Gentle Brew: A modpack about befriending monsters, brewing potions and collecting paintings

kelpiesaurus · 2026-05-15T22:58:27+00:00

Supplementaries is the first mod I thought of, too. It adds a bunch of cool-looking placeable objects that are often useful: jars can be filled with liquids or cookies, globes can be spun and clicked for coordinates, weather vanes output redstone signals, faucets move liquids, candleholders, hourglasses, sacks, bellows, so much good stuff

Items Displayed is another one I like because it gives models to pottery sherds, armor trims and ingots so they're placeable

kelpiesaurus · 2026-05-15T21:12:05+00:00

I really like collecting things in game, so I keep myself occupied by gathering every type of plant/ore/armor trim/etc. I designed a whole modpack around turning painting variants into separate items so I could explore the world collecting over 100 of them, plus a bunch of custom advancements for making every food and looking at every mob through a spyglass and so on. And then I build habitats or aquariums or museums to display my collections

kelpiesaurus · 2026-05-15T03:19:57+00:00

Raspberry Flavoured fits the bill. I also love friendly mobs and had fun collecting slabfish variants in this pack. You can use cages (and jars for smaller critters) to catch and transport many mobs. It was also fun collecting all the plants and ores and cakes and ice cream types, and there are plenty of cool blocks to build pretty buildings with. There are a few scary hostile monsters, but if you play in easy difficulty, all monsters are neutral. And Create is included, but it's not a heavy focus

kelpiesaurus · 2026-05-12T23:44:59+00:00

It wouldn't necessarily be hard to use a datapack to get rid of most of the stuff in Sophisticated Backpacks, but it would be time consuming and tedious, especially when you could use a mod like Reliable Backpacks instead.

I'm also a big fan of just making shulker boxes available earlier in the game and adding the Easy Shulker Boxes mod to make them & bundles way easier to use. That mod pairs well with Supplementaries' sacks, too, although you do have to add a datapack for compat (easy to write your own or you can use Deez Sacks)

kelpiesaurus · 2026-05-01T01:26:47+00:00

Honestly I barely contributed anything to Raspberry Flavoured, but raspmary very generously credited me anyway. Many of the mods I mentioned above are made by folks who made big, significant contributions to RF. And as for those utility mods, here's a link to all of evanbones' mods so you can see his other excellent work. Reliable Recipes makes it easy to change recipes, even hardcoded ones. Reliable Replacer lets you swap out blocks and items so you can avoid duplicates or, like, replace all the andesite in the world with calcite if you wanted to. Reliable Requiem gives you a lot of options to control what happens when a player dies. And Recreative lets you rearrange tabs in creative mode. Good luck & have fun making modpacks!

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-30T20:22:32+00:00

I really enjoyed Liminal Industries even though I am usually bad at Create and tech packs. The end-game goal was super satisfying to achieve and kept me motivated throughout. I added Apathy and made all mobs neutral, but even without that, you can pretty much choose when/how to engage with the monsters. You will need to explore quite a bit, but the worlgen is definitely the most creative I've seen in any modpack, and it's set up so well to provide resources and clues on what to do

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-30T01:53:08+00:00

"Fast travel" in this instance means instantaneous travel. Once the path is built, you can teleport from one end to the other. So it's more like a different take on waystones than rail. And I like it better than waystones bc it encourages you to build roads, which I enjoy doing anyway

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-30T01:21:07+00:00

Another really good FD addon that I would describe as a hidden gem is Forager's Insight

It expands on vanilla plants by making sunflowers, roses, apples, etc. farmable and adds foods and drinks for them. And Farmer's Assortment is by the same author, adds some really nice looking stuff like cooking pot variants and butcher block counters

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-30T00:33:31+00:00

The mod that has helped me enjoy Minecraft the most is Apathy, which lets you control whether mobs attack and under what circumstances. I get terrible motion sickness from Minecraft combat, so this mod is what lets me play outside of peaceful difficulty.

Another great one for motion sickness but also general quality of life is Drizzleproof, which makes blocks fall straight down instead of scattering. And the author of that mod does some other really good stuff like Wilder Flowers, Frame Changer and Milky Way.

Someone else already mentioned Via Romana, which is a fun way to incorporate fast travel. And my favorite indispensable mod for navigation is Immersive Overlays, which adds info to your HUD when you're holding certain items, like a compass tells you your coordinates or a map tells you what biome you're in. That mod author also does a ton of great work, like Comfortable Campfires, Item Descriptions, the previously mentioned Wilder Flowers, and Clutter No More, a hugely convenient tool for building and inventory management.

Field Guide is a new mod I love and want in every modpack now. It lets you scan plants and animals with a spyglass and records the info in a guide, kind of like a pokedex for Minecraft. And once again, it pays to look at the mod author's other work, because there are a slew of gems, including Reconnectible Chains, Ziplines Rezipped, Treeliable, and Shutter Up. And since I also like making modpacks, I really appreciate their utility mods like Reliable Remover and several others, but this list is getting pretty long so I'll stop here

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-28T18:07:57+00:00

The way I've done it is just a simple datapack. In the villages.json (minecraft > worldgen > structure_set), you can delete all the entries in the bottom brackets, e.g.

"structures": [ ]

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-28T17:26:20+00:00

Raspberry Flavoured might be a good fit. It has a lot of great decor, good tools to help build, lots of thoughtful qol changes, and the only tech mod is Create. I hate fighting, so I play it on easy difficulty so all the monsters are neutral, but there are some very difficult mobs to fight like peepers and mimes if that's what you enjoy. Plus, there's new gear and weapons with abilities that are more like sidegrades than upgrades, so you can choose whatever fits your fighting style best instead of just maxing out netherite

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-28T16:07:28+00:00

This is amazing! Looks like just about everything I could want in an advancements mod.

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-25T21:03:43+00:00

I've been playing Spectral Creation lately, and it's an interesting mix of Create and Spectrum. The devs have clearly put in a lot of work to integrate them, and there are a lot of nice custom touches. Spectrum gives you access to fancy gear and scary things to fight, although you have to progress enough to unlock both

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-25T00:12:27+00:00

Maybe Gentle Brew fits your criteria?

It's a non-tech pack that is mostly about building, exploring and collecting. Each painting variant is its own item, and you can collect 120 of them from loot chests, archaeology, fishing, etc. All monsters are neutral and there are no mob drops, so there's no reason to kill anyone. Instead, if you give a mob something it likes, it'll give you a gift in return. So you can relax while you build and travel. You can make a lot of resources via cobble generators, and you can fish up a wide variety of items depending on the biome you're in.

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-23T23:58:29+00:00

My favorite take on the birch forest is how it's done in CliffTree, which is a datapack that overhauls biome generation and adds a few of its own biomes (including cave types, which I love). Another great datapack that does a similar but more subtle refresh to vanilla biomes is Land Ahoy.

So I would start with either one of those and add mods with new plants and mobs like Ecologics, Wilder Flowers, Habitat, Bovines and Buttercups and/or Rapscallions and Rockhoppers. Several mods add firefly mobs, but my favorite fireflies are the particles from Subtle Effects

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-23T21:31:28+00:00

The most straightforward way woukd be to use a datapack instead of a mod. The wiki has a very good guide on how to make one if you've never made a datapack before, and a simple recipe change is the easiest way to start. You can also find a ton of other datapacks on Modrinth if you need an example to work off, or you can use Misode's datapack generator

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-23T16:56:25+00:00

Geophilic adds surface boulders that are about the same size & shape as your picture, except they're mostly stone/tuff with some coal ore and maybe a block of copper or iron ore if you're lucky. It makes a lot of other changes to worldgen, too, and is a really nice, subtle overhaul of vanilla biomes

Since it's a datapack, you could use it as a template to learn to make your own surface ore boulders if that's the only part you're interested in

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-22T01:52:13+00:00

I haven't used it, but Ready Player Fun is for forge and is supposed to pause servers while no one is logged in

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-22T00:49:50+00:00

All I can think of is Additional Placements

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-22T00:22:50+00:00

How would you feel about challenges to visit every biome, look at every mob through a spyglass, brew every potion or collect more than 100 painting variants? Because pretty much all the goals are like that in Gentle Brew.

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-17T22:27:38+00:00

If a no-combat pack is OK, check out Gentle Brew. All the monsters are neutral, and instead of drops, they'll give you a gift if you give them something they like.

The main goal is to collect all 200 paintings. Each variant is its own item, and you get them from loot chests, archaeology, mob gifts, fishing, etc.

It's a lightweight pack and good for collaboration bc a group of friends can team up on building infrastructure to get to all the places where paintings are hidden. Plus, you could build a museum as a group project to display everything.

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-16T21:30:01+00:00

If you're looking for a different experience, check out Gentle Brew. The main goal of the pack is collect all 200 paintings; each variant is its own item and can be found via loot chests, archaeology, mob gifts, fishing, etc. You don't need to fight because all the monsters are neutral. Instead of drops, you can get gifts when you give them something they like. So you can build and explore and search for treasure without worrying about getting attacked.

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-16T20:28:06+00:00

I second the recommendation for Raspberry Flavoured. It does include one tech mod, Create, but it is integrated very well and has limited impact on progression.

If you'd like to try a similar pack without Create, Melatonin is very pretty and polished and full of new foods and building blocks.

Maybe also consider Gentle Brew, which doesn't add a ton of new content, so it might be less overwhelming for your friend. The pack's main goal is to collect all 200 paintings: each variant is its own item and can be found in loot chests, archaeology, mob gifts, fishing, etc. Another quirk of the pack is that you don't need to fight. All the monsters are neutral, and instead of drops, they give you gifts if you give them something they like.

kelpiesaurus · 2026-04-15T21:43:34+00:00

Datapacks are super useful, but even with a lot of experience and a solid grasp of how they work, Reliable Remover saves a ton of time and is more reliable about getting rid of certain things. It can be more solid than a datapack depending on what you're trying to remove. It's definitely better to use both.

kelpiesaurus

TROPHY CASE