CalaMariGold

I've put off making this review for awhile because I felt like I haven't put enough hours into the pack or gotten very far, but I feel like early game and first impressions are really important. I'll update this review whenever I get to the rest of the pack.

Coming from someone that has really struggled to enjoy tech mods and automation in modpacks, this pack felt different. I've always wanted to enjoy tech, I find it really cool! But for one reason or another I couldn't get very far in any tech pack or mod without getting frustrated at a lack of explanations or boredom.

This pack explains EVERYTHING but still let's you figure out puzzles on your own. The puzzle being how to most efficiently complete this automation task. At least in the early game, the quests give you all the information you could need, with a few exceptions. It's really easy to get into the groove and just keep going. Most other packs have some sort of roadblock or tedium, this pack doesn't have that so far.

Thats another thing, basically all tedium is GONE. No mobs, no day-night cycle, no annoying terrain, just focus on the fun! This might put off some people but I implore you to give it a try! Because of its heavy focus, it has a lot more effort put into the fun part of the gameplay loop. While there is a main progression (thankfully!), this pack lets you explore with a few different tech mods at the start, letting you tackle what you feel is most important.

Performance is very great, given it's a basically superflat world with no mobs. With some modern 1.12 performance mod changes and Cleanroom, you could probably get this pack to run on a 20 year old laptop. I can't say anything about late game performance however.

Aesthetics I gave 3 stars because not much effort was put into it as far as I can tell. No high-effort presentation and aesthetic polish that many modern packs have these days, basic vanilla main menu with a logo and screenshots. Only 2 texture changes as far as I see in the files. The custom item textures are nice however. I would've really loved a more polished presentation and consistency in aesthetics, but it really doesn't matter all that much considering the vanilla aesthetics fit the pack mostly well, but a unique presentation and aesthetic is important these days!

If you've struggled with tech in the past, want to try something different or don't want any tedium/differing focus of other tech packs, please give Feed The Factory a try!

I saw this was one of the highest rated packs on the site, so thought I'd give it an honest try to see what it's all about. To preface, I am running this with an Intel i9-10900k, an RTX 3080, and 8gb of RAM assigned (which seems more than reasonable for a pack with 137 mods).

I was greeted with a very long load time, the default vanilla menu, and an even longer world load time (nearly 15 minutes total). As I spawn in I run around for a couple minutes and notice the TPS is abysmal, everything is a slideshow. Doing any action takes 2-4 seconds, with frequent FPS freezes. I really wanted to play more and see what it really had to offer, but I could not stand the performance.

Of the gameplay, I noticed nothing good. Chat spammed as soon as I spawned in, no quest line, no advancements, nothing directing me what to do. I noticed very few mobs as well. The structures were neat, but I could tell most of this was just mods thrown in with little configuration.

This pack was likely made for a couple of friends, and was not intended to grow beyond that. Further more, the logo of the pack is clearly AI generated, so that goes to show how much effort they care to put in.

It's fine to have a pack like this for friends, but I don't see any reason this pack should be anywhere close to the highest rated packs, along the greats like MeatballCraft and Divine Journey 2.

I don't have many hours in other tech mods so take this with a grain of salt, but every time I play a modpack with tech, I've found myself gravitating towards Mekanism. I really enjoy its aesthetics, intuitiveness, and the progression. It's super simple to get into, but also challenges you in plenty of ways. It all feels very seamless and polished with plenty of risk and reward. Making a fission and fusion reactors was super challenging for me but lots of fun!

Some context: I played this pack on a community server with 10-20 people, usually less than 10 online at any given time.

Coming from someone who hasn't played much of modern versions and tech, E9 serves as a pretty good introduction to its mods. I mainly used Mekanism throughout the whole pack, with a couple other mods throughout. It's beginner friendly with good quest descriptions, not the greatest but it told me what I needed to know to get started. Late-game Mekanism, the quests started to degrade and I was forced to use the wiki and multiple tutorial videos. Quests weren't in the best order either and the quest rewards in the beginning felt super OP. However, for a kitchen sink pack, this felt rather polished compared to others I've played in the past but definitely not perfect. I still enjoyed this much more than E6, that's for sure. I recommend picking a specific mod in this pack and going through it fully, especially if you're new.

I will say the exploration, caves, and mobs felt pretty barebones. The modlist is fairly tame compared to most kitchen sinks, but it seems like it's intentional. Personally I think this pack could've used a bit more to spice it up (especially the caving) but it wasn't a big deal to me as I was inside my base working on tech 95% of the time. I rarely even went to other dimensions as there wasn't much reason to, aside from plopping a digital miner in the Nether and going back home.

E9 has a lot of potential for a polished experienced with great inter-mod compatibility but drops the ball on a few aspects. A big pet peeve of mine was the fact that there were multiple versions of the same ingot. Osmium for example had the Mekanism version and the "enigmatica" version. It was really annoying when going through recipes and having to find recipes and uses for a specific ingot.

I'm very curious to see how E9: Expert compares to this, but as a beginner when it comes to tech, I still had a blast learning all the systems. It felt open-ended with enough direction to not have me completely lost. EMI is a blessing and blew my mind when I first saw what it offers. Plenty of QoL in the pack but could use more (cough, Carry On). E9 could use more building blocks as well, definitely sad at the lack of chisel (i like the cool tech blocks 😭). You really gotta get creative to make some nice looking factories.

As far as performance and stability, the first half was pretty much perfectly fine. I would've rated it 5 stars if the server crashes didn't start coming in half-way through. Issues and crashes started to become common as more players got ahold of complicated tech, but I don't entirely blame the pack for that. Any kitchen sink would struggle with the amount of players we had, so I only deducted 1 star.

All in all, if you want a somewhat-polished, easy, and fun kitchen sink pack to play with a bunch of friends where everyone can be satisfied, give E9 a try :)

As a modpack dev, having mods be as configurable as possible is a massive help, if not a necessity for many mods. Quark really goes a step beyond and adds pretty much every single configuration possible, even adding a custom in-game menu for it.

The features Quark adds are comparable or just straight up better than other mods' implementations. The backpack is a favorite of mine. It's such a clean way to extend the player inventory, not just add a completely separate inventory (good for immersive packs, maybe not for tech or kitchen sink packs). Also love the totem of holding in place of other grave mods. It's simple, intuitive, and configurable. Quark really helps keep the mod list down and all it's features feel very balanced.

If you're on 1.12.2, highly recommend Quark RotN Edition for even more config features.

Absolutely beautiful trees with a lot of compatibility mods. This single mod will make your world a lot more pretty and enjoyable to be in. Lots of attention to detail and config options. I haven't tried it yet but I imagine Better Foliage would be a great combo. Can definitely do a number to performance, especially on servers, so keep that in mind. I recommend disabling the forest expanding feature as I've seen that cause performance issues.

Heightens immersion considerably! I love seeing the seasons go by, really adds a sense of time to your modpack. Pairs well with other snow and winter mods like Snow Real Magic. Bonus points if you increase the length of day and night.

It's very difficult for me to play modded MC without this mod, it feels integral now. I have lots of memories of basing with friends early game only to move our base quite far, and all of us would grab a chest and run to the new base spot. Something about that feels so immersive and fits right into MC.

Unfortunately for some reason this mod has had so many issues over the years in multiple MC versions. Something always happens to break with it or a mod is incompatible. Many of these issues have been fixed overtime but I'm always on edge when including this in a modpack. Make sure to do some testing.

Finally, a music mod for 1.12 that does everything and is very stable! The GUI is super clean and easy to use, setup is a little bit of a learning curve but honestly not bad! Does everything you need it to and more, even looping tracks at certain stages. If you're still using any other music mod for 1.12, definitely switch to Music Triggers.

[self-review!]

I've been developing TREPIDATION since 2021, and what a ride it's been! I'm really proud of my work so far but also think this pack has a long way to go. Honestly, I had no idea trepidation would be this fun when I first started working on it. Hell, I had no idea minecraft could be this fun, especially the combat! Yes yes yes, of course I'm biased, but if I wasn't having fun in my own pack, I wouldn't give a damn about developing it anymore. Everything from the combat and movement just feels so fluid and satisfying. If you've played doom eternal, you'll know what I'm talking about. I want to continue to build on that.

A massive focus on the pack has also been horror. A lot of people have gave feedback and debated if a pack or game can really combine speedrunning and horror, I'm still of the camp that yes, it can. Let me talk about my reasoning.

I don't believe that just because this is categorized as a "horror modpack" means that the entire playthrough of the pack must be always invoke the feeling of horror. Good horror has a mix and explores other avenues. While I understand the main point is that much of the horror is mitigated by the ability to just i-frame and dash away, I don't actually think that detracts from the overall scary experience.
Look up the meaning of trepidation: "tremulous fear, alarm, or agitation; perturbation." That is exactly the kind of feeling I want to invoke in the pack. It's the feeling of going up to fight a Blazing Juggernaut but then quickly realizing they are avoiding all your attacks and do massive damage. It's the feeling of walking around the Erebus in the darkness and hearing a crawly noise get louder and louder. Yes, you dash away from these situations, but what makes it so much scarier is that you have control. Outlast and Resident Evil isn't scary only because of the gruesome scenes or the setting, it's scary because of the chase scenes and it's easy to get lost or mess up mechanically. It's all in your control and your fear can easily put you in a bad situation. In TREPIDATION, giving the player so many options to escape makes your brain fire off many thoughts as once, making you panic and be more prone to mistakes as you decide where to dash away to or if you should hide in a hole or what ability to use. The amount of times I've ended up in worse situations because of my panic...

I feel like that's the key word, panic. That's the feeling I like to provoke in every dimension. Just pushing "w" to run away in a game like Minecraft doesn't really put you in a panic state as much doing parkour moves while dodging and keeping track of 18 things all at once does. Dashing away quickly puts you in situations you'd rather not be in sometimes because of your panic state, and so you have to dash away more until eventually you've panicked so much that you're out of dashes. That's when the horror sets in, the feeling that all this power you had is suddenly gone, and you feel helpless and desperate. It's only going to get better as more mobs get custom abilities and as the dimensions get more content and become polished. The feeling of terror (as in suspense and dread) is there, but not nearly as much as I'd like it to be, so I have ideas for that as well.

But anyway, I just wanted to talk about that. Go play TREPIDATION and shit your pants like I have so many times during development and testing 😭