The cult of the new is pretty strong in modded Minecraft. To be honest, I haven’t done much modded stuff in awhile, but 1.16.5 is a solid choice or at least was back when I last put a pack together.

Create is the big new mod that has everyone buzzing. In some ways it’s a reaction to the RF-ification and magic blocks/multiblocks that dominated the 1.12 era. Everything is very nice and modular, and it reminds me of Rotarycraft in that respect, though they are very different mods.

Dang it, now I want to play some Rotarycraft. Reika has enough 1.7.10 mods that you can essentially put together your own pack of just them, but I digress.

I feel that most people play modpacks nowadays, but maybe I’m biased as a packdev. I’ve seen some good progression packs come out, if that’s your thing. I’m biased towards my pack, Brass, of course, but Create: Above and Beyond is the official Create modpack with loads of custom content. I never got around to playing it, but it looks neat.

1.16.5, it’s peak modern Minecraft. I actually hate the new world generation post-Caves and Cliffs.

For me it’s 1.15. I really did not care for the nether update, but I think this is an unpopular opinion. Unfortunately doing modding on this specific version is not great. 1.12.2 obviously has the best modding support, but I really liked the 1.13 aquatic update.

There are surprisingly many mods already for 1.19 but there are also a lot which are still for older versions like 1.18, 1.16 or even 1.12. I’d recommend having a look at some packs with create. I think they are mostly for the newer versions. As for making a pack yourself, I do that a lot but there are also lots of good prebuilt ones.

I have always been playing on more modern version, but because of memes I started playing GTNH (greg greg greg) and I quite like it.

Good alternative to Gregtech on Fabric – Modern Industrialization. It’s full of content, but without tedious parts that Greg has. And it’s being updated regularly.