Panzerschrekt

Think of a hard game, think of the hardest difficulty or that game, does it make the enemies faster and does more combo? or does it... put you in a 500 hours stat grind where you have to outdps 60 billion hp enemies that oneshots you?

Well if you're playing this modpack, you WILL be hit with the latter, congrats!

Now let's get more in depth, Cisco's ultimate certainly tried it's... best, i think... to mimic the endless grind of RPG dungeon crawler games except it does it very badly because it does things exactly like those other endless grind RPG dungeon crawler where enemies has tons of dps checks and you generally has no fighting chance in the early and midgame...

Except you do! it's Minecraft, you can do guerilla tactics, block off dungeon paths, and just go straight to the chest and get the absolute best early game gear (Brightsteel) 10 minutes into the pack... yeah, a bit insane isn't it?

And look, stat checks can be turned into something fun if it was something very gradual and forgiving and not damage sponges type of dps checks, but when your pack does it like this simply for the reason of making it very hard and then have nothing else to entertain the player, it's just a bad RPG choice, and as unforgiving as other semi-RPG pack is (RLCraft, Abyssal Ascent, Ascendra, ATM (kitchen sink), GTNH (it has difficult mobs in it, not entirely rpg but tangent), etc), they all work because they have other things to make your players entertain themselves while still being stat checked by the bosses and so

Not to mention the performance of this pack honestly feels really bad, even for 1.20.1 packs which many has bad performances too, this is just on the worse ends, aesthetics feels very bland like there's just no identity to the pack, nothing much to the immersiveness either, and then, you're hit with this kinda gameplay, it's just like that one meme...

play our game at the hardest difficulty!
"is it numbers difficulty or mechanics difficulty?"
what?
pull out detailed chart explaining the difference between the two
its a difficult game sir
its numbers difficulty again

THIS PACK IS JUST NUMBERS = DIFFICULT, and even though it's still really bad, i definitely see the potential with it, just, Ciscos Ultimate has just been pretty bad for the time being, i dropped this a few months ago, i do wanna say that the next iteration of this pack (also known as Ciscos Dragonfyre) does it's stat check a bit better compared to Ultimate, but that's for another review, poor modpack, hope it gets better

To put it simply, carry on is a makeshift backpack mod except for blocks and entities, you can now basically be an enderman! sounds cool right?...

And while i would really want to end my review there, i do have a thing or two i wanna talk about this mod and it's issues

First of all, it's a good mod, it's very convenient for basic vanilla+ experience and maybe some more in-depth storage mods as this can be helpful if you don't have backpacks, wants to transport villager, etc, it does it's job...

However....

Second of all... this mod has a really really bad compatibility with a lot of mods/blocks sometimes, i don't like saying it's game breaking, but when you have a kitchen sink pack and this mod, and you accidentally picked up something like interdimensional chronospherical spacetime singularity multihatch perfect overclocking convertible digital controller, your whole game just gives up and you may or may not lost your block and has to redo everything to craft it again, and will eventually just tend to make people end their runs or cheat, and as you may or may not see with the other reviews, this mod breaks in a lot of cases, not just kitchen sink custom kubejs block, it breaks with a lot of tech mods, it breaks with certain custom renderings, it breaks with machines, it breaks with this, it breaks with that, like, this mod is just not worth it to fix it's compatibilities because it has so many, compared to Mekanism cardboard (which still has certain issues but it works better somehow)...

And while that's really all i can say with this mod, it has been a part of a lot of my older playthroughs, compatibility issues does made this mod hard to be added to my new and newer modpack experiments that doesn't like having it's machine broke, so yeah, unfortunate

Exosphere 1 or BM Exosphere 1, is a modpack that does almost the exact same with about all other adventure/tech/kitchensink 1.20.1 modpack with exactly one twist, the entire world is an old Minecraft-type sky island type, fall down and it's all void, that's it

Now you might be wondering, why would i rate it this high compared to most other 1.20.1 modpacks when the only most notable difference is the world type? like, i can just play skyblock or whatever, but here's the thing

The whole modpack is actually pretty much designed around this, and as generic as all the mods that were being put into this pack, they all blend surprisingly well for the world type at hand... now let me just get into the points of the pack

The Good

1. This pack's world type adds so much verticality to the game, in a regular Minecraft world, you wouldn't always be changing the height of where you look, not even in the mines, in this pack however, you will not be seen at once or ever be at the same vertical level whenever you are exploring, and although it sounds like something's that can be bad for exploring, the pack gives you a soulbound grappling hook at the start, so you can pretty much explore easily, and it isn't that hard to be repaired either, PLUS it finally gave a good meaning to Elytras as now you have some sort of things to crash into instead of just occasional mountains and then flat lands everywhere else like in Vanilla

2. The pack has quest that does a surprisingly good job for people to read and learn about the pack or even Minecraft in general, like, i can see people actually start out on Exosphere instead of regular Minecraft, but then again that's from me, this pack seems pretty introductory for everyone starting out on modpacks and goes easy on veterans

3. Balance, every mod is still generic in here, but they all work in conjunction to how the world itself looks, ore creepers would be absolutely busted if not for the fact that you're playing on sky islands where finding diamonds = risking void death, and that's just one of many implied interactions that i get from this modpack, it's just so refreshing

The Bad

Genuinely i don't think i can exactly pinpoint the actual bad part as many forge (or even fabric) 1.20.1 modpacks has this same issue with fps/tps stability, there is a very heavy lag when you start out with the Complementary shaders settings until i tone it down (it was at 45 fps, now runs at 90 after i reduce shadowres, runs at 150 fps without the shaders at 8 chunk render dist), lag spikes happens once every few hours and noticably gets worse with more backpacks you get but this is more of a mod fault rather than a pack fault, there are times i see villages without villagers which could either be due to the worldgen made it harder for villagers to survive or other underlying system issue to which i don't know the exact thing is, but overall, none of this is actually that bad compared to other 1.20.1 packs which also has the same problem and doesn't address it's standing point/balance either, so yeah

Overall i want to conclude by saying that this is an actual banger modpack from my personal standpoint, from a more objective one i would say that this pack does have it's own charm and i can see people enjoying it rather than grind endlessly like what an rpg/adventure pack would do, i haven't experienced Exosphere 2 (the 1.21.1 Neoforge version) and as much as i would like to assume that it should put Aeronautics to use and expand on the concepts of this Exosphere 1, still, props to the devs for making such a wonderful pack, i would recommend this to anyone

If you've ever played modded once, you'll just know about this mod. It's literally the one plug of almost any modpack that wants a very little bit of tech to it, without much effort of integrating. With that being said though, it doesn't mean that this mod is bad at all, it's really good, but it sure does gets bland after a while too many times seeing it in kitchen sinks...

Do note that this review by all means, applies to the entire mekanism module, it is not a sole review of just plain mekanism and nothing else, this is simply due to the fact that mekanism without those, does feel a bit lackluster... those modules will get their specific reviews, and this one here will be the general experience review of mekanism

So what's the deal?

The Good

1. It's pretty straightforward in it's progression, mine iron, osmium, redstone, and some other thingies, make machine, make that. And you'll get a way of way of increasing your efficiency at first, like instead of crafting logs, you can sawmill it and get more planks and sawdusts, very convenient. The longer you play, you get more choices and machines, you get pipes, you get generators, you get tanks to hold chemicals and so on and so on. You go from making more efficient methods of processing your items, to automation, to basically a whole working factory for your whole needs, very convenient, atleast until the nuclear spam... yeah

2. It actually integrates very well with a lot of mods, making it pretty compatible with anything, by default it does energy conversion (RF, FE, AE, etc), it automatically sees into the item tags to make it compatible for processing... say, woods from Twilight Forest, Regions Unexplored, etc etc. And if it isn't, you got tons of community addons already because the mod...

3. The mod is mature, it's no longer in big development hell where the devs simply doesn't know what to do, it's tested and thrown into many packs that doesn't sound fitting (RLCraft, etc) and it still kinda works in respect to the pack's progression.

4. It's intuitive... yeah, technically an overlap with point 1 and 3, but pretty much that's exactly what the mod should be, Mekanism just makes sense to be used. It has logistics, energy generation, storage, and the machines itself, which made it pretty much a really intuitive "path of least resistance" way before you experience more of teching your gregs

Now, what's actually wrong with the Mekanism experience?

The Bad

1. Believe it or not, when a mod adds more types of ores than your usual ingots, etc, the amount of bloat just skyrockets... i've never seen someone really enjoyed pure Mekanism, or just any other tech mods that added more types of ores, unless they themselves got a backpack mod or bundles or something. Regardless this is a very common issue that came from design decisions, so, yeah

2. Performance can sometimes drop, i don't need to explain this as i feel like a lot of you would already know of how heavy tech mods usually are, but is it really our fault of making 9000 wind generators cause we don't wanna risk a Nuclear fallout that just nukes your frames faster than anything else

I feel like that's all i can say, uh, Mekanism is honestly good, the bloat did distill fear on people that's gonna play the mod, and there's certainly balancing issues, but Mekanism is still very cool! very very solid mod... would recommend this over Create for new players, especially for those who wanna start on experiencing older Minecraft modpacks, good mod~

The mod is as equal to it's title as it is, it adds a storage drawer which can be used instead of chests

The Good:

1. Drawers are by far more interactive, they display how many items are in them, they store as much as a chest, and has many usable interactions with other automation/machines
2. Simple, unlike other solutions such as AE2, RS, etc, this mod is just a direct replacement to chest based storage and works exactly like a chest based storage, it just does that

The Bad:

1. Lags, Drawers aren't as optimized as Vanilla chest, not in the sense of storing items, but in the sense of rendering their display, it can be noticable when you use them in extremely huge farms that has high throughput, each drawer will have their own set of block updates, which can be a bit bad as compared to chest which only updates what are being stored to them, but this isn't that big of a deal unless you play expert packs

And atleast from my perspective, that's all i can say about this mod, it generally has some fall off, and the unfortunate sayings that people generally prefer digital storage systems compared to just basic storage system, still, a pretty good mod

I don't have much to say about Farmer's Delight, to put it simply though:

The good:

1. Very clear and realistic, in a sense that everything it adds is coherent, it adds more crops, adds knife which you can use to cut meats, adds cooking pots to cook more foods, even adds more vanilla like interaction where you can strip wood with axes. You can make up everything here logically.
2. Not bloated, in a sense that the additions it adds doesn't immediately overwhelm you, as this is one of my issue with Pam's Harvestcraft but Farmer's Delight introduces everything in itself in a very clear and engaging way as compared as to infodump everything. This is also prevalent due to how FD has simply more processing chains via cutting board, cooking pot, etc etc, which does limit how much information were being dumped to you.

I don't think i can really say anything bad about this mod, it just does it's job, it's integrated with a lot of things, has a lot of addons, it's in almost every pack nowadays, but most of the time it doesn't really affect you that much as FD more and more feels like a must use mod and not one that get's shoved into your face, it's just there and it works for any kind of packs that it's in, W mod

To make it short and clear, this pack is pretty immersive and for it's size, it ran pretty smooth compared to other packs of similar size.

Things that this pack did good:

1. The Progression, it's clearly semi-linear, there's plenty of armor and weapons, and the modpack clearly defines which is which as they have listed in their tiers. There are notable weapon/armor set that you can get from just farming the sniffers or doing other mundane things and basically skip a huge chunk of the progression tiers, and then you can progression skip again by fighting Ignis with said armor set, and skip yet another tier with it. I like the overall progression due to the fact that it has many sidegrades not just netherite -> iron netherite -> gold netherite, etc.
2. The Questlines, it's decorated, it's pretty clear, and it pretty much mentions a lot of things regarding the progression. You can see all the curios that you can get and which slots they belong to, you can see all the magic mods and in which part of the progression will they appear, and you can see which armor/weapon/pickaxes belongs to which tier (as in how good they are). There's still some roughness to it, but it's by far, really great, almost like a wiki by itself.

The only thing that i feel like this pack still fell off is in:

1. The difficulty system. When you start your world, you were given 4 difficulty selections that's separate from the world difficulty that you chose when creating your world. My only issue is that this selection, especially on higher difficulties, just makes enemies into damage sponges... i'd much rather have enemies dealing 5x damage than them having 2x health, but really this is fixable
2. The tech mods. Yeah it's still pretty basic, just a simple implementation of Create and Mekanism, there's no mundane way to generate resource other than snagging some spawners from Chtonian Dungeons or somewhere else and a lot of things in the modpack will exhaust your resource fast, and you'll be forced to mine for hours end. But yeah, this is a Terraria-like pack anyways, so this is a rather semi-neutral take from me

Overall, very solid modpack, will play till finish (getting the Nightmare Sword)

When talking about climate and seasons, usually it makes sense to simply use the 4 terms of Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter, but in reality, people often associate temperature and humidity as the real indicator to each seasons, and while globally the 4 terms are accurate enough to represent the overall state, regional areas in real life may or may not exhibit a slightly different or even extremely different temps as opposed to the global state. A desert that's always scorching hot will generally never take a rainfall on itself, a tundra will generally never feel a hot summer, and moderate areas will feel all 4 seasonal terms

Now, imagine that, but in Minecraft, that's this mod basically

Every 24 days the seasonal terms will cycle through it's local stages, i will refer to them as early-mid-late, so that in spring there is early-mid-late spring, in summer there is early-mid-late summer, and so on for each seasons. Ecliptic Seasons does this in it's day counter, but what's exactly the benefit of spreading out the terms this way? yes, regional climate

In Minecraft, the temperature and humidity usually determines the biome you're in. In this mod, those temperature and humidity are being reused by another internal counter which separates the place you're in into different seasonal categories, which results in a very realistic settings such as:

• Deserts will stay in summer for almost all seasonal terms, and only went to spring during the global winter.
• Icy biomes will almost always stays in harsh winter, and only be graced with short spring and autumn.

And to top it all off, Ecliptic Seasons also has compat with pretty much any biome mods there is with more detailed config in their addons, as long as it can access the temperature and the humidity of said biomes, it works

It also has compat with seeds, saplings, etc, so if you want your wheat to grow, maybe plant them on spring, and always have them ready in your stocks for winter, just amazing

I do wanna say that it has certain downfall because of the amount of compute that it does (yeah, regional season do make that), but overall, still an extremely solid seasons mod

Thirst Was Taken is simply a mod that does the job of adding thirst mechanics to Minecraft, for this review i will only be reviewing up to the current most recent patch as the mod itself is moved to Thirst Was Reclaimed, it's technically an abandoned mod now but for the time being it's actually decent.

Let's start with...

The Good

1. Instead of simply adding thirst as in you just have to drink water or purify it, this mod adds stages and logics to purification of water, water that came from waterfalls are clearly more pure than stagnant still water (i'm trying so hard to not make a pun here), water from higher places like in the mountain are usually cleaner than those stuck on the puddles in y = 64, which is also where the stages came from. Stagnant water when bottled creates dirty water, which takes 3 stages of purification (dirty -> slightly dirty -> acceptable -> purified) 3 times cooking the same water, whilst the moving/flowing water only takes 2 stages (slightly dirty -> acceptable -> purified) which makes sense to real life too, you don't wanna drink still water.

2. The mod heavily interacts with the environment, in more lush and wet biomes your hydration goes down slow, in desert and in the nether, you will be thirsty all the time, it makes the mod a whole lot impressive i'd say.

3. Quenchness, many thirst mods out there either only has the thirst bar as is, or they don't exactly show what happens if you drink too much water, Thirst Was Taken actually integrated in the Quenchness part on top of the Thirst bar, it's just like how Saturation works with Hunger, and by far it's actually good knowing what overflow of water does, and it's integrated with Appleskin, so pretty much already good by any standards.

The Bad

I can't actually really think of any, it's just a very straightforward mod, does it's job well, executes it perfectly, and doesn't do anything else that you would not expect nor is bad, it's just a good mod. It integrates with temperature mods too, farmer's delight, etc. Honestly, i do wanna say that if possible, the mod would be updated to have some sort of it's own filter system, but like, it's already very good as it is now, i will be more in depth on the continuation of this mod (Thirst Was Reclaimed) once it settles to a more major update or so, but for now, this review stands for Thirst Was Taken, 10/10

Cold Sweat is perhaps one of the best temperature mods for modern Minecraft, simply for a few reasons...

The Good

1. The mod works as intended, magma emits heat, lava also emits it, water cools you down, biome has temperature and all, pretty much as expected.
2. It integrates with a lot of mods, which at this point is very good. You can put in other biome mods like Regions Unexplored, OTBWG, BoP, it will work seamlessly.
3. A huge amount of things in the mod is configurable, you wanna add other armors to be resistant to the weather? go ahead. You want items to emit or absorb heat when you carry them? yep go ahead. You wanna make foods that can lower or increase your temps? yes you can add those too. It's simply convenient.

The Bad

The mod did have some issues which made me deduct some points from it, but it is almost entirely from a technical standpoint, which goes as such:

1. From Version Beta 2.4, it has many compatibility issues, pretty much this is from my experience of using it with other Neoforge mods that interacts on nearby mixins to it, so, i'm pretty much stuck on 2.3.12 of the mod itself, a bit disheartening, but on it's own, the mod doesn't cause this issue. This seems to be fixed on the release 2.4 but some packs have certain mods stuck on the older version for sometime, so, yeah... legit a headache
2. It does miss some form of possible config for block heat, technically the mod has config for it's hearth, but i don't see much on the specific block config

Regardless, good mod, i see so much good things and potential from this, either for huge modpack or just vanilla+ use, or just the mod itself, it's good