Minecraft is one of the most successful games of this generation, topping the XBLA and PC charts with its huge amount of sales. However, the game has much more to offer than just continuous updates and an infinite world. The game has a huge mod community attached to it, so there’s a huge amount of impressive mods that improve and add to the original game you know and love. Out of all of these mods, here are the top five!
5) Forestry
Forestry adds a huge amount of content to Minecraft. There is incredibly in-depth coverage of farms and plantation systems—including automatic food collection, fertilization, and irrigation methods. It expands on trees and wood as a form of energy and introduces Biofuel, a renewable source of energy that works well with its farms. It also includes special machines to process these items as well as a complex bee-keeping system, with which you can make coal and iron into renewable resources. Did I mention you can control the weather? Since many parts of Forestry are dependent upon the weather, one of its items gives you the ability to start and stop thunderstorms.
4) Extra Biomes XL
Adding dozens of new biomes to the vanilla world, Extra Biomes is one of the best mods for the game and fits well with any style of play. Whether you’re looking for new places to explore or just better views, Extra Biomes XL expands upon Minecraft’s world generation. You can find breathtaking Glacial Mountains, Mesas, Bogs, Wastelands, and the very impressive Redwood Forests (to name a few). It doesn’t bring very many unique items to the game—just some leaf piles, its own fertilizer item, and the many new trees you will see in the landscape—but it does make a huge difference. Each world will truly be different, and finding a certain biome for its resources becomes much more of a challenge.
3) IndustrialCraft 2
One of the best mods focused on adding content to the game, IndustrialCraft elaborates on the inventions of Minecraft and moves the game from the Iron Age into the present-day era. It introduces a pipe system which simplifies item sorting and transference. It also adds many machines as well as methods to power them. Many other mods rely on IndustrialCraft 2 because it adds so much ease of use to the game. The mod is so successful that in a recent update, an item was added that mimics the function of pipes—the Hopper. While the two types of items have clear differences, it’s easy to see that IndustrialCraft 2 has actually managed to influence the official game.
2) Optifine
Optifine is a mod that focuses on improving Minecraft’s performance. Despite its simple graphics and premise, the game is actually a huge burden on the RAM of older computers, and Optifine aims to fix that. Not only does it improve the frame rate by a huge percentage—most Optifine users report that it more than doubles their FPS—but it also supports high-resolution texture packs. It’s a very simple mod, but also one of the most resourceful, and an essential mod to anyone who needs to improve their frame rate. You will need this mod to install a few others, including the impressive Unbelievable Shaders.
1) Not Enough Items
What could be better than adding power, more biomes, automatic farmings systems, or improving the FPS rate? Well, that would be Not Enough Items. This mod has three different modes: Cheat, Utility, and Recipe. What makes this mod shine is Recipe mode. You can search for an item in its search bar and the item will show up on the side. Clicking it will give you all recipes that use that item, as well as how to obtain them. Right clicking will tell you how to make the item itself. This mod is compatible with a huge amount of other mods, so if you’re playing an unfamiliar mod and need to know how to use an item, NEI is the best thing that can happen to you.
For #3, thats a BC quarry. Not anything from IC2 at all.
Also, the description itself of IC2 talks about the pipes it adds to the game.. again, that’s buildcraft. The author of this article could have looked into these mods a bit more carefully before writing this. :/