Yeah, there's not a lot there. I've played it, and it's okay but not particularly good or interesting.
Yes. Mekanism and Immersive Engineering both use FE, they just change the name. This means you can use their energy interchangeably. That said, the Mekanism generators have a lot higher energy output than anything Immersive Engineering has, but that might not necessarily be a problem.
Create, by default, has no way of generating FE power. You need an addon for that. There's a couple different ones out there, depending on the version.
Pretty sure Forge is dead in the water. The majority of devs left for NeoForge, and it's likely the majority of moddevs will follow.
The best mobile games tend to be ports. Stick Ranger is a good example.
Hi! Nice to see you over on the little corner of Lemmy I carved out for this niche. Hopefully the transition goes off without too many issues. One thing I've been wondering is whether changes from 1.20 to 1.21 NeoForge will be enough to have a bottleneck effect like the 1.13 and 1.8 changes had on previous versions, but it might be too early to tell. Best of luck on the new project!
Neat! I've toyed around with Minecolonies before. I'll have to take a peek at it at some point. I'm interested to see how they build their progression on it.
Cool! Railcraft is a fun mod, but I always found it hard to justify using it compared to other mods that generally worked just as well and were simpler.
Warsim deserves love. It's a real passion project: a text-based kingdom management sim with lots of things to do and nooks and crannies to explore.
The biggest reason is that it's a reaction to RF-ification. Starting back on 1.7.10, there was a big push for every mod to move over to RF. This eventually cumulated in RF being renamed FE and becoming part of the Forge API. This was good for cross-mod compatibility and came to dominate the space.
1.12.2 was peak RF. Before Create, you'd have to go all the way back to Rotarycraft or Electrical Age on 1.7.10 to find a tech mod that wasn't seeped in RF, and even then people sometimes used these mods solely for generating RF. The closest you could get on 1.12.2 was Better With Mods, the Better than Wolves spin-off. (To play the original Better than Wolves, you have to go all the way back to 1.5.2! It still receives updates, but I'm getting off track.) True, there was Industrialcraft, which used EU, but 1.12.2 saw it get displaced by Immersive Engineering, which was somewhat similar in function but used RF!
The problem with RF is that it's kinda boring. You make it, you move it, you store it, and you burn it. It's fine. It functions, but the power transfer isn't that interesting. You also had "magic blocks/multiblocks," which were powerful machines that were basically plug and play and didn't need much design to get working right.
So when Create showed up, it wiped all that away and used rotary power. No RF, no magic blocks. Here are the pieces, figure it out. Nothing like it had existed for several versions. On top of that, it had a vanilla-plus vibe, which people like. It's visually interesting, which people also like. Stuff like that gets r/feedthebeast's attention, which gets the packdevs and the YouTubers attention, which leads to modpacks and videos, which leads to attention over the whole modded Minecraft scene.
On top of that, it is a genuinely good mod. It is in everything, though, kind of like how Tinker's Construct was in everything for awhile. Eventually people burn out on it due to overexposure and the pendulum swings back. How many packs have Tinker's now? Plenty, I'm sure, but not like it once was.
Modded minecraft has a pretty strong cult of the new. It doesn't matter how small the next update is, everybody has to jump to it.
I've been working on my own modpack, Rotary Skies. It's a Skyblock modpack centered on Rotarycraft. I plan on doing a separate post touring my starter base before too long. I really like how it's coming together.
Intrinsically, definitely. Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, Victoria 2, and etc.