Ethereal adds many new biomes, plants, food items and tweaks to your world that makes for an interesting adventure :)
Here are some of the new additions:
Biomes: glacier, bamboo, mesa, alpine, healing, snowy, frost, grassy, caves, grayness, grassytwo, prairie, jumble, junglee, desert, grove, mushroom, sandstone, quicksand, plains, savannah, fiery, sandclay, swamp, reefs, sakura, tundra, mediterranean.
Trees: willow, healing, big, banana, frost, mushroom, palm, redwood, orange, birch, sakura, lemon, olive.
Food: wild onion, strawberry, lemon, olives, many fish, banana, pine nuts, coconut, golden apple, hearty stew, mushroom soup, firethorn jelly, sushi, teriyaki.
Special items and features: potion of flight, crystal tools, staff of light, gilly staff, cold blocks freeze water, hot blocks melt snow and ice, torch drops near water.
Good for both decoration and survival
On both survival (Linux Forks) and creative servers (C&C City Server), I found that the gaming experience was improved in both cases. In survival, it add more features (e.g. proper trees instead of the nearly useless bushes) that is extremely helpful for survival players. From another standpoint, it is useful for creative and building players since all blocks' appearences are very nice
But on the another hand, the mushroom biome is too large and those mushroom trees are quite ugly. I think developers can refer to the appearence of big mushrooms in Minecraft, to create beautiful mushroom biome.
Overall, this is a good mod that I recommend to any server.
Very Diverse
Adds some much needed aesthetics & plenty of items & nodes. Gives worlds a more diverse feel.
Too unbalanced
I'm more than disappointed to see an old mod is still far from mature. The mod is overly unbalanced.
sakurastays all the way up, covering lots of area.savannais the only biome recognizable, and every time I start up a world I start in a savanna.Best surface mapgen mode
a really good mapgen mode, it makes exploring really fun, with an easy to use biome api.. this mod, some mobs_redo animals and monsters and ambience will make exploring the surface awesome, unlike default MTG where there is nothing to see/find while exploring.. would be really nice to have a building generator mod supporting this one, also would be nicer if minetest supports adding biomes at every hight without using VoxelManip or whatever.. biomes are the best!
Realistic mod
I really like this mod which provide a lot of news biomes and others blocks, and we have more building possibilities.
Almost worth it
This mod has caused a multitude of items (a LOT of unified inventory pages) to display "unknown item/node" textures and conflicts with stonebrickdungeons. the latter of which is an ESSENTIAL for my enjoyment of MT. I know it's ethereal causing this conflict because I've done both in isolation and they STILL conflicted.
Problems: -Unknown Node Stuff. -Causes Stonebrick Dungeons to treat the Player's hand as a node.