Overall great modpack, but suffers HEAVILY from performance issues. I have a 4070TI and AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. The game is insanely laggy, exploring new chunks and various other NORMAL gameplay aspects causing crashes, with a dev team that seemingly does not care. Discord mods rarely offer troubleshooting, going as far as finding posts about the issues I’ve been having, being unanswered despite being years old.

At first, this pack is a dream. It immerses you in its world with a perfect texture pack, and enough of a foothold to get started, due to quests and structures. The promise of progression is there.

I picked the Astrologer starting class. It’s supposed to be a magic class, which has a spellbook from the getgo. At first, I was spamming Magic Missile from a safe distance for 3 hours just to slowly take down a goblin fort. I figured that my damage was so low because I was supposed to be getting stronger, and hadn’t done so yet.

Then I looked into how you are supposed to get stronger. The magic progression mainly requires a generic material, called magic essence or something. But to get it, you need to loot structures and defeat powerful foes.

So, my starting point is well behind the power curve expected to be ready for hostile structures. And, to get stronger, I need to defeat and loot those hostile structures. Seeing the problem here? Best case scenario, you are required to grind world-gen for the structures that actually contain magic essence, and then grind the enemies in those structures with a pitifully weak starter spell for hours. Worst case scenario, the enemies are not cheese-able, in which case you have no chance at all. From the get-go the progression is just unusable, at least for a magic character.

I decided to stick with it anyways, just to see if I could break through that progression wall. I always play with KeepInventory on, because losing all your items is basically resetting your progress in most packs. Turns out, that does not work with the backpacks from this mod. So once I lost everything in my backpack, and could not really use backpacks to carry the 10 billion loot items, I had no more reason to play.

It’s a real shame because it’s clear that the pack has its heart in the right place, for an RPG pack.

This mod pack is hands-down one of the most incredible RPG mod packs I have ever played in Minecraft. The music is a vibe. This mod pack has everything from extensive and interesting questing and progression to beautiful and fleshed-out aesthetics and storyline. I recommend this mod pack for anyone who loves Minecraft and TRUE RPGs. Don’t pass this one up.

i’m not a huge fan of most role play/rpg pack and this one is not bad, it just get quickly boring…

NOTE: I played the first couple of versions (1.0-1.3) after this pack publicly released, and going off their changelogs up to 1.14 they’ve addressed a lot of issues already, so I may list outdated stuff in my criticisms.

– This pack is one of the only ones you’ll find that has Epic Fight Mod at its core. The novelty of EFM integration alone is arguably reason enough to spend at least a day or two playing DawnCraft.

– At least on release, you could’ve called this a youtube-bait tier pack akin to Better Minecraft and no one would fault you.

On one hand you have

– EFM

– Custom bosses built with EFM in mind

– Puzzle structures

– Custom mobs

– Custom questing

On the other hand, you have:

– Many essentially untouched configs

– A lack of cross-mod integrations

– Horrid balancing of mobs and weapons and armor. Why do ice elementals spawn everywhere? Why do hollow knights teleport-chase you a million blocks away? Why is that dragon invisible??

– Usage of *shudders* the Champions mod. By the way, bosses were able to have affixes too. They didn’t even think to blacklist them (fixed now though).

– Untouched loot tables

– Real head scratchers like not including mods for things like health bars and damage indicators… in a combat heavy RPG modpack. Okay then…

– The custom questing doesn’t have a quest tracker GUI, the quests aren’t rewarding or interesting, and many crafting stations were previously GATED behind these mundane and tedious quests… AND YOU HAD TO PAY EMERALDS AFTER THE CORRESPONDING QUESTS TO UNLOCK THEM. To my knowledge they are now just gated behind the main quest

– Very little optimization. Just FYI, these folks also made Mineshafts & Monsters, another pack notorious for how badly it runs

– Lack of reasons to use different weapon types beyond boring aspects like reach and damage output

– Dodge roll, arguably a core mechanic, isn’t unlocked until after your first guild quest. You may be surprised how much of an issue this is for people who start the pack without knowing about…

– The villager reputation system. In theory, can be cool, In its execution, it’s just a major annoyance. Basically if you loot, kill, etc. in villages, your rep goes down, and the only way to fix it is if you pay off your bounty. Your max negative rep caps at something like 8 bundled emeralds (64), which you pay to the guild in their little treasury box. Anyways, lots, and I mean LOTS of players learned about this too late, and end up spending the next few irl days grinding out emeralds for their bounty, or start their playthrough over entirely. Remember how crafting stations and dodge roll (also all other skills after dodge) are gated behind villager quests? Yeah.

– Patreon-gated content. Yep. Lol.

To summarize, a novelty experience worth playing just for EFM, but otherwise poorly put together. Keep an eye on the pack if you are also waiting for a holy grail RPG Terraria-like pack focused on combat and bosses, because frankly out of all the “medieval” “rpg” packs out there, this one is better than most of them DESPITE its flaws. With more development, this pack has insanely high potential. Looking forward to when I can rewrite this review.