annylianny

RealClockHUD displays a real clock on your HUD.

That is what it sets out to do, and that is undeniably what it does. You get a digital clock displaying your current real-life system time as an overlay in your game. If you want it to, it can also display the real-life date, the in-game time and date, and the playtime of the current session.

However, despite the simple premise, there are some small oddities I wish the mod would improve upon.

For instance, while there is a respectable amount of configuration options, they are not compatible with the standard mod menu system of Fabric. The mod can only be configured by manually editing the config file, or using chat commands. This is strange; it is the only mod I have encountered thus far with a config that cannot be edited using the in-game mod options.

Another annoyance is that while the mod supports the 24-hour time format, it does not automatically enable it based on the locale or timezone of your system.

Lastly, while you can set RealClockHUD up to display the in-game and session time, you can not disable the real-time clock display separately to only show the in-game time or session data. This is a strange omission for something so obvious, in my opinion.

For a mod this straightforward, I wish it would have gone the extra… foot, really, to make its configuration a little more sensible.

I did not expect to write this about a mod like this, but I have rarely played with a mod this polished and customisable.

Not only do the effects look really good out of the box, they are quite remarkably customisable across like four pages of configuration.

From the sample rate, the colour, lifespan, the width, custom patterns, all the way to whether the contrails should fade, get wider or narrower based on velocity or distance and what exactly those variables look like; practically everything is customisable.

I use it on a server (client-side only) to see actual persistent contrails in the sky from other players flying overhead and it is genuinely so amazing and adds a lot. I also have noticed no performance impact whatsoever.
Big recommendation.

AppleSkin does not need an introduction, I feel, since it is ubiquitous and includes in almost every popular modpack out there.

I will therefore cut the well-deserved praise short for this review: it's an excellent UI improvement adding vital saturation and hunger information, it is integrated seamlessly into the UI and it honestly should be in the vanilla game already.

However, I do feel like it could use some polish in the visual department.

The main issue is that AppleSkin just does not work gracefully with resource packs that change the hunger icon. The saturation icons rendered behind the hunger bar are just the vanilla 'chicken leg' hunger icon reduced to a yellow outline. This looks good in vanilla. But if you use a resource pack that modifies the hunger icons to be a different shape, AppleSkin will still behave like an elephant in a porcelain shop and render the vanilla 'chicken leg'-shaped outline behind the differently-shaped custom hunger bar icons, essentially clashing with and clipping into them.

It would not be too difficult a task to generate these icons dynamically based on the currently active resources. After all, it's just a simple yellow outline that you could generate for any arbitrary shape easily.

Additionally, the saturation scale behind the hunger bar is a simple dithered gray rectangle that in my opinion can look quite busy and jarring. A more modern style would do well here.

Overall though, AppleSkin is obviously still a must-have, and there are plenty of resource packs out there that add compatibility for AppleSkin icons too. It's just a minor annoyance that you can't really use some resource packs with AppleSkin because of the overlapping texture issue.

There is really not much to say about this mod! But for a mod like this, that's a good thing, right?

Emojis does exactly what it says on the tin: it allows you to type Unicode emojis in chat easily using the colon (':') shortcuts, similar to how messengers like Signal, Element, Teams or Discord work. The names are the ones you are familiar with (e. g. :pensive:). Since the mod just inserts a standard Unicode emoji character, everyone can see the emojis you send, whether they have the mod installed or not.

By the way, if you don't like the standard, black-and-white fallback style of the emojis, that's because Minecraft's default font does not include colourful and fancy emojis. I recommend using resource packs that add an emoji-capable font! I personally use one called "Cheerful", which adds little pixel-art emoji that fit very well with the Minecraft style.

Let's be unconventional and start with the bottom line: I enjoy Autowork a lot!

It is the only automation mod that I am aware of that really leans into the redstone-like toolbox philosophy where it gives you a bunch of relatively generic universal tools and allows you to do your own problem solving with those.
It's what people commonly describe as the opposite of the "magic block" design pattern: instead of providing you with a block that pre-solves your task (e. g. the IE Garden Cloche for an automatic tree farm) if you pump enough resources/energy into it, it provides you with a bunch of cheap, generic tools that you can arrange cleverly to solve your specific task yourself.

It's something that Create originally set out to do and is often praised for, but ultimately ends up failing due to the addition of tons of blocks and items with a really specific purpose. Shafts and cogs are just cables, water wheels are just generator blocks, and the processing blocks are magic 'ore crusher' type machines, right?

Autowork instead takes cues from vanilla automation, and simply expands it.
If you are the kind of person who complains about 'magic block' tech mods, but does not like Create because you feel it's also ultimately a 'magic block' mod with pretty animations, this might be right up your alley. It also performs much better, so no more laggy factories!

The Autowork aesthetics are excellent and fit in perfectly with the vanilla game. Most of the blocks are inspired by the Crafter and similar existing redstone machines, and they are all very well animated and themed. These look exactly like what Mojang would do. The author is nice, active, takes both suggestions and criticism very well, and updates the mod quite frequently.

So, why the slightly lowered review score?
Well, my problem with Autowork is that some of the utilities it adds are already easily possible using vanilla redstone. The most obvious offenders here are the pulsating timer, the AND gate, and the chute. (I am not going to count things like the Minecart loader/unloader here because while they're technically possible in vanilla with things like amethyst crystals, they involve quite in-depth glitches and unexpected physics behaviour that just aren't too clean to use.)

This might not sound like a big deal, but if the whole idea is to expand creativity-driven redstone-style automation without 'magic blocks', it does not make much sense to replace existing redstone circuits and mechanics with single-block versions. Additionally, some of the blocks already slowly being 'magic block'-ified with some more recent updates, with auto-filters and such included despite filtering already being a fun problem to solve using vanilla redstone.

These minor nitpicks however are just that – minor nitpicks – and do not impact my enjoyment of the mod much. I definitely still recommend Autowork for anyone who likes Redstone-style automation and simply wants a better way to break and place blocks, use minecarts in automation, push entities around without water and all those kinds of shenanigans.

(Transparency disclaimer: I volunteered to provide localisation to Autowork so technically I contributed to it; however, I had no creative input and I am not related or associated with the mod's developer otherwise)

Item Descriptions quickly became a mod I just do not play without anymore as it's so lightweight but does so much.
As someone who started playing all the way back in 2011, I am intimately familiar with every aspect of old Minecraft, but I often forget about so many new features they added to the game since ~1.2.1 or so. Item Descriptions genuinely helps a lot learning about all the new thingamajigs and recalling what stuff does.

It also just makes the UI feel a little bit more "complete" and I can imagine it being very, very useful for new players to the game.

The descriptions do not get in your way because they're toggleable, they are customisable and have mod support out-of-the-box simply using regular locale files in resource packs, and they integrate fabulously well with other mods like Spyglass Improvements or Field Guide.

I recommend also checking out the Mod Descriptions resource pack that adds a plethora of descriptions for all kinds of mods. "Hey Wiki", the mod that allows you to open the Minecraft wiki article on items using a hotkey is a great companion, too.

The only 'downside' to Item Descriptions is unfortunately something that isn't their fault at all: namely that many many mods do not support it and that even the aforementioned Mod Descriptions addon – while extensive – is still missing a ton of popular mods. I really wish more mod authors would add Item Descriptions support. A lot of mods do add descriptions, but they all reinvent the wheel and do their own thing and do not integrate with Item Descriptions even though it's right there.