LVTH3R

One of the very first things the quest book explains to you is that you shouldn't look up. Not yet. And I think that first chapter established a tone and expectation that there was no way a pack designed like this could ever fulfill.

It starts with a special strength that you do not often see in questing packs, with a narrative that you don't really understand but feel like you'll slowly unfurl and discover over time, then it softens into a healthy serving of slop. Thousands of iron in your sophisticated storage before you even set up your ae/rs network-type of slop. Notice that I said AE OR RS. Yes, it's another one of those packs where the developer is too scared to force one or the other upon you, leaving one path or the other in your quest book unfulfilled forever. That problem persists across power sources, machines, everything.

Pick a lane packdev. Stop being scared to enforce your vision.

This is an odd pack for a variety of reasons, one of them being that the pack developer made 7-8 mods specifically for the pack. They are rehashes of other mods and I have no idea why they made them considering how their features all exist elsewhere or could just be Kube'd, but it is nice to see custom content.

Otherwise, there are strange happenings all around you. Void Ghosts of yourself flicker in and out of reality, following your movements. Tears in the sky open up without warning. The 8th Gateway to Eternity in the past 5 minutes opens up to your left and it's always the easiest difficulty, as if you're expected to fight a gate every other chunk or something.

For every strange or cool happening, there's another one that his lame or unbalanced. You'll know just how rotten the configs are when you reach the Warped Forest in the Nether and half the Enderman population are Mutant Enderman.

At the core of it, is a custom mod made by the pack developer called the "Void Relic". An alternative take on Project E, but with less of the Equivalent Exchange and more of the Klein Star leveling. It's a trinket that can be powered up via a 5x5 obsidian ritual altar, as well as a variety of machines that handle, manipulate, duplicate, and power themselves with the mod's power source. A fluid called Essence. With each level, up to 5, the Relic grants you increasingly powerful buffs, from water breathing and night vision, to flight.

It has misc uses, but while they are novel, the quest book does nothing to explore them.

The second mod is "Swarm Miner". It's the Digital Miner from Mekanism, but drones instead of whatever the DM uses. They clip through the ground and seemingly home in one whatever you set for them. They suck up a hilariously small amount of power (I could power a swarm of 8 with upgrades and a Furnator from Powah) and spit up just as many items as you'd expect.

The last mod of the 8 customs I want to bring up is the Quest Slot Machine. The rewards are not gated and you can get everything from Nether Stars to Baked Potatoes. Naturally, almost every quest rewards you with a coin to spin the wheel. You likely won't even need to go mining.

When you put these all together, along with Apotheosis, Enchanting Infuser, Agritech, All the Modium, and all this other JUNK, you can see how the story goes. You go into the All the Modium dimensions before you fight the Ender Dragon (End Remastered btw). Let's wrap this up.

There's nothing in here that suggests that story will ever come back. The tone in the beginning was an accident. Nothing happens if you look up. Those ghosts become annoying more than they become interesting. You get strong early and stay unchallenged and unquestioned beyond there, escalating through all the modium until the final chapter of the pack.

Can you redeem something like this? With a major re-design, maybe. To make this many custom mods, even if you vibe-coded them, for your pack is either an act of cynically farming CurseForge for money or because there's a specific vision you're chasing, then I think you have to care at least a little about what was created here. It's not good, but with better design, maybe a second pair of eyes, the strengths can be capitalized on in a way that's not so empty.

1.5/5. Didn't Crash, Had Custom Mods, No Bite, No Balance pass, I think BetterMinecraft was more interesting. Starts crunchy and turns into mush before you're done eating.

I love this pack to death, I use it as a simple benchmark for other RPG Packs, but it's comically straightforward. There's no central story or theme, the quest book doesn't even pretend to do anything important, it has a core feature which acts as an inoffensive shop, but you almost always forget to use it, and never keep track of how much currency you have. There's no amazing flourish or crazy integrations. There's barely any custom content. Quests are missing descriptions. The ores have not been adjusted, the and enemies have not been balanced, and despite being called Terramity Awakened, it doesn't even use more than half of the Terramity Addons. Hell, it barely interacts with Calamity until it's time to kill their bosses.

Stoicism - The RPG Modpack

But it doesn't use what it doesn't need (somewhat). Alex's Mobs isn't here. The Construction Wand isn't here. No CraftPresence or CosmeticArmor Reworked. It doesn't even have Artifacts, choosing to stick with Relics alone. It does however occultism, born in chaos, and with a recent update, things like Valoria and Cult of Azazel were added. They all fit as, kill thing simulator, but like the rest of this modpack, they are not tied in properly beyond a questline. A fact that everything in here suffers from.

I can't think of many words to describe anything in here. If you know those packs that have to rely on other people's datapacks or they use a starting gear mod instead of configuring it themselves, it's kind of like that.

It's not offensive, and I think that's a huge stand out feature considering the other Terramity packs out there and how amazingly fleshout they are. Vanilla+ Terramity is oddly satisfying once you get rolling. You will skip certain mods, like Cardiac and probably most of the weapon mods. Passive Skill Tree doesn't synergize well with the pack flow because most of the better weapons and armor you'll be chasing aren't crafted, but many of the nodes on the passive skill tree ONLY work for crafted gear. The gun enchantments overwhelm other enchantments and haven't been touched at all, meaning you can end up with gun enchants on your sword or armor.

But none of that matters because, as is the case with every Apotheosis pack, you become unkillable by midgame.

I could go on like this, but I think you get the point. Solid mediocre pack with no explicit features and comically poor integration. This pack is perfect to be cloned and built off of because despite being sterile, it's stable and clean.

Alex's Mobs is the modern successor to an old mod called Mo' Creatures and carries its legacy for better and for worse. It's used as a filler animal mod when in fact it's a detailed and verbose ecosystem of mobs across many different themes. They spawn frequently enough by default to overwrite normal vanilla mobs and completely transform the nature of the game. They rely on one of the more egregious core dependencies out there, Citadel. And while many issues of Alex's Mobs can be fixed with lots of config tweaking, Modpack developers fail to do so, creating a frustrating and sometimes terrifying experience from nothing at all.

First off, Alex's Mobs comes with a breathtaking roster of almost 90 Mobs, one of which being a boss. Each mob is beautifully textured in a way that is genuinely faithful to Minecraft's style. They are also charmingly animated, my favorite being the catfish. When damaged, he will bulge his eye like a cartoon character. Another favorite of mine is the Comb Jelly, a rainbow jelly fish that drifts under the ice of cold oceans.

The thumbnail for this mod might fail to properly explain however that there's far more than a few farm animals in Alex's Mobs. There's a reason why it's not just Alex's Animals. Some of the creatures in here are the worst Modded Minecraft has to offer.

• The Crimson Mosquito is a Nether Mob that can "latch" to your face, blocking your view and ticking you for damage, staying put until you kill it. Did I mention it has the same amount of health as a Spider? In a dimension where stepping in the wrong place often means the end of your life, and sometimes your items, this jumps the list as one of the worst mobs to encounter.
• The Murmur is a cave mob that can extend its neck through and around over 45 blocks. Their head does not de-aggro if you warp away either, creating a horrifying scenario where you could /home out of a cave, only for the creature's head to hit through your floor. Like the Crimson Mosquito, it has way too much health, sitting just above an Evoker with 15 Hearts by default.
• The Cave Centipede is a mind numbingly horrific creature that is also in the caves. It has 17.5 hearts, is about 5 blocks long, moves faster than you can sprint, poisons on contact, and of course, it can climb walls.

For most of the aggressive mobs in this mod, they will attack you unless you are wearing a specific bit of gear or are under the influence of a particular potion effect. Everyone has a weakness or interaction, usually in a way that's secular to the mod by itself or the vanilla game. An anaconda can be pacified with Raw Chicken. A Tusklin will attack unless you feed it Brown Mushrooms. In addition many of these mobs prey or interact with other mobs within Alex's Mobs. An Anteater will indeed eat Leafcutter Ants. And the AI for many of these mobs can be downright advanced, such as the Cockroach, which will run from areas with a Light Level at or above 7. They consume dropped food, get eaten by Cave Centipedes, run from players, can be fed sugar and bread, and can live without their head. They even dance next to a Jukebox or wear a sombrero if given a Maraca.

There's two issues with these mobs being as in-depth as they are.

1. It creates an insular environment. Unless twisted in the way that Intergrated MC twists Create to function, the mobs in here react with the very world they are overwriting and nothing else. While not as aggregious as the Aether, locking you out of your equipment and asking you to start progression over from almost nothing for this one dimension, Modpack developers really need to put the work in to make the Mobs in Alex's Mobs bearable for any playthrough or modpack. I will echo other users here in saying that this mod would do well in a Zoo pack just because it's fantastic on its own and holds up its own experience. It's built to be the star of a modpack, not an accessory, but that's how it is used.

2. All this advanced AI comes at a performance cost. I mentioned it before, but Alex's Mobs spawns a LOT of these guys if using the default config. It's not unusual to see vanilla mobs rarely because Alex's take the mob cap for themselves. And when there's so many of these guys running around with AI that's as complex as early Sims titles, especially in a modpack that's already bloated with 800 structure mods and zombie expansions, it's a killer. There's very few mods that you could blame for boosting the RAM requirements of a pack but this is one of them.

Alex's Mobs isn't buggy, I've never crashed or seen something that was functioning abnormally. It isn't ugly, everything fits in its own weird and charming way. It isn't poorly designed, the creatures are clever and have interesting behaviors that one could grow to love.

But if you're a Modpack dev, you have no business using Alex's Mobs unless you know what you are doing or if the Mod dev updates the default config for Alex's Mobs to be more friendly with little tweaking.

In short,

Use Naturalist instead.

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.