Terrafirmacraft is the original total overhaul mod, changing every facet of survival gameplay. Past 1.12.2, there is an ingame guide for the player to inform themselves about every change in the mod.

The player is presented with several unusual challenges they must overcome in order to progress; for example, in order to leave the stone age, they must melt metal ore before pouring it into a mold and carefully smith heated metal into useful gear.

The environment is full of obstacles, some passive and others actively harming the player in a task. One of the former is temperature which can be fought by several means, like adapted crops, seasonal preparation and water management. As for the latter, one can think of mining, where the very stone around the player can cave in upon them, crushing any careless miner to mulch if they do not prepare with proper supports.

A large variety of tools is available to the player in order to overcome, and even take advantage of these mechanics. A builder might intentionally cause a cave-in with explosives in order to gather large amounts of cobblestone, or an early player could create elaborate sandwiches to improve their maximum health.

Overall, this mod has a flexible progression arc, and lets the player stray quite far from progression without any punishment. Alone, it can sate a player’s appetite for a good challenge, or a relaxing experience for hours.

Unfortunately, the endgame doesn’t consist of much- just like any modpack, or the vanilla game, it falls short in progression past the end consisting of the most refined of steels, perfected tool techniques and masterfully cooked meals. At this point, like a vanilla player, the only thing to do is to set your own goals. This is why I rate it 4/5, rather than 5/5.

TerraFirmaCraft, like it advertise itself “Survival mode like it should’ve been” is a minecraft mod about, guess what: Survival. This mod rebalance and overhaul mostly every aspect of Minecraft by introducing a much more survival-like aspect to the game, explore a completely new world with a revamped worldgen where you now need to deal with cave-ins, food rot, pit-kilns, and semi-realistic tool forging. What you know of vanilla Minecraft won’t apply there, there no vanilla furnace or diamond tools and getting simple planks requires you to make a metal saw. While the mod may not be everyone cup of tea due to hard and grindy gameplay, it’s a pretty fun mod to play if you ever feel like minecraft is too easy to rush and has no real progression. The mod is a much survival overhaul, but it doesn’t have much content past-red steel, in fact, the mod is best played as a early game mod which is where it shines. I would rate 4.5 if I could, but 4 is too low for the amount of interesting content it provides compared to most mods out there.

TerraFirmaCraft is a detailed total conversion survival mod with a lot of custom mechanics, and has some of the best crafting mechanics I’ve seen to date. The 1.7.10 version in particular is so comprehensive that the mod can pretty much be played on its own. Worldgen, blocks, and items are overhauled, and there is even new music and mobs. Unfortunately, the mid/late game gets repetitive and is mainly just improved methods of metalworking. iirc the mod also had issues with insufficient in-game documentation, which was less of a problem when the 1.7.10 wiki was around, but now that version of the wiki is gone. Still, it’s a great mod overall that is worth trying at least once for the experience.