Well obviously that is going to be Minecraft web chat!(soon available on modrinth once review clears)

Nothing to do with me creating it last week and having worked on it a bunch together with Tea over the past couple of days and being proud of what was achieved. Nope, it just the best mod there is :p

More seriously though, distant horizons ranks pretty high and besides that mostly some QoL utility mods. Chest tracker, inventory profiles, that sort of thing.

I am not behind my pc but once I am I'll make a bit more comprehensive list.

My favourite used to be Millenaire (approximately Minecraft 1.7), which basically turned your minecraft world into an open-world RPG with different villages, factions, relationships, etc. Sadly, I think it is no longer updated; curseforge mentions that its latest update was on 2022, and for minecraft 1.12...

There's lots of great and popular mods (Create, Thaumcraft, Botania, etc), but I'll try highlight some of my favourite, lesser-known mods, across all versions.

• Electroblob's Wizardry: Some of the most fun in Minecraft I've had. Unlike most magic mods, there's no tech trees or research system. You aren't toiling away in your base, crafting things together and navigating UIs. Instead, you find spells simply by exploring the world. Discover new elements, artifacts, and spell types to use. Each spell is unknown to you when you first find it, so it's a lot of fun to blindly try them out to see what they do. Sometimes you just end up lighting yourself on fire, but others times you discover chain lightning, or some other wicked ability.
• RotaryCraft: The first truly realistic tech mod I played. This one pulls no punches. You're expected to know how to set up a production line, balance torque and speed, and even lubricate the machinery. While it expects a lot of the player, it doesn't feel tedious to me, and each step of progression rewards useful tools and utilities. That said, it's also possible to blow things up if you're not careful. I love that this mod primarily uses iron in its recipes, without polluting the world with dozens of random ores. I think of RotaryCraft as an earlier, less-polished, and yet in some ways still more charming version of Create.
• Mahou Tsukai: This mod is pure power fantasy. It's not balanced against anything else, be it vanilla or common mods, nor does it try to be. There lots of clever ideas for weapons and spells inside, offering utilities I've rarely seen featured in a Minecraft mod. One ritual allows remote viewing of an entity, great for creeping out friends. Or you can discover the invisible ley lines in the world, which can be surfed on using elytra. The mod is visually stunning, and really unique in its presentation.
• TerraFirmaCraft: An old favourite of mine. TFC is practically a modpack in of itself. It's a low-tech survival experience that adds new survival features (temperature, thirst), mining mechanics (giant ore clusters, prospecting), it revamps farming and seasons, introduces damage types to weapons, and much more. The world is absolutely gorgeous. It also adds a nutrition system which I enjoyed enough to rewrite as a standalone mod a few years ago.

Honestly, I could have made this list much longer. I've played dozens of modpacks and hundreds of mods over the last 15 years or so, and many of them stick out. There's exciting new mods almost every month, and it's difficult to even keep up with. It's such a rich community.

The Minecraft modded ecosystem is also fantastic for embracing open-source and compatibility. The vast majority of mods are written in MIT or other permissive licenses, and it enables modpacks to utilize them to their fullest to create compelling experiences. There could be a completely separate topic on interesting modpacks, with all their variants of skyblocks, exploration packs, combat/survival packs, expert packs, and general kitchen sink packs.

Even after all these years, I still love the game. Minecraft was the best €10 I ever spent.

I think the create mod and all it's add-ons is a product of genius. If I build a server for friends to join, it's always a requirement, everyone loves it.

Growing up I had a few favorites which have been long gone, I was always a terrain generation nut so I played stuff like BetterWorldGeneration (BWG) and some sort of 'large trees' mod. I also had a no-snow mod because this was back when cold-warm biomes generated with jarring effects. This was back in 2013 when I was still in middle school, at the time my PC couldn't handle modpacks too well so I shyed away from them (22 mods was the comfortable limit, and this was back when installing them was very difficult). My brother had a tekkit server though, and I tried a little of it.

In the mid 2010s I had alot of more serious terrain mods like RTG and ATG, now you have stuff like biome bundle and whatnot, and this is what I'd use combined with some other terrain enhancement mods.

I think these days mojang fixed terrain generation pretty nicely and they added some pretty cool stuff so I use a LOD mod and some extras like optifine, so not too much going on.

Oh boy, let's go down the list! This list excludes performance enhancing mods, for that I usually pick a bunch from the Fabulously Optimized modpack.

AmbientSounds: Adds sound effects such as birds, waves, dripping water in caves, etc. Very good for immersion!

BetterF1 & BetterF3: BetterF1 let's you turn off GUI elements while still showing held items. BetterF3 lets you remove a bunch of the unneeded bits from your F3 screen.

Bridging Mod: Adds the bedrock method of placing blocks into java. You can place blocks below the block you're standing on and you can scaffold with blocks while walking forward, among a few other little things that make building faster. Big fan of this one.

Distant Horizons: As mentioned by others, let's you see very far into the distance.

EffectTimerPlus: Adds small timers to the top right of the screen that indicate how long you have left on various effects. Makes it easy to keep track of how long potion effects last.

Freecam: Detach the camera from your character to fly around and view builds. Saves a ton of time by not having to fly away to look at your project constantly.

Freelook: Let's you hold a key to freely point your camera around you without turning your head. This lets you look around while flying an elytra and not crash into whatever you're looking at.

Inventory Profiles Next: Let's you sort and move items more quickly.

Lighty: My favorite mod for showing spawnable blocks.

Shuffle: When enabled, each time you place a block your hotbar selection is randomized. This let's you fill your hotbar with a selection of blocks you want to texture with, and it will do the randomization for you quickly.

Shulker Box Tooltip: Must have! See the contents of a shulker without putting it down and opening it.

Xaero's Minimap/Worldmap: My preferred mapping mod. I'd literally be lost without it.

Zoomify: Zoom zoom! Seriously, you can zoom in a lot.

Still looove the quarry from Buildcraft

I have fond memories of Better Than Wolves. It’s possibly one of the oldest mods, but is all but forgotten. It started out as a very creative tech mod. It never fell into the trap of having single magic blocks that do everything for you. The developer was pretty influential in the early modding scene (back when you opened Minecraft.jar as a zip file, deleted meta.inf, and copied a bunch of class files into the jar). I recently learned he was one of the initial creators of forge, which is what really made modding generally usable. Then he got into a fight with, if I remember right, the dev of RedPower about how many base class mods were needed to support what he thought was a frivolous feature. Additional base class mods make it more difficult to support new Minecraft versions when they release. After that fight, BTW stopped using Forge or ModLoader and built its own API for it to use. Then for a big future version (maybe 1.12), there was an informal race between BTW and forge to see who could update their code faster, and BTW won by a day or two. After that, BTW decided it wasn’t worth it to support new versions, and has been in the same version ever since.

Sometime around this time, don’t starve was released and BTW started becoming a total conversion mod influenced by this hardcore type of games. This is also the time where I stopped playing continuously, but I kept watching the development closely. To give some perspective, one of the most influential features is hardcore spawn. When you die, you respawn somewhere in a wide swath of the overworld (beds no longer set your spawn). You have to build back from nothing, build a farm (or you will absolutely starve), start mining, get a compass (and getting those 4 iron and 1 redstone is no small feat, 1 coal makes 1 torch, a wood pick mines 1 stone, 1 coal smelts 1 item, iron chunks smelt into a nugget, not an ingot, etc). Then you make your way back to your main base. Over time, your world becomes lived in. It encourages large infrastructure like a road network in the hardcore spawn range.

The dev released the source and quit modding a few years age, and there is now a community effort to keep improving it.