Modded Minecraft Reviews

if this modpack just didnt have apotheosis it would already be MUCH, MUCH better

If you like exploring this is an amazing modpack. I enjoyed every minute off it. Just 1 tip in the nether if you have low framerate (like I did) turn Particles down to Minimal.

Progression for both factory rats and loot goblins. It’s well-rounded and decently challenging.

## Foreword

I completed this pack about a month and a half ago, but with playtime split over the course of about a year and a half. It took me about 262 hours to complete the pack, with an estimated 15 hours of that being AFK. Some details about the early game may have escaped my memory given that it was quite a while ago that I played through it.

Also, I made a few tweaks to my experience, being that I added the Comforts mod, but only for hammocks (Astral Sorcery is a bit annoying to do if you can’t skip daytime), and I cheated in the two paper clip singularity singularities needed to beat the pack (for reasons I will get into later).

Also this is going to be a long review, with a TL;DR at the end.

# SevTech!

SevTech: Ages is overall a fun modpack for those who enjoy tech and some exploration (though mostly tech). The concept is really fun, going from caveman to space faring explorer, and it’s also executed fairly well. The mods included are mostly good additions and implemented well, with only a few feeling arbitrary. There are however, some occasional design decisions that I find to be a bit odd, though they mostly are not a big deal up until late game. And speaking of late game, I think that it is where the pack falls off.

# Ages 0-1/Early Game

The early game is very solid IMO, with a unique start compared to your typical pack. You start out gathering sticks and stones from the ground, shaping logs into makeshift crafting tables and being rather limited in the things you have. There wasn’t anything that I found particularly bad about ages 0 & 1, with them being overall enjoyable. A big compliment I have is that this portion of the pack feels very unique, being fairly different from any other pack I’ve played or watched.

Totemic rituals are a bit awkward/confusing at first, but you only need to do a couple of them, and the totem poles from the mod are nice enough that I feel like the mod isn’t a completely negative inclusion. I’m not huge on shoggoths from AbyssalCraft, but they’re tolerable enough.

Once you get to age 2, you’re doing some more advanced stuff, and going to more places. This is where each age gets longer than the last, the training wheels are off and you start to lock in and work on bigger projects. More blocks, more tools and more conveniences will likely have you establishing a more concrete base, though you may want to wait until age 3 for larger scale construction.

There are many things I like about age 2, but a few things I don’t. Starting with what I like, you get a good chunk of new materials, tools and whatnot that give you more freedom to expand and explore, but not so much that you’re overwhelmed or that you have everything already. Tinkers’ Construct is a good inclusion here, as it almost always is in a pack (I love TiCon!), and this is where you get some more options for tools. I also like Astral Sorcery here, and age 2 AS is where the most notable tweaks from the base mod are.

The thing I’m not a huge fan of with age 2 is the dimension exploration. The inclusion of The Betweenlands and The Twilight Forest feel rather unnecessary if you ask me, as they feel too disconnected from the overall theme of the pack. These mods break up the pacing a bit, but given the progression of the pack restricting stronger gear to later ages, the pacing could be worse as you’re at least not blowing through the dimensions with gear far stronger than what the mods were balanced for.

I did not enjoy traversing through the dark and tedious to navigate Betweenlands for the sole purpose of getting a couple gems to make a smeltery controller and one other thing I forgot. I will say though, the Betweenlands does at least let you get around the need to light torches after placing them via sulfur torches, which is nice. Thankfully you can bypass the dimension’s tool restriction mechanic with Tinkers’ tools.

You have to play through about 60% of the Twilight Forest just to get to age 3, and then afterwards you never need to go back there, which I’m not a huge fan of. Thankfully, you can use a slimesling and slime(blood)boots to get around quickly, but there’s still a lot to go through, and it’s likely that you’re going to have to clear at least 2 crimson towers to get enough burning tears. I spent at least half of my age 2 playtime in the Twilight Forest.

While I’m not the hugest fan of needing to go through so much of the Twilight Forest, I’d be lying if I said it was all bad. The Twilight Forest was still pretty fun, if a bit too disconnected from everything else, and you can get some good stuff from there. Steeleaf is pretty good, as Tinkers’ tools made with them will repair themselves if you have steeleaf in your hotbar.

# Age 3

Age 3 was my favorite age, as I found a new love of Astral Sorcery and Immersive Engineering, and this is where I built my full base. To be honest, not too much was changed about AS and IE here, but I feel that the way they fit in the pack is just really solid. Like with age 2, age 3 is longer, with more gear, machines and whatnot from various mods becoming available. I spent a lot of time in age 3 doing things that weren’t necessary to complete the pack. Building, exploring AS, checking out neat things from mods I hadn’t used before and getting improved gear. Age 3 is basically just age 2 but with a bit less exploration/travel, and more tech & base development. You still have places to go though, as you unlock the nether and new metals you’ve gotta go find.

Age 3 isn’t anything too crazy, but it feeds you a second helping of content and goals that are well paced and fun to complete. The only things that I don’t like here aren’t too big a deal. I don’t like the mod Steve’s Carts, though you’re not actually required to use the mod beyond a few materials from it. It’s a good thing that you’re not forced to use the mod, because it has a bafflingly bad design decision of using cart assembly time as a balancing lever. This makes no sense and is just annoying, and it’s the reason why I didn’t use the mod.

# Age 4

The differences between age 3 and 4 are basically the same between age 2 and 3. Age 4 has less exploration, and focuses even more on tech. While age 4 isn’t bad, it does have a higher amount of somewhat tedious processes and odd design decisions.

One thing that totally confuses me, is the fact that the advancements point you towards making a Cooking for Blockheads sink, but then it’s configured to not act as an infinite water source. I don’t get why all the way in age 4, you finally get access to the sink, and the advancements suggest making it, only for it to be used for making food. By the time you reach age 4, you’ll have undoubtedly found a stable source of food, so you don’t need a sink for food crafting. Also, given the fact that in most other packs the sink is used for its infinite water source functionality, I was misled into thinking it would be the same here, which just made it all the more annoying that it doesn’t work that way in this pack. What’s even more baffling is the fact that there is an infinite water block in the pack, but it’s only unlocked in age 5 and is incredibly expensive. Such a block being so expensive makes no sense since it’s really only QoL, as you can pump infinite water from an infinite water pool which is effectively the same but slightly less convenient. The only reason I can think that this was done is because there’s a design decision to have water not be infinite outside of rivers and oceans, but this doesn’t really matter since pumps ignore this and you can just pump into a tank to fill your buckets.

There are a handful of other odd decisions like that here, but they’re not really too big a deal. The main complaints I have about age 4 have to do with things that are annoying in included mods. 1.12 Pneumaticcraft is not that great IMO, being a bit janky and just weird overall, but you’ve gotta do a handful of it to get through the pack. The AE2 inscriber is also kinda annoying to use, and the ender alloys are a bit wack to make.

# Age 5

Oh dear god age 5 is torture…

This pack is really good up until you get ~10% into age 5. The start of age 5 is fine, upgrading your infrastructure to use Mekanism and AE2/RS, exploring the moon and mars, but after that it’s awful. Age 5 easily constituted half of my playtime on this pack, and I really only enjoyed a small portion of the age.

The main goal of age 5 is gathering a ton of materials (20k of each) to turn into singularities to summon the final boss. You are given methods to obtain these items in bulk, but not all of them are created equal. You have Environmental Tech ore lasers, Mystical Agriculture, RFTools, Industrial Foregoing & (some of) Mob Grinding Utils to help you out.

EnviroTech is good, besides the fact that you have to spend a bunch of materials and wait like 10 hours in game to get enough crystals to start upgrading your lasers to the point where you’re actually getting a notable amount of resources from them. The wait was god awful, but I really enjoyed setting up logistics for processing the ores my lasers produced once the lasers got going.

I liked setting up some of the things I needed for the singularities, like Mekanism ore quintupling, a cookie farm, logistics & a manyullyn alloying setup, but most other things sucked. The resources that required MystAg sucked, because unlocking MystAg sucks here, and setting up MystAg automation is not fun at all as it’s just garden cloche spam. I didn’t like doing the player mob farm, though that’s probably due to the fact that I left it for last and chose a bad method of farming them.

This pack showed me my new least favorite mod of all time: Extra Planets.

Oh my GOD this mod is so bad, and this pack doesn’t do anything to alleviate it. Extra Planets is a Galacticraft addon that adds more planets, and you need to go through our solar system all the way to Neptune to beat the pack. This mod is so horribly designed that it feels like everything it does was made to piss me off. There’s enough about this mod that I could make a whole post about it, but I’ll stick to some of the key points for the sake of brevity.

So Galacticraft has these alloy plates as a material with three tiers, each of which being crafted with the previous tier. This works for the base mod, as there are only three tiers so while it’s not the most convenient to make, it’s not to the point of being tedious either. Extra Planets looks at that and decides to add **SEVEN** more tiers of these plates. As soon as you hit the EP plates, they just get incredibly tedious to make, and you have to make them again and again each time you want to go to a new planet. And you’re not even doing much on the planets themselves, as all you do there is dig for ores for a while then leave. Space exploration could be really fun, but with Extra Planets it’s just not fun at all and ends up being an incredibly tedious chore. And by the way, you need to go through all that planetary pain to get Mystical Agriculture, so you’re going through pain just to get some boring plants.

One thing I do not understand, is why the paper clip singularity singularity exists. To make a singularity you need 10k of the respective item, and to beat the pack you need 2 of each singularity, so 20k of each item. One of the things you need is the paper clip singularity, with paper clips being made from meteoric iron. This is fine, except for the fact that you also need paper clip *singularity* singularities, meaning you’ll need an arbitrarily high amount of meteoric iron to beat the pack. This would honestly be fine if it was that you could get meteoric iron from EnviroTech lasers, but you can’t. The only reasonable way to get bulk meteoric iron is through MystAg, which is still super slow and boring. This is why when I beat the pack I decided I would get every other singularity then cheat in the paper clip singularity singularities.

# Misc. Stuff I Want to Mention

I like the inclusion of Geolosys, and how you unlock more ores each age. I personally wasn’t a fan of the “realistic” heat distribution biome mechanic, as I felt that it just made certain biomes more inconvenient to find and leaves the world feeling like there are only 5 biomes that are all ugly.

# TL;DR

SevTech: Ages is a great pack up until you reach age 5, at which point the pack gets rather unfun. The pack is good if you like tech, and a decent helping of exploration. There’s nothing too crazy going on here, but the pacing of the pack and how it introduces each mod is very solid. If you want to play this pack, I recommend playing up until you land on the moon which completes age 4, then call it quits there.

Its okay, uses a custom map to its advantage and has innovative gameplay in the form of vaults, plus the quests are good and have decent explanations… but the lategame falls into the tediousness of ´go farm this very specific material, afk for 20 hours to get enough of it for one unlock, then go get a new mat.

The one and only, the greatest, the original that has yet to find a worthy successor: blightfall. A modpack that uses its custom world to tailor the experience for the player (stoneblock 4 has a similar starting mechanic) that can make the early game either feast or famine. However, it shows its age. A bit glitchy, and lacking modern conveniences, it can be quite tedious for players accustomed to modern conveniences like deeper caves, inventory sorting, etc. Honestly, it is quite a shame most modpacks dont use premade structures or adventure maps- it can make stuff quite fun.

The questbook is messy and while promising to fix the inventory cluttering on final release, it didn’t. Chest organizing is annoying, the UI is messing, inventory is always filled with stuff but it lacks adequate backpacks to fix it, and the world is messing- there is homes with random villagers everywhere, and for 1.22.2, it feels like 1.7.10. Despite all it promises, it ultimately seems, not for me, which is sad.

Clayblock was an interesting premise only plagued by a very few repetitive manual tasks that took a very long time to get fully automated. The Early to midgame is heavily intriguing and replaced the standard minecraft progression with a very interesting path that put the onus on the player to solve via exploration. All of the vanilla mobs were replaced with modded ones which felt nice to spice up the combat as all the mobs interacted in very different ways from vanilla. I would say that the Mid-late game is fully reliant on Modern Industrialization so if you arent a fan of fully automating factories the end game may be a bit boring but the journey to get there is very well paced and the environments are fun to explore as the vanilla generation has been changed.

Careful with fast pipes though, as they did corrupt my save and I had to restore from a backup.

(Played this pack on Cosmo’s CSMP in August of 2025)

There’s a few ways to make an exciting pack, and having lots of content is one way to stay entertained. Over Stars certainly has content, but unlike a pack haphazardly thrown together in an afternoon, OS distinguishes itself by trying to tie much of that content together. It has questing where you need to complete quests and build manufacturing to enter the next technological age. Really the main content was powering up though, and much of the manufacturing was a means to an end. There’s a lot of bosses in this pack from the usual suspects like Cataclysm and Bosses of Mass Destruction and that was neat since I haven’t tried fighting them in a multiplayer setting. The scaling did get quite absurd (in a fun way), and while the balancing was… limited and the end game gear involving the void was honestly boring after an afternoon, it was still novel and I’m glad to have played through it. I haven’t been keeping up with active development but if some of the rougher edges in tech integration were smoothed over and there was a boss at the end of it all (There might’ve been, I didn’t reach beyond IE personally and tagged along another group but I don’t think there was one in space when I played)

It’s just sort of a boss pack that petered out for me and didn’t inspire me to build anything in particular.

There was however lots of player interaction, from exploring weird structures to melting a boss and comparing damage numbers, this pack had a fun amount and since loot was instanced and bosses (usually) had immediately easy respawn mechanics, we did stack up to fight them often. Oh and also spawn got nuked on launch with a curious spawn egg or something.

The most memorable thing though has to be observing the island group failing to contain their nuclear reactor and watching all their livestock melt into ash :]

I think this pack especially could benefit from something like a set dimension or large structure that can easily act as a questing hub, since it feels a bit strange having the floating villages without a origin or capital to like, protect or something. That might be plagiarizing from Waccy’s Fantasia though…

Overall I liked the pack enough but wouldn’t necessarily play it again without having something besides content or polish. It needs some sauce and not necessarily more main course you know? I can recommend it if you aren’t afraid of the popular tech mods and like boss content and powerscaling. Just play with under 8 people since this is a chunky pack, TPS was NOT good at peak hours compared to every other pack we played so far. It’s a good time otherwise, I recommend it but might be too familiar if you’ve tried these mods before.

(images tba)

Played on Cosmo’s CSMP a few months ago. Menagerie was a lil cozy zoo building pack with a lot of wildlife (wow) and light adventuring addons, but didn’t have much that stood out to me. I played this back in November 2025 but can’t remember much besides the small animal pens ppl had. Admittedly I played just because, but the pack didn’t really inspire me to build or make infrastructure, there weren’t any tycoon elements as far as I knew but I think those would be interesting to see. I can’t say the aesthetic was particularly different from other packs either. No Create mod or figura, lacked a storage mod outside of backpacks I think. Ran well for me with Distant Horizons on a Ryzen 5800X, pack was quite light.

Really the premise sorta fails on it’s lack of incentives and that’s my main gripe, but I can’t place anything that actively hurt the experience (except for seagulls F those birds). tbh I build when I have a reason or an idea that sticks out, I’m not the type to play like, the Sims or build villages, so that might be me.

I don’t typically enjoy tech packs, but this is an exception. This pack made me get automation online and enjoy doing it. I spent about 193 hours in this pack.

Here are my thoughts!

Praise:

-Ambient sounds are so cool in this pack. Aesthetic is on point

-Thank god there isn’t a wire monster. Would’ve been very easy to market the pack to children and focus really bad horror mods for clickbait. Opting to not do this was a fantastic decision.

-Mod integration is very well done. To make progress in one mod, you need the others, which I appreciate

-The mods for the most part progress together and the scaling for what mods you get access to and when was really well done

-Almost no recipes are left untouched, and I love that. These mods are integrated super well with the environment

-I like that there are a so many different ways to do certain things. I got to design farms as I pleased and do whatever I felt necessary, with only some minor nudging in the quest book. Things like “it may be best to automate this process” or “do not progress further without some automation otherwise the next chapters will be hard” are really nice to have as someone that doesn’t play many tech packs and would’ve squeezed by with the minimum necessary resources. This pack pushed me out of my comfort zone in a lot of ways while not making it an unpleasant experience.

-Locking water wheels behind more of an expensive recipe + not buffing their stress units was a great way to prevent water wheel spam. This plus making copper blocks, pipes and tanks spawn in the rooms really pushes the player to get a steam engine online

-The pool rooms are cool as hell, love that the ability to get some more difficult to craft items like AE2 controllers and crafting terminals lowers the barrier to entry with the mod and may push players to explore it instead of sticking with create storage or drawers. Same for the cake eating flower from Botania. I wasn’t lucky enough to find it, but I like that it’s possible

-This pack’s version of the nether is incredibly creative, and portal linking being such a useful form of navigation was really fun. The nether never becomes irrelevant to progression the way it tends to in packs

Critique:

-Sculked mobs are a cool idea, wish they were executed better. Having them be so few and far between was a great decision, I wish they were more than retextured and buffed vanilla mobs

-Magma cubes can only be spawned by a bucket of magma being specifically placed down by the player. Deployers and dispensers don’t work. The only solution I was able to find was using auto-placers, which isn’t actually mentioned anywhere in the guides. I don’t know if this is intentional, but I feel it should be communicated or fixed so dispensers and deployers work as well

-I would like more Botania integrated into the main questline, or explained a bit more as an option in this pack. Maybe not more forced progression with it, because I know a lot of people dislike it, but I would love to see it shown off more here. You can get by with just using the endoflame if you’re patient enough, and given that the pack tackled water wheel spam pretty well, I’d like to see a solution to endoflame spam from them at some point.

-Need more clear communication about the Ender Chests and how they work. I had to do external research to figure out that they can be independently linked if you dye the bands on them. This probably isn’t an issue for people that know the mod already, but would be good for people that don’t (aka me)

-Not sure how I feel about the igneous extruder and the infinite resource mechanics in this pack. I think they’re okay for now and for progression reasons, but I’d like to see this part of the pack revisited to avoid the “mc block that just does stuff without any input” thing.

-Eidolon feels a little out of place in the later game since it is such a crazy challenge to automate the crucible in comparison to the other mods present. I would like to see the mod revisited or maybe replaced with Botania mechanics in some aspects

-GIVE THE SCULK TENDRILS AN ASSIGNED DESTRUCTION TOOL PLEEEEEASE

-Light blocks. Wish the devs would make it so they’re overridden by plants growing and deployers placing things, or include a disclaimer about them in the quest book. It took me quite awhile to figure out why some bamboo just wouldn’t grow, and why my deployers couldn’t place blocks on certain spots. Plus my elven gateway wouldn’t activate because of one being in the way. It’s not major, but it is super annoying.

-Chapter five was a bit of a let down. It went back to more conventional magic box tech mods which I don’t typically enjoy. This pack taught me I reeeeally don’t like Ender IO and Mekanism. Most of the quests at that point don’t have descriptions or guides, so I really struggled here as someone that was unfamiliar with almost every mod in play. It needs work, and doesn’t flow near as well as the previous chapters in my opinion. Plus, I feel like I’m just messing around in GUI after GUI, and making a million tables that just felt like reskins of each other. I believe chapter 5 is unfinished because of these things, so I’m a lot more willing to give leeway, but it was not as good as the rest of the pack.

Disclaimer: I attached photos of the pool rooms and nether. Keep in mind I’m running Complimentary Reimagined shaders, which I don’t believe come with the pack by default. They look nice, but they break the antiblock effect in the pool rooms. I recommend disabling shaders in the pool rooms as a result. They also break some stuff with the ‘overworld’ so disable them before going though your end portal. If you want to run shaders in the main backrooms level I’ve found no conflicts or issues so far. I added Create Better FPS and Entity Culling to my client to help with performance when running shaders

Reclamation is a very simple alt-skyblock modpack with heavy progression gating that takes place in a dead dimension that only generates with 10-24 total block types, most of them being a block that’s exclusive to this pack, Dried Dirt.

For as far as the eye can see, and even further with Distant Horizons if you so choose, anywhere where you’d normally see dirt, grass, podzol or other grass variants, it’s just dried earth. A largely useless block that exists to supply a couple of early game recipes.

Other packs that are in the same vein are Liminal Industries and of course, this pack’s main inspiration, Regrowth.

Positives:

1. **Well Designed** – I never got locked out of a quest or hit a wall where I didn’t know what I had to do next. While there’s usually only one solution to each problem, the pack doesn’t usually struggle to tell you how to get there.

2. **Lots of Quests** – They only give you XP as a reward most of the time, but this links into my previous positive. Where the guidebooks for the mods in this pack may fail here and there, the quest book is excellent at giving you the exact solution that’s expected of you. While some things like “the best way to automate aura” are left up to you, the critical path is designed so that you never get lost. That XP is also great for repairing some low-tier but enchanted gear you’ll find from one of the handful of structures out there.

3. **Lightweight** – Like all other skyblock/skyblock-adjacent packs, it runs fantastically with minimal intrusion or hacky type mods that could crash your game. I don’t think I’ve ever had a crash that wasn’t because of the mods I added on myself.

The mods I added for my playthrough are LiteMiner, ClientSort, DistantHorizons, Right Click Harvest and a few aesthetic mods like ParticleRain, Subtle Effects, Punchy and Highlighter.

Negatives:

1. **No Breadcrumbs** – To actually begin the process of re-claiming the world, you need to ||perform a ritual with the Enchanted (Witchery) mod in Chapter 3 of the quest book. ||This is easily a 20 hour job even if you know exactly what you are doing. While most modpacks would drip feed you bits of what that progression could look like, true biome recovery and removal of that ugly brown filter that tinges even the grass you grow, is fully gated off.

This is NOT Chunk-by-Chunk. You are not a snowball rolling down a hill. You either have it, or you don’t. And no, pumping an insane amount of Aura into the environment and praying that it spreads between chunks isn’t viable. It’s slow, inefficient and doesn’t actually let you grow the green grass you’re expecting. It’s gated hard by Chapter 3. Speaking of gating.

2. **Aggressive Gating** – I hope you like Enchanted and Nature’s Aura. For the majority of your playtime, before you have the ability to automate, you must manually fill that cauldron with three buckets of water. You must perform tens of rituals, many of the same type. If I could give you any advice, it is to focus Mystical Agriculture as soon as possible. It’s almost hilarious the sheer amount of stuff the early game requires of you, and rather than reward you for playing clever with hidden quest lines or something, the pack demands you grind out every fiber, flower and line of chalk. Entire life-saving rituals, that you likely could have created early, have been blatantly patched out and paved over with an advancement requirement.

3. **Does Not Lean In** – You’d be surprised to see how the lore of the pack doesn’t match up with the reality of playing it. The water isn’t poisoned, the land isn’t hot, the enemies are normal husks, skeletons and cave spiders rather than normal spiders, but they may as well be filler. The wasteland suffers from the Space game design problem. There’s nothing out there but the same 8-12 small abandoned structures that may or may not have an ender pearl in a chest, and then the countless walls that hold one block of oxidized cut copper. There’s no temperature, thirst, or other mod that actually pushes you into desperate straits. In fact, one of the first 5 quests give you a fishing rod. You could set this pack in the Bumblezone and genuinely get a very similar experience playing it. That’s how divorced the wasteland is from the gameplay you’ll actually experience.

There’s plenty of nitpicks I could add here, too many building blocks clogging emi, one of the more disliked bee mods (complicated bees) being present, the fast travel system being via romana instead of waystones or something else, lacking variety in the structures you find or the useful loot available, the drip feed of copper unless you stumble into the house with a basement, an entire chapter in the questbook about photographing mobs, and plenty more, but these are insignificant in comparison to the core of the pack and how it is designed for you to play.

In the end, I think Reclamation is best enjoyed as a slow and zen-like experience. Something more like Sunlit Valley rather than Liminal Industries. It’s horrifically dull, but that can be suitable. It’s balanced aggressively with no room for you to breathe. If you have 50 hours to burn, and would prefer not to think beyond what the quest book tells you, you could do worse.