If we count any mod then it's got to be Too Many Items (father of NEI, grandfather of JEI)

If talking about content mods, it's harder and depends a lot on personal taste but I'd personally pick Thaumcraft. Back in the day there really was nothing remotely like Thaumcraft 4, and even now 10 years later while there's some very good mods in their own right that take a few pages from its book (no pun intended), they're still so far away from it. It's one of the only mods you could just have entirely on its own, nothing else installed, and still have an incredible experience with it.

IC2 gave us gregtech, thaumcraft gave us thaumcraft 4. None other mods could really be an answer
twilight forest might be there too, but the mod is only complimentory to other mods, not much by itself

Well TIL. Apparently a a big inspiration for Factorio was in fact these minecraft mods.

Jei doesnt count or else it would obliterate every single mod ever no question

Which is why both should be included in a modpack lol.

Love those two mods, I’m playing with the both right now in the 1.12.2 pack by tekkit.

There are 3 mods that i missed when I moved from modded to vanilla, mouse tweaks, inventory sorting and apple skin

Other that I miss and would love are backpack mods on vanilla but they would need to come with a complete update on minecraft inventory

Litematica is a must if you like redesigning your builds in creative

Dynamic lights is nice to have

The aether, although a great mod, doesn't really add anything "must have"

no mods are must have. apart from some performance mods I never play modded, and even performance mods I dont use often since they take a while after an update gets released to adapt to it.

Where is that guy that always says "play the game however you like"

There are so many mods that imo should have been implemented in vanilla years ago. Mouse tweaks, appleskin, and the mod that sorts your inventory with the middle mouse button, these are an absolute must. I haven't touched vanilla minecraft in years because modded is simply better in every way.

1.5.2 for me, especially hexxit my beloved

1.5.2. Mine was pirated, and as a dumb kid I was, I didn't have any clue on how to update it. I would often heard the other kids talking about horses in vanilla, and thought they were delusional and bullshiting.

1.7.3 beta it was so magic

Pretty sure tbe version that came out at launch is the equivalent of beta 1.6.6. The only version I usually play on Java 😅

version 1.2.5 was when I first started playing and its the most nostalgic for me at least

Are you sure you're not thinking of 1.5.2? The new launcher was required for 1.6, not 1.3

Buildcraft.

First mod that could move items from one spot to another and could pick up items. Completely revolutionized both modded and vanilla

I remember trying to make my own pack before Forge existed.

I spent about 10 minutes reading about how to resolve conflicts between mods, and then gave up.

When you consider that FML and OreDictionary are also parts of Forge, I have to agree. Also don't forget that Forge is what does this stuff when you join a server. It was supposed to be in the official API, but it never happened.

Forge is truly the greatest mod.

EDIT: I stand corrected. Right in my screenshot it says that it is "Brandon's Core" that does this, not Forge. Oh well, I'm still impressed by Forge.

Thaumcraft. No mod has immersed me so fully into it. It's really beautiful with by far the most gorgeous and well-done book, really amazing textures and models that to this day blow most mods away and just a really nice overreaching theme to the entire mod. And it all feels cohesive together with well-done mechanics that seamlessly interconnects every part of the mod. A lot of magic mods I've tried feel really confusing, unclear or some parts of the mod feel "one-up"py with super furnaces and end all armor sets, but all of Thaumcraft's mechanics and features always felt thematically "right" to me. I would suck Azanor's actual dick I could.

JEI. Without its recipe viewers, modded Minecraft and new mods would be virtually impossible to get started in.

Risugami's Recipe Book is the earliest I remember. Just pages of 6 crafting recipes (Even earlier, 1 per page?), and you could left/right click to navigate one page at a time. Its amazing utility and awkward navigation inspired successors (irc.esper.net, #EESupport, 2011-10-20 14:48:01), primarily NEI then JEI.

I've been looking for it but for Modrinth. And let's say if I want to use two modpacks together, I want to know which version works best to accommodate all the mods.

Man I wanted something exactly like this when I first got into modding Minecraft.

This is cool. Prism's export feature has URLs that this doesn't accept. They look like: https://www.curseforge.com/projects/1015105.

Registering doesn't work-- at least one required field (nickname) is hidden from view, always resulting in the error "the Author field is required". Even if I use inspect element to fill in the nickname field manually, submitting the signup form redirects me to the homepage with no confirmation message, and attempting to login doesn't work

The starting base in craft mode

If it’s not the Super Yamato or the Ragnarök it has to be the starter dingy in the campaign we all instantly scrap for material as well as half of our base

Ragnarök maybe?

Super Yamato?

I’d say it’s down to the Ragnorok, Martin’s Yamato (either version), or the Gimle.

Of These, the Ultra Battleship Yamato is one of the most subscribed to craft.

###General/Vanilla+ mods

Akashik Tome, Alex's Mobs, almost all of Abnormal's Mods, Tetra (w/Tetranomicon), BetterEnd, Drawers, Iron Chests, Lootr, Apotheosis, Artifacts (w/Curios API), BYG and of course, JEI (w/JER) Neat and The One Probe. Don't forget about backpack, mapping and grave mods too, and optionally, a veinminer (my personal favourite is FTB Ultimine)

Then put whatever mods are fitting for your pack:

###Tech mods:

I consider Mekanism, Resourceful Bees, Thermal Series, Tinker's construct, Botania, Morph-O-Tool, Industrial Foregoing, AE2/RE and Create essential for this

###Magic mods:

Botania, Astral Sorcery, Occultism, Eidolon are pretty much essential for this

###Structure/Worldgen mods Valhesia Structures, Terraforged, Repurposed Structures, Dungeons Mod and WDA (When dungeons arise) are good pretty good

###Dimension mods

Abyss: Chapter Two, Blue Skies and Twilight Forest are the best imo, even though Abyss is still WIP and the English translation is weird

###Performance mods Sodium Reforged, FerriteCore, LazyDFU, Clumps, and FastSuite w/FastFurnace Minus Replacement and FastWorkbench Minus Replacement

###Modpack making tools OpenLoader, FancyMenu and CraftTweaker/KubeJs

Hope this helped :)

Alexs mobs, create are some content mods that can make modpacks much more fun

Mekanism v10

Well this has been a fun thread to walk into and realize nobody plays my mods anymore. :D

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/gregtech-intergalactical/files/3257703

I say this as someone who used to include epic fight in their pack, it isn’t worth it at this point. Too many incompatibilities, but the mod has really good potential and i hope there’s a focus on more compatibility soon.

I've scaffolded out some page updates. Will see if I can do more this coming week. That's entirely a fair point. It's been on 1.16 for a long time now actually (and frankly the download count is pretty good, I guess people just aren't really "aware" though).

I’m gonna throw in my own vote, the original tekkit pack will always have a special place in my heart

Enigmatica 2 Expert. I've played it through all the way twice and am on my third playthrough. I think it's fantastic, if a bit grindy

I loved the progression of the agrarian skies modpacks. Make a burger. Make 100 burgers. Make 10000 burgers.

GT New Horizons. I've spent somewhere between 2500 and 3000 hours on it so far with no plans to quit. It was amazing when I started playing it several years ago, and every release since then has seen groundbreaking improvements.

Infinite Evolved Expert

Beat me to it! It was either that or Revelations, but I'm pretty sure it was Infinity Evolved. It was the one we played after Tekkit.

My friends and I had a server for it and good lord did I get addicted very quickly! I was a noob to modded so after spending time adding a woman's touch to the base, basically just building like it was vanilla because I got tired of living in a hollowed out cube in the side of a mountain, and then making a beautiful farm to keep everyone fed, I got very interested in all the tech stuff and especially power generation! I kept sticking my nose into everyone's projects until I finally figured out how to start making things on my own. I'm so glad I did too, I joined their Tekkit server late and was just lost from day one. I built a tree house and hid from the machines, just barely dabbling in ProjectE when someone showed me how to get pretty much unlimited building blocks from it.

Our next server which in pretty sure was infinity evolved or a later pack! Inrecall that it was an FTB pack that had AE2, Mystcraft, and Buildcraft! Those mods ended up becoming the main ones i used in my pet project. I made an ME storage network, kept making new worlds and then setting up quarries and pumps to drain them of resources until I had such a massive amount of metals that I made a void world and began building a sci-fi themed space station!

That pack is where my absolute love of modding began, however, my new passion for all things automation began with Skyfactory 3!

These days I'm pretty much obsessed with Minecolonies and am having a ball making one in All The Mods 8 while my wife explores the twilight forest and constantly brings us back new material types! All the while my mad scientist's laboratory grows ever further hidden under the village starting out from the basement of our main warehouse! Machines line the walls, processing ores, while create farms spin slowly gathering wood, food, and essences from a vast subterranean facility bristling with mystical agriculture flowers. Meanwhile the massive refined storage network slowly fills, stopping only to demand another disc drive be built! The colony must grow. . . The machine must feed. . . Insufficient. . . Storage. . . Space!

Botania. No other mod is self-contained like the tech/magic hybrid flower mod, from what I’ve played. You can even play it without JEI, if you want, because the guide book is just that dang awesome. Then there’s the coroprea system. That is freaking amazing. Tools that are powerful, yet not DE-level OP, vanilla redstone interaction... the list goes on and on.

Thermal Expansion. It's just the best. No other mod has brought me as much joy and contentment as that one.

I really like a lot of mods, but Create has just been so much fun lately. Definitely have to go with Create

Mekanism or immersive engineering. I love how OP mekanism is but really love how immersive looks so I sometimes make immersive machines and hide melanin machines under them that do the same thing. It looks cool while being far faster and more useful.

.....

.... JEI.