Modded Minecraft Reviews

Incredible progression and mod selection, are you an adventurer and hunter? or a redstoner and tactician? this modpack really is for everyone, they used the Scape and run Parasites mod, a mod with potential, and built a world around it, with fun quests, and progression that teaches you about what you are, or may encounter, if you like SRP and would like a more balanced experience that gets you out of your comfort zone and shows you more stuff this is for you, AND this mod is optimized incredibly well, my pc is pretty good but im running max settings like butter, if you have a lower end pc there are extensive configuration options, I recommend. (this mod also has Real good parasite, survival vibes.)

Better Than Adventure doesn’t exactly feel like beta; it’s sort of hard to feel like beta when you have the explosive launcher that lets you rocket jump across the map. It’s also not really a fully fleshed out alternate universe vision of what Minecraft could’ve been if it “stayed indie” or any other manner of equally nebulous statements. It is very much it’s own sort of thing that can’t really have it’s essence captured in a short sentence, but I think it is all the better for it and a sublime experience.

The mod meets very high standards of polish; GUIs have been spiffied up, there’s a massive selection of world gen types, Creative and Hardcore are here, there are minor texture changes across the board to mellow the harshness of Beta visuals, support for controllers, captions and localization files have been added. All of this is accompanied by a beautiful guidebook which has been massively prettied up since the last time I played, which serves a double purpose as both a list of recipes and also a sort of “catch ’em all” repository since items are partially hidden until you acquire them. This is further buoyed by the new descriptions which are fun bits of flavor text that sometimes can clue you into other uses for items but generally try not to give the whole game away so some fun surprises are left for you.

The mod also breaks what I would consider are a lot of unspoken conventions for modded Minecraft experiences in the best way possible. The four bar armor system where each material gives different resistances to different types of damage is cool in and of itself but is massively enhanced by the specific balance between all the materials. For example, Gold is the strongest generalist armor material in this mod, but is weighed down by its durability, cost, and lack of specialization; would I really be able to argue it’s strictly better than Chainmail, which lacks in every category except for combat resistance, which is probably what you’re wearing armor for? But combat resistance doesn’t apply to creepers, so making a larger piece of your general set like leggings out of Steel which has high durability, decent generalist stats and incredibly blast resistance might be good. There are so many justifications for all sorts of armor combinations here, and they don’t even have any other special properties; this depth entirely comes from the resistances and external tradeoffs of each material type.

We have macro decisions like the aforementioned armor system and the also somewhat aforementioned addition of Steel which is a cheap high durability metal that mines slower than diamond to make immediate obvious impacts on the way the game is played, but this same mentality is brought everywhere to the smaller details, like the choice to have every flower in the game be a tiny flower and then to allow you to stack flowers in the same tile to make bushier flowers as the game’s personal solution to the need for something akin to the Rose Bush. They added the Reinforced Piston, which acts akin to the old pistons mod, but they transposed the (also new) ability for pistons to break blocks against obsidian and added the feature that it processes certain blocks like Cobblestone into Gravel. You can tell you’re in a slime chunk because it spawns slime particles underground. It even managed to do something new with Ropes, a common modded item, by making it so you can both right click to break the bottom-most rope or break it normally, and in both cases the rope will go straight into your inventory rather than dropping onto the ground. These are weird solutions that other mods or modpacks might not consider, but they are what make Better than Adventure both special and also feel incredibly thought out; the mod never makes me feel like “I wish I could do X with Y” since every feature is taken full advantage of, even if the overall volume of features is kept quite constrained.

Performance is maybe the one place where the mod stumbles, even if it’s not quite the mod’s fault; I remember the mod running at like a thousand FPS on my old computer and my new one massively dipped on the same version so I think it or Beta can tend to get quirky with specific hardware choices. In the worst case scenario, it can end up being a stuttery mess even on a faster computer, but the positives are this will still function on the saddest most pathetic hardware you have because not only does it have additional optimizations over Beta but it has support for new Java versions, so you can do the funniest overkill of running it with Java 25 CompactObjectHeaders to *achieve negative ram consumption*.

I do not have an ending paragraph. Better Than Adventure is one of my all time favourite things. It’s cool. It enhances the simpler pleasures of Minecraft like building a huge ass ugly structure or strip mining for an hour. Play it.

Disclaimer: As of writing, the latest version of the modpack is is 1.26.1. The following review is for version 1.15.1.

FTB’s take on AllTheMods. Kitchen sink pack so lots of options. Balance is… alright but there are many ways to trivialize combat and exploration early on if you so choose. Completion of the pack requires you to dabble in each of the major tech/magic mods and automation is heavily encouraged, though Productive Bees and Mystical Agriculture especially seem to massively overshadow almost every other form of resource gathering.

Modern Industrialization (watered-down GregTech) is uncharacteristically difficult and craft-heavy compared to everything else in the pack and pushes you to optimize AE2, resource gathering, and logistics. It’s possible to complete the MI quest trees with mostly manual crafting and quest rewards, but it is painful.

There are only a handful of custom mobs/bosses, and none are remotely threatening or challenging when considering Apotheosis upgrades.

Aside from those few pain points, there is a lot of variety in the pack and the quest book seems fairly fleshed out as well.

Fun to play with friends since everyone can find something they’re interested in, but can also be daunting and instill decision paralysis. Not as friendly towards newer or more casual players, especially those with little to no modding experience.

Disclaimer: Mayview seems similar to BCG+ Cobblemon but I never played that pack, only this one. Also, this pack is a WORK IN PROGRESS and is being actively updated so what I say here will probably be outdated soon.

The core themes are Cobblemon and Stardew Valley. For the former, AllTheMons, TMs/TRs, etc. are in the pack. For the latter, villager trades are now based on “Mayview coins”, which you get by selling items in a selling bin block a la Stardew Valley. You can use said coins in a rotating Daily Shop to get hats, Create items, spawn eggs, etc. There’s also a good variety of crops and foods expansions, as well as many of the Let’s Do! mods that add side content like winemaking and baking.

Gear progression is the same as standard Minecraft for the most part, but you can get a bit stronger in the endgame with the existence of Charms, unique swords (SimplySwords), and Create: Enchantment Industry shenanigans. Nothing crazy though, and there are no difficult bosses or mobs added that require any level of optimization.

The Cobblemon aspect is fun but standard. Levels, EVs, and IVs can all be automated and optimized. Flying is fun. Shiny and rare hunting is fine but relies heavily on enchanted golden apples (which are not sustainable). I would really like to see a Pokenav or similar added to better diagnose spawn conditions without the need for admin perms on a server, and also to better fit the pack’s theme.

Storage and logistics rely heavily on Sophisticated Backpacks. Create is also there for some automation but it lacks the addons that let you make trains, planes, or anything more advanced. Sadly AE2 is harshly neutered in this version, rendering it a total waste of time when backpacks exist.

Performance is alright. It can get laggy when lots of pokemon spawn or when loading new chunks, etc. Create especially is a huge contributor towards server and FPS lag. I would recommend allocating at least 8 GB RAM to the server and checking that it’s correct, since we had problems with the amount resetting and being difficult to configure. There also exists a gnarly bug with one of the selling bins, likely the Redstone Selling Bin, that effectively turns it into a chunk ban. The only way to fix this without resetting the world is getting an admin to run /fill to destroy the bin(s).

Overall the pack is fun but is carried by its individual mods. It seems thematically scattered and it could really focus more on the Cobblemon/Stardew Valley theme; there are no good natural Cobblemon spawns, gyms, or NPCs, and the variety of items you can sell in selling bins is extremely limited. It needs polish to feel coherent. The art direction is great though.

Future versions aim to re-add some AE2 functionality and, importantly, add quests.

While it is evident that a lot of effort went into this modpack to get everything to function, the early-mid game feels like it is hard for the sake of being hard. Additionally, the difficulty is not due to the player’s lack of skill, but rather because they are thrown into a world where there are too many enemies that cannot be taken down without higher-level gear and are sometimes unavoidable once you even see they are there. If this modpack were released today, I doubt it would gain much more traction than any of the other ultra-hard “kitchen sink” style modpacks. I would not recommend this pack for any reason other than nostalgia.

There’s one thing wrong with it and it’s the lack of documentation for 1.21, but ProbeJS (an addon) and the people on the Discord server help alot. I use it for like all of the things I make. Great mod!

The sixth best thing to happen to 1.12.2, very nice

Really fun gameplay with a smooth, nostalgic flow that never feels boring at first. The theme is well executed and genuinely feels like a lost Minecraft update done right, though after about 5 hours the gameplay started to feel a bit repetitive.

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.