Auseawesome

Although I'm an author on this project, Ive really only helped on the documentation and some of the ideas. It's Lucky who's really made this mod shine.

Foundry Engine is pitched as a mod to bring together scripting from mods like KubeJS with a built in editor GUI, tools for editing the world like axiom and the ability to run serverside only for mini games. Even in this early state it does succeed at that, we have Gcat testing it for his current project!

I've tried to be as unbiased as possible in this review, as you can probably see from the rather low performance and stability score at the moment, but thats only because the project is in alpha and constantly changing!

I've made this review to hopefully bring awareness to this newcomer in the scripting mod scene. Id genuinely recommend it to anyone trying out new experimental content for 26.1+, come over to our discord if you want any help or want to influence the development!

Apothic enchanting is a module that really demonstrates the great ideas of the entire Apotheosis mod, whereas vanilla enchanting is very one-dimensional and doesn't add much actual length or complexity to progression, apothic enchanting adds complexity in an enjoyable way!

The new bookshelves do really help in bringing decision making to enchanting, unlike the vanilla system of getting 30 bookshelves then continually picking the highest experience option until you get what you want. One drawback is, like the rest of apotheosis, the higher level enchants available through this system will often cause significant scaling issues with other mods, especially fortune and looting which can make resources far more plentiful than mods were designed around.

One gripe I do have with this mod is how easy it is to remove enchantments from gear, it makes it so that you basically never have to think about whether it is worth using enchantments as you can always get them back later, or the fact you can split enchanting books you find in loot to apply the good enchants without worrying about the curses.

This mod has a pretty good configuration and I'd highly advise checking it out to make the experience fit your pack and ideal as best as possible. I recommend this mod to people who don't like the enchanting system in vanilla but don't want to throw it out entirely.

Apotheosis is an incredibly ambitious mod, and does actually manage to achieve many of its goals. The elites and invaders help break up all enemies feeling the same and can add more interest to combat.

I honestly really love the conceptual idea of socketing gems, a way to imbue gear with abilities you can find through exploration and combat. I also really like the fact mobs have more variety added through elites (although I will get into the issues I feel there are with the execution of this later). This mod is a treasure trove of interesting concepts and ways to improve systems in the game, however it fells like this mod would be better if it thought about how these would interact with other mods.

My issues with this mod start at the balance, but in my opinions hint at some deeper issues when this mod is viewed from the standpoint as a small side addition to many packs as it is often treated. As a mod that is often treated as a side mod, this mod does a lot of things in questionable ways, for example the elites/invaders can often be so fast it's incredibly difficult to escape them, or have so much regeneration it is almost impossible to kill them with your gear at the time. This, in my opinion, often draws from the intended experience of the pack/game because it interrupts the players focus, forcing them to deal with some threat when they may have just been trying to build or explore.

On the other hand, for combat focused packs which are designed to make a player try to become as powerful as possible and feel as 'cool' as possible, this mod does really work, however I feel this is a narrow scope for the usability of the mod. This leads on to understanding how this mod is balanced, because it isn't balanced around vanilla gameplay, it is balanced around taking everything and scaling up both damage and health in roughly equal proportions. While this can make the player feel powerful, and lead to cool moments, it often makes other mod's content get overshadowed as spells become underpowered or modded bosses become trivial. This is fixable with configuration, but out of the box as it is in many packs it can be a large issue.

You should try this mod, maybe in a small pack or in a combat/RPG pack, but please, don't shove this into any old pack and expect the balance to work. I recommend this mod to those that don't mind sinking their teeth into config files to make sure their mods work correctly together.

While this mod cannot hold a torch to it's new rewrite, that does not mean it was not a good mod on the versions where it existed already. I would heavily advise staying away from the original MCreator version however due to serious stability issues.

'Oh The Biomes You'll Go' is an interesting mod, many of it's biomes are unique and I feel have more character than mods such as 'Biomes o' Plenty'. However, in my opinion, many of the textures are... lacking. Most trees don't provide much utility for building unfortunately and although the biomes are often interesting they can sometimes look discontinuous.

This mod often doesn't work amazingly with other biome mods, with much repeated content or biomes that have no business being together being placed immediately adjacent, however this is to be expected to some extent with how large this mod is.

Despite all the problems I've described with this mod, most of the criticism comes from a place of love as this is a mod I have played with a lot, despite it's flaws. I would recommend this on older versions to people who are bored of vanilla, but if possible play it's rewrite first!

Malum is a mod I should've tried long ago and for some reason I've only just gotten around to it. The ability to collect different materials from every enemy with a scythe is amazing to add more reason to explore and do things that may have once been monotonous annoyances.

This mod has a really good grasp of trade-offs, use the scythe and get extra resources to do magic or use conventional weapons and get bonus damage and the ability to use ranged weapons. Use totems to replenish your hunger or keep food on you to make sure you're protected wherever you go. Sure, you could do both but then you're wasting inventory, which in Minecraft is often very limited.

I'm not normally a huge proponent of magic mods, I often find them very disconnected from the main gameplay loop of Minecraft or many packs, but Malum does a great job at making its systems feel interconnected with the Minecraft world.

This may now be my favourite magic mod, we'll have to see. I would highly recommend to people who like magic mods and want a fresh new experience, or to those who are trying a magic mod for the first time!

This mod helps prevent so much unneeded frustration caused by losing items to cacti or lava happening to be nearby, or because someone else just happened to load the chunks you died in for too long before you got back yourself. Furthermore, because this doesn't place a block like most other similar mods it is more robust and can generate a corpse in almost every death situation.

The only weirdness with corpses is because they can be pushed around by fluids etc, it is possible to lose the corpse and struggle to find your items on some occasions, but this is only a minor issue. Corpses also often cause some issues with mods that affect player rendering, but this isn't really this mod's fault.

I'd highly recommend this mod and it is my go-to gravestone-esque mod!

Iris used to be incredibly dependable in my experience, it was always significantly better than any alternative and had far less weird quirks. As a shader mod iris helped allow people to get the performance of sodium but the shading ability of optifine and similar mods.

Unfortunately, recently I've had so many issues with Iris even optifine looks tempting. On some game versions I've had it crash on launch with no others mods, especially on neoforge. This is not really acceptable for what is supposed to be the gold standard of shading mods and while I might have given this mod 4.5 stars a few months ago I have had to give this scathing review instead.

Part of my issue with this mod may be that it was originally designed for fabric, so I never played it much except in packs where it had already been tested, instead often using oculus. Now Iris is on neoforge I've been using it instead, often with significantly more issues and with worse performance.

TLDR, Iris on neoforge doesn't work that well in my experience. I don't really have any alternative to recommend other than just missing out on shaders for a bit or trying to use the limited vanilla shader options.

When creating modpacks, there's undoubtedly going to be at least one mod with broken tags due to expecting an older version of a dependency or just because it was lazily made. This mod helps fix that.

While I wouldn't advise just installing this mod and praying it fixes stuff correctly (this can lead to empty tags or recipes not properly working) it is incredibly useful for understanding what is broken and allowing uou to work on other areas of the pack without all the recipes being broken.

This mod probably isn't useful for end users, but I'd highly advise it for anyone trying to make larger packs!

This mod seems like a small change but because you always see the item you're holding throughout basically the entire game, this mod makes quite a large difference.

Patching the small holes in model seams for items is definitely noticeable more on certain items than others, but it is an improvement to almost every item making this incredibly worthwhile to add to a pack.

There's no reason not to use this, its been included into vanilla now anyway, use this mod!

BetterF3 may help some people navigate the F3 menu through colouring different items but I find the colouring just reduces contrast on many backgrounds and makes it harder on the eyes.

By far the worst part about BetterF3 is the performance, text rendering in Minecraft is already unoptimised but pulling this menu up can genuinely reduce you from playable FPS to an unplayable slideshow, especially on older machines. This is made even worse by the fact it animates sliding in and out which gets really choppy and slow at low frame rates which means it can be even harder to diagnose why your frames have dropped because it takes ages to even open the F3 menu.

One advantage of this mod is the ability to customise the F3 menu on versions before that was possible, and I have seen packs such as Raspberry Flavoured make use of it to lock coordinates behind items. This is a niche use case however.

If you really struggle to read the normal F3 screen, maybe get this, I wouldn't recommend it to the average person though.