This pack does a couple things very well. It never crashed; it performed well even with high render distance and shaders; there are plenty of challenges throughout the world; and, it actually provided a good enough environment for me to finally learn Create.

But that’s where the good things end. In service of creating beautiful, epic screenshots, the terrain is BIG. Navigating this terrain takes a long time, even with gliders. The actual process of travelling is just not very fun as a result. The pack seems to know this, and offers plenty of Waystone towers to let you skip the travel as much as possible.

Unless I am missing something, the progression is basically vanilla for the first portion of the pack. I never felt like I was finding loot or materials that made me stronger than the vanilla tools and armor I crafted. Maybe you have to get deeper into the pack to experience that, but for me it was too slow/unintuitive.

The enemies were pretty tough, given that. Most felt brutally difficult, and I could not complete a dungeon in 1 sitting. Most of them felt almost identical in difficulty. This made the pace of combat also slow, by necessity. So, slow combat and slow exploration.

Finally, the soundtrack is bad. It’s nice that it isn’t the vanilla soundtrack, but just alternating between the same 2 terraria-esque tracks got really boring really quick. I turned the music off entirely ~6 hours in because I was already sick of it.

I hate to say it, but this is the kind of vanilla+ pack I hate. One that makes you go through all of the vanilla systems you’ve already done 1000 times in other packs, and just tries to make it all bigger and prettier, at the expense of gameplay.

So I guess that says something about it? Or maybe about my patience.

It does an okay job of keeping you going kind of like how Terraria does, but it falls short of actually challenging and putting you under pressure in the same way. That might not be the point – the quest page does say to ̶0;take your time,” but…eh. There’s a LOT of mods in here (300+) and it really feels like it starts to buckle under its own weight later on. I had fun in my 140~ish hours but also feel like it could’ve been a lot better. You need some patience for jank and internal server lag to play this one.

The pack is rather unbalanced – in my experience the difficulty curve was reversed, being very tense and unforgiving at the beginning but only getting easier as it went on. Mileage may vary of course, but despite the supposed Protection nerfs it gets increasingly hard to die, especially when you get lucky with Protection VIII armor drops from Dungeons Arise mobs (I really don’t like this mod) and strip it to use on your own set – but even before then it genuinely gets kind of hard to die after reaching Neptunium armor. You also aren’t really ever pushed to fight bosses until the third chapter and by then, if you were at all dilligent in upgrading your armor, they’re all pushovers you can facetank.

There’s also no real incentive to build any infrastructure or anything besides a wall of chests hooked up to a network. No NPCs to house, villager trading isn’t really necessary so building with Villager Comfort in mind is an afterthought – like, Create’s mechanical crafter was only ever used once or twice, the only time I know for sure it was necessary being for the Clockwork Eye. I feel like that was a missed opportunity. I never needed more than a randomly generated tiny house I stumbled upon that I added little necessities to and made a little walled up compound around. Protip: the only food you ever need is Sinigang cause it fills your bar and sat completely, gives all food groups besides sugars and uses very easily farmed ingredients.

There were also mods that felt pretty underutilized besides Create, or are only there for extremely specific progression. Blue Skies is only really there to start Expert Mode besides a few busywork fetch quests. Epic Samurai’s stuff gets outclassed extremely early on and the mobs are pushovers. Brewin & Chewin just feels like an annoying pacebreaker and time-gater – by the point you’re forced to use it, it’s unlikely there’s anything you can do to pass the time while you wait for alcohol to brew or cheese to ripen (seriously??) since AFAIK there’s no chunkloader tools included. Some of these quest steps feel like they go against the tagline of “Minecraft without the tedium.”

As for instability, man this pack was really starting to fall apart by the endgame. It heavily encourages exploration, but so many times I’d deadlock or freeze for several minutes with endless “hanging entity” errors in the log, or new chunks would take forever to load making the faster horses kind of counterproductive. Save yourself the time and frustration and just use /locate for some of the rarer structures if it’s going to chug like this. It also uses a bunch of MCreator mods, some of which integral to the progression, and most of which just add a ton of clutter to your inventory. I don’t like those useless Corpse Maggots from Born in Chaos. God, I really don’t enjoy sitting for multiple minutes opening Iter RPG Geodes with a macro because they can’t be cracked any other way. I also tried building a beacon and no matter what I did, it just wouldn’t work. I don’t know if it was gated behind a quest or something, but I just gave up on it and beat the pack without it.

Spoiler section; it was pretty disappointing how the adventure capped off with ||the Wither storm; the page talks about lore and there were a few mid-dev reddit posts with screencaps of NPCs which seemingly don’t exist and the lore is pretty barebones with a pretty predictable “betrayal” from the mysterious voice that’s been giving you heart containers. Then when you get all the eyes, this random character tells you “thanks for playing now go 1m blocks out :)”. It’s genuinely cool that it’s gated behind the Dimensional Carver so all your stuff at home is safely out of range, but then it becomes a simple game of “put waystone near wither storm spawn, find another one a few thousand blocks away, warp between each until late phase 5, hope the world doesn’t break itself harder than the storm can while running, facetank the symbiote and repeat.” Worst part was that after all that and hitting the command block the final time…it didn’t die. It didn’t warp me out or anything like it was supposed to – it just left me in an empty Bowels with a “NaN” health command block and a still-alive Storm. Had to /kill to actually finish it. The framerate takes an absolute dump the further it evolves too even with shaders off, and I have a more than capable rig (RTX 3060 Ti, Ryzen 7 5800X and 32GB of RAM to spare) so I think there’s just too many mods for the game to not buckle by that point.||

One of the few modpacks I’ve actually enjoyed. As a person who’s not a fan of tech based modpacks but loves quest heavy ones, this one just hit the spot. Does everything it says on the tin and more.

Honestly one of the best experiences I’ve had with Minecraft.

Did add some mods on my own though, but that is to be expected with all modpacks.