Modded Minecraft Reviews

I’ve always thought expert modpacks were interesting, but Compression is my first time playing one. I think the creators have done an amazing job of enhancing the player experience, like starting off with additional speed and jump height, and making it easy to find different biomes. This really lets you focus on the automation aspect, rather than having to constantly put that on hold to go find specific resources.

This pack has a strong sense of identity, immediately establishing the lore of the world and hinting at hidden secrets. I’m excited to see how this develops as the pack updates.

My favorite thing though is that a lot of time and attention is put into all of the manufacturing processes. As someone very interested in chemistry, but with no real education beyond an AA degree, I’m learning a lot just by googling some of the items and reading up on how these materials are made IRL.

I’m loving following along with the development of the pack, and I’m excited to learn some new mods as they get implemented into the progression.

(First review lol)

Beautiful seaside cliffs (sure, randomness is involved but I like them; and if they randomly turn out ugly, so what).

Seaside caves. underground lava rivers, tall mountains.

It’s compatible with many other worldgen mods but you can use it alone (I often do) to get a nice terrain in a strict vanilla+ pack

You come to a chest (with selected hotbar slot empty and offhand slot empty), you pick up the chest/furnace/whatever, carry it while it’s visibly in your hands and then you drop it where you want it.

Simple and natural. The best kind of mod.

If you want some tech in your pack but don’t want pipes and wires – this is it. A perfect fit into unthemed or magic-themed pack.

It’s not vanilla-plus with all magical stuff, and it’s not for everyone… but for a good reason – Botania will challenge your planning skills, engineering sense and intelligence.

Maybe you don’t want tech mods but tree farms are so helpful – Botania has you covered. Farms and small contraptions are doable and if you don’t know what you’re looking at – it looks like pretty flowers and some particles doing things around them.

A perfect backpack for those who want more inventory space but not unlimited space. You can’t have multiple backpacks on you (as most lower-quality backpacks allow), thus it doesn’t invalidate shulker boxes and the need to go to the end.

Extras include pickpocketing the wandering trader (can be turned off, i turn it off) and some skins for backpack (cosmetic, can be turned off, too).

Number of rows is configurable. You want three more rows in inventory, or six? Fine. but no multiple backpacks or one-backpack-inside-another or nonsense like that.

When you get home you right-click the shelf (added by this mod) and your backpack becomes a container block which a hopper empties; meanwhile you grab a fishing backpack or a diving backpack from another shelf and do something else.

You start on a floating island a few blocks wide. Use of the wine making mod Rustic, and a couple of others, allows you to slowly expand this island. As you do so, the story will lead you through a number of magic mods (including Wizardry, Arcane Archives, Embers, Roots, Thaumcraft and Astral Sorcery) and some of 1.12’s best dimension mods (the Betweenlands, the Aether and the underrated Misty World). It culminates in a fight with Botania’s Gaia Guardian, and the modpack’s final act was never finished – it was made by the same creator who made the also unfinished (yet fantastic) Regrowth.

All the same, what is there is well-done, and it’s honestly worth experiencing just for the Misty World, which is a very different, very real feeling dimension mod. Also just building a wizard tower on a magical floating sky island is a real vibe, and there are a lot of beautiful blocks in this pack.

If you like magic mods, and you want to try a skyblock, this is a solid place to start.

This one was very competently done, with a skeleton story centred around upgrading “the World Engine”. In practice that means working through different mods to create the necessary upgrades, and then watching the World Engine build itself in cutscenes.

**Exploration**

The world is made entirely of stone, so it’s not one for sightseers. As you dig further out in the stoneblock world, you’ll reach other dimensions. Teleportation mods make this less painful than it sounds, although some midgame quests require a lot of digging to find dungeons buried in the outer rings – there were slightly too many of those for my tastes.

The quest dungeons themselves are very well done, each centering around one mod in particular – e.g. Create, or Portal Gun. They often call on platforming abilities, and seemed of the perfect length.

Other more generic dungeons exist in each ring. These tend to be very rich on loot in the inner rings (the Nether dungeons in particular) and very loot poor beyond that.

**The mod offering**

There are a lot of mods in this pack, although quests do not force you through these. Many mods seem to be here to provide options – there are several storage mods, for example, and you’ll only ever need one.

Particular focus is given to Oritech and Draconic Evolution, especially in the late game, although other technology focused mods include Industrial Foregoing, Mekanism, Create and Immersive Engineering. The magic mods in the pack (Occultism, Psi, Ars Nouveau, Malum and Iron’s Spellbooks) are barely touched, although progression along Apotheosis’ enchanting path is a core part of progression.

Resource generation is done firstly through villagers, and then through specialised cows and chickens – meaning that you’ll never be short of resources. Although you may at times be short of the right chicken.

**Pacing**

Cataclysm and Twilight Forest bosses are in the pack. Some of the Cataclysm bosses appear first, and are much harder than the Twilight ones. The pacing is otherwise good, although the very late game really amps up the resource requirements (a collection of chickens is practically essential by this point). I did get bogged down with Industrial Foregoing’s laser fluid drill, which gathers resources essential for progression incredibly slowly. It might be that there was a way to speed this up that I missed (that wasn’t just craft two dozen identical complex machines), but it did mark the point at which I burned out, just before the end of the final act.

**Summary**

A world of stone might not be for everyone, but I would still personally recommend the first half of the pack. The quest dungeons are well put together, the generic dungeons are very rewarding, and progression flies along. Seeing the World Engine upgrade is a satisfying conclusion to each questline. The later half of the pack is more for the factory-minded, requiring a command of an array of tech mods, with magic by that point having been thoroughly sidelined. That half – while not for me – was nonetheless very well done, and there’s a lot of joy to be found there by those with that kind of head.

Horrible beyond compare. Not even joking. Play anything else.

Techopolis 3 feels like a deliberate return to classic Minecraft modpacks, just updated with the advantages of modern 1.21 Minecraft. You get smoother performance through Sodium and Java 21, and AE2 benefits from its newer features. Most performance mods still need to be added manually, but the base experience runs well.

A Modern Pack With an Old-School Feel

The “old” feeling mainly comes from the absence of Create. Instead, the pack leans heavily on Mekanism and its own custom multiblocks for almost all processing, which also means that nearly every recipe is changed. The amount of intermediate materials you need naturally pushes you toward building real automation setups instead of relying on early ME autocrafting. The progression is very tier-based—similar to GregTech—where the strongest automation tools don’t appear until far into the pack with Hellish Technium. The AE2 grind exists, but Tom’s Simple Storage makes the early-to-mid game much more manageable.

Weak Points

The pack doesn’t have many major flaws, but a few frustrations stand out.

Thermal Evaporation Plants are used far too often, and you end up constructing them repeatedly, which gets tedious. A larger multiblock that could output around 100 B/t of hot water would solve a lot of this annoyance, since the demand for hot water becomes huge.

The endgame multiblocks are another weak spot. Unlike the impressive, detailed endgame machines you see in something like GTNH, the Techopolis 3 late-game multiblocks look very simple—basically larger versions of the Technium Compressor or the final Technium machine. They function fine, but visually they’re not very exciting.

My Playthrough Experience

I played through the pack on the official server with one friend, which meant I only had nine force-loaded chunks available. That forced me to build compactly, but it wasn’t as restrictive as expected. With careful planning, it’s possible to fit an entire late-game base into a vertical layout that stays within the chunk-loading limit.

Overall

Techopolis 3 is a strong, progression-driven modpack that successfully blends old-school structure with modern Minecraft performance and quality-of-life features. It has a few rough edges, especially with repetitive multiblocks and underwhelming endgame visuals, but the core gameplay loop is engaging, challenging, and rewarding for players who enjoy structured automation-focused progression.