Modded Minecraft: Cuboid Outpost

Posted by brilokuloj on Oct 28, 2024

Since I have so many hours logged on Minecraft modpacks and since I’ve spent so much time playing them, I figured reviews would be a good fit for the blog. I’m starting with one of the modpacks I have the most hours on: Cuboid Outpost by Cuboid Droid.

The modpack starts you in the titular “Cuboid Outpost”, a square building with a few essentials to get you started. Outside of the Outpost is nothing but snowy wilderness. There are no structures to discover, no ores to mine – in short, this is a Skyblock-style pack where you have a floor.

I found this approach quite refreshing. It conveys a classic Skyblock’s intrigue of starting from scratch while avoiding the (literal) pitfalls of building dirt over an immersion-destroying void.

The modpack does come with some flimsy lore distributed through chatter in quest logs, though it seems to exist primarily for humor. I wouldn’t have been opposed to a more heavy-handed presence of a backstory, but I also understand that this pack is trying to appeal to the broadest demographic it can. Oh well!

Speaking of humor, the pack itself is extremely, purposefully funny. A lot of humor in modpacks falls flat for me, being reliant on references to Marvel movies or YouTubers that were popular 10 years ago when I wasn’t in the community. Cuboid Outpost takes its own presence and goes as far as it can with it: you have to make a Coal Quantum Singularity (an item that spawns infinite amounts of coal) before you even have a block of dirt. It’s a modpack that always gives you a great answer to “Hey, what are you doing?”

Cuboid Outpost is CuboidDroid’s first modpack, which was a huge surprise to me while researching this article. The pack benefits from what I feel to be an unprecedented level of polish for Minecraft modpacks, along with a very tight focus on progression. Not only that, but the pack is defined by some very well-made mods made by CuboidDroid specifically for it, such as Quantum Singularities and Singularity Resource Generators. These are blocks I could easily imagine as recurring players in any tech modpack.

Unfortunately, Cuboid Outpost’s biggest flaw in my eyes is that inventory management is a nightmare. There are just too many items for me to work with. Crafting becomes easiest at the crafting station added by Refined Storage, which is connected directly to a Disk Drive, so you don’t have to juggle things directly within your inventory. But you only start with one disk, and it fills up fast. The quest to get more disks requires you to temporarily dismantle your digital storage, but I immediately ran into wishing that I still had access to my disk while having to juggle a dozen identical-looking items.

This modpack falls firmly into what I consider “sci-fi tech”, a subgenre of Minecraft tech that focuses on frequently absurdly overpowered unitasking blocks. Unlike the worst of packs I’ve played that rely on Industrial Foregoing, Cuboid Outpost at least has a lot of visually distinct unitaskers, but ultimately they’re still unitaskers. I was glad for the presence of Immersive Engineering, the first mod to get me really into modded Minecraft (due to its focus on, well, immersion), but the modpack barely calls for it. By the time I stopped playing, all I had was a coke oven for making treated planks.

I stopped in what I think the questline would consider to be early-game, though I dabbled in enough nonlinear later quests that it does feel like I’ve experienced roughly half of the pack. The rest was just not enough to keep my attention. I wanted to make a field full of garden cloches to pursue restoring plant life, but there wasn’t really a point.

Pros:

• Engaging humor
• Always something to do while waiting for other tasks to finish
• Feels super polished

Cons:

• Inventory management is a nightmare
• Not as much immersion or survival focus as the premise suggests

Cuboid Outpost can be downloaded on CurseForge. It also has a 1.20.1 port.

Categories: gaming

Tagged: modded minecraft minecraft

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