smart-fella

All of Fabric 3 is in a massively weird spot where it was made on a version before Fabric got a lot of the more interesting mods available but it was also one of the packs in this series to get the longest term support, so it has become noticeably overcooked over time? A series of weirdly half baked mod integrations like funneling all early game tech through the Modern Industrialization Forge Hammer or removing random "unneeded" features like the AE2 Quartz Grindstone compounds with mods added long after most people had played the pack that don't mesh together at all like Nourish making Sandwichable irrelevant or Croptosis fertilized dirts not being compatible with any modded crop not from Croptopia. There are quests now but it's simply split by mod and most of these dont have descriptions and you can't access the crafting recipes through the quests menu in this modpack so it's just a weirdly stilted checklist that isn't even close to being thorough.

One star might be rather harsh but I have no idea why you'd play this now considering how it feels like the pure simplicity you might've picked this modpack for from watching playthroughs like ChosenArchitect's has been wrung out of it through a series of increasingly poor decisions, some of which are not the natural result of it being a kitchen sink pack but are from active tinkering on the part of the modpack developers.

(completed at 17-ish hours? had to make a new world because of the update) Reminiscence is a fantastically put together experience with some of the best thought out vanilla minus reworks in a pack I've seen. Even after having a massive update though, I think it still has a little bit further to go until everything really fits together.

Thematically, I think the modpack fits well more with the description of "beta with a bunch of mods installed" than any other goal or genuine appeal to some sort of pure beta experience; where Better Than Adventure isn't trying to be Beta because it wants to experiment with some un-betalike mechanics, Reminiscence isn't trying to be beta because it has a clear and extended progression line combined with a bunch of weird stuff that's slightly out of place like funny looking mobs and ores. Basically, imagine the vibe you get when you install DrZharks Mo Creatures, with the mob models fitting in slightly better. As you can tell by the rating and this review's vibe though, I think this goal works and this pack works fundamentally.

Big reworks; While foods still heal instantly as in beta, the food system still plays a lot differently. Farmer's Delight is in the pack, and stackable foods are in the pack, but big meats don't stack and a massive amount of ingredient type items while stackable are almost universally nerfed to only healing half a heart. While nothing is technically stopping you from playing it like Beta and going with Cooked Porkchop, you will definitely want to cook as the prepared meals from Farmer's Delight heal a lot and stack well. The armor system hasn't received a BTA style total makeover, but sets now have effects, either having small stackable per piece bonuses like Copper's mining speed, bonuses that only come with a full set like Meteorite's double jump, and bonuses that are unique to each piece of the set like Silver pieces having various status immunities. This basically renders every player preference towards armor sets viable in some way; there are reasons to be going with mixed armors, standard full sets of the highest tier, or quirky off meta armors with special set bonuses. I think the only real obstacle to this system as is is that acquiring some of these armor sets is slightly too difficult to be worth it so your choices will be more limited in practice.

I think the main issue I had here is that the progression line breaks down halfway and as what feels like a pretty progression heavy modpack it doesn't feel great to get stuck on. First, the oversights with the End Remastered eyes are baffling since all but one of these eyes have been specifically poured over and had their crafting recipes or obtainment methods tweaked, so I don't know how the Exotic Eye (there are no coral reefs to get the corals required) or the Guardian Eye (beta oceans are too small for ocean monuments to spawn; you can still obtain prismarine because guardians are now random ocean spawns ) got in here. And the remaining eyes are still very negatively affected by the beta generation and lack of Cartographer maps making their related biomes or structures very hard to find depending on your luck. There are no fun shortcuts here to make traversal fun; the Aether moas are End gated, and there's another issue with traversal I'll mention in the performance section. Second, the Aether is fun and cool, but it makes the largely unmodified Nether stick out like a sore thumb in comparison. There's no new ores except for Silver which also spawns in the overworld and the only other things to look out for are the Quark mobs and the fact that it's now double height (for which you have no tools to navigate). I don't think it works sitting next to the Aether in terms of progression and I wish there was a little more to do there. Finally, as more of a nitpick, the Dragon fight has a few weird secondary attacks like the Dive (deals massive damage if it the dragon himself hits you directly) and the Lasers (I don't even know how those work) that deal unreasonably outsized damage and will probably kill you without warning several times that put a massive damper on what is otherwise the best dragon fight I've seen.

I also think the modpack just needs maybe a hundred more custom EMI description entries and other assorted guides. Most ores are described, but not all ores. Lots of weird mod specific mechanics go unexplained and its rough when something like an eye recipe requires a Quark stone. The pack will entirely rename and retexture something and still not have a description for what it does. The modpack is really dark which is true to beta but the standard brightness slider is simply non-functional and hasn't been replaced with a gamma slider like BTA did which means you need to figure out that you have to go to a specific section of the Nostalgia Tweaks config to brighten stuff up. This pack had me googling a surprising amount which I really wish was not an issue here.

Finally, performance is almost there. It was kind of there in the 1.5.0 pre-release that I installed and started playing on (before 2.0.0 released literally the day after without me noticing), with fast load times, Crucial 2 level memory consumption and high framerates. The load times are drastically worse, the memory consumption is slightly higher, and the framerates are still about the same, but the main issue which may or may not have been in the pre-release is that the pack has a pretty severe memory leak problem: base memory consumption doesn't really matter when frequent dimension hopping or an hour of straight traversal can force a restart. I hope this can be fixed but I don't even know why this happens; this seems to be plaguing 1.20.1 packs in general so it might be unavoidable.

Basically, in conclusion, as notes for the developer; add something else to the Nether, go back over the eyes, add ten million EMI descriptions, fix the terminal memory leak that's highly contagious and is spreading throughout 1.20 modding like a virus. For anyone else reading, if you're not a modpack developer, these might seem simple enough, but it is genuinely kinda hard. I have faith in the developer though cause I had like a bunch of things to complain about from the 1.5.0 pre-release that just magically disappeared when I upgraded so I trust he can do some miracle worker shit and cook insanely hard. Also the end is really cool I didn't have anywhere else to mention it but it's really cool

(completed, 43h) Past the pretty distinct but extremely short early game, Mechanical Mastery will feel like a lot of other skyblock packs of it's time, if more compressed. ProjectE is used on a very surface level where maximizing EMC production isn't actually important for anything since nothing is actually expensive enough and the only other things to spend your EMC on are the vanilla wood types and deepslate. The modpack isn't hard enough to actually "put players tech mod knowledge put to the test" (lightly paraphrased from the modpack page) but it's also not explanatory enough to be that great for beginners. Despite only having 150~ mods the mod bloat is insane ranging from IE existing just for thirty gameplay minutes of coke/steel to the extremely unwelcome inclusion of mandatory Industrial Foregoing, in addition to maybe thirty other mods I didn't notice were in the pack until I saw them randomly pop up in JEI (only god knows why computercraft is here). This (or more likely one specific shitty or poorly configured mod) has a deleterious effect on load times which is especially aggravating when you eat a crash to something as random like accidentally putting the Ultimate Singularity back into the extended crafting table.

Beyond these, the refined mixture recipe double conflict, a low quality quest tree, and important configurations not being made by default such as FTB Chunks fake player chunkloading, I still had a decent amount of fun. It's nice to skip the resource gathering sometimes to just make funky resource lines and even if ProjectE wasn't explored and I had to google all of its functionality it was still a cool mod to mess around with for the first time. The pack just doesn't stand out as much from other skyblock packs of the time as you might otherwise think it would, or at the very least the most unique parts of the experience are mostly limited to the very short earlygame.

Prodigium Reforged is an RPG modpack. It has many of the prototypical follies of RPG modpacks such as pretty abysmal performance and random enemies spawning directly on top of you that instakill you, but the rest of the pack is so surprisingly refined that none of that really ended up getting to me? The pack has strong cross mod integration with its custom content, a surprisingly coherent aesthetic and a very clean progression line that only really falters at the points where the pack is notably and explicitly unfinished. It's a pretty high effort project from a solo developer that's definitely not Terraria, but does inject some of the better ideas that game had into making this project a reality.

The pack is more liberal in its use of gamestages to sequester resource progression than Terraria is (or at least, relative to its length) and I think that's important to the appeal of the pack as it helps to balance and space out mining sessions especially where Terraria has additional things that Minecraft doesn't to space out its content in other ways like seperate underground biomes. Once dimensions are introduced into the mix, they are introduced in very small number; the only additional dimension here is the Aether, and certain pieces of content have been moved from the Overworld to the Aether to bulk it up. The pack is very focused in its execution, and the main quest line is linear; just a straight shot of bosses. Due to the mods themselves, not all of these bosses are winners, although the worst ones are definitely the Ender Dragon (due to the additions being kind of buggy) and the Elder Guardian (due to YUNG's Better Ocean Monuments both not having a good layout for the fight and whatever mod disables all surrounding mining when the Elder Guardians are alive going poorly when the structure spawns inside the floor). They don't all have to be winners though; the ones that are nice make up for the weaker fights.

I can only really dot down issues respective to the modpack and not the mods in bullet point format, so in no particular order; I wish there was some way to get recall potions outside of doing quests, I wish the custom town NPCs took more precedence, I wish SOL Carrot wasn't configured to have low thresholds with on death loss so if you die and don't change that config setting you have to spend ten minutes sprint jumping around so you can get your hearts back (a high threshold would encourage actually engaging with the food mods), and I wish the End wasn't so anemic although that will hopefully be remedied in future versions.

I noted the performance earlier; you're not going to run into any weird server tick issues, but your framerate will absolutely shit itself sometimes; most frequently in the overworld where you can dip from a stable 220 to a stuttery 40-50 in nighttime combat, structures dipping into the twenties with the lowest number I saw being 9 fps during Nether traversal. From the sounds of it, this is better than the other modern RPG modpacks though, which would just straight up get a 1/5 from me, but I'm comparing the modpack to all other modpacks. In terms of bugs, I also had to use commands sometimes to compensate for stuff like the Ender Dragon fucking off to Narnia (yeah that fight is really broken). For ram usage, I would recommend allocating a minimum of 4.5GB in singleplayer if you're using Java 25 and UseCompactObjectHeaders.

Funny note as I'm typing this part of the review; I just realized I had installed the modpack basically right before a major update came out and didnt update it when I started playing, so I'm a little behind, but I doubt it would've changed my rating or anything I said in the review after quickly going through the changelogs and default config files (i.e the issue I have with SOL Carrot on death loss is unchanged although there's now a 4 hunger minimum for any food item to count which wouldn't be my first choice for an adjustment here). Just know, it seems to be a big rework of existing systems, and the modpack might have more cool things in it now. If you have any interest in trying an RPG modpack for your next playthrough, you should play it.

Engineer's Life 2 is a semi-expert pack with a large focus on less popular mods or mods that often get crowded out by the competition, especially Immersive Engineering which is arguably the core of the pack. There's a strong highly custom early game, a lot of fun and weird mods to play around with, and then you get dumped into the various quest trees which are less goals and more just guidance; as far as I can tell there's no end game here, you just explore the mods. And at the point where I realized a significant portion of my following playthrough would mostly just be doing seemingly untampered Immersive Engineering stuff, I gave up? Funnily enough, I looked online and saw a playthrough series from Mischief of Mice where he dropped the pack at the same point.

I think the choice to make this more of a semi-expert pack instead of a full expert pack was the inherent folly; when you imagine something like a pack called "Engineer's Life", you can probably imagine a lot of complicated stuff to put together basic machines, and for the early game at least it captures that essence with making you smoke your early clay parts on a campfire to put together a blast furnace to get ingots, but then it kind of just ends, and you're just playing untouched Modded Minecraft. I'm not really feeling immersed in the experience anymore, and the mod selection present doesn't give you the more immediately available factory building capabilities to satisfy automation nuts; Immersive Engineering is a slow burn, but there's nothing here left to fill the gap.

I think the weird mod selection featuring stuff like Tetra, Project MMO, Vanilla Food Pantry and Serene Seasons adds a big novelty factor, but you're going to potentially run into issues with just how many things this pack wants to "overhaul". For example, I wanted to get into Productive Bees, and silk touch is really annoying to get because Tetra, so I wanted to make an advanced hive to counteract the need for that. Unfortunately, you can't craft a regular campfire; you have to throw stuff on the ground and firestart it TFC style. That's fine, I'll craft a soul campfire which still has a recipe somehow, except 700 blocks in any direction from 0,0 in my nether was an endless BYG green forest sludge (pictured below) with no soul sand in sight, which is also apparently a common issue. Funnily enough the most frequent sources of frustration or confusion were the more popular mods or mods from more popular creators, like the unintuitiveness of YUNG's Better Portals (note; you can pick up the reclaimers. do not be me or the people on reddit who also suffered this and warp back to the overworld 3000 blocks away from spawn) , Quark Deepslate being here alongside Caves and Cliffs Deepslate for some reason, or this version of Tetra being quite old so you can't see a lot of important info like your tool's stability level.

RAM usage is initially excellent but the pack seems to leak a little bit and you will run into a lot of stutters (this pack is best run on Java 17 which will fix long GC pauses and some of the stuttering).

This pack is a 3 out of 5 mostly because I was genuinely enjoying myself up until the point where I decided to stop playing, which is a strong point in favour of the pack even if you personally prefer something that feels worth taking to the end. The rest of the modpack doesn't really seem to be what I was hoping for, though.

Reclamation is a skyblock-esque magic-heavy modpack. It's not skyblock, but it's essentially the world of Regrowth (which I don't remember enough about to make further comparisons to), so you won't be doing any resource gathering after early game. The problem is I'm not sure exactly where I'm supposed to extract enjoyment from this modpack.

It is a heavy manual pack that feels like it wants you to do some side content to distract from the main progression but your access to the full capabilities of any given mod is massively restricted by the progression walls so you can't explore the mods. I can't start restoring grass to the world on a meaningful scale as soon as I hit chapter 3 because dirt is pretty expensive. I don't feel like I can build because the most I can do to expand my palette right now is to mine only for building blocks and not ore (or make a limestone farm), so my palette is just stone derivatives and a few wood types of which I also cannot effectively farm. I cannot make my life in certain mods easier with the use of other mods; for example, I wanted to maybe make a rudimentary Create elevator to ferry myself between my base and the required Embers Ember Core that you have to place on bedrock, but I don't even have redstone yet even after going down the branch of the quest tree that I expected to get me redstone. So the only thing I really absolutely can do is throw myself at quest progression, which consists of ferrying stuff between various magic multiblocks. Gathering metals is drawn out, certain things are quite expensive early on, and automation is very light in the worst way possible.

The way that Chapter 3 functions makes it feel like extended early game. I would not suggest bringing newbies along for the ride, which is something I did (decision slightly influenced by the description of the modpack), because everybody needs to have a grasp on what everything is doing, and we are dealing with a selection of mods that can already be confusing to experienced players. The presence of automation can be nice in division of labor scenarios because you can abstract things; here, you are not going to have that luxury for a while. The lack of exploration means I can't send my army of newbies out to explore for me. And again, the potential side content currently accessible to me personally is already chafing, so I can't assign that to anyone either.

Other than that, the modpack is shockingly ram heavy considering its mod count and scope, performance is okay, but I ran into a number of grating graphical issues like the Botania Runic Altar not showing its gui until it has a complete recipe, and Create machines not visually updating properly with changing power states. Since this was a server context, I also ate just a considerable amount of Rejecting UseItemOnPacket errors that I don't understand why this pack is more prone to than others.

This very much feels like a case of "this isn't for me" but in a way that I can't explain or justify why someone else might enjoy this.

I've never played a previous version of Slightly Flavoured (or as it was known, Slightly Vanilla Flavoured), but what I have played is an official variation of the modpack called Slightly Cinnamon Flavoured. Slightly Cinnamon Flavoured took the base of Slightly Vanilla Flavoured and added a few minor tech mods like Immersive Engineering and Botania. Didn't actually engage with anything SCF specifically added other than Botania all that much, but I liked the pack well enough. It was one of the earlier packs to go in on Tetra, providing a decent enough Tetra experience as well as unique features like seasons and a wall jumping mod that occassionally came in clutch. It was a very light pack, coming in at only 130 mods, and was a bit lacking in QOL because of that, but it was fine enough.

Fast forward to now where I was excited to see how the latest standard version of the main pack would fare. Unfortunately, the things that I thought were good about SCF are not present and everything bad about the pack design remains in addition to brand new problems that I would've never envisioned.

The pack is massive now, coming in at over 300 mods, and it weighs like that too; even on a low render distance with Distant Horizons removed and Java 25 CompactObjectHeaders this pack wants at least 5GB of alloc. It performs excellently, though its not entirely stable; I ate a LegacyRandomSource crash like five minutes in.

Even if the performance hasn't suffered for it, this obscene mod dump causes a lot of other issues especially considering it's a largely unconfigured pack. One example is mods with entirely conflicting goals; there's a mod that adds random RPG modifiers to crafted armor and tools, but it seems to only do it for vanilla armor and tools, and if you turn your tool into a Tetra tool the modifier will go away. It also likes to expose untranslated strings for its modifiers. I don't think this adds to the modpack, and I don't know why it's here if it messes with some of the core appeals of the modpack, being the wide variety of modded armors and Tetra tools you're likely to want to pal around with.

We are also running into overlapping mods. We have multiple tetra addons adding multiple variations of the same material, two mods that add Silver where the Galosphere recipes aren't unified and won't take Caverns and Chasms silver. Quark and Every Compat means if you try to use a log on a Mechanical Saw it's going to block cut and you're going to get a hollow log instead if you don't have a filter, while many other wood related recipes are not compatible with Create block cutting.

The mod selection itself gets a little funky; for example, AE2 seems to have migrated from SCF into the main pack for nebulous reasons considering the lack of most anything you'd need AE2 specifically for. There are a lot of single purpose mods I'd probably never be able to track down unless I meticulously scrolled through the very stuffed advancements. There's a mod here to make you take damage when you punch fire which is not appreciated. For some reason every time I get an advancement the modpack takes a screenshot in the background which I didn't really ask for?

This is not an exhaustive list of nitpicks, and nitpicks they are, but beyond the nitpicks, I just don't really see the results of this massive modlist? It doesn't feel noticeably richer than a pack like SCF was; we have two dimension mods which are both pretty old (Aether and Twilight Forest), the Nether is pretty much just BOP nether with some structures, and the most prominent addition is a new combat focused magic mod which takes a while to get going. We are still massively lacking in certain QOL mods like Appleskin, Fast Leaf Decay, or something like Carry On. It is a shockingly meager showing for a modpack which, again, has over 300 mods in it and the RAM consumption to compensate.

It is at the bare minimum a functional modpack; it hasn't crashed since that initial crash so I'm going to say that was a fluke, and it runs really really smoothly in spite of its resource consumption, but the rest of the actual content in the pack is a really disappointing devolution when I know I've seen better from this pack dev.

Welcome to Antimatter Chemistry! Here's a questbook where we'll railroad you into doing a linear series of extremely specific not necessarily required things but not tell you about anything else. Don't worry, there's some really good stuff waiting for you at the end of all of this after I drag you by the scruff through vanilla nether, and then the cave dimension, and then vanilla Atum, interspersed with fun quests like making a fishing rod and then telling you to not use the fishing rod. Were you expecting to do something tech related? Don't worry, you will, maybe a dozen hours from now. While you wait for other functional machines to use, have a pink generator. Trying to fuel this is definitely a good use of your time. What do you mean you dont want to go into the vanilla cave dimension to gather ore blocks of ores you already had a bunch of? We love meaningful quest rewards so here's a bunch of useful things and also 8 pieces of bacon that are inferior to the three stacks of cooked potatoes you're probably carrying around. Don't worry, you can go do something else, you certainly don't have to worry about things like end of chapter timewalls and gamestages to pressure you to not take your time.

I think I'm probably just going to go and try to get my alchemistry fill somewhere else.

Break Out is an immaculately designed beginner xblock experience; it's short, it's simple enough that you are never going to get lost while allowing you to get to the goal in your own way, every mod is thoroughly well explained through the quest book. It definitely falls into some modded stereotypes, but that's for the better of the goal of the pack in my opinion, and it successfully balances having a traditional modpack mod flow while still being it's own thing.

If there's anything I noticed on this replay, it's that there's generally not a lot to do sometimes; it's very much pure progression and that progression is relatively simple, which is what helped make it the first modpack I beat all those years ago, but you're likely to get timewalled by Botania or something unless you have full recollection of the progression flow, and if you are not new to modded, it might become a little bit of a bore. I think that's the main reason I didn't put this up at 5 stars; not to make it sound like it was an insufferable replay, since everything bad about the pack is absolutely assuaged by the runtime and the other freedoms it allows to you.

Other notes;

• It's very optimized. The optimization mods are maybe a little bit aggressive by today's standards, but the rock bottom resource utilization here is gonna mulch any newer pack.

Spectral Creation is a small modpack consisting of Create, Spectrum, and a handful of tiny content mods, performance mods and QOL mods. Beyond that, there is a small custom guidebook that's kind of rough to use due to poorly formatted entries. The few mods in the pack are surprisingly buggy, like Scout and ExtendedDrawersAddon (all related bugs to which are fixed in the 1.21.1 version). It can be a genuine bother, and why I would say this is probably not the ideal way to experience Spectrum, much less Create, and also probably not that suitable for building your own Spectrum focused pack off of.