#The short of it

Project Ozone 3 looks to echo the success of it’s direct predecessors as well as contemporaries in the Skyblock subcategory but falls short due to simultaneous over and under tuning of core mechanics.

#The long of it

**Gameplay – (don’t waste your time on me you’;re already the voice inside my head)**

There is an innate problem with a lot of modpacks that seek to find the much fabled “perfect pace of progression”. That sought after feeling that you’re making good progress but not too fast. That problem being, that in order to slow down the ever acceleration found in Vanilla Minecraft where you can go from sticks and stones to diamonds in under an hour, mods often set limitations and extra steps in order to bring us down to a leisurely speed. That’s admirable to try to do but the truth is, incredibly difficult to get right. Most modpacks feel like they are just wasting your time, perpetually spinning the wheels like a drag car right before the race. Unfortunately, Ozone 3 is no exception.

Example? The early game starts off familiar but strong. All our old pals are here! Here comes that rascal Ex Nihilo. Oh and look it’s Tinkerer’s Workshop! And oh my! We’re using composters to make dirt. How quaint and familiar. Then we hit the wall. We realize, hang on…yes I’m using all these familiar faces but is there no other paths? No. There aren’t. There is no other way to get diamonds other than Ex Nihilo so have fun with the loot table. Tinkerer’s Workshop’s smeltery is now behind a porcelain smeltery which takes the better part of a Lord of the Rings film (extended of course) to actually make the bricks for the real smeltery and guess what? There is literally no other way to produce dirt for the first 10 or so hours. I’m not joking, composters only, so better get those hoppers and leaves farms ready. These are all in place to prevent that priorly mentioned super acceleration but instead of giving a rewarding feeling of progress it comes across more so as enforced dilly dallying.

I know it sounds like I despise this Modpack’s gameplay but I didn’t. I just can’t ignore the amount of times it made me roll my eyes. Perhaps the best indicator of this is the faithful iron bucket. In vanilla minecraft this costs three iron ingots. In Ozone 3 this costs three iron ingots. However, whereas you can just instantly craft this in Vanilla. In Ozone 3 you need to turn the ingots into plats by manually smashing them at a seperate block with a hammer. There is no additional resources used, no challenge in the station needed to be crafted to make the plates, it just takes time. 3 seconds in vanilla but 30 seconds in Ozone 3 with no test other than on your patience. Tedium for the sake of it.

**Aesthetics – It’s 1.12.2 what do you expect.**

It looks good. Like 1.12.2 has always looked you know? I’d call it a fond memory. There are no grand sweeping changes to any of the textures of the included mods and even though there is something janky stuff in the tokens you get from quests having a rather bizarre texture. There is nothing bad nor nothing exceptional here. It just is.

**Performance – Nearly as much waiting as in the gameplay**

This modpack runs horribly. Very odd thing considering there is no way this can be more intensive than Meatballcraft but somehow it is? It takes longer to initialize, is more prone to frame drops yet is distinctively less ambitious busy as it’s well known for being intensive, 1.12.2 competitor. Very odd. It doesn’t crash or shoot my dog so I suppose it cannot warrant a 1 star but I simply don’t understand why it’s such a heavy breather.

Lots of weird mods that make it feel like a non-cohesive experience, still fun nonetheless!

They kept the aesthetics and grandioseness of Project Ozone 2 and cranked it up to 11. But in doing so, they also added a lot of mods that really don’t fit into the modpack and only add annoyances and frustration. Embers (debatably), Landcraft, and Lordcraft are big examples of this. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the last two were because their mod devs paid the pack maker to include them for that curseforge ad revenue.

The expertness of it is honestly great in the early game, and Ex Nihilo isn’t that frustrating as ore drops are very common so you sifting gives you that dopamine rush when you rack up all of those ores early on. And the mods you use starting out are quite fun and interesting as well.

But it all falls apart once you get to the midgame. In Project Ozone 2, you had Logistics Pipes to help you automate much of the microcrafting, but in Ozone 3, all you have is Project Red. It’s a nice mod and does plenty, but there are no auto crafting tables it works well with (There are EnderIO ones, but each individual one is incredibly expensive as opposed to LP’s only costing wood and cobblestone and NOT requiring power). So you’re stuck manually microcrafting just about everything, even into the late game since that’s where AE2 is locked.

Combined with the fact much of the modpack felt like the developer just threw in as many big content mods without actually thinking if they’d fit (eg. shoehorning magic mods in a way that felt like they were for filler content rather than integrating well with the pack), I have to give Gameplay 2 stars.

Aesthetics were decent, though the custom shop coins looked pretty goofy. The shop also felt poorly thought out.

And with so many mods, the performance, stability, and startup time were atrocious. There’s even a mod that adds PONG to the loading screen, to give you something to do, but that apparently DOUBLES the loading time. I’d rather browse my phone or step outside while waiting the 20-30 minutes needed for it to load.

All in all, this modpack was incredibly disappointing, especially with the lightning in the bottle that its predecessor Project Ozone 2 was. Ozone Lite, despite being much smaller in scale and incredibly generic in design and mechanics, was more fun than this.

It really makes you think more and look at outside perspectives from youtubers on how they did things only thing I will say it was kind of made a little bit worse because of the removal of Landia and the switch to the Degree Ingots which made it just annoying but bearable. Other than that this pack took me about 2 years to complete off and on of course. Would recommend for other to play through. I didn’t finish every quest but I definitely could have

Yes. The objective is more. It is all the things. Everything.

The different difficult tiers really make it stand out among the sea of kitchen sinks. Ohboi, it’s definitely finally in one of those tiers where ‘I wish I knew where my sanity was’. Its hellish and will make you expand and expand your skyblock more and MORE. Learn to autocraft on any mod that will let you, it will be your friend way down the line in the pack on higher difficulties.

POZ is the personification of MORE. More ores, more materials, more mob drops, more of everything because you will be using ALL of it. You will run out of things all the time, so you need to keep production going, automation in tech, automation in magic, you need to get learning because it will be a wild ride otherwise.

Performance isn’t too bad. Just keep in mind what you shouldn’t put down and know what ticks more than it should. Its a skyblock.

Overall enjoyed the pack, gods help your soul if you ever play on Kappa+.