Modded Minecraft: Liminal Industries

Posted by brilokuloj on Aug 11, 2026

Liminal Industries exists in an interesting space. At 600k downloads as of 2026, it’s not the most popular Minecraft modpack by any means, but it’s captured the eye of casual modded Minecraft players and has become an entry point for many people.

The premise has been done a million times: it’s Minecraft, but you’re in the backrooms. This already sounds really corny to start with, but it’s executed brilliantly here. I sometimes forget that I’m a big fan of the core backrooms concept, because I don’t care much for the more SCP-esque formula you’ll see on places like Roblox – I think it’s a cool group effort, it just doesn’t really captivate me in the same way, and its lack of curation leaves it a bit of a mess. (I wrote most of this review before the movie came out. The movie is cool.)

Liminal Industries cuts all the chaff and gets to the core concept: you are in the backrooms. There are no native backrooms monsters and there is nothing hunting for you. Your only “monstrous” threat is dens of sculk-infested mobs, which are treated as an external force. These are easily avoidable and can be eventually totally overcome. The goal is to survive and automate everything.

The modpack advises you to automate everything as soon as possible. You should do this! It’s initially so easy to do all of the tasks by hand that I didn’t realize the pack will later start incrementing the resources it asks of you. More on that later.

There are many gameplay loops, and they are introduced seamlessly and flow into each other. Your primary fuel will probably be bamboo for most of the pack, so a good bamboo farm is a must. You can get bamboo through the Botania mod. In order to harvest it, you’ll probably want some mechanical saws, which take iron and copper.

Getting ore requires you to explore the labyrinth of the backrooms – and I can’t speak highly enough of the set design here. The map is generated as a maze made of large connected square rooms. These rooms are all individually designed (some by guest builders) and will frequently have mazes or puzzles within them to solve. Every room has a chance of spawning furniture, which you can turn into charcoal, or appliances that you can melt down into ore.

If you tire of the Backrooms setting, you … probably should have picked another modpack, but you do get two options.

The first dimension is this pack’s Nether, which has been reimagined as an endless trash heap of bookshelves and iron pots and other goodies you can harvest for ore. There’s incentive to build a train network here, as it’s much easier to connect tracks to Nether portals without worrying about walls and furniture, and iron can be automated within here. The downside is that it’s damn boring to look at and flattening the heaps takes forever.

The second dimension is the Poolrooms, which I personally relocated my entire base to as soon as I had the means. Sure, it’s a never-ending jungle of ceramic tiles, but the rooms are comparatively huge and you get to look at the sky.

I got quite excited about solving issues of automation. I genuinely don’t know if I’ve ever had this much fun with a video game before. The questline is guided enough that I never found myself wondering what to do next, but permissive enough that I frequently had the room to do ridiculous sideplots. My playthrough ended up being about the goal to open a pizza restaurant in the Backrooms. (I never did come up with whom exactly I was selling the pizzas to.)

The progression feels natural, while also getting into insane scale. By Chapter 5, you’re working with antimatter. I’ve never played with the Mekanism mod before and I found its selection of machines to be interestingly complex. Thermal machines remain my current favorite, but I acknowledge they’re unitaskers.

Now on to some negatives: I found that the final third-or-so of the modpack was the weakest. The introduction of the reality frame was fresh and exciting, but it’s interspersed with what I found to be odd and un-thematic additions, such as farming frogs and snow golems. And speaking of thematics, I didn’t care much for the modpack’s intense focus on magic and souls. I could get down with the inclusion of Botania, since it’s a tech mod and has been configured to play well with Backrooms-specific items, but I just couldn’t suspend disbelief enough to buy the idea of farming snow golems. That’s just me and my personal preference.

ALSO, and this is really small in the scheme of things, but when I played there was an unfixed bug with redstone acid that made me keep having to break my mixer over and over … I saw someone say they were fixing it, but who knows …

For the finale, you have to feed blocks into the AE2 Matter Condenser to create singularities. I approached this with Igneous Extruders dumping cobblestone onto a belt that pulled it into the Matter Condenser, but this was going absurdly slowly. I ended up searching online and finding that the better option was to use water pipes. At this point, there is no problem-solving left that I can imagine; it’s just a matter of wandering around your base looking for something else to do. If I had been collecting blocks from the start, this might not have been such an issue, but you’re still up against item transfer speed limits.

With all that said, Liminal Industries is my favorite Minecraft modpack and quite possibly my favorite video game. I already played it past the halfway point again to review the fanmade Oil Expansion fork, which I’ll be publishing later.

Categories: gaming

Tagged: modded minecraft minecraft