hi529

Beyond Cosmo is a pack I've had a love/hate relationship with so far.

Early game was best described as a nightmare. No death felt like it was the result of a mistake on my end, but rather some change that was neither telegraphed nor foreseeable, like "Creepers disguise themselves as zombies" or "some zombies can break cobblestone. which ones? guess." The bronze/iron/diamond upgrade template system is interesting for a few moments, and then frustrating forever.

The quest book seems half-finished and doesn't adequately prepare the player for upcoming challenges. Most pages are just "here's the vague progression of this mod" with no indication of why to care right now. I didn't find out the Nether was gated until I tried going there.

Call from the Depths is... not a great mod. I won't go into too much detail here because it's not like the pack author made it, but gating the Nether behind it is... not ideal.

That's not to say I haven't had any fun with the modpack, though. The "gun dungeons" felt mostly tough, but fair- the mobs are powerful, but have exploitable weaknesses that are relatively easy to find and feel AMAZING to discover. (Cave Hunters are still annoying, though.)

My biggest complaint is that it doesn't feel clear to me what Beyond Cosmo is trying to be. Does it want to be a tough but fair exploration/tech pack, or does it Wanna Be The Guy? Nothing really feels cohesive. I constantly feel underpowered and unprepared, and the pack doesn't seem to have any indication of how I COULD prepare. Every time I think I've found my footing, I get walled by OP mobs with no clear way to proceed besides unforgivable cheese.

Some of the mechanics also seem to actively reinforce this, with the worst offender being the total inability to place torches near spawners. This makes pushing in dungeons through actual combat non-viable, since you have to break the spawner just to make the number of mobs finite, and often that's not reasonable due to knockback, forcing the player to tunnel creep.

I will give it credit for one thing, though: it provides the player with an excellent motivation to go to space to begin with. (Namely, that I don't want to live on this planet anymore.) It's also, to my knowledge, the only modpack which has significant implementation of Cosmic Horizons at ALL, so credit where credit is due on that, too.

I was already cautious when I saw "carefully curated" next to an AI image that wasn't even proofread. Upon generating a world, I found that it simply wouldn't. It was certainly trying, the logs make that clear, but if loading Create recipes into JEI takes 7 minutes on a modern PC, you don't have a modpack, you have a PC torture device. I rate this pack a Mercy Kill/10.