Puppydaze

I've never had any issues with Embeddium! It does everything that you'd expect from a Sodium fork! All the optimizations I need are present and work well with my Forge installations. I enjoy being able to adjust the performance settings I need.

An incredible technical feat! Distant Horizons allows players to continue seeing the chunks that they've loaded while exploring the world. This allows for massive landscapes that can be viewable at any distance! Minecraft has never felt so large and vast with it's fairly low render distances. This mod is a MUST for me personally nowadays, and with shaders, it's even more beautiful!

Oculus is great for Forge builds, but as it runs off an older fork of Iris, it struggles in some areas. Any improvements that Iris has made in the last couple years, such as recent Distant Horizons support, is completely lost on this. Just wish it still got updates for bugfixes!

Sodium carries Minecraft to heights that Optifine struggled to reach. Coming through as a modding-friendly option for advanced quality adjustment, it absolutely dominates at giving players the opportunity to adjust various performance settings. Been using it for years, no complaints here. It does what it's supposed to and it does it well!

This is the best third person mod for Minecraft! It does a great job of giving many options for third person view type and setting up the camera to look the way players want! The combat camera modes work well and are highly customizable. My only complaint is that it doesn't have a free-look option. I want to look at my character sometimes without unlocking the camera in settings!

Inventory Profiles Next is a feature-heavy solution to any inventory sorting needs that might come up! I would argue, jokingly, that it's almost got TOO many features! I have to turn a ton of them off when I first install it, but once I get my settings tuned, it's the perfect complimentary mod for any modpack that needs sorting! Do you want to move over items of the same type? This mod does that! Do you want to sort horizontally? Vertically? This mod does that too! It's a great option and highly compatible with most mods, when other inventory mods tend to overstep and cause issues.

This is what I would consider to be old reliable! Used in most modpacks, JEI allows players to pull up any recipe they desire. This allows for simplified crafting, especially with packs that have a ton of mods and custom recipes! Not sure I could play a pack that didn't have a recipe viewer like JEI! My only complaint is that it doesn't include a Recipe Tree system in it like EMI does. Still, it's very performant in my experience and it does a great job!

This is my favorite recipe viewer! Inspired by other recipe viewers such as JEI and NEI, it takes the task of recipe collection to another level with the integrated Recipe Tree feature! This allows for recipe components and quanties to be visible at a glance, allowing for easier crafting in semi-vanilla and early-game modded Minecraft!

The JEI compatibility is the icing on the cake. I love having both mods installed!

I docked a point because EMI can be incompatible and slow with some modpacks. It's best to test it out first and then see if it works well with your modpack!

I think that Create gets a bad reputation because of how common it's used in modpacks, but I truly think that it's used this much because it's simply fantastic!

Create is a technical marvel in the modded Minecraft space, incorporating technology that fits the archaic feeling of traditional Minecraft. The animations are superb, the machines look incredibly intricate, and the recipes aren't bad at all!

I think the place where Create can be intimidating is how it all depends on physical force as a power source. This leads to everything needing to be connected, instead of other technical modpacks which allow power to be moved around more compactly. But I don't think this is a negative, I think it's just a difference in preference. This mod is still truly amazing!

Controlling is one of the best mods ever developed for large modpacks. It gives players the ability to search through the keybinds menu, sorting by key or category. Takes keybinding, which is normally a pain, and turns it into something fairly pleasant!