Yzjdriel

Scavenge is a packdev's best friend when you want to add any kind of block interaction that isn't opening a gui.

Whether it's turning items into other items, dropping items in the world, mutating blocks into other blocks, or anything in between, this tool is your go-to for adding a new mechanic to your pack.

With a built-in linter and the ability to reload on the fly, you can quickly test and implement a ton of functionality to your pack with as little as a single config file.

This review covers 1.12.2 only.

It's old, it shows its age, and it was incredibly sexy back in its heyday (and some people swear up and down that it still is): this dev tool is the definition of a silver fox.

CraftTweaker is, at its core, a recipe editor. Using it requires the use of a custom scripting language designed specifically for the mod called ZenScript, the documentation for which is fairly good (provided you know how programming languages work already).

Pros:

• out of the box, the capabilities of the system are highly expandable via the use of ZenClasses and native method access. With addons, you can edit the recipes from even more mods.
• literal decades of documentation on how to use, abuse, and expand the core functionality, most of which is collated on a single webpage (the official CrT documentation)
• mountains of example scripts to crib from in modpacks like E2E:E, ROTN, and SevTech

Cons:

• requires learning an entirely new language (ZenScript), as opposed to just using Java (which minecraft developers should already know) the way GroovyScript (the main only competitor to CrT on 1.12) does
• ZenScript has technical limitations that make doing certain things unintuitive or outright impossible: this problem cannot be fixed due to the design philosophy and technical debt of ZS itself
• significant load time cost as some things can't be hotloaded after editing files (this is a technical limitation whose blame is split between minecraft itself, the zenscript interpreter, and the jvm they both live in)

The tenth of the ten mods every pack on 1.12 should install, no questions asked.

Playing Minecraft when you have multiple monitors absolutely requires the ability to have the game be in borderless mode so you don't have to constantly Alt-Tab to get to youtube or discord or your IDE or whatever else is going on on your other monitor(s).

Vanilla didn't ship with this feature, so someone had to add a mod for it. This is that mod.

The ninth of the ten mods every pack on 1.12 should install, no questions asked.

The actual mechanics of Hunger in vanilla are needlessly obfuscated by the UI for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
This mod fixes that by - get this - fixing the UI to not do that anymore, by adding two visual tweaks to the hunger bar.

Hunger, Saturation, and Exhaustion are all integral to the hunger system and players need to be able to see them in order to be able to consciously manage their hunger values, making this mod absolutely indispensable.

The eighth of the ten mods every pack on 1.12 should install, no questions asked.

Load times in large modpacks are the bane of many developers. Anything that can reduce that pain is a godsend, and this does more than that. Dynamic model loading greatly reduces the use of PC resources, making the game run smoother and allowing other important functions to use those resources, which has cascading effects on lag reduction.

The seventh of the ten mods every pack on 1.12 should install, no questions asked.

Minecraft's crash logs are notoriously dense, especially for users new to packdev or Java in general.
The deobfuscation of those logs alone would be enough for this mod to earn this rating.

Catching common errors so you don't have to relaunch your pack, adding better lag profiling to the F3 menu, and warning about potential issues on load so you can avoid problems on top of that?
Phenomenal.

The sixth of the ten mods every pack on 1.12 should install, no questions asked.

Title is clickbait, this mod is perfection: simple, targeted tweaks that don't affect your gameplay, only your enjoyment of it.
No more frustration at placing random torches, not being able to see parts of your screen, or losing a favorite tool to bad Mending rng.

Does absolutely everything you'd want a tweak mod to do, and nothing you wouldn't want it to do is on by default.

The fifth of the ten mods every pack on 1.12 should install, no questions asked.

Making furni (the fancy-pants plural of 'furnace') and brewing faster saves your valuable time.
Crafting slabs and stairs back into their constituent blocks saves your destructive frustration.
Adding 2x2 recipes for stairs makes mineshaft stairway crafting stress-free.
Boats no longer throwing a fit when you row upstream makes waterways navigable in both directions.

The kind of mod where you won't notice it's there, but you WILL notice its absence.

The fourth of the ten mods every pack on 1.12 should install, no questions asked.

Microcrafting chains are a problem you constantly run into over the course of playing modded. This mod makes them not feel terrible by adding a few simple improvements to all crafting table (and crafting-table-adjacent) GUIs.

Gone are the days of having to manually smooth out uneven numbers of ingredients in batch crafts, manually fixing a misremembered rotation in a crafting recipe, quickly crafting stacks upon stacks of intermediate products, or clearing the grid one-by-one when you need to make a new recipe and still have leftover extra ingredients in the grid.

The third of the ten mods every pack on 1.12 should install, no questions asked.

The mechanics of the vanilla cursor in inventory GUIs leaves a lot to be desired. MouseTweaks adds several contextual functionality improvements that have become so natural to use that I literally cannot play the game without them anymore. Moving items to and from inventories and quickly making crafting recipes are so greatly improved with this mod that not having it in a pack feels like a cardinal sin.

If you've made it this long without using this mod, please remedy that immediately. It will change your life (or at least the way you approach moving items around in your inventory).