sharklaser

Encrypted is more than an 1.18 version of Antimatter Chemistry. It’s bigger, prettier, and heavier on the RAM too. My computer couldn’t handle so much excellence, but the first 5-6 hours were quite a blast.

Premise
Just like in Antimatter Chemistry, you start in a flat field of white and gray blocks, that can be converted into chemicals. But the flavor is different. Unlike Anti-Chem focusing on chemistry, Encrypted’s lore is that the blocks are pieces of a simulation, and by decrypting them the player gains the components necessary to proceed.

Content
The structure is quite similar too. Break the white and grey blocks, get chemicals. Unlock other colors of simulation blocks and get more chemicals from them too. Go to the Nether, go to a mining dimension, and a few more places until you’ve gathered enough stuff to reach the endgame. But unlike with Anti-Chem, there’s many more mods. Create, Thermal Expansion, Mekanism, Hexerei, Mana and Artifice are just few of the mods, which are the necessary milestones to proceed. I don’t have enough experience to tell how the gating was executed. I can only conjecture that while it can make the game a little more tedious, it would encourage the players to go through different and unfamiliar mods.

Appearance
Oh, it’s beautiful. The custom items, such as the ‘encrypted orbs’ that the player gets in the beginning have a beautiful and polished-looking sprites. The sprites for other mods were also pretty neat, since the 1.18 versions for some mods made great improvements in their mods’ sprites. The Allthemodium is a bit dismal of an addition, since the ores look too similar in it. But that isn’t too troublesome. Also, since I played during Halloween, I sometimes saw ghosts that dissipated in Sakura petals. It looked amazing.

Performance
While Antimatter Chemistry ran on 2-3 GB of RAM, this modpack runs on 8 GB at the very least. That was manageable in the beginning, but the lag spikes and stutters became increasingly unbearable. I understand that it’s a curse of modded Minecraft, which owes its existence to the way Java uses too much CPU and not enough GPU(please correct me if I’m wrong).

Conclusion
Encrypted is the bigger successor of Antimatter Chemistry, with all the pros and cons that entails. But it stands well as a separate modpack, and is worthwhile for those who love tech mods and have powerful computers.

Ultimate Alchemy is one giant puzzle, with many interlocking mods. The goal is simple - get Clay, the true test for any alchemist(ha-ha, balanced clay meme!). Diverse mods like Tinkers’ Construct, Thermal Expansion, Thaumcraft, Draconic mesh together to create a giant crafting chain for the end goal. Giving the player two infinite barrels of resources, it’s remarkably easy to automate, but at the same time pressures the player to expand their automation further. The lack of quests or advancements to guide along is a little jarring, but figuring out the steps is a part of the challenge.

Here are a few tips for players who may struggle:

• You can make more infinite barrels, autocrafters and translocators very easily! Make a chain with an infinite barrel, a bunch of autocrafters and a normal barrel at the end, connecting the entire thing with translocators. That way you can get basic metals and dusts early on.
• The smeltery is good in the beginning as a source of alloys, but it’s such a pain to automate. Use Induction Smelters when you can get them.
• You can automate Mystical Petals by creating a setup. The entire crafting chain is made of Forestry Machines, and the inputs are renewable.
• The building gadget is cheap to craft, stone and wood are infinite. This means you can make a colossal platform to house all your automation easily.
• For Botania, a bunch of endoflames with an infinite wood barrel connecting to the open crate is a good setup for mana. It’s a little slow for things like the Alfheim Portal and the Gaia Guardian summoning.

Lycanites Mobs started all the way back in Minecraft 1.6, a time when 50000 downloads was considered a big achievement for a modpack. Despite that, it owes most of its popularity and downloads to RLCraft. And for a good reason, since Lycanites exemplifies the unfair, unbalanced and downright bizarre ethos of RLCraft. Yet for all its disadvantages, it has many interesting points.

Lycanites Mobs earned its controversial reputation for good reasons. Overly powerful monsters spawn whenever the player takes any sort of action. Hell, even going to sleep will get you attacked by the Grim Reaper himself. The models are ugly and clashing with the entire style of Minecraft. It’s as if the dev thought he was modding Doom, instead of Minecraft. And the equipment in that mod makes the game swing from nightmarishly difficult to pathetically easy. The Summoning Staff alone can cheese entire dungeons’ worth of enemies, and is a favourite of every Minecraft streamer.

But a skilled modder can turn those downsides into upsides. Lycanite, thankfully, created an extensive config for each mechanic and monster. With a little knowledge of modding, it’s possible to hand-craft the spawning patterns for each monster, as well as the parts that it would drop upon death. It’s thanks to those configs, that RLCraft has such a high probability of a deadly Ent spawning when the player breaks the first tree. But it’s also possible to decrease the spawn chances and ease a player’s burden.
The monsters themselves are creative, if a little annoying. Geonachs that spawn from breaking ores are vulnerable to pickaxes, sea-dwelling Lacedons slow players and force them to sink, while the desert Crusk attacks from the underground. They all spawn in completely different environments, forcing the player to adapt their tactics depending on where they are. And when all fails, it’s satisfying to watch a Twitch streamer struggle against a horde of Imps.
Each monster even has at least one ’shiny’ variation with higher stats and better drops. This shows the dev’s sheer dedication to the mod. Players that find the low-poly style of Lycanites unpalatable can download the Lycanites Redux resource pack, which turns every mob model there into a more Minecraft-like style.

Lycanites Mobs is an old mod, the legacy of which continues to this day. Without it, RLCraft wouldn’t have had the sheer number of players rage-quitting and re-downloading it, and it wouldn’t have had the sheer number of YouTubers attempting to play it. But I would recommend you a few other modpacks, which use Lycanites Mobs arguably to a better extent.

Blood N Bones - essentially RLCraft, but old-school, all the way from 1.6.4. It’s also quite frustrating, but worth playing for those who want to understand the modding environment back then. May require downloading Java 7, as a glitch in Forge prevents newer versions of Java from working.

Fixxitt412 100 Days Mage - a very light-weight modpack that combines Ars Magica 2 and Lycanites Mobs. The mobs spawn quite often, but the early game is closer to vanilla, giving a fighting chance to the player. Fixxit412 made an interesting YouTube series about it.

Horrors of the Deep - you spawn on an ocean platform, with only a shotgun to fight against terrible creatures. Early game is a bit frustrating, but shooting down sea monsters with a shotgun feels so satisfying.

Thanks to Feed The Factory I learned to appreciate conduits and mass-crafting.

Premise
Feed The Factory’s premise is simple. No worldgen, no hunger, no pesky monsters to worry about. Only a mining drill, a questbook and a dream to build the biggest, meanest factory. The core gameplay loop is about gathering resources and feeding them to machines that create research, needed to unlock more advanced technology.

Tech
There are 5 tiers of research in total, each unlocking more advanced logistics, power generation and production technologies. You start with hoppers and minecarts, moving to conveyors and conduits. Windmills and coal burners make way for complicated petrol refinement facilities, and those are needed to unlock nuclear power. And with enough perseverance and knowledge of tech mods, it’s possible to make an ore processing chain that turns a single ore into 294 ingots. Because of the gating, you WILL have to go through each tech mod. That is the first time I actually progressed in Immersive Engineering beyond the Blast Furnace. The entire modpack is basically a giant tutorial for some of the main tech mods, but it challenges advanced players too.

Appearance
The style is gritty and technological, and the machines from various mods don’t explicitly clash with each other. I could have appreciated if the sprites of the machines were changed to correspond to each research tier, with machines for each new tier bearing an increasingly futuristic, powerful appearance. But that’s a small complaint.

Performance
Runs on 4-5 GB of RAM, perhaps even less than that. When the modpack is set in a superflat world and centered around the few key tech mods, there’s really no need to worry about performance.

Conclusion
Feed The Factory is a very well-designed modpack, perhaps one of the exemplars in how to design a tech-centered modpack. All gameplay elements not related to the tech premise are removed, and the progression is strictly linear. This allows the player to focus on exploring the tech mods, helping understand their strengths and weaknesses.

MeatballCraft's Dimensional Ascension is one wild ride of a modpack, blending the intricate machinery of Enigmatica with the bold spirit of Hexxit. And I found it only after stumbling upon some shitposts on Reddit by the mod's creator, Sainagh.

Premise
The game starts with you, a scientist, getting sucked into the Overworld right in the middle of a turf war between two monstrous factions. Your mission: explore other dimensions, take down the leaders of these warring factions, and become a god-like master of the universe. The 250-hour-long progression is packed with surprises, but I won't spoil the details for you. Suffice it to say that the mid-game planet, Sedna, is like the holy grail that every player wants but few can attain.

Early Game
The early game is not your typical Minecraft fare, with hostile mobs lurking in broad daylight and intricate crafting chains to manage. But with a little grit and a lot of help from a well-written questbook, you can get your hands on some serious power within hours of starting.

Exploration
And speaking of power, exploration is where MeatballCraft truly shines. You'll soar through a wide array of biomes, taking down evil wizards and shoggoths with shurikens, and looting one battle tower after another. But the true joys lie in the custom structures and cool dimensions that the mod's creator has peppered throughout the game. And with the Slimesling and Player Launcher tools, even covering thousands of blocks in search of the next ruined fortress is a breeze.

Technology
Of course, tech is a central focus of MeatballCraft. It's marketed as "dimensional GregTech," and it lives up to that claim with gusto. The crafting recipes quickly get complicated and interdependent, requiring you to master Thaumcraft, Astral Sorcery, EnderIO, and Thermal Expansion just to make it to the mid-game.

Visual Style
Visually, the modpack is a bit of a mishmash, drawing heavily on DivineRPG and Advent of Ascension. The cartoonish look of many of the enemies and items can clash with the aesthetics of grittier-looking mods like EnderIO, but it's a minor quibble.

Performance
Be warned: you'll need to assign at least 8 GB of RAM to the game, and exploring too far from spawn can cause lag and freezes. But with over 250 mods in the mix, including magic, tech, addons, and performance enhancers, it's a small price to pay for such a sprawling and engaging experience.

Conclusion
Overall, MeatballCraft is a labor of love by its creator, and it shows. Despite the performance issues, I found myself hooked on this modpack, and eagerly await each new update to see what new wonders await.