= New content mods =
Aquaculture - New fishing rods, more fish types
Astral Sorcery - Star/constellation-based magic
Backpack - Craftable backpack
BilbioCraft - Shelves, new books, new cartography/map system, and much more
Biomes O’ Plenty - Over 50 new biomes with new blocks and items
Birds Nests - Adds bird nests that fall out of trees and contain items sometimes.
Botania - Magic plants
BuildCraft - Pipes and engines
Chickens - Breed chickens with stats
CraftTweaker, CT-GUI, & CraftTweaker JEI Support - Add/remove recipes, used to resolve recipe conflicts between several mods
Cyberware - Special body modifications using SCIENCE
Death Compass - Compass that points to last death point
Dimensional Doors - Discover and craft doors to pocket dimension dungeons
Enchantment Descriptions - Does what it says on the tin.
Energy Converters - Energy conversion
Exotic Birds - Adds ~100 exotic birds from real life
Extra Alchemy - More potion effects
Felling - Enchantment for axes that removes an entire tree at once
Forestry - Cool agriculture/nature stuff, including bees that make you resources.
Ice and Fire - Rad mythical creatures
IndustrialCraft2 - Industrial revolution in Minecraft
Iron Chest - Adds more chests with more space.
JEI Villagers - JEI addon.
Just Enough Items (JEI) - Recipe and item helper.
Just Enough Throwing In Fluids - JEI addon. (Thaumcraft, Astral Sorcery)
JurassiCraft - Find fossils, revive dinosaurs and ancient plants from fossils, get profit.
Magic Bees - Magical bees addon for Forestry
Malisis Doors - Adds new door types
Mo Creatures - The OG new mobs mod
NetherEX - Adds a ton of stuff the nether.
Open Glider - Cool gliders.
Primitive Mobs - Adds chameleons, floating books/tools, lost miners, traveling merchants, mimics, etc. Plenty of new mobs to discover.
Project: Vibrant Journeys - Adds new biomes, mobs, and items.
RailCraft - Rails, trains, and more
Recurrent Complex - Adds new structures to worldgen.
Rustic - New decorative blocks and whatnot
Selim’s Enchants - New enchantments
Spark’s Hammers - Slower versions of pickaxes with way more durability and 3x3 mining
Stygian End - Some new End biomes
Thaumcraft, Thaumcraft Inventory Scanning, Thaumic Additions: Reconstructed, Thaumic periphery, & ThaumicJEI - The good stuff.
Tomb Many Graves, Tomb Many Graves API, & Tomb Many Graves Backpacks - Adds those cool gravestones instead of launching your items everywhere
Twilight Forest - New dimension full of intrigue
What Are We Looking At + Hwyla - Lets us know what the hell these blocks are
Waystones - Teleport to waystones you’ve discovered or made yourself.
Wings - Rad wings for flying.
= Fixes, performance, and aesthetics =
AmbientSounds - Nature/ambient sound effects
AppleSkin - Hunger bar preview effect and saturation indicator
Born in a Barn - Fixes a Minecraft bug where Village doors keep chunks loaded.
Chunk Animator - Chunks will load in with an animation
Clumps - Reduces lag by clumping xp orbs together
Controlling - Search keybinds in the keybinding menu
CTM - Allows resource packs to add connected textures
Dynamic Surroundings & Presets! - Auroras, better rain, etc
Fancy Block Particles - Turns the old 2D vanilla and a few more particles 3D!
FastFurnace - Furnaces are faster boi
FastWorkbench - Vanilla workbench works faster and runs better. Disables recipe book.
FoamFix / FoamFixCore - Optimizations in java heap usage.
Gotta Go Fast - Removes rubberbanding and “player moved too quickly” message
InstantUnify - Unifies oredicted items automatically.
It’s the little things - yells at 32-bit java users. Various small features.
Morpheus - Sleep voting.
Mouse Tweaks - Adds mouse tweaks.
NetherBound - Wither can only spawn in the nether.
NetherPortalFix - Ensures correct destinations when traveling back and forth between portals in multiplayer
Quick Leaf Decay - bye leaves
ReAuth - Allows you to log back in without restarting the whole client
Smooth Font - Font is smoother
Sound Filters - Reverb added to caves, muted sounds underwater
UniDict - Unifies identical resources that several mods end up adding (copper, silver, etc.)
Vanilla Tweaks - Tweak stuff that vanilla Minecraft does badly.
In addition to the above, we have a few API mods to keep the main content mods running.