Modded Minecraft Reviews

Prodigium Reforged is an RPG modpack. It has many of the prototypical follies of RPG modpacks such as pretty abysmal performance and random enemies spawning directly on top of you that instakill you, but the rest of the pack is so surprisingly refined that none of that really ended up getting to me? The pack has strong cross mod integration with its custom content, a surprisingly coherent aesthetic and a very clean progression line that only really falters at the points where the pack is notably and explicitly unfinished. It’s a pretty high effort project from a solo developer that’s definitely not Terraria, but does inject some of the better ideas that game had into making this project a reality.

The pack is more liberal in its use of gamestages to sequester resource progression than Terraria is (or at least, relative to its length) and I think that’s important to the appeal of the pack as it helps to balance and space out mining sessions especially where Terraria has additional things that Minecraft doesn’t to space out its content in other ways like seperate underground biomes. Once dimensions are introduced into the mix, they are introduced in very small number; the only additional dimension here is the Aether, and certain pieces of content have been moved from the Overworld to the Aether to bulk it up. The pack is very focused in its execution, and the main quest line is linear; just a straight shot of bosses. Due to the mods themselves, not all of these bosses are winners, although the worst ones are definitely the Ender Dragon (due to the additions being kind of buggy) and the Elder Guardian (due to YUNG’s Better Ocean Monuments both not having a good layout for the fight and whatever mod disables all surrounding mining when the Elder Guardians are alive going poorly when the structure spawns inside the floor). They don’t all have to be winners though; the ones that are nice make up for the weaker fights.

I can only really dot down issues respective to the modpack and not the mods in bullet point format, so in no particular order; I wish there was some way to get recall potions outside of doing quests, I wish the custom town NPCs took more precedence, I wish SOL Carrot wasn’t configured to have low thresholds with on death loss so if you die and don’t change that config setting you have to spend ten minutes sprint jumping around so you can get your hearts back (a high threshold would encourage actually engaging with the food mods), and I wish the End wasn’t so anemic although that will hopefully be remedied in future versions.

I noted the performance earlier; you’re not going to run into any weird server tick issues, but your framerate will absolutely shit itself sometimes; most frequently in the overworld where you can dip from a stable 220 to a stuttery 40-50 in nighttime combat, structures dipping into the twenties with the lowest number I saw being 9 fps during Nether traversal. From the sounds of it, this is better than the other modern RPG modpacks though, which would just straight up get a 1/5 from me, but I’m comparing the modpack to all other modpacks. In terms of bugs, I also had to use commands sometimes to compensate for stuff like the Ender Dragon fucking off to Narnia (yeah that fight is really broken). For ram usage, I would recommend allocating a minimum of 4.5GB in singleplayer if you’re using Java 25 and UseCompactObjectHeaders.

Funny note as I’m typing this part of the review; I just realized I had installed the modpack basically right before a major update came out and didnt update it when I started playing, so I’m a little behind, but I doubt it would’ve changed my rating or anything I said in the review after quickly going through the changelogs and default config files (i.e the issue I have with SOL Carrot on death loss is unchanged although there’s now a 4 hunger minimum for any food item to count which wouldn’t be my first choice for an adjustment here). Just know, it seems to be a big rework of existing systems, and the modpack might have more cool things in it now. If you have any interest in trying an RPG modpack for your next playthrough, you should play it.

It’s the perfect choice for players who want to get lost in a world that feels alive. It’s challenging enough to keep you on your toes but polished enough to be relaxing. The craftsmanship in this pack is “at another level.” From the moment you load in, the custom structures and the spawn area are incredibly detailed, featuring professional-grade architecture that makes the world feel lived-in and ancient.

Engineer’s Life 2 is a semi-expert pack with a large focus on less popular mods or mods that often get crowded out by the competition, especially Immersive Engineering which is arguably the core of the pack. There’s a strong highly custom early game, a lot of fun and weird mods to play around with, and then you get dumped into the various quest trees which are less goals and more just guidance; as far as I can tell there’s no end game here, you just explore the mods. And at the point where I realized a significant portion of my following playthrough would mostly just be doing seemingly untampered Immersive Engineering stuff, I gave up? Funnily enough, I looked online and saw a playthrough series from Mischief of Mice where he dropped the pack at the same point.

I think the choice to make this more of a semi-expert pack instead of a full expert pack was the inherent folly; when you imagine something like a pack called “Engineer’s Life”, you can probably imagine a lot of complicated stuff to put together basic machines, and for the early game at least it captures that essence with making you smoke your early clay parts on a campfire to put together a blast furnace to get ingots, but then it kind of just ends, and you’re just playing untouched Modded Minecraft. I’m not really feeling immersed in the experience anymore, and the mod selection present doesn’t give you the more immediately available factory building capabilities to satisfy automation nuts; Immersive Engineering is a slow burn, but there’s nothing here left to fill the gap.

I think the weird mod selection featuring stuff like Tetra, Project MMO, Vanilla Food Pantry and Serene Seasons adds a big novelty factor, but you’re going to potentially run into issues with just how many things this pack wants to “overhaul”. For example, I wanted to get into Productive Bees, and silk touch is really annoying to get because Tetra, so I wanted to make an advanced hive to counteract the need for that. Unfortunately, you can’t craft a regular campfire; you have to throw stuff on the ground and firestart it TFC style. That’s fine, I’ll craft a soul campfire which still has a recipe somehow, except 700 blocks in any direction from 0,0 in my nether was an endless BYG green forest sludge (pictured below) with no soul sand in sight, which is also apparently a common issue. Funnily enough the most frequent sources of frustration or confusion were the more popular mods or mods from more popular creators, like the unintuitiveness of YUNG’s Better Portals ||(note; you can pick up the reclaimers. do not be me or the people on reddit who also suffered this and warp back to the overworld 3000 blocks away from spawn)||, Quark Deepslate being here alongside Caves and Cliffs Deepslate for some reason, or this version of Tetra being quite old so you can’t see a lot of important info like your tool’s stability level.

RAM usage is initially excellent but the pack seems to leak a little bit and you will run into a lot of stutters (this pack is best run on Java 17 which will fix long GC pauses and some of the stuttering).

This pack is a 3 out of 5 mostly because I was genuinely enjoying myself up until the point where I decided to stop playing, which is a strong point in favour of the pack even if you personally prefer something that feels worth taking to the end. The rest of the modpack doesn’t really seem to be what I was hoping for, though.

Beyond Depth is overall a very good challenge pack, despite the difficulty it was surprisingly easy to get into the mechanics and general flow of the pack, which made it fun to play and relatively easy to just dump hours into without getting bored. Used this pack to come back into modded Minecraft after years of not playing any

As expected of a challenge pack, dying alot is inevitable but it doesn’t make it necessarily “unfun”, which i find a very important factor in a challenge pack. It’s not hard for the sake of being hard, it’s not tedious like some other packs I’ve played, mostly because of how the exploring and how the progress in the pack works. The structures, weapons and overall mobs/bosses are all pretty well thought of, armor being made with create is an interesting take on equipment that you don’t commonly see in other packs.

Due to the nature of the pack consisting of over 400+ mods, it is not exactly recommended to play on lower-end machines since being able to run it smoothly is pretty important to be able to fight the bosses properly, but despite the size of the pack. it is optimized fairly well. It is still definitely worth a try even if you have an older machine.

This mod-pack has the very unique idea of being a collection based progression pack. I’m sure other packs out there with similar progression exists but none that I have seen. The presentation is fantastic with a cohesive style and theming. It is very performant due to being a fabric based mod-pack. My only gripe is that it includes create when it really doesn’t need to. I feel being able to heavily automate things takes away from the charm a bit. That’s the only reason I do not give this pack 5 stars.

I was introduced via utube video and I fell in love with it and a lot of time in this. But unfortunately the late game progression is not that good. Like uh I crafted syvill or sylivv set whatever it is called and I basically became unkillable though I did not get a problem with that but the thing is that the deus interface(i think it’s called that) in the quest book is the bosses part and literally I hate it. The early bosses are cool but I literally one shot them and they don’t scale well. I literally have to search for hours on end to find boss or it’s summoning materials or sometimes I can’t even find it and got to use cheats moreover the explorers compass is not even that accurate I don’t like how late game stuff is locked strickly to end even best enchantings tuff is locked to end if u play and get to end it will get too boring and this is too unoptimised and unbalanced aesthetically it ain’t good at all I absolutely hate the everbright and ever dawn dimension in combination with this mod(they re good but not good combined with other mods they should be played solo tbh)

This pack has many conventional upsides that make it the ideal beginner modpack: it’s light on memory, short, playable in peaceful, no exploration, and acts as a tutorial for many mods standard across other packs.

But there’s something about this pack that makes it stand out to me as a special experience that no other modpack has ever replicated (to my knowledge): it acts as a modded adventure map.

Almost since the beginning of Minecraft, people have been handcrafting downloadable worlds to act as playable games in their own right, such as The Dropper, Herobrine’s Mansion, or even the original Skyblock. These transform the progression of Minecraft from the standard (punch tree -> … -> kill dragon) to whatever the creator wishes, whatever it takes to reach the end of the map. But they’re ultimately limited by being in Vanilla Minecraft, requiring extreme lengths to even add custom functionality to items and blocks.

In theory, a modpack should be more than just a pack of mods. If the player wanted to just play Create and Botania, they could just play Create and Botania, no modpack needed. We download modpacks for a reason: the expectation that the creator has weaved them together into a cohesive and unique experience. Effectively, though, the “progression” of the pack usually just involves getting through the questbook by acquiring different new items. The physical world you spawn in never really changes from the Vanilla standard: a procedurally generated world with different biomes, ores, dungeons with loot, and new dimensions gated behind portals. Or a skyblock pack, which requires the bare minimum of construction.

Break Out! represents to me a proof of concept for what an adventure modpack should aspire to. The creator has built a custom map for us which we must physically escape, but doing so requires progressing through the mods to break through layer by layer. Each layer feels like its own “tier” or “age” in the world, but it doesn’t just unlock new chapters of the questbook and give you more space to build. Scouring the environment will reward you with hidden goods to aid your escape, each time relevant to what you need.

An incredible experience. This was my first modpack, and it’s the reason I love modded Minecraft.

P.S.: Don’t pick Botania first at the crossroads. Trust me.

Gameplay loop is fantastic across game stages, especially if you enjoy stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.

On a low end PC performance isn’t great especially with the amount of travel required to loot end game structures, but the rest of the pack being so fantastic makes that a small issue in the grand scheme of things. Would definitely recommend.

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.)