This modpack was made for personal use, primarily for a private server used by my family.

I have always loved exploration in games, but I get bored pretty quickly with vanilla Minecraft—to my great disappointment. So, I've been trying a bunch of mods together until I found just the right group to give exactly the "interesting exploration & things to find" feel without adding so much that it feels overwhelming or looses the good "feel" of Minecraft.

Anyway, I'm just sharing this with the hopes that someone else with similar tastes can get some enjoyment from it too (or use it as a starting point, as I often do when searching through modpacks).

This Modpack runs on 1.19.2 using Forge

INCLUDED MODS

(Underlined titles link to the mod page)

[Creatures + Villagers]

Alex's Mobs
Requires: Citadel
Adds a ton of new mobs ranging from passive to hostile to boss mobs
Includes: tameable, breedable, rideable mobs.
Includes new items & crafts relating to each creature.
Currently configured so Cave Centipedes, Cockroaches, and Skellywags spawn extremely rarely compared to default settings.
I'm a coward and these three things really freak me out, but the Cave Centipedes and Skellywags have awesome loot if you're actually good at Minecraft and don't die, unlike me lol

Aquaculture 2
Adds 30+ new fish
New loot, ore type, and tools for fishing

Mooshroom Tweaks
Requires: Collective
Mooshrooms have a chance to spawn naturally

More Villagers
Adds new professions (listed below).
Potentially game/balance breaking! Adjust spawn rate in the config file if you like the challenge of the Nether and End.

Oceanographer (easy way to get Prismarine)

Netherologist (easy Nether items)

Forester (woods + saplings)

Enderologist (easy End items)

Engineer (redstone items)

Florist (plants, honey)

Hunter (easy rare monster drops)

Miner (easy rare ore - not diamonds/iron/gold)

Smarter Farmers
Requires: Moonlight Lib
They replant seeds now.

VillagersPlus
Adds new professions (listed below)
Currently configured so you're likely to find 0-1 per village (from what I've seen so far, I'm not an expert)
Potentially game/balance breaking! Adjust spawn rate if you like the challenge of finding rare materials.

Horticulturist (non-tree plants)

Occultist (glow stuff, soul stuff, quartz & amythest)

Oceanographer (corals and stuff)

Alchemist (easy way to get Nether Wart & other potion materials)

YDM's Red Panda
Adds a red panda mob
Tameable & breedable with Sweet Berries
Health restored by bamboo

[Immersion + Decor]

Doggy Talents
Super deep system for dogs as companions that I can't summarize succintly
You're going to want to go through the description on the actual mod page
For people who want more from their tamed wolves

Domestication Innovation
Requires: Citadel
Adds items like Pet Bed that your tamed mobs link to to respawn in after death
Cycle through Wander, Stay, and Follow commands
Can't accidentally attack pets now
Makes axolotls, rabbits, foxes, and frogs now tameable

Fairy Lights
Highly customizable in crafting
Personal favorite for lighting decor

Farmer's Delight
Adds way more crops to farm, meat cuts & varieties, and a full cooking/kitchen system
Addon: Collector's Reap
Addon: Cultural Delights
Addon: Delightful
In listing these, I now realize I'm missing a few I like to have. Seriously, this mod has so many amazing addons, I recommend searching for them to customize your experience even more.

Macaw's Furniture
Lots of new & functional furniture

Name Tag Tweaks
Requires: Collective
Adds a recipe to craft nametags

Supplementaries
Requires: Moonlight Lib
Adds a ton of stuff for building and everything

Twigs
Adds a few cosmetic items to find on the ground
Can be broken into useful items, like sticks or bonemeal

[Quality of Life]

Appleskin
Adds useful info about food & hunger

Axolotl Bucket Fix
Axolotl Buckets show the right axolotl appearance

Comforts
Adds sleeping bags (night) and hammocks (day) to sleep without creating new spawn point
I literally can't play without this anymore. Highly recommend.

Double Doors
Requires: Collective
Two adjacent doors (& multiple trapdors) of the same type will open at the same time when clicked.

Enchantment Descriptions
Tooltip that explains what enchantments do

Fast Leaf Decay
Leaves instantly decay once the tree is cut down

FerriteCore
To make it run better

Friendly Fire
Requires: Bookshelf
Prevents friendly fire on pets
Probably don't need it with Domestication Innovation, though, tbh

Gravestone Mod
Stores your inventory in a grave when you die
Configurable to prevent other players from breaking it to get your inventory first
DO NOT USE if you are setting the world to Keep Inventory! It overrides the setting and you will not get to keep your inventory

JourneyMap
Personal favorite ingame map
Minimap is configurable
Normally JourneyMap would allow you to teleport to any waypoint placed on the map at any time, but Waystones seems to override this for immersion purposes.
If using with Sophisticated Backpacks: you will need to remap B if you want to be able to easily open Backpacks
If using with Notes: you will need to remap N to use the Notes mod (or choose a different key for Notes)

Just Enough Items (JEI)
Essential for any modded gameplay
Tells you the recipe for anything in your current game instance

Lootr
World-generated chests have a gold trim and every player gets the same loot from them
Makes it fun for exploration on servers

Notes
Adds a personal Note GUI

Patchouli
I added it because I know it's important, but honestly don't know how to use it.
Might be useless in its current state idk

Sophisticated Backpacks
Requires: Sophisticated Core
Adds craftable backpacks to increase inventory size
Upgradeable to further increase size and utility
I cannot play without this anymore. It is perfect for explorers who constantly pick up all the cool weird stuff they find on a journey.

Starter Kit
Requires: Collective
Fully configurable, allows you to set an inventory for all players upon their first spawn
Currently configured to give you an Iron Backpack and a Sleeping Bag

TrashSlot
Requires: Balm
Gives you a Trash Slot on the inventory screen
I literally can't play without this thing anymore. It's such a small but incredibly important Quality of Life fix.

WTHIT
Requires: bad packets
Tells you what you are looking at, what mod it comes from, how much health armor it has
Can be configured to a toggle

[WorldGen]

Better Villages
Requires: Library Ferret
Adjusts villages for new layout and building design

Biomes O' Plenty
Requires: TerraBlender
Adds a bunch of really nice vanilla+ feeling biomes, but not too many to feel overwhelming
Personal favorite Biomes mod

ChoiceTheorem's Overhauled Villages
Adds 23 village variants and 14 pillager outpost variants

Immersive Structures
Adds cool "abandoned" buildings dispersed throughout the world
A personal favorite, highly recommended for any lightly modded play.

Repurposed Structures
Adds variants of vanilla structures (temples and villages)

Structory: Towers
Adds some neat towers to discover

Towns and Towers
Adds 50+ structure types to discover

Waystones
Requires: Balm
Adds craftable & discoverable teleportation stones
Spawns in every village and occasionally in the overworld
Note that the addition of Waystones seems to make the JourneyMap configuration default to not allow teleporting from wherever you want, instead requiring you to be at a waystone and to teleport only to other waystones (or things added by the mod).

YUNG's Better Desert Temples
Requires: YUNG's API (Forge)

YUNG's Better Mineshafts
Requires: YUNG's API (Forge)

YUNG's Bridges
Requires: YUNG's API (Forge)
Generates bridges

YUNG's Extras
Requires: YUNG's API (Forge)
Generates cool stuff like ruins, obelisks, desert wells, etc.

[Inter-Mod Compatibility]

Alex's Delight
Alex's Mobs + Farmer's Delight

Compat O' Plenty
Biomes O' Plenty woods for blocks created by other mods

Every Compat (Wood Good)
Every block type (even from mods) is available in all wood types (vanilla and modded)

Farmer's Compats
Farmer's Delight + Supplementaries + Aquaculture 2
If you don't have Aquaculture 2, it will break the knives from Farmer's Delight! Either keep Aquaculture 2 or remove this mod.

It looks like there's a few libraries that might be leftover from other mods, but I am too nervous to mess with removing them so they're still there. If you are better than me at this (pretty high likelihood lmao) remove them if you know they're totally useless for this pack.

Architectury API (I haven't the slightest clue what needs/needed this)
AutoRegLib for mods by Violet Moon (I think this was from when I had Akashic Tome in the list)
GeckoLib (might've been for Alex's Mobs, and anything else that adds new mobs. You may want to keep this just to be safe.)
Kotlin for Forge (I think this could be from when I had a few other mods that wound up too much for my computer to handle)
Mysterious Mountain Lib (for the Corn Delight addon, but it was one of the first things I removed)

But anyway, that's it!

I'm not a Minecraft expert. I'm not even good at the game. But I do love exploring and discovering new things in games like this, and these mods combined all scratched that itch just right. I hope it works for you too, or that you at least found some neat mods you want to try in your next modded run.

Wanderlust Plus