Hyperphagia-Induced Delirium - Or why Pam's Harvestcraft is a bad mod

Hyperphagia-Induced Delirium - Or why Pam's Harvestcraft is a bad mod

Pam's Harvestcraft is usually recited as the go-to mod for farming and foods, boasting over 80 new crops to farm, 50 new fruit trees to pluck and a whopping 1400 items and foods. Sadly, "Pam" didn't just take it to heart, but pretty much embodies "quantity over quality".

The Crops:
The thing is, that all these crops work exactly the same. Even for crops where it would make sense - like berries growing on bushes - to have a different model, they still work on the same script that vanilla wheat works on. The only thing that differentiates them from one another is the textures. Textures that were acquired from someone else's texturepack. A lot of these textures were colorswapped - most notably seeds - to overcome the limited number of textures the artist provided. Pam's limited ability to code and model also resulted in fruit trees looking awful with their fruits being the item textures simply crossed, resulting in them looking bad from most perspectives. Not to mention the way said fruits work just like regular crops, again rightclicking resulting in you getting the fruit and leaving a small-stage crop behind. If you somehow break the crop, the tree remains barren. Compare this to other mods adding fruit trees, like Rustic whose apples are actual models hanging there, are actually plucked and the tree will regrow apples over time.

The Cooking:
Uninspiring and often tedious. The tools don't add any interesting mechanics, all cooking is done inside the crafting grid leaving you with the impression of transmuting items instead of cooking. Most dishes require 5+ ingredients (probably to justify the 1400+ items!) and often require intermediate products like dough and creme, resulting in dishes requiring multiple steps to be made. I've only seen so many useless-on-its-own items being required for less-useless items in Factorio, and indeed the mod just begs to be automated like you're the new Kraft Foods factory.

The Dishes:
Nice to look at, but still leaves you empty inside. They're just there to refill your bar, none of them do anything positive other than keeping you from dying because your foodmeter got empty. The only dish that gives any semblance of a positive effect is the Miner's Stew, which requires inedibles such as iron ingots and diamonds for some clever reason.
"If they don't do anything, what's keeping me from just eating vanilla bread?" you ask? Well, to make their shit be relevant without having to fiddle with actual mechanics, Pam The Generous reduced all saturation values of vanilla food, so bread and co is pretty much useless now! Why buff when you can nerf?!

Additional Notes:
The sheer volume of textures and item IDs significantly increases loading time and RAM usage. Some textures look out of place, or inconsistent with the rest of the mod.


Author's afterword:
As a fan of the original Harvest Moon series, Rune Factory and Stardew Valley, i extensively enjoy farming games likes these and have come close to understand their mechanics.
What made farming crops in these games interesting was how different they worked. Parsnips are cheap but grow very fast, cabbages take time to grow but are profitable and cucumbers can be harvested multiple times. They don't all just work on the same random growth mechanic.
What made cooking interesting was that a lot of dishes had beneficial effects beside regaining stamina. There was also a sense of exploration as not all recipes were available from the start and you had to acquire them from someone or something first, but that's besides.
Granted most of them didn't have anything mechanically regarding cooking, but at least they werent a chore begging be done by a factory instead.

When i saw harvestcraft i was immediately drawn to it, but quickly disappointed. The whole mod felt like someone found a "how to add new crops to minecraft" tutorial and ctrl+v'd the wheat based template over and over again after nabbing some texturepack's sprites. Like there's been zero work on it other than porting it to the latest version since its initial release on what, beta 1.2? Mechanically it just feels way too simple and outdated.


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TL;DR
LITERALLY-literally bloats (loading times and RAM) with the amount of same-shit-different-texture, absolute tedious and boring crafting, precisely zero benefits to using it over vanilla spam. At least the textures are nice, right?

Alternative choices?
XL Food mod			- Not much different, a lot less items though and the crafting isnt made tedious by cooking tools
Cuisine 			- Unique mechanics reminiscent of Monster Hunter and Breath of the Wild.
Culinary Construct	- Sandwiches stacked to the sky.