Puppydaze

While at a glance, this mod seems to provide a very basic palette, it was quickly clear that colors could be mixed and matched and I was given the creative tools to paint a gorgeous picture of what I see. It reminded me of the days when I used to be more creative and my imagination was greater. I've had so much fun!

I'm playing this pack because I have friends who started an MC Eternal 2 server. As a common player of MC modpacks, I was excited to play a pack that was so jam-packed with mods and custom content! My initial impression was amazing! The pack was beautiful in regards to its questbook and art showcased in the main menu, and the quest book was unique in its premise. I loved the rats being a core part of the modpack and the Lawyer rat was a funny idea!

Unfortunately, the paint started to peel the more that I played. There's something to be said about biting off more than you can chew. and I think that the sheer amount of mods in this pack have limited the amount of things the developers can adjust at once without breaking things. Add that to the massive amount of things that are disabled or locked behind progression and difficulty changes, and you have developers trying to do too much to balance a modpack that is arguably unbalance-able.

Most kitchen-sink packs will err on the side of giving players early access to overpowered equipment. MC Eternal 2 tries the approach of making sure players are not able to progress too quickly past where they are supposed to be. This means that there are very strict paths for progression and available equipment. For anyone who is used to playing a certain mod, it is surprising when the recipes that you've learned have been changed so much and gated behind difficulty-gated progression. This, in my opinion, eliminates a lot of the fun that comes from playing modded Minecraft. I don't feel like I get to be fully creative because there are so many limitations that increase the grind required to get to the fun.

I've noticed that a lot of the combat is balanced around utilizing EVERYTHING available to you in your arsenal, which is great if you know the pack like the back of your hand and know what equipment to bring, but is terrible practice for anyone else. The questbook is not clear on the best weapons or armor, which becomes frustrating when you're trying to fight bosses and die without understanding what you did wrong. Same with automation as well! The intended power generation to use for specific difficulties of the pack are not clear, so I ended up spending 80 hours playing before I finally got power fully automated!

Overall, the pack is not good for anyone who wants to stretch their creative tech bones, or just wants to have a generally fun time. It feels that it caters to the same audience as Prominence II does, which is focusing over balance and difficulty over general substantial fun. Not for me.

I'm impressed with what Void Cube has accomplished with this pack. Everything for the first 20 hours of gameplay (chapter 1 and 2 for me) feels intentional, well thought out, and made with care. I was able to follow along with the quests and encounter some extremely new and unique gameplay and mechanics I've never seen in any other packs. For the first 20 hours, I was ready to give this pack a full 5 stars! Once chapter 3 started, there were cracks in the gameplay that started to show, and I realized why this was still in beta.

Pros:

1. The environments are very well made! I feel like I'm living in a world that was lived in and has truly been ravaged by the apocalypse. I love the level designs and hidden bunker structures. The aesthetics are just top-tier.

2. The player movement and UI feel well polished! The mods used feel like they're meant to be part of Minecraft and I can tell there was a lot of care put into the mods that adjust the behavior of the player's character.

3. The general survival concept and the mods that enable that (fishing, farming, butchering) are exquisite! I really enjoyed the first few days of trying to get my hands on food and learning more from the quest book about how food has changed. My favorite is the butchering system. Felt so real to drain blood from animals, skin them if necessary, and then chop off their parts. Very immersive!

4. Guns from TacZ are accessible pretty early, but aren't SO easy to get that you're gonna be OP really quickly. Ammo is also fairly easy to obtain for most of the starting weapons.

5. The zombies are SMART! They won't run into traps and they'll pathfind to you in interesting and unique ways that make you really think about what you're doing.

Cons:

1. Quests are hidden until you unlock their predecessor. This is common in packs when you have a category hidden until the player is ready for it, but I'm talking entire quests within a category will be hidden from view. This creates a frustrating relationship where I found myself missing out on items that I had no idea I could craft because the prerequisite quest didn't seem worth the resources to complete. I found myself multiple times wondering "is this the best armor I can craft?" because I got far and didn't see any clear progression, as the quests were hidden.

2. The difficulty increases as you play the game. This can be a plus in my opinion, but only if the difficulty increases only to the point where it continues to be fun for the player. The problem with this is that all players have a different tolerance for difficulty. When you have mods that try to gauge when to make the world harder, there are bound to be people who get left behind. This introduced the frustrating reality of having to bring firearms EVERYWHERE to get anything done. I love shooting my gun, but the usage of ranged in every fight really makes me feel a lack of utility from melee weapons, which brings me to my next point:

3. Melee weapons SUCK when the difficulty starts to spike. All zombies seem to spawn in which much more health, and I'm using the best melee weapon that I know of, the sledgehammer. It does 12 damage at its base and hits very very slowly. Without any modifications, it takes 3 HITS to kill the LOWEST HEALTH NORMAL ZOMBIE. If I "sharpen" my sledgehammer (a mechanic they added that allows you to sharpen melee weapons for 32 uses) it becomes 2 hits. This weapon is VERY slow though, and zombies are usually in groups or hordes, so it's easy to get overrun quickly.

4. Enchantments are severely nerfed. What I mean is that you either have to get really lucky and find an enchantment book as loot, or progress until you can craft expensive enchanted books. Enchanting Tables are NOT craftable and are unobtainable in natural generation. The difficulty has already increased exponentially since I started, and I'm still on chapter 3. It's super rough to get by without enchantments when that's the case. I basically have to use the "Defender" set of armor to get by defensively, since I don't have access to the protection enchantments.

5. There are enemies that will practically INSTA kill you if you walk into a structure unprepared. There's not proper warning in my opinion to warrant this kind of behavior and it led to many frustrating times where I felt that I was killed unfairly and had to trek thousands of blocks to get back to my stuff. I didn't feel like my expectations were set properly when it came to any threats that came up. The best way to handle things this powerful is to REQUIRE that the player craft the threat (Wither) or have them set off an intentional set of events that gets them ready for a" boss fight" (Ender Dragon).

6. Starting with Chapter 3, there are missions that you can get sent by an exterior faction called Central. These missions are THOUSANDS of blocks away sometimes. They give vehicles that players can craft to make the distance bearable (I crafted a Biplane which required some Create to get working, including a precision mechanism). Going this distance and then dying is ROUGH if you didn't set up a bed. Even if you had, you then have to get your stuff back within highly contested POIs that have spawners hidden in hard-to-guess places. This can create a fairly frustrating journey to get to your stuff again while having no equipment. Keeping in mind that the world gets harder and doesn't care if you died, so you've got the protection of a fresh-spawn without any of the gear that's been keeping you alive. There's also a quest where the objectives are not achievable in the quest itself, which is extremely frustrating! You actually have to go back to the previous quest location (which could be 4000 blocks away in my case) and harvest more materials from the area. Very frustrating!!

7. Create is NECESSARY to progress through the modpack and you can't get blaze rods, which are a common recipe for many of the TacZ weapons, without setting up a factory line. This is something I was quite surprised by, and it felt a bit frustrating as I had hopes that Create would be an optional element to the modpack. Also, andesite is a lot harder to find naturally, so you have to find it, or diorite, in structures mainly in order to progress with the pack. Same with Nether Quartz. Neither of these changes were mentioned in the quest book.

At its core, this mod does exactly what it sets out to do. Disables mandatory telemetry integrated into Minecraft. It works great.

One of the things that makes Minecraft so unique is the independent control that the game was developed for. This mod, in a way, is special because it is an upfront showcase of that independence. A display of rebellion that reflects and inspires life and culture.

This mod disables the chat reporting that was incorporated as a part of Microsoft's journey to infuse safety measures within Minecraft. In vanilla, whether a server is an officially hosted Minecraft Realm or a privately hosted dedicated Minecraft server, players could report any messages sent that were thought to violate trust and safety rules. This mod works perfectly fine to disable this.

This mod is a tangible representation of the ingenuity and passion of the modded Minecraft community. People coming together to create custom models and animation for all of these Pokemon, not to even mention all the other mechanics that are incorporated, is absolutely stunning! This IS the definitive BEST Pokemon mod for Minecraft! I've had a ton of fun choosing from all the starters and going through the mod, gathering Pokemon and trading with friends!

It's a rough time playing with this mod. It's not hard to play with, it just feels very unbalanced out of the box and strangely paced. This mod tries to add progression to upgrading your armor and trying to roll for specific stats and upgrades, but I always quickly find that most enemies, outside of Apotheosis bosses, aren't hard to fight anymore.

The common spawning of Apotheosis bosses is also annoying! Having bosses spawn in the world at random is just dumb in my opinion, not to mention that sometimes the bosses spawn in inaccessible areas or despawn right away. The default should be to have an item to spawn in these bosses.

All in all, this feels like a mod that gets slapped into a lot of modpacks and tries to take the forefront of combat progression. It doesn't respect other mods when it takes the spotlight.

I can only speak for the 1.20 and 1.21 versions of Mekanism, but I can say with certainty that this mod is awesome! Has a ton of machines that allow for all kinds of automation and ore processing. Gregtech tends to be a little more in-depth, but I think Mekanism hits the casual base perfectly and the mod is approachable with guides! Being able to process ores and multiply the outputs using automation and piping is incredible! Getting into this mod is a treat and I enjoy playing with it! There are times where I get tired of it, but I think that is more related to the "Mekanism: Generators" addon that adds complex reactors!

All in all, it's a fair mod to play with and while I don't think it's necessary, I'm happy to see it when I do!

Backpacks are so necessary in the beginning of a Minecraft playthrough! I enjoy collecting loot right from the start, and I'm a bit of a hoarder! When I get my hands on my first backpack, I'm excited when it's from the Sophisticated Backpacks mod because they're so powerful and upgradable! Let your backpack become your personal companion as you slot in various upgrades to hold different things and improve your portable functionality! Want a crafting table and a furnace? You got it! Want to hold liquids? It's right here. Want to have cobble automatically picked up and throw into the void so you can FINALLY mine in peace? This mod excels at that!

I docked off half a star because trying to sort with the Sophisticated suite of mods is usually a headache and doesn't work well with most GUI-sorting mods.

A wonderful mod for detailing and understanding exactly what players are looking at! It's based on a history of mods that do the same thing, but I find this implementation to be the best! It stays up to date, it works well, and has a variety of addons that allow you to look at machines at a glance!