Modded Minecraft Reviews

*I have played the 1.12 version the most, that said this review will also take into account newly-added improvements and 1.16 exclusive content*

#What is it ?

Atum II is a mod centered around an arid and dangerous war-torn desertic dimension;

It has a nice foggy desert vibe to it as if the sand itself was blurring your vision and has quite detailled nature/structures at times, making it probably one of the most detailled desert dimension mod out there. It contains some amount of lore too I guess.

#What does it offer ?

Sandy lands with **alternative ways** for getting your hands on **vanilla** items and features (such as how brewing ingredients are still available within the dimension but are now different items, or how dyes can now only be obtained by using a ||quern|| , among other stuff etc.).

**Challenge** through swarms of enemies appearing both at night with undeads as well as during the day with warriors and bandits, with the **one dungeon** added by the mod which comes with mazes, traps and fights, and the need to look for food as it tends to be **scarce** .

It is also a quite decent-looking dimension for being desert one, as most of deserts even in plenty of video games tend to feel lacking in terms of aesthetics, while this one with its constant yellowish fog, dead trees, villages and building blocks has enough going for it to be more interesting than most.

In terms of **flaws** :

The enemies feel a bit **generic** in terms of AI, as they mostly come up to you and hit you, with little to no new mechanics with the exception of the dimension’s **boss** ||giving you a status effect depending on its related deity|| , the assassin ||poisoning you on every hit|| or the **mob infighting** going in between the dead and the living. In fact I would go as far as to say the gameplay provided with the 1.12 version’s boss is **more interesting** within the **context** of the structure it spawns in ( ||it not taking any knockback and attacking in melee forces you to sort of attack and run while avoiding the traps located in previous rooms, which is more interesting in my opinion than just having to block its projectiles with your shield|| ). *I am not going to talk about the unused second boss as it is unused and not that interesting*

The Dimension could have been more interesting in terms of **looks** (even though I know making a desert interesting is an hard task), and while it has **several biomes** they sometimes feel a bit **repetitive** .

I find it also a bit **lacking** in terms of **sound design** , as it mostly resorts to using vanilla sound effects, with also a lack of custom made music (regular overworld music plays inside the dimension), and there is not even something like a desert wind or ambience of some kind to follow you on your journey.

#In conclusion

While not as good as other mods out there, it not having many issues in terms of performance in its 1.12 version makes it an interesting mod to be expanded on by modpacks (like adding custom structures with reccurent complex, or new mobs from other mods to spawn there using multimob or craftweaker’s spawntabletweaker addon).

It ends up as a decent mod, which is good enough tutorial-wise as the original curseforge mod page gives you enough information about what the mod adds in its latest version (And the custom crafting related to the mod’s new workstations are fully compatible with JEI), but some information might be missing from that. For example ||I don’t recall the mod telling you in any way how to get the boss to spawn, you basically have to look up a tutorial for that||

A shame it is now discontinued, due to this some better desert dimension mod or revamp of this one might be made one day, always be on the lookout for this kind of thing.

*It is of note that dying in this dimension also respawns you inside the dimension itself in 1.12 even if you don’t put a bed down, making it a good dimension to exile and banish people to (making an exit portal from within the dimension is also made harder by the fact that the surface of most biomes is too hot to keep water in its liquid state) ; take notes modded server dwellers* !

From my time played (Around 19 hours) Caramel seems to strike a nearly perfect balance between the nostalgic charm of vanilla gameplay and the depth of a well curated modpack. It keeps the familiar feel of Minecraft alive while adding just enough new mechanics, biomes, and progression to make the world feel alive again. And surprisingly, nothing feels out of place and everything blends really naturally with the base game. Performance is solid, stability is excellent, and the mod selection feels intentional rather than overwhelming like other “Vanilla+ Modpacks”. If you’ve ever wanted a true “vanilla, but better” modpack Caramel nails that vision nearly perfectly.

One of the few mods that is both massive and high-quality the entire way. Amazing art style, massive structures that consistently provide great sights. I can’t give 4.9 stars, but some small problems:

– after spending 50 hours, you start to see the same structures again and raiding gets repetitive

– ai is sometimes funky

– you need a pretty powerful computer to run this

Positives:

– Very fun tech research tree

– Many items and tech blocks work with other mods

– tech is intuitive and accessible

– consistent art style

– great community and devs that listen to feedback

No other modpack does automation like GTNH, the way that it combines the progression of gregtech and other mods makes for a kind of progression that I’ve never seen before. The difficulty, while extreme, creates interesting automation challenges rather than being tedious.

#Initial Thoughts (before gameplay)

The description is really lacking, it mostly consists of the modlist of the pack (in paragraph form, the devs may as well just have written it in bullet points) and some java args, this tells me nothing special about the pack.

The changelogs for the versions are just “mod updates” which are not promising in the slightest, where’s the custom content??

I downloaded the pack and it took maybe 15 minutes to load up, which is ridiculous considering it has less mods than my 1.21.1 Vanilla+ pack

From there, I was greeted with the standard 1.12.2 screen, with some ugly debug messages in the corners

Supposedly this modpack is sponsored by Bisect Hosting, why is there still a realms button lmao

Bisect literally offers free logo design yet the devs of this pack still went with an AI logo and a sloppy standard main screen

#Gameplay

(This is more of just a gameplay journal than an actual review, but it’ll give you a good idea of what the gameplay was like)

When I opened the new world screen it says “New Chronos” rather than “New World”, this is the extent of custom content present in this pack

After waiting exactly 5 minutes 30 sec on the world loading screen (I timed this with a stopwatch starting from when I clicked create world) I left my computer to eat lunch

Came back the stopwatch said 7:27, world still on that screen

At exactly 8 minutes 20 seconds the world finally loaded the terrain and I am presented with all sorts of visual clutter in the form of tutorial toasts and chat popups

There was some weird visual bug (screenshot attached) that only went away after like 3 more minutes of trying to orient myself, in about 15 FPS

Finally the pack fixed its own visual errors, and I ended up getting a pretty solid 59-60 FPS for a bit, ignoring some lag spikes

Feeling that this pack was actually running quite well, I broke some dirt blocks (which did not drop anything due to server lag) and was rubber-banded back 10 seconds, repeated this and the block finally broke after doing that ghost-block thing where the block breaks after a delay

Got stuck in a timeloop when trying to climb a vine

Suffered my way through many lag spikes to a dungeon tower thing that had no loot, there was an iron door with a stone pressure plate in front of it but for some reason the pressure plate was having a day off and did not open the door

Found some dead chicken drops in a pond??

There seemed to be random structures pretty much everywhere that followed no cohesive theme – why is there a ruined medieval tower here, a dead dinosaur skeleton there (I assume that’s what the inverted bowl shape of bone blocks is) and 2 radio towers over there

While walking to said radio towers my game kept stuttering, it’s like trying to watch a youtube video while spamming spacebar to pause/unpause it

Found some weird-as tree that seemed to have given up growing past its trunk and just stopped

When I arrived at the radio tower it was literally just made of iron bars, there was nothing of interest there

Some how ended up suffocating in some leave block i got teleported into (screenshot attached)

mined the same leaves block 5 times in a row before it decided to break

Some more structures I found included some piles of polished granite/andesite with nothing of value in them (apart from some quartz ore) and also 2 gravestones on some podzol

Saw some grass that had generated underneath a tree, replacing its bottomost log block

Found a sheep, I decided to punch it to death (for wool for a bed) but it started levitating due to TPS lag, I couldn’t punch it again while it just floated there invulnerably

Found some dude called “Green Archer” from Medieval Craft just hanging out under a tree not really doing anything, also found his friends “Green Knight” and “Green Soldier” standing by 4 lumps of Birch Planks in the forest

It’s worth noting every single entity I had seen was completely still due to TPS lag

Uhh then one guy decided to come alive and shoot me, so I ran away from these hostile musical statues (one guy with a sword also ran really fast at me and took out half my health)

I wandered through the biome of floating reed items (idk why there were floating reed items, probably a worldgen bug)

I was going to make my way up a hill but then I realised I couldn’t break blocks, but too late as I was now stuck in another time loop of being half-stuck in a block and trying to move away

At this point I thought i should probably try make some basic tools, but no apparently you can’t craft oak logs into oak planks (I put it on my crafting grid and no output showed up, despite JEI saying i could do that

After falling off a hill, and taking damage when the game registered it (about 5 seconds after) I thought i might eat some of that raw chicken i had found earlier, given it was an emergency as i couldn’t kill animals

However I couldn’t do this either, as the tps lag prevented me from eating

Found some mixel flowers that i could see even when they were in ungenerated chunks (yeah did i mention the chunks loaded so slowly it’s ridiculous)

Came across some random pile of grey concrete, grey concrete powder, and iron bars, and somehow took half a heart of damage from some unknown source (probably sunburn or something)

There was also this waterfall that had broken loads of the foliage in the surrounding area and all those items had collected at the bottom of the waterfall

In the waterfall there was a group of 9 ravens (they only moved a little bit every 20 seconds or so, so i could easily count them)

At this point i decided to just fly around in spectator mode to observe the world generation as it was clear survival gameplay was not an option under the ridiculous TPS lag

In some cave there was some stone type that was literally just stone recoloured red lmao

I also found this village that was a mixture of ridiculously large modded houses and normal 1.12 small houses, all of which had generated on a hill and overlapped with each other significantly

Oh and in JEI there was an item called “Valleyman beans Australia definitive edition” [sic] with a texture that makes me ashamed to be a texture artist

27 of the 297 JEI pages were taken up by content from Chisel, and 66 pages from TConstruct and addons

We don’t talk about the 3 different copper ingots, or the 3 different silver ingots, or the 2 steel ingots, or the 2 “aluminum” ingots and the 1 “aluminium” ingot

There was also some backport mod called “Future MC” that couldn’t decide whether they were backporting textures from JAPPA or making ones that fit programmer art

My game also just randomly froze and the screen turned white but thankfully (?) it didn’t crash

I did find this structure made of sandstone that lined up suspiciously with chunk borders, but I couldn’t really see any of its details because the visual bug from earlier had returned and everything looked awful

Eventually, I decided to just put the poor frozen mobs out of their misery and close the modpack, having experienced enough of this awful pile of slop

My game froze when i clicked save and quit to title, and considering I didn’t care one bit about my world at all i decided to just force-crash the game and then delete the modpack

my biggest regret about the chronos is that it exists, and i feel like my playtesting of it was an hour of my life i’ll never get back.

# Computer specs

Dell Precision 3470 laptop

12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1270P (2.20 GHz)

16 GB RAM total, 8 allocated

# Feedback

I honestly don’t really know where to start, it seems like the devs haven’t even played their own pack, and if they have, do they own a nasa pc or something??

* Firstly, this modpack needs a vision, if it’s meant to be about prehistoria or integrating 2 prehistoric mods together, then you need to focus on that

* A visual overhaul would be really important, you also need to actually tie the modpack name “Chronos” into the gameplay – are you bringing back things from earlier in time or what

* You need to have a custom menu, better description, custom logo as the minimum

* the performance was AWFUL please add some performance mods and really focus on optimisation

* Cut down on bloat, consider every mod – why do you actually need what this adds? For example, you have enough flowers everywhere as it is – do you really need a mod that just adds even more flowers?? and why tf do you have valleymans beans in this modpack??

* Even within mods you need to cut down on bloat and just integrate things – all those duplicate ingots that exist, plus that one mod that just adds a bunch of random ingots with no uses

* Integrate the mods in this pack together, this separates a pile of mods from a proper high-quality modpack

I’d recomend to play this togeather with: (Anchient_Warfare_2_TWEAKED) and (Spartan_Warfare) for the best experience

Like for real…. if you ever get tired of vanilla and it’s laughable lack of dragon variety. Then this mod is for you I swear. And be prepared to be totally bamboozled as a ropey. (This is one major reason why I’d recomend Anchient Warfare due to it having settlements that are capable of withstanding/ having ur back if you ever fuck upp)

I’d recomend to play this mod combined with (_Ice_And_Fire_) and (_Spartan_warfare_)

And I’d also recomend to invade the desert people for the greather good of the roman empire. Afterall. They might have some oil in dire need for some LIBERTYYYYY 🦅

I saw this was one of the highest rated packs on the site, so thought I’d give it an honest try to see what it’s all about. To preface, I am running this with an Intel i9-10900k, an RTX 3080, and 8gb of RAM assigned (which seems more than reasonable for a pack with 137 mods).

I was greeted with a very long load time, the default vanilla menu, and an even longer world load time (nearly 15 minutes total). As I spawn in I run around for a couple minutes and notice the TPS is abysmal, everything is a slideshow. Doing any action takes 2-4 seconds, with frequent FPS freezes. I really wanted to play more and see what it really had to offer, but I could not stand the performance.

Of the gameplay, I noticed nothing good. Chat spammed as soon as I spawned in, no quest line, no advancements, nothing directing me what to do. I noticed very few mobs as well. The structures were neat, but I could tell most of this was just mods thrown in with little configuration.

This pack was likely made for a couple of friends, and was not intended to grow beyond that. Further more, the logo of the pack is clearly AI generated, so that goes to show how much effort they care to put in.

It’s fine to have a pack like this for friends, but I don’t see any reason this pack should be anywhere close to the highest rated packs, along the greats like MeatballCraft and Divine Journey 2.

I’d like to start by saying this is my all time favorite mod, at least in it’s 1.12.2 incarnation.

I have played lots of versions of this mod, like the early now deleted alphas for mc 1.4.7 (which were kind of buggy and limited but those are old and now long gone from official downloads of course), version 1 in 1.7.10, which was very great overall, version 2 in 1.12.2 which i have to say expanded greatly on version 1 and provided vary qol tweaks, and version 3 in 1.20.1, which, although i feel like is inferior to version 2, is still great and maybe a bit more balanced.

For gameplay, i gave 4/5 stars because although the gameplay is very fun and nice, it sometimes can be a bit overpowered (specially with certain materials added by certain mods).

For aesthetics i gave 5/5 stars because both the old textures and new jappaified textures are very beautiful in their own ways, and the whole seared stone bricks aesthetics was always very sleek.

For performance and stability i gave 5/5 stars because i never ever had any stability or performance problems with the mod, even in its buggy 1.4.7 alpha state.

Honestly, i suggest this mod to anyone.

Plus it replaces the enchanting system with the material/modifier system for its tools and thats a good thing in my book.