I love Minecraft. I think Minecraft may be the best game ever made. It's not my favorite game ever made, that's reserved for the Witcher 3, but I cannot deny that Minecraft has had the impact, longevity, and community to truly put it at the top.
Minecraft with mods is even better. System altering mods like Create, Farmer's Delight, Applied Energistics, etc can make the game feel new again even thousands of hours in. I have probably played over 300 hours of just the original Tekkit modpack over the years.
But I have a very specific gripe against 'Kitchen Sink' (KS) minecraft modpacks. To my understanding, KS modpacks are modpacks created with the intention of throwing in every mod possible as long as the game still launches and the systems don't clash too much. I think these types of modpacks are fundamentally flawed and make for a worse experience when compared to more narrowly-focused modpacks or even vanilla minecraft.
The two pitfalls that almost every KS modpack can fall into are:
- One or a few of the system-altering mods -- e.g. Ars Nouveau for magic, Create or Mekanism for tech -- can end up completely outcompeting other mods for efficiency or ease of progression, thus rendering the pursuit of any other mod in the pack alternative at best or unrewarding and grindy at worst. This discourages play diversity, especially in a server setting where in a few days people can often get to flying-around with netherite armor whereas you are struggling to even make a full iron suit simply because you chose a slower mod to progress down.
- The system-altering mods conflict greatly with other resource-alteration or world-generation mods, making it necessary to have light to moderate progression in several to many of the major mods in order to progress past a certain stage in any singular mod. I admit this is a bit confusing so here's an example:
- Say I really want to play X modpack for the inclusion of Ars Nouveau, and progressing in Ars requires a significant amount of both Lapiz Lazuli and Redstone. However, the modpack also includes a world gen mod that makes redstone either exceedingly rare or impossible to find - like covering the world in water because the world is pirate themed. I, as a good modpack creator, have thus altered some of the configs for Create Sifting so that some of these exceedingly-rare resources are much more likely to come up when sifting. But what does this mean in the end? Well... the player has to go a decent ways down the Create progression tree in order to even start to use Ars Nouveau in any significant capacity. I'm sure you can replace this specific example with a myriad of different conflicting mods.
The worst bit is that problem #2 can often reinforce problem #1 because any players that continue to give the modpack a chance will realize another system is simply more efficient, more powerful, or easier and switch to that.
Now the obvious rebuttals to this can be 'skill issue, learn more mods' or 'a good modpack creator should be able to balance all systems' or even 'so what? You picked the worse system that's just how it is'.
For those that instinctively thought the second sentence, I'd like to say that you're correct in theory. In theory, you could spend weeks on end modifying configs, drop rates, world generation files, hell even mod progression itself to balance all these systems and ensure one doesn't simply cannibalize or kneecap the others. But is that worth it? Do most modpack creators want to spend 3 weeks modifying and playtesting each one of 20-30 mods included in the pack just so that it's not a pain in the ass to pick that mod as your preferred progression method? I doubt it.
Not only that, but why subject yourself to such a time consuming task, when you can spend that time creating a highly focused modpack that tightly integrates the 5-10 systems you've decided to include? I think again to the success of Tekkit, RLCraft, Feed The Beast, or even Integrated MC.. All of these modpacks include a variety of systems but all focused around one or a few fantasies. Tekkit for technology progression, RL Craft for hardcode 'semi-realism' (for that just play Vintage Story IMO), and so on. This tight scope enables developers to spend time crafting a great experience, instead of trying to cram one more magic system mod in and making sure it doesn't break the others.
/rant
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kagumail.uselessly535@passinbox.com
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