues, this remains a fantastic modpack. I think it's also pretty stylish - a lot of thought and care went into the map as a while as well as each spatial cell location. I highly recommend it if you like questing packs. Skip if you prefer kitchen sink packs, building packs, or packs with a lot of freedom.

I'm very picky about my post-apocalyptic games, so I honestly wasn't expecting much from this modpack, using Minecraft as a base. I was quite wrong!

This modpack ended up an excellent experience. It made my little loot goblin heart flutter. Each building - each room, in fact - has specific drops appropriate to the location. A restaurant has food loot, a hospital medical stuff, an office building technical stuff. You don't have to craft much of the basics - there's often a place you can loot to get what you need.

That being said, the recipes are fairly well changed. A bit more Create was required than I like, but overall a good balance of Create and Immersive Engineering. My biggest complaint is that some items were gated behind rare or end-game only locations - some of the Refined Storage stuff, for instance, and even the Drawers Drawer Controller I didn't get 'til almost end game.

There are some downsides - for one, I sometimes had bad performance, the FPS dropping quite a lot. Second, some items were a little too common in loot (the golden apples for curing infections and the food - I never once cooked anything for myself, there was so much food loot). Third, I really didn't like that the Spice of Life count reset when you died, without resetting the list of what you'd eaten, so you were limited in how many extra hearts you could get. Fourth, I also started the loooong oil crafting line but ended up not needing it at all. It was a lot of work for what ended up being zero payoff. Finally, there are imo too many guns that are too similar. I really felt like they should have cut the number of guns in half.

However, overall it was a really fun experience. It took me about 80 hours on normal difficulty to get the final cure crafted, and I spent a lot of that time building my base and looting for the fun of it. I didn't finish every quest, but I finished the majority of them.

If you like fighting in Minecraft, this is an excellent modpack for you. If you hate combat, you're going to hate this one. If you love looting abandoned but still dangerous buildings, this is again perfect for you.

This pack starts out as a pack very firmly focused on exploration, with many dungeons and dimensions to explore. This pack makes Alex's Caves separate dimensions, as well as adds several other dimension mods. One of the interesting things is that to get Thermal Expansion ores, instead of mining, you have to run specific dimensional dungeons - a nice twist that emphasizes the exploration at the heart of the beginning of the pack.

And then you hit the crafting portion of the pack. Lots of Create, a bit of Thermal Expansion, tons of time spent in one place, crafting. This is the expert portion of the pack, and in my opinion, it felt like running into a wall at a sprint and coming to a dead stop. All the time was spent between two locations - my oil pump and my Create base. There were two more dimensions I had yet to open up, but by that point, I had lost interest.

I'm not a huge fan of expert packs, but I have enjoyed them in the past. This one just felt like a tonal whiplash, switching between the exploration focus to the 'stay in one place and craft' focus. If you think you can handle that better, I really enjoyed the first half of this modpack.