Minecraft Mod Review: Quark – Adds a Ton of Great Features

Quark adds a ton of features to Minecraft that feel like should already be in the vanilla game.

What Is the Quark Mod for Minecraft?

Over its almost 15 years on the market, Minecraft has added multiple new building blocks, mobs, and quality-of-life features. However, even with today’s state, the game can still have numerous small updates that make the playing experience just a little bit better.

Fortunately, there is a perfect mod that seemingly adds most of the features that fans have been messaging Mojang to add for years, such as vertical slabs and an inventory sorting button. It’s called Quark and although it adds dozens of new things to the game, it feels like they should all be integrated into vanilla Minecraft. Even the developers’ (Vazkii and the Zeta Team) motto is “Anything added to Quark could also be added to the default game without compromising its gameplay style.”

While the things added by Quark are individually fairly simple and small when combined together they truly enhance vanilla Minecraft’s gameplay and almost seemingly blend into it. And if certain Quark features are not to your liking, you can configure them through the special menu added to the main screen. Speaking of features, let’s look at some of the things added by the mod. While we don’t have the time and space to go over every new item or feature, we’ll talk about what we think are the most interesting additions by Quark.

New Automations Added to Minecraft

Starting off with what will be useful to both seasoned Minecraft redstone engineers and newer players alike, these items and features greatly expand the capabilities for automation with some relatively simple additions. For example:

• Chains Connect Blocks – The vanilla chain block can now connect other blocks together when a piston moves them. This also works with sticky pistons, which can allow for some quite interesting new movable contraptions.

• Chute – While it is shaped like the hopper and can transfer items vertically, it works more like a simpler dropper. Items can be inserted into it via automation (Hopper, Dropper, etc), and any items inserted are instantly dropped under it, always precisely in the center. A redstone signal can be used to disable the Chute.

• Dispensers Place Blocks – as the name suggests, blocks in the Dispenser’s inventory can now be placed in the world. The blocks are rotated so they’re placed forward from the dispenser and crops such as Wheat Seeds or Potatoes also count, making for more compact automated farms. Any blocks that already had a placement behavior, like TNT, are ignored.

• Pistons Move Tile Entities – just like in Minecraft’s Bedrock edition, pistons are now able to move Tile Entities such as Chests or Furnaces. Do not, however, that if you attempt to move a block to an invalid position will cause it to break and drop its contents. For a block that pistons can’t move, now that furnaces can’t be used, look into Sturdy Stone in the Building category

What Building Block does Quark add to Minecraft?

We move onto what is perhaps the largest single category of new features added to the game. While again we do not have much time and space to go through everything, you can read more on Quark’s official page. However, here are some new items and building blocks we think stand out quite a lot:

• Compressed Blocks – Ever had tons of Sugar Cane, Bamboo, Cactus, or Leather? Well, now you can package them, and some other items into blocks that not only take up less space in your chests but also look good as decorative blocks of crates filled with stuff.

• Hedges – tired of using vanilla Minecraft leaf blocks to make garden hedges? Well, hedges are a nice alternative. They can connect together like Fences and have the same bounding box. You can even put flowers on them!

• Industrial Palette – use Iron to make Iron Plates, which will look great in more industrial builds. These also come in a Rusty variant, crafted with the use of a Water Bucket. You can also make Iron Ladders, using Iron Nuggets which work like normal ladders, but fit the industrial style.

• Sturdy Stone – a hard stone block made with 4 Stone and 4 Cobblestone (outputs 4). The block has the Furnace Texture, and can not be moved by Pistons.

• Variant Bookshelves Chests, and Ladders –While they function exactly like their Vanilla counterparts, they add a lot of variety in textures.

• Vertical Slabs – Simple, self-explanatory, but amazing for builds. They exist for every vanilla and Quark block that has a slab and can be crafted by placing 3 of the respective slabs in a column.

What Client Changes Does Quark Add?

Once again, we will go over just some of the features added here that make things like managing inventories and items much easier:

• Buckets Show Inhabitants – Buckets can display variants of mobs like crabs, axolotls, and tropical fish.

• Chest Searching – A filter button will now appear on the top right of chests you open. When you click it, a tab with a search bar will pop up, where you can type and filter items in the chest by your query. Items that don’t match will be darkened.

• Improved Tooltips – Tools and armor now have their attributes displayed with icons. Food shows how much it’ll heal with icons, and will show when it’ll give you negative effects.

• Long Range Pick Block – You can now select blocks at any distance using the Pick Block function from vanilla Minecraft.

• Usage Ticker – a small addon that shows you how much you have of an item that is currently in your hand. For example, if you have a stack of Planks in your hands, but you have one more in your Inventory, then the Usage Ticker will show you have 128 planks in total.

Item Management Is Now Easier

• Automatic Tool Restock – When a tool breaks on your hotbar, it will be restocked by other items of the same type taken from your inventory. Additionally, when a stack of items in your hand runs out, it will be replaced with another from your inventory, provided you have the same type of item.

• Easy Transferring of Items between inventories – Two new buttons are added to chests: Insert, and Extract. If you hold Shift while pressing these buttons, they’ll only move items that are on the other side. (For example, if your chest has Stone and Dirt, and you have Stone and Sand in your inventory, Insert with Shift held will only move the Stone)

• Inventory Sorting – perhaps one of the most requested features that Minecraft players have been pestering the game’s devs to add. The Sort button, that’s now added to your inventory and chests can rearrange items, except your toolbar.

• Quick Armor Swapping – Shift-right clicking an armor stand will swap its armor set for whatever armor you’re currently wearing.

Quark adds New Mobs to Minecraft

Again, we can’t go through everything here, but the mod brings seven new mobs that you can find in various parts of the world. These range from friendly ones like Shiba dogs that spawn in mountain biomes to new threats in the Nether, like the Foxhounds which can set you on fire. While Quark doesn’t have nearly the same variety of new mobs as other Minecraft mods, the ones that it does add feel like they have been part of the game for years.

New Tools

While not adding new variations of already existing tools, such as pickaxes, Quark introduces some other items that can prove quite useful in many situations. While there are 15 additions, we will focus on a few that have piqued our interest, such as:

• The Abacus – When you right-click a block with this tool, it will be bound to that block. After that, it will count the distance between the targeted and hovered block, measured along right angles. The Abacus will count up to 48 blocks, outlining the counted blocks. Right-click again to unbind.

• Ancient Tomes – Ancient Tomes are a rare loot item from dungeons and stronghold libraries, being usable to upgrade enchantments. This means that if you combine an Ancient Tome in an Anvil with an item containing the same enchantment, then it will increase its level by one, up to one over the cap (e.g. Looting IV).

• Bottled Cloud – Ever wanted to place blocks in mid-air without having to make pillars up from the ground or the side of a mountain? The Bottled Cloud can be obtained by using a Glass Bottle at the cloud levels (192-196 by default). When right-clicking the bottle, it will spawn a block floating in midair in front of you from which you can build.

• Trowel – When right-clicked, it will place a random block from your hotbar. This is useful if you want to randomize the textures in a build, without having to constantly swap between different items.

Quark Add a ton of Tweaks

With almost 40 random, but also useful tweaks, it almost begs the question of why these things aren’t already in the vanilla game. Here are just some examples:

• Armed Armor Stands – like in Bedrock, the default armor stand now has arms, which can hold items.

• Campfires Boost Elytra – When flying using an Elytra over a Campfire with a Hay Bale under it, the player will be propelled upwards slightly. It makes sense that the how air will push you up.

• Double Door Opening – pretty self-explanatory. You can Shift+Right-Click to open each of the double doors individually.

• Enhanced Ladders – Right-clicking a ladder with another one will place it, allowing you to drop ladders down. You can also climb down faster by looking down when on a ladder.

• Hoe Harvesting – Breaking grass or crops with a hoe will break a 3×3 of them. A Diamond Hoe will break a 5×5 instead. If you put Fortune on the hoe, it’ll also apply that effect to everything it breaks.

• Petting Wolves – Sneak-click a tamed wolf with an empty hand to pet it. Why is this not already in vanilla Minecraft?

• Reacharound Placing – This feature allows you to place blocks behind the block you’re looking at. This can be done either vertically or horizontally, provided you wouldn’t be placing a block given normal rules.

• Simple Harvest – You can now right-click a crop to harvest it and replant it at the same time.

• Slabs to Blocks – Slabs can now be recombined into blocks in a shapeless recipe.

World Changes Added by Quark

While the mod doesn’t add many different new biomes to Minecraft, as other mods do, it still enhances the world generation a bit. For example, you can now see fallen logs in forests, adding to the overall realism of the biomes.

Meanwhile, if you dig under Y=0, you can find the Glimmering Weald. The biome contains a new form of mushroom, Glowing Mushrooms which can be grown on deepslate.

The nether’s world is also slightly enhanced thanks to the new Obsidian spikes. They jut out from the lava ocean at the bottom of the nether and sometimes they can get quite tall. If you climb those, you’ll be treated with a loot chest and a Blaze spawner under it.

Back in the overworld, there are also a few new types of trees such as Trumpet Trees. They are an uncommon specimen in esoteric colors that dot your landscape. In addition, Azalea trees will grow with a new wood type, aptly called the same. Azalea wood can be used for all normal wood recipes, including new green variants for most wooden blocks.

Conclusion

Quark is arguably one of the best Minecraft mods out there because it adds features that feel so natural to the vanilla game. It doesn’t overwhelm the player with tons of new mechanics, mobs, items, biomes, and the like, but still has enough new things to keep even veteran players interested. For this reason, Quark is quite a good choice for players who are either new to moded play, or simply don’t want to diverge too far from the vanilla game.

However, if you’re into transforming your Minecraft experience then we suggest trying out Immersive Engineering. It adds a whole ton of industrial machines and mechanics into the game, helping you enter the Industrial age.

Of course, Quark’s mechanics and quality-of-life changes can perfectly blend with Industrial Engineering and other mods that you may play with.