Do You Remember the Greatest Mod of All Time?

Just for anyone who might be confused, I am talking about Thaumcraft 4 in this video, Thaumcraft 4 is the best version and these praises I will give it might only apply to Thaumcraft 4 I’m jumping into this knowing that this is going to be a controversial subject for many.

There have been many extremely well made mods over the years, some overtaking the amount of content in the base game, and some having straight up higher quality features than vanilla Minecraft ever had. Some of the mods that might come to your mind when you hear of this would be the Aether,

The Twilight Forest, The betweenlands, but you have to notice one very important thing about these mods, they all stand on their own. They could be their own game without Minecraft. The problem is that if they were, they would be short and meaningless, so in reality, these

Mods are meant to be experienced and then disposed of. So what really, would make a mod good enough to keep in the base game forever. Let’s break it down to some fundamentals: First we have the quality of the content put in by the mods.

This includes how well the things added by the mod function, and how good the concepts are, and how good the content is in general. It is quite easy for a mod to surpass Vanilla Minecraft features in quality because generally things added by mods have more functionality and purpose, which greatly boosts the quality.

Secondly we have the amount of content. Lots of people will say that quality is over quantity, but the reality is, you can’t have any good quality features if there isn’t a quantity of them, because there needs to be a large quantity to tie all of the features together in a meaningful way.

Thirdly, we have a controversial one, complexity. Many people will complain about complexity because they don’t like to learn or overcome things, and they come up with excuses like how Minecraft isn’t supposed to be complex even though it is very complex to first time players.

Complexity builds a learning curve and skill gap, one makes a sense of accomplishment and gives meaning, and the other makes practice vital and adds play time. Complexity also weeds out incompetent players, which is bad for a purely game advertising

Perspective, but it is good for a player’s sense of value, and remember this is a mod. People can also look up tutorials if they really need help. And finally, and the most important one, the mod needs to be able to seamlessly merge with

The base game and synergise with the game’s already existing mechanics, blocks, items, mobs, and everything else. Let’s see, what mod does this? The Aether? Absolutely not. It is a completely disconnected dimension and leaves everything in the base game behind.

Even though it is a great mod with a good amount of content and great quality, it would never last forever given how disconnected it is, and plus, it isn’t complex at all and really just sticks to the normal game’s mechanics.

I know I just said that it is good if the mod merges with the existing mechanics, but there is a difference between copy pasting the same mechanics and building off of the mechanics. The Betweenlands has decent complexity, a good amount of content, and great quality.

But again, and even more so this time, the mod is completely severed from the base game of Minecraft. So much so that you cannot even bring vanilla tools into the dimension because it would ruin the progression system. On top of this, and I will prove this later, it’s complexity, amount of content, and

Content quality completely pale in comparison to Thaumcraft. The Twilight forest has a good amount of content, okay quality, low complexity, and no synergy with vanilla Minecraft. The mods that do compare with Thaumcraft in synergy, however, are going to be the old Witchery mod, buildcraft, create, and last and least – Blood Magic.

I’m going to get the Blood Magic mod out of the way first by just saying that, well, it synergizes, it does, but just because it synergizes and builds off of Minecraft’s base mechanics doesn’t mean it does it all that well.

The in game mechanics are just busywork, so it isn’t high quality and honestly it isn’t good in quantity either. It is complex enough, but the mechanics are just boring and not intuitive compared to Thaumcraft. There is something so inherently magical about Thaumcraft. I honestly think it is impossible to beat.

The mod is so well designed that it is an insult to just call it a mod. The fact that you can choose so many different paths and not get lost and bored of the mod is incredible, but at the same time you still have so much content to progress through by

Doing things in the mod to get to new things. I haven’t even gone over how Thaumcraft synergizes with Minecraft yet because I am just too caught up on the sheer amount of quantity, complexity, and quality content you get out of it. The tech mods are next up on the list.

The thing about all of these mods, mainly, buildcraft, and create, is that they have really good synergy with vanilla Minecraft. They beat Thaumcraft when it comes to creative mode builds and just building in general. They have really good complexity but still don’t beat Thaumcraft in my opinion.

But the issue here is that one – it is a completely different genre of mod, and two – these mods lack content. Now I’m not saying that a tech mod that lacks a lot of content is inherently bad, sometimes again, quality is over quantity.

But once again you need some quantity to have quality, so generally, it isn’t worth making another Minecraft playthrough with only that one mod installed. So here is where things get a little difficult. We now have to compare values between two different genres of mod.

We have a creativity side where you can make complex builds to collect resources and do things you would normally do in Minecraft but amplified. Big hint here, normal Minecraft but amplified in structural challenge. And then we have the RPG side where you can make new weapons, have new methods to get

Them, explore new areas, and beat new enemies. You might see why I would choose the RPG side which Thaumcraft is on over the creativity side, but, the thing is, I’m not going to. Honestly they are equal, especially given that Minecraft innately leans towards the

Creativity side as that is the nature of the game. Well then is Thaumcraft worse then the mods on the creativity side?… Nope, it’s way better. The thing about Thaumcraft, and I was scheming this the whole time, is that it is on both sides, it’s actually perfectly balanced on both sides.

You might have not known this, but Thaumcraft is in fact technically a tech mod. You build crazy looking machines. Vis smelteries, flux cleaners, vis sorting systems, more sophisticated mob grinders, and the thing is, these machines work better then the machines on the creative side of the spectrum because they have a purpose.

You need these machines for specific things while on the creativity side it is all about efficiency, and so mods like buildcraft can get boring way too quickly. Create is a little bit different though, because you can use it for a lot more than just normal resource collecting.

It basically makes normal Minecraft redstone and physics extremely good, and that beats Thaumcraft in that way, but Create as its creativity enabler is not enough to beat Thaumcraft as a whole. Now that I have proved to you that if Thaumcraft is as good as I say it is it would be considered

The best mod. Let’s get into the details of why Thaumcraft is so good in every single category I mentioned. The thing about Thaumcraft when it comes to the amount of content it contains, is that Thaumcraft as a true extension of Minecraft, never really ends.

It is perfectly set up to where you never obtain the stupidly overpowered level and basically make the whole game irrelevant, and you always have something to do. Whether it be building better vis systems, finding more nodes, or making larger golem

Farms, you will always find yourself in a spot where you will need something else, in a good way. Now it is important that these features are quality, or they aren’t worth playing. But I am here to tell you that just the art style and the mechanics combined would make

This mod’s features considered quality. But past this, I have run into more bugs in vanilla Minecraft than I have in Thaumcraft. The mechanics work perfectly together and everything in the mod synergizes with itself, so you will never make an item that can’t be used past its original purpose.

There is so much content in each corner of the game from Thaumcraft, and it is all so well done. Thaumcraft is by far the most complex mod I have ever played, hosting one of the most intuitive but complex systems in all of gaming, and yes, I know this because I play Warframe.

You first start off by trying to find primal element blocks, which requires you to think about which blocks can carry only the very basic elements. From there you can scan and gain knowledge about more and more complex items.

When you do this you get points in the research table that you can spend to link together two or more complex elements in a formula for a specific item, which requires you to think about the best path to take to use less points.

On top of this, having you choose whatever path you would need to take by yourself just amplifies the complexity. The complexity makes it so much more immersive because you have to think like you are in the game to understand what to scan, what next paths to take, and where to go with the

Mod. Now, how does Thaumcraft merge and synergize with the base game of Minecraft? Well, it’s completely seamless, the basic things you need to progress in the mod already exist within Minecraft, and the new things are mixed into the world.

When you first start scanning, you will obviously be scanning blocks that already existed in vanilla Minecraft. On top of this it also mixes well with other mods because lots of blocks from other mods have Thaumcraft element values and so you can scan them.

Nodes are found inside of vanilla Minecraft, and the elements that they contain match to their surroundings. The new structures and biomes fit well, and the features later on into Thaumcraft do not break the base game. You really have to play the game for yourself to understand how Thaumcraft really just feels

Like it belongs inside of the game. Alongside the Aether mod of course, But given that you made it all the way to the end I can show you the depressing viewers VS subscribers graph, just kidding nobody cares. *whispering* (seriously please do subscribe though).

Only if I am able to grab the algorithm by its throat and throw it off a balcony again… Do that though.