Tempest051

A unique but heavy minigame

[My reviews are based on a mixture of subjective preference and objective game design criteria]
[Disclaimer: I am the developer of this project]

Design ratings:

-Originality: 7/10

-Aesthetics: 9/10

-Thematic Consistency: 6/10

-Custom Content: 10/10

-Grind: Very Low

This project was created to try and capture some of the nostalgia I had playing old tower defense flash games. For me, it captures that gameplay really well. Actually relying on towers for defense instead of just the player is something I had only seen one other pack do (Mirage Tower Defense, which is unplayable due to bugs unfortunately). Between the custom invasions, challenges, and the first prototype of SAM Worlds © (semi procedural adventure maps), I think it offers very unique and fun gameplay.

It's not without its flaws though, and there are many things I'd do differently now if I were to revisit it. Although a lot of time was spent balancing the in game shop and the 20 levels, the invasion levels themselves lack variety. It would be better if each invasion's enemy distribution and maybe even type were randomized instead of being fixed for any given level. As is, the replayability isn't very high. The gameplay is also somewhat awkwardly split between genres, with the player engaging in a more RPG-like gameplay in between invasions. While this wouldn't be bad on its own, since invasions trigger every night, the day cycle/ time between each level doesn't really give the player enough time to both repair their base and go exploring the structures to engage with the story. And considering that certain parts of the story unlock some of the most powerful weapons in the pack, it creates a bit of a rushed experience. The day length should have been much longer. Another issue is the large number of mobs in later levels, which make it difficult for weaker systems to run the modpack. It definitely would have been better to reduce mob count and increase their health instead to achieve the same effect in a more performance friendly way.

Despite its flaws, it's still some of the most fun I've had in modded MC (creator bias, I know). I enjoy total overhauls and custom content, and this is about as far from vanilla gameplay as I've played so far. My favorite part of the pack is still the challenge levels, even though I've never actually managed to beat them >_<

Ok so this is going to be a bit of a long review, as this mod touches on a topic of game design in modpacks that really bothers me.
First of all, I love temperature thirst mods that make survival harder. They can be great fun when done right. It enhances survivalist modpacks and makes you really feel like you're fighting against the elements. It pairs especially well with season mods. Trying to find a cave to warm up in when you're caught in a snowstorm? It just tickles the primitive parts of the human brain that scream "Ug survive, ug make fire."
But the keyword here is "done right." Barely any modpack actually puts effort into testing and configuring TAN, which makes the experience insufferable. And that's due to the mod coming with terrible default configs. At the default rates, stepping outside at noon will almost instantly make you suffer from heatstroke. Wading across a river in the middle of summer gives you hypothermia. And getting caught in a snowstorm? Instant death. You're basically immediately taking damage. And so pack devs throw this mod into their pack without any edits just to "make it harder." And that brings me to the second issue.
This mod doesn't fit 90% of modpacks it's used in. TAN is great for packs that are focused on hardcore primitive survival. But this requires integrating mechanics that makes it enjoyable to interact with TAN's mechanics and make it relevant. On it's own, a thirst bar is really just a second hunger bar. It's not very interesting. But if water is scarce in an apocalypse pack, or in space where you have to harvest and manage water from asteroids? Now that's interesting. You've tied water management to interesting gameplay. Same with temperature. The greatest implementation of temperature I've seen is in Winter Rescue where they had a custom mod for stormfronts, and blizzards sometimes lasted for days on end. You had to prepare ahead of time your food and campfire fuel. It made temperature a core part of gameplay. But when you just throw TAN into any random pack because "difficulty good," it ends up being an annoying mechanic that players eventually circumvent by using the temperature controlling baubles, making the mod irrelevant. This is partly the fault of the pack devs, but also partly the fault of TAN's lack of advanced configurability and variety of temperature management that isn't essentially "full immunity."
Newer versions of the mod seem to have somewhat fixed some of these issues, but I find myself switching to Survival Inc these days for my own projects. And if I find this mod in a pack using default configs, I'll straight up rip it out.

This review only applies to the 1.12 version as I haven't tried it on newer versions.
Clumps can significantly improve performance in situations where an area is generating lots of XP orbs, such as in mob farms. This is especially useful on servers. But this mod does it by replacing the XP entity, which can break mods that also rely on them. For this reason, if playing 1.12, you should use Fixeroo instead, which does the same thing without adding a new XP entity.

I've always hated mapping mods. Not because I don't like to know where I'm going, but because topographical maps ruin exploration. In modpacks where there is no exploration, then it doesn't really matter. But in packs where exploration is a key factor, and you've got loads of custom structures, things like journey map and xearos ruin the mystery of discovery (the entire point of exploration! Not to mention it's comparatively MUCH more performant). It also makes balancing structures harder as they're easier to find.
Enter Antique Atlas. It's balanced, comes in item form, only reveals vague biome style drawings, and has a very nice aesthetic. No more using the map to see everything around you for a thousand blocks. It allows you to easily navigate without ruining the experience. Every adventuring pack should use this instead. It also has CraftTweaker addons and support for RecurrentComplex if you do want to make some structures automatically discovered for easier locating.
The only downside is that it's harder to share markers/ waypoints as you can't just type in the coordinate to place them, but it's not a big deal imo.

MoC was one of my favorite mods when I first started modding, but as people familiar with it know, it was murder on performance. It also relied on the mob spawner mod which broke mob spawning of every other mod. MoC Extended fixes all that. Well, mostly. It now uses the vanilla spawning system and the lag is mostly gone now, but I still notice a moderate tps hit in mob dense areas, so limiting ambient mob spawns with another mod might be a good idea. MoC Extended also revamped many of the models and textures, so the aesthetics are much closer to more modern mob mods. Still one of the best mob mods available for 1.12. Did I mention there are fairy pegasi? There are fairy pegasi.

This is a mod I have mixed feelings about. It is useful for development, and has some pretty useful features like fancy waypoints, map-to-png export, loaded chunks mapper, etc. But at the same time, It's held back by some bad design decisions and poor performance/ bugs.
Every time you open the world map for the first time in a world, you get hit with a wall of donation links. I honestly dislike this sort of thing, so it loses a star for that.
Performance also takes a hit, and the mod can straight up crash the world when used with certain mods (e.g Warpdrive. The constant ship jumping forces constant mapping updates, which leaves ghost ships everywhere in the map, and just causes massive amounts of lag). Loses another star for that.
I don't ever actually use Journeymap for survival gameplay. I recommend using Xearos or, my personal favorite, Antique Atlas.

This mod allows you to ship default keybinds with your modpacks, while simultaneously not overwriting the users options.txt file if it already exists, which means you don't have to worry about breaking players options and keybinds with every update. This is a godsend because I no longer have to listen to players complaining about it xD. It also increases player retention, as some players will actually drop a modpack if keybinds don't come pre configured (I know because I'm one of those players). It does lose one star, however, as there is now a better alternative called More Default Options for including default mod options, such as for Journeymap (which this mod doesn't support). If you only want to ship keybinds though, then this mod is easier to use.

I love this mod. I was in the middle of writing up a draft for a mod commission to add custom plants to the game until I came across this. Basically, it allows you to add custom plants that naturally grow, and it even supports underwater plants (with native support for Fluidlogged API for extra sexyness). Now I can populate all my custom planets with alien plant life :D

Yes, I will die on this hill. Sure, the default structures are nothing to gawk at, but as a dev utility for adding your own structures, what this mod is capable of is insane. Jigsaw blocks don't even come close. RC's greatest feature is the structure script block. Randomize portions of a structure on generation? Check. Create dynamic mazes? Check. Create dynamic towns with theoretically infinite unique layouts? Check. Compatibility with nearly every modded block and entity? You bet. It does lag the world a little with larger structures, but pregenerating can fix that, and most people aren't creating structures with 200k blocks.

I love EB Wizardry, it's probably my favorite magic mod. It's one of the few magic mods that focuses only on the spells, and has a similar vibe to Ars Magika from 1.7.
Eb Wizardry uses wands to cast its spells, and it has a ton of spell variety in all the generic fantasy spells people are used to, which makes it great for roleplaying. This also means the spells aren't overpowered (mostly), so melee and ranger setups can still square up against it (speaking of roleplaying, it has a ton of addon spell packs. Check out WinDanesz's addons, they're the best! Especially the Apprentice and Fates addon. Great for RP).
It does lose one star because, last I played, it still had a pretty critical exploit that ruined multiplayer which allowed binding multiple of the same spell to different wands to spam them, since cooldowns are tracked per wand instead of across ALL wands (idk if this has been fixed in recent versions or not). While it doesn't seem like that big of a deal, it allowed healers to spam spells, making them immortal (something I'm against any mod doing). The default values for some spells spells (especially healing and necromancy) were also really broken, and I had to spend several hours editing configs to balance them for PvP.