Modded Minecraft Reviews

This pack appears to be great but quickly melts under scrutiny. Unfortunately there’s rarely a good way to tell if a pack is good without sinking significant amounts of time into it. This pack contains an enormous amount of mods, most pointless, redundant or poorly balanced. Just figuring out how to progress is a nightmare because the pack is so overrun with filler you can’t sift through it all. A good example is armor. This pack contains around15+ sets of slightly different looking Iron armor with near identical stats. All of which is pointless because you can just make the vanilla armor the same way you do normally. This also applies to weapons. Every random weapon and enemy pack is present and none of them are consistent. Boss fights feel impossible until you try a weapon from a different mod and discover it does 10x the damage. This is a sloppily constructed kitchen sink pack that promises a full fledged RPG and delivers infinite jank. I’m not angry, just disappointed in every youtuber that clickbaited this without testing.

Liminal industries is aesthetically extremely strong. Each of the dimensions you have to go to are interesting and fun to explore, and while the poolrooms can get a bit repetitive, there is more than enough generation designed for the backrooms to make every journey away from your base unique and unsettling.

The tech progression itself is solid, but I wish it was more entangled with the setting. The first two chapters feel like they take advantage of the backrooms really well, but as the tech tree spreads out into all these different mods it feels like the cool, integrated elements like echo shard production and having to route items from your igneous extruders in different dimensions get drowned out by all the noise.

That being said, a modpack with the same progression but without Liminal Industries incredible setting would still be like a 6/10, and overall it is more than impressive enough to be a 5/5 in my book. Lastly, as others have already noted the late game is a bit bare.

I only played until the end of Chapter 2 so far.

Chapter 1 was really fun and easy. As a more technical Minecraft player and not really magic Chapter 2 was harder for me. But Chapter 3 is tech again 🙂 I needed to watch a lot of video’s on Blood Magic and Ars Nouveau. But the Chapters are not so long so far so it’s okay easy to make video’s on 😀

This modpack has everything I was looking for and is well optimized.

I feel that I may not be the best judge of this specific pack due to my inexperience with GregTech but I think it’s actually probably fine, given the positioning of this (and beforehand Omni/Nomifactory) as a good entry-level Greg pack. And so most of my criticisms are likely moreso criticisms of GregTech and the philosophy around it in general, so take that into consideration.

What it really boils down to is that every inconvenience you surpass is just replaced with a new one. It never really feels like you’re making things easier by building infrastructure, you’re just building more infrastructure to have to deal with. Tool-based microcrafting gets phased out for machine crafting, which is much more clunky than just clicking through everything in a crafting table. Some resources get automated and suddenly you don’t really need them anymore (and when you do, it’s an alloy or chemical breakdown which takes several steps).

I ended up tapping out right around HV/getting AE2 automation, and while this would’ve been huge, the setup time for that would probably take forever, between building all the parts and rewiring my (admittedly rudimentary) base. The push for polyethylene was quite annoying and I would definitely need to build some more blast furnaces (I was running this on a server, but friends got bored and so if I were to continue it’d be local). It seems like chemical reactors become a very big aspect of the game going forward which is not exciting given my aversion to dealing with fluids in MC modpacks. I don’t even want to go through the process to make the next tier of conductive wires lol. I realized at some point that everything in front of me was just going to be a chore, which when completed would only be rewarded with more chores.

It’s still entertaining for a long while though, in the same way as pulling a loose string from a sweater is. It is for sure an achievement to get 100 hours out of me basically on a whim. Just don’t really expect to be satisfied or particularly happy with the time you spent by the time you tap out unless you’ve got the tenacity to hit some of the bigger goals.

#What is it ?

The tropics is a nice and calm dimension themed around a peaceful tropical environment, in which anyone would want to have spend a vacation;

It adds content related to what one might expect from some days off on some lush islands around the Equator, with some cool tracks to listen too while building your new house.

#What does it offer ?

A warm world and a whole new tropical landscape for you to live in.

There isn’t much in terms of **progression** and **equipements** apart from a few armor sets and tools, as well as some diving gear, as this dimension is really **not at all focused on dungeon crawling** nor getting geared up for the next challenge.

There some decent **building block variety** and **ambient creatures** which can give life to building projects made in this realm. The music is also quite good, especially the **music discs** with some that I quite like. I find it a bit weird that vanilla music seems to play in the dimension at times, but it could be an intentional choice for all I know.

I saw a bunch of **critics based on the more modern dimension worldgen changes** as this mod seem to bring memories to many out there, and the tropics’s generation probably used to be a bit flatter than it is now which might not be pleasing to some, and that is without counting the fact that many new blocks introduced by the mod have since been simply replaced by their vanilla counterpart (such as mud or bamboo).

I know this may be just me but I **don’t really like the mod’s current artstyle** (especially regarding the mod’s item textures in 1.21.8) ? I would like to mention it in case it may subconsciously affect my review. Also in the version I tried this mod in (as of this review I tried it in 1.21.8 last version), parts of the mod had some issues such as the Cowktail model being broken, and it seems quite a lot of the **ambient mobs present in this mod lack unique sound effects** too which is a shame honestly even if not technically required.

#In conclusion

**This mod somewhat succeeds at bringing to life a new tropical environnement** , though in its current iteration it is a bit more nuanced than simply saying ‘it works’.

I always like it when a mod brings in its own way of teaching the player custom mechanics and introduce its own content **without external requirements** such as JEI among others, so I quite like it when a mod brings its own book (though I prefer other means), which I find **weirdly absent** from the last 1.21 release I tried.

This mod is mostly a vibe more than it is anything else really, and while it is not my favorite kind of experiences I can understand the purpose of mods like these and why it grew in popularity; Though I would say the competition is tougher in current recent versions of the game and many mods out there might offer a similar or better experience, so while it may have been a really good mod in the past **I don’t think it currently stands a chance against 1.20+ dimension mods** .

It is of note that there is a maintained fork for 1.7.10 called **Tropicraft Continuation** , which I haven’t tried, but it might be worth checking out.

*I may go back to this review in the future later on, feel free to make up your own mind on this mod and review it as well, your opinion matters*

I’ve completed this pack multiple times and I’d say this is an amazing pack overall. ProjectE has been utilized amazingly and the automation focus is very well done, however the endgame is very unbalanced because of the watch of flowing time basically negating requiring an actual infrastructure to progress further but rather fixed with 1 item instantly. The optimization could be slightly better.

#Overall

It’s a fun pack, play it!

I finished the pack solo in 75 hours, there is post-game content but I did not care for it.

#What I liked

– The custom made “Vaults” were very fun to explore, except the ||maze|| which was broken for me

– A great introductory for newer mods (speaking as a 1.12 player) like Oritech and Just Dire Things

– I enjoyed the spawn area with the questline even though I didn’t read any of the lore

– Early game is really fun and properly balanced with exploration and automation.

– The concept of the World Engine and the requirements to craft certain items

#What I think could be improved

– Too many chickens! I ended up making them all because they’re just by far the best way to generate resources

– The shops felt more like “we couldn’t think of a good way to implement this so let’s just make it a shop item”

– After the early game the pack didn’t feel like “stoneblock” anymore, but just a kitchensink/tech/exploration pack which happened to be in a stone world. The different NPCs in the spawn area sell a certain item which makes it trivial to traverse to a certain “ring” in the world, and from there its just digging in a straight line where you want to go and thats it.

– The dungeons generating in each of the rings weren’t worth it after early game

– Why was projectE in the pack? There were maybe 4 items with EMC, and the only other things you could make was the armor and the tools, but there are plenty other and more fun options.

– I wish it was easier to see what new recipes I could make after upgrading the world engine.

– In the final chapter you’ll be working with mekanism a lot. Specifically ||reactors||, ||nuclear waste|| and especially ||Antimatter||. I really disliked this part, I made both the ||fission reactor and turbine|| almost as big as they go, and it still took multiple hours to get all the ||Antimatter|| needed to create a better way of obtaining it. I ended up cheating in 10 ||Antimatter|| for the ||Antimatter chicken|| purely because I had nothing else to do in the pack at this point and I did not feel like tripling my already big setup. Not to mention the power requirement to run the ||antimatter machine|| was leagues higher than everything else in the pack. I would’ve loved to see a different approach to this finale.

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.