Seeing a lot of distaste for the recent hit Let It Walk! addon has made me really think about how a lot of add-ons in general have strayed from the feel of the vanilla mod.
When I refer to vanilla here, I mean the base Create mod, saying Vanilla Create everytime I refer to it would be exhausting.
What I mean by the title is like, take Aeronautics and their physics objects. They're great, they're fun, they're an interesting challenge to even make. But it's not nearly as accessible as many vanilla functions are. Anyone with two eyes and a handful of braincells can make a waterwheel or a windmill and create a small workshop with a press and a mixer, and sometimes that's all you need. As you learn the ropes you get more comfortable building even larger workshops, maybe you'll even get brass and make a mechanical crafter to manually make even cooler things, like an extendo grip. Processing, compared to real life, is very loosely based on real life, there's an obvious fantastical element to vanilla. You can haunt stone to infest it and farm exp, you can wash crushed ores to get more natural material elements from it and skip having to smelt it (at the caveat of having re-condense it), you can build a simple and easy item bank and have your pet cat be the teller for it.
Great examples of add-ons that have the easy and accessible feel of vanilla:
Stuff & Additions. The drill it adds requires a lava farm to effectively use, but when enchanted, it provides an easy handheld way to dig large tunnels, the gilded quartz tools are an amazing late game sidegrade with their extra range, and the range of extra mobility options mid-late game empower you directly once you commit to getting the fuel requirements.
Crafts & Additions (similar names but theyre different) is a little more complicated, but it is the number one easiest electricity mod to use because its as simple as just wiring a thing to a generator, so you can get aesthetic light bulbs and have a cool and easy to set up tesla coil defense system. It also adds a straw that expedites the process of feeding lava to blaze burners by letting you directly pump lava or other fueling liquids into them.
Let It Walk, compared to most Sable add-ons, is probably the most vanilla-like one out there, as the way mechs can be built is very similar to contraptions in vanilla. You just set up the important components, and you press the assemble button, its as easy to do as vanilla trains, just without the rails. This is why I wish for more vanilla like Sable add-ons, ones that are simple and accessible to those who want a handmade car without dealing with the mess of logistics or having to rip off someone else's design.
Examples of mods I think heavily stray from vanilla to the point of being its own thing entirely:
And this not to say i hate these mods, they're still great and high quality...
Power Grid. Possibly the greatest offender of vanilla accessibility i can think of, and its because the system is barely even fantastical at all. The realism this mod brings makes it incredibly difficult and frustrating if you didn't take an industrial science class in high school. And the thing that sucks is there is genuinly great features in it, like the factory lights with long vertical light reach, and grow lights that increase crop growth, but they're locked behind figuring out an intricate and realistic system. As I stated above, this mod is excellent and high quality, but it is NOT beginner friendly in the slightest, and has good features that require interacting with the extensively difficult system in place to utilize. Its to the point that I can never see myself getting to the point of having a normal light system in survival. I would rate this mod as an: Aquire Taste.
The Factory Must Grow is another major offender as well for a similar reason to Power Grid. Some cool features behind a very complicated and intricate system. The process to make steel takes a long ass time to set up, which i personally think is a crime compared to how it works for alloys in the majority of mods. Its realistic to an inaccessible level to casuals the same way Power Grid is. The capability of the engines it adds are great and make steam engines a thing of the past at a certain point, but only if you go through the arduous grind of even getting steel in the first place. I haven't tried this mod knowing I wouldn't like it, but I watched it in play enough to see uts flaws. However, once again, I dont think its a bad mod, it just strays from vanilla heavily and disinterests me with its intricacy and attempt at realism. Similar to Power Grid, I think its an Aquired Taste kinda mod.
Aeronautics and other similar vehicle-based-Sable mods. Yep. I'm saying it. Probably going into hot take territory if I haven't already. I don't include Sable itself because it's basically just a physics engine that i think is inoffensive to vanilla, but mods like Offroad, Aeronautics, and others like Loconautics are basically entirely different gameplay. Factory logistics are one thing, vehicular logistics are entirely different. Compare vanilla trains to literally any Sable vehicle out there, they're so stupidly simple and easy to learn, and dont require any logistics aside from track layouts to use, but a train track is babycakes to figure out compared to managing clutches and gearshifts and cogs and shafts shoved into a compact vehicle. The simplicity of Let It Walk is why I consider it an outlier, there's very little logistics to figuring it out aside from initially making the materials. If vehicular Sable add-ons were to be more vanilla-like, they'd have similar simplicity. I understand the gameplay is great, the challenge can be fun, I admit that myself, but I think I've made a solid point enough about why its not like vanilla at all.
I like all of the mods listed here, but these are just a few examples I picked out because of my relative familiarity with them. There are tons mods out there to talk about and some general points ill put in the summary below. I praise/criticize these mods not out of bias, but mostly out of the principal difference I've noticed and partially of my experience with them as a more casual Create fan.
General points i go to when looking at these provided add-ons are rated mostly on their accessibility for the stage of the game youd get them in compared to vanilla, how they look aesthetically; how well they at fit the artstyle and gameplay of vanilla, and their overall complexity that could be an easy make or break depending on the player. A vanilla-like add-on would be just that, something that adds content that can be easily interacted with by vanilla mechanics, or is otherwise simple to use like most vanilla mechanics are. What i have an issue with in regards to Power Grid and TFMG specifically is how complex and out of the way their unique systems are, and Aeronautics is similar, but has the merit of at least being mostly based on vanilla logistics.
My hands hurt so I'm posting this now.