Haven't played in a while, looking to do some single player. Are there any interest mods I should be looking at? I'm not hugely into building, more the exploration part.
Master!

Can't help ya all that much. I'm fairly new to Minecraft and unlike Oblivion don't run a wealth of mods. In fact almost all mine are performance enhancers like OptiFine or utilities to make mod loading easier such as Magic Launcher. The one "true" mod I run at present is Better Enchanting, since that's one of the few areas of the vanilla game I find lacking. Sadly, my texture pack of choice, Fancy Craft by JJJason hasn't been updated since Minecraft 1.1.
There's a quite interesting weapons mod that allows dual wielding, shields, burning torches in the left (?) hand and so on. Don't recall its name. (I don't yet use it.) Yogscast recently did a YouTube video of it in action.
-Decrepit-