Bad Minecraft Mods
There are some mods for minecraft out there, that are just plain bad, not because of code quality or because they contain bugs and are badly maintained, but because they’re subscribing to some kind of philosophy that’s actually hostile towards the player. In most cases, nobody would use them, but sometimes these mods get entrenched into modpacks where they become a nuisance to a lot of players. I likely did forget some things, and maybe people will tell me that this-and-this feature(!) has been fixed, but on the whole I gather I’m right, and these mods are not going to change what I’m criticising. Since I don’t want to post a worst-of-list, but detail where they fail, they’re sorted alphabetically.
Avaritia
Avaritia offers some extremely powerful weapons and armour, which it tries to counterbalance with two things:
- Idling to wait for enough stuff to build up in some strange machine whose main purpose is to be slow (you need thus a lot of those) or for stuff to build up in you system (like hundred-thousands of blocks of something), to move into some other machine, very slowly, to convert into something. To add to the insult, if you break the machines, you loose all content; like tens of thousands of iron blocks.
- Clicking various stuff into place in an oversized crafting table that can hold much more different ingredients than your inventory, thus making any effort of automatic filling in of the recipe useless. And if the recipe is simpler than 36 ingredients , you’re sure to need something like 58 stacks.
Sounds familiar?
Buildcraft
Buildcraft is intended to goad players into overloading servers by having things that will behave badly and produce lag, unless the player knows exactly what he’s doing.
- Hose’d It’s not a pipe, it’s a hose, and the player needs to throttle the feed, or it will spill and kill the server. But maybe it will anyway, since it runs on random ticks and likes to spill on chunk boundaries. And you need to power pipes, and these engines produce, you guessed it, lag.
- Not Invented Here Needs its own incompatible power system, which is basically the same, but incompatible. Oh wait, replaced the compatible one with an incompatible one.
Factory Tech
Factory Tech is for making replacement parts that constantly break for Factory Tech machines that constantly break.
- Russian Dolls Sorry, but to craft the thing you need, you need to craft 5 more machines. Actually, a complete production line for all these machines, because you need to supply them with parts that constantly break.
- Micro Stacks So you can’t stack up on parts and need to set up a production line. Really.
This might be an interesting mod if you really wanted to decide on it, like for a modpack that does not have RF or its equivalents at all; but if you run into it in any other context, it’s an exercise in frustration.
Forestry
It’s about beekeeping. It doesn’t care whether you only wanted to grow trees, now you’ll do beekeeping.
- Wrong Path The main problem is, in order to pollinate trees, you need to breed bees, and you basically need to go into a rabbit-hole of bee breeding, just to get the right kind of bees.
- Mutations There’s a huge tree of species; actually two trees, one for bees and the other for trees to mutate around. If you’re lucky. In fact, you’ll be so unlucky, there’s a mod called Gendustry out there that allows you to tone down the randomness and with some effort get the species you want.
- Weird machines You need several machines that are basically useless for everything else. Some also need electronic parts, which are also useless everywhere else, and are made by other weird machines.
There’s actually a lot of interesting stuff in Forestry, but the mechanisms force you to do microcrafting and follow paths — for a long time — you didn’t actually intend.
Hats
Because novelty is only funny once.
- Not Hats. Putting weird shit on your head doesn’t make it hats. Believe me, I’m the guy who has a collection of more than 100 actual hats, caps and helmets.
- Visual Mis-cue Sometimes probably intended, you see something and think there might be something special, but it’s only some stupid thing on the head of a mob.
IndustrialCraft 2
The use of IndustrialCraft is to craft and power IndustrialCraft machines.
- Hostile to other mods. It actively tries to do it’s own thing, to the point of sabotaging interoperability-efforts of other mods. For instance other power-systems than its own, but also stuff that tries to pick up its blocks, or stuff that feeds to/from IndustrialCraft machines.
- Things fail Machines will explode if they get too much power. And they always used to break if somebody tried to pick them up with a pickaxe, and even sometimes if done with the proper wrench. Which is just a nightmare for new players to figure out how this mod is supposed to work.
- Not documented Lots of weird and inexplicable behaviour, not documented. And even the textures are nondescript, which adds to the general impression of hundreds of (machine?-)blocks with no purpose (apparently it’s only 98).
- Microcrafting You will need a lot of these machines, just to get the parts done for other machines. And then you need to craft things from things to craft things to craft things.
- Highly Illogical It’s got a power system on it’s own. Not one that’s more realistic, but one that’s totally absurd; like needing a transformer at the plant for every thing that uses power. And did I mention everything explodes if it gets too much power?
- Abomination What highly illegal thing is this?
multiple items in same slot for ONE craft
Lordcraft
The real clicker game. It’s even worse than Avaritia.
- Clicker It has its own crafting bench, which needs to get some kind of power from another block, where you need to feed in crystals; but the really bad thing about this crafting bench is that you need to click for every item that is being crafted. Wait a few seconds until its crafted, click again. Of course it ignores redstone clocks.
Magneticraft
The evil twin of Immersive Engineering
- Powerless Magneticraft feels somehow like the modern cousin to Immersive Engineering, the logical extension to it. But it does not accept power from it. Magneticraft does have a real-world electrical system itself, but there is no reason not to just convert RF to Joules and RF per ticks to Watts. The voltage could be ignored or converted to LV/MV/HV where available. But no.
- Interface unclear Especially for the multipart machines, it’s entirely unclear where the in- and outputs are, and why the machine doesn’t get power and so on.
Modern Industrialization
It takes 13 blocks of material to make a machine of one block size
- Massive amounts & Microcrafting A basic pump (one block) takes 81 copper and 24 tin. And the “Forge Hammer” you need for micro-crafting the 3 different bits of each of the nine-parts of the two rotors takes 49 Iron.
Tech Reborn
Tech Reborn has gotten a lot better actually, so maybe this should even be removed. In fact, I’ve grown to like Tech Reborn in 1.19.2 and later.
- Microcrafting Everything needs complicated things, preferably made by other machines.
- Powerless All the generators are measly, except the end game one, and particularly egregious is the diesel generator which takes more energy for the making of diesel than it produces.