Ok so this is going to be a bit of a long review, as this mod touches on a topic of game design in modpacks that really bothers me.

First of all, I love temperature thirst mods that make survival harder. They can be great fun when done right. It enhances survivalist modpacks and makes you really feel like you’re fighting against the elements. It pairs especially well with season mods. Trying to find a cave to warm up in when you’re caught in a snowstorm? It just tickles the primitive parts of the human brain that scream “Ug survive, ug make fire.”

But the keyword here is “done right.” Barely any modpack actually puts effort into testing and configuring TAN, which makes the experience insufferable. And that’s due to the mod coming with terrible default configs. At the default rates, stepping outside at noon will almost instantly make you suffer from heatstroke. Wading across a river in the middle of summer gives you hypothermia. And getting caught in a snowstorm? Instant death. You’re basically immediately taking damage. And so pack devs throw this mod into their pack without any edits just to “make it harder.” And that brings me to the second issue.

This mod doesn’t fit 90% of modpacks it’s used in. TAN is great for packs that are focused on hardcore primitive survival. But this requires integrating mechanics that makes it enjoyable to interact with TAN’s mechanics and make it relevant. On it’s own, a thirst bar is really just a second hunger bar. It’s not very interesting. But if water is scarce in an apocalypse pack, or in space where you have to harvest and manage water from asteroids? Now that’s interesting. You’ve tied water management to interesting gameplay. Same with temperature. The greatest implementation of temperature I’ve seen is in Winter Rescue where they had a custom mod for stormfronts, and blizzards sometimes lasted for days on end. You had to prepare ahead of time your food and campfire fuel. It made temperature a core part of gameplay. But when you just throw TAN into any random pack because “difficulty good,” it ends up being an annoying mechanic that players eventually circumvent by using the temperature controlling baubles, making the mod irrelevant. This is partly the fault of the pack devs, but also partly the fault of TAN’s lack of advanced configurability and variety of temperature management that isn’t essentially “full immunity.”

Newer versions of the mod seem to have somewhat fixed some of these issues, but I find myself switching to Survival Inc these days for my own projects. And if I find this mod in a pack using default configs, I’ll straight up rip it out.