Better Than Adventure doesn’t exactly feel like beta; it’s sort of hard to feel like beta when you have the explosive launcher that lets you rocket jump across the map. It’s also not really a fully fleshed out alternate universe vision of what Minecraft could’ve been if it “stayed indie” or any other manner of equally nebulous statements. It is very much it’s own sort of thing that can’t really have it’s essence captured in a short sentence, but I think it is all the better for it and a sublime experience.

The mod meets very high standards of polish; GUIs have been spiffied up, there’s a massive selection of world gen types, Creative and Hardcore are here, there are minor texture changes across the board to mellow the harshness of Beta visuals, support for controllers, captions and localization files have been added. All of this is accompanied by a beautiful guidebook which has been massively prettied up since the last time I played, which serves a double purpose as both a list of recipes and also a sort of “catch ’em all” repository since items are partially hidden until you acquire them. This is further buoyed by the new descriptions which are fun bits of flavor text that sometimes can clue you into other uses for items but generally try not to give the whole game away so some fun surprises are left for you.

The mod also breaks what I would consider are a lot of unspoken conventions for modded Minecraft experiences in the best way possible. The four bar armor system where each material gives different resistances to different types of damage is cool in and of itself but is massively enhanced by the specific balance between all the materials. For example, Gold is the strongest generalist armor material in this mod, but is weighed down by its durability, cost, and lack of specialization; would I really be able to argue it’s strictly better than Chainmail, which lacks in every category except for combat resistance, which is probably what you’re wearing armor for? But combat resistance doesn’t apply to creepers, so making a larger piece of your general set like leggings out of Steel which has high durability, decent generalist stats and incredibly blast resistance might be good. There are so many justifications for all sorts of armor combinations here, and they don’t even have any other special properties; this depth entirely comes from the resistances and external tradeoffs of each material type.

We have macro decisions like the aforementioned armor system and the also somewhat aforementioned addition of Steel which is a cheap high durability metal that mines slower than diamond to make immediate obvious impacts on the way the game is played, but this same mentality is brought everywhere to the smaller details, like the choice to have every flower in the game be a tiny flower and then to allow you to stack flowers in the same tile to make bushier flowers as the game’s personal solution to the need for something akin to the Rose Bush. They added the Reinforced Piston, which acts akin to the old pistons mod, but they transposed the (also new) ability for pistons to break blocks against obsidian and added the feature that it processes certain blocks like Cobblestone into Gravel. You can tell you’re in a slime chunk because it spawns slime particles underground. It even managed to do something new with Ropes, a common modded item, by making it so you can both right click to break the bottom-most rope or break it normally, and in both cases the rope will go straight into your inventory rather than dropping onto the ground. These are weird solutions that other mods or modpacks might not consider, but they are what make Better than Adventure both special and also feel incredibly thought out; the mod never makes me feel like “I wish I could do X with Y” since every feature is taken full advantage of, even if the overall volume of features is kept quite constrained.

Performance is maybe the one place where the mod stumbles, even if it’s not quite the mod’s fault; I remember the mod running at like a thousand FPS on my old computer and my new one massively dipped on the same version so I think it or Beta can tend to get quirky with specific hardware choices. In the worst case scenario, it can end up being a stuttery mess even on a faster computer, but the positives are this will still function on the saddest most pathetic hardware you have because not only does it have additional optimizations over Beta but it has support for new Java versions, so you can do the funniest overkill of running it with Java 25 CompactObjectHeaders to *achieve negative ram consumption*.

I do not have an ending paragraph. Better Than Adventure is one of my all time favourite things. It’s cool. It enhances the simpler pleasures of Minecraft like building a huge ass ugly structure or strip mining for an hour. Play it.

This mod feels like a parallel universe compared to normal minecraft. With the old textures, some modern mechanics ported to feel like beta and some completely custom additions that blend nicely into the vibe. I’ve had sooo much fun playing this.