Ming-Hin-Shi

Modded Minecraft can be difficult to get into. Popular modpacks often include tens of content mods, each fundamentally changing how Minecraft is played, which can get overwhelming. FTB Academy aims to bridge the gap of lightweight, beginner-friendly modpacks.

The gameplay is not stellar — it's a kitchen sink pack with a short mod list, which questionably includes Draconic Evolution, leading to some machine spam in the late game. What's special in this modpack is its rich guidance. It has the standard FTB Quests, which cover more items than usual, and pretty much all mechanics associated with that item is explained. Then it has a Guide, which is an in-game wiki complete with images, and Tutorials, which are annotated images, mainly for showing how to use the UI. Finally, before you even start the first day, you'll complete the School dimension, an interactive tutorial where you get to learn the very basics. The modpack makes no assumptions that the player knows anything about modded Minecraft, so it teaches mods like JEI and The One Probe as well.

Whether that's enough for a new player to finish this pack, I'm not sure, as I have some experience in modded already when playing this pack, and I think a lot of things in modded cannot be taught and must be learned from experience. But regardless of how much prior experience you have, this pack is great if you want to learn new mods. I had fun playing Astral Sorcery for the first time here.

Create is an innovative mod that promises a lot of potential, but because it's so open-ended, its progression can feel lacklustre. You're offered all these machines, but you're not sure what to do with them. Create: Above and Beyond is an official take on linear Create gameplay to showcase what Create is capable of. It's so successful that it has inspired countless other spinoffs.

The recipes for machines have become more expensive and complex, such that automation of their production would utilise almost all mechanics Create has to offer. All the different types of machines finally serve an overarching purpose, encouraging you to learn the intricacies of the mod, which is not difficult thanks to the ponder scenes. As a result, the modpack is beginner-friendly, yet you'll end up with a comprehensive understanding of Create, and a large factory that serves as your proof.

This modpack has an emphasis on the process of building the factory itself, which feels engaging. You'll fit together cogwheels and gearboxes to power belts, presses, and mixers along different axes of rotation. You'll figure out which combination of machines can interact with each other the right way to do what you want. If you like solving puzzles, this pack might be for you.

What I adore most about this modpack is the developers' relentless drive to improve it. After more than 5 years since its inception as Omnifactory, it's receiving not only bug fixes, but content updates focused on the quality-of-life of the modpack. They listened to players' experience to decide what to add.

It used to be that the endgame of Nomifactory required spamming tens or hundreds of the same machine to reach the required processing speed to finish the game, so they added Processing Arrays and eventually Gregicality Multiblocks. A single multiblock can now run up to 256 copies of the same recipe at once. AE2 without channels used to cause great amounts of lag, so it was forked to implement the optimisations and became AE2 Unofficial Extended Life. Players disliked the sided inputs and outputs of Deep Mob Learning, so again it was forked and became Deep Mob Evolution.

These forks are now used in other popular modpacks such as MeatballCraft and Antimatter Chemistry. Nomifactory is a gift to the 1.12 modded community.