Boy, it’s kind of embarrassing to have the posts on the front page cover a five-year span. I’ve had…issues, but that’s not for here.

I’ve certainly been playing games, but of them all, Minecraft still dominates a lot of my playtime. I hardly touch vanilla anymore, just modpacks nowadays, and over the last few years I’ve tried:

• Age of Engineering: A gated progression pack, where you proceed through a series of ‘ages’ where each age unlocks a new tier of machines and you progress to the next tier by crafting a certain item. Each age depends on stuff produced by the previous age so you can’t really skip ages, and many recipes are changed to make mods more interdependent on each other and more difficult to make. Can get a bit grindy, but I actually stuck with it all the way through this one and ‘beat’ it by crafting the hardest item in the pack, a creative vending upgrade, at which point you basically have infinite resources. Even if my base kinda looks like a hot mess…
• Sprout: I had high hopes for this one since it’s by the author of Regrowth, another really good modpack. It is very well-crafted, as all of the mods fit together well and create a nice, coherent world…but I couldn’t really get into it. I guess I was expecting something a bit more goal-oriented like Regrowth, but this one has only vague, nonessential quests.
• Craft of the Titans: A challenge pack where your goal is to survive an extremely hostile world (lots of new and aggressive monster spawns, even in daylight) and eventually get strong enough to work your way through defeating various bosses. I eventually got tired of this one before beating all of them, but did make it fairly far.
• Project Ozone 2: Also a challenge pack, though not as hostile (just the occasional blood moon) and with more intermixing between the mods. Did almost all of the quests in it aside from killing the Chaos Guardian, which I gave up on after a while.
• All The Mods Expert: Anther progression pack with customized, more-difficult recipes where it takes quite a bit of effort just to get to the basic sets of machines like Ender IO furnaces and grinders. No real end goal to it, so I stopped after I had a base where most processing was almost fully automated.

There are a few other packs I’m tempted to try out, like Modern Skyblock 2, Divine Journey, and Forever Stranded, but I think I might be kinda sick of Minecraft, for a little while at least…