Explore and review Minecraft Primitive Tech mods and modpacks.

There are features in Quark that are downright difficult to play Minecraft without, and really ought to be added into vanilla as soon as possible.
Linking items in chat is practically required for playing multiplayer, the option to build on the far side of blocks by sneaking is a life saver, Glass Item Frames are the decoration block of the century, not to mention, all item frames work on the top and bottom of blocks, the tooltips for food and armor have information that is extremely useful and cleanly presented, and I personally end up making a lot of use of the emotes and fairy circles.
However, not every feature is on this level. The biggest standout are the ghosts, which are three white squares that make random sounds, rather than having any of their own, and just kind of spawn around in the nether. The autojump keybind is exceedingly annoying, and I'm very doubtful that anyone in history has pressed it on purpose. The animal texture variants are hideous, Quark somehow managed to make a frog that I don't like, and that takes effort, the Nether is full of normal melee monsters, which isn't what the Nether is designed for, guardians free-spawning at random in the ocean is an unhinged idea, axes fast-breaking leaves instead of hoes leads to you accidentally wasting tons of axe durability trying to mine wood, and the vast majority of content comes in the form of mid-tier Building blocks that you won't use, because you're playing modded, and there is no chance your other mods don't have better options.
For a mod based around customizability, Quark is remarkably bad at having the kinds of options I'd want. For instance, I don't like the normal animal variants, but I love the idea of rare shiny variants of mobs, but they cannot be enabled separately, you get one, you get both. The Tetris enchanting system is really cool, but other mods rely on enchanting to work the way it does by default, I'd love to just have a variant of the enchanting table with a different crafting recipe that does the tetris enchanting, but instead you cannot enable it without removing default enchanting.

Overall, as stated in the title, one of the most essential mods out there that I never want to play without, but configuration feels less like tweaking it to my preference than hitting it with a hammer until it behaves.

I've been trained to read descriptions of mods and modpacks with a grain of salt when it comes to claims of being inspired by or based on other games and media, as I'd come to understand that in most cases this inspiration was very loose and/or weak. But when Sunlit Valley says "A Stardew Valley experience!" it means it. A currency system, important things being ticked by days, selling crops, making mayonnaise, animal affection, and the Skull Cavern?? It's wondrous how many things have been translated from Stardew into Minecraft. Everything is implemented with great care and intention, with an eye on keeping progression (which is based primarily on your money-making potential) balanced and well-paced. My favorite pack I've played.

currently at the end of chapter 3, so this review reflects my experience up until then.

meatballcraft is a very "experimental" modpack, and completely builds 70% of its progression out of contenttweaker, custom multiblocks, and custom structures. this virtue alone makes mbc a completely unique experience in its own right -- even if you've played most of the mods in the pack, you have simply not played meatballcraft.

mbc builds its progression on top of incredibly in-depth quest worldbuilding, and experiments with a bunch of very weird/esoteric progression concepts. i think the uniqueness of this pack's progression is the main appeal: most modpacks are pretty homogenous in terms of content, so the prospect of a pack that blends its own creative and silly progression in-between everything is quite exciting.

however, while this pack is very experimental, it's in a way that often feels like it shoots in the dark. for every brilliantly unique and fun problem the pack offers me, it mixes in a problem that is incredibly grindy and uninteresting, so it's like a constant rollercoaster of "very fun problem" and "tragic grind." it's the modpack equivalent of chasing the dragon, i want to experiment and solve all the cool infrastructure and manufacturing problems and play with the fun toys the pack gives me, but i have to put myself through tedious grinds just to get to it.

several imprecise things that i liked:

• i like a lot of the automation/passive/subnet gameplay
• i like how early AE2 and void worlds are
• i like how the questbook is very helpful at leading me through mods i hadn't touched before
• master spells are so fun. favorite modpack concept ever. absolute highlight of the pack being experimental
• first modpack in 10 years to finally make me care enough to learn how to do forestry bees
• furnace dimension

several precise things that annoyed me:

• warning the player that switching dimensions too frequently will cause severe lagspikes is good to know! but then there's abyssalcraft, which is all nested dimensions, so the modpack actively encourages you to spent several minutes waiting for dimensions to load whenever you need to get to omothol. please put the advanced dislocator in chapter 2
• so many times i have been climbing through a crafting chain, only to think that i'm done, and then find that one item (that i assumed i had/seemed easy to get) was actually a different item altogether that's extremely painful to get. for example, the renewable recipe for ice crystal looks simple, so you spend time getting everything else and then right when you're done, sike! the two ice blocks were actually two perpetual ice blocks, you fool, you utter buffoon. this sounds petty, but this kind of crafting recipe frustration happened to me at least a dozen times in this pack. it's a very oddly frequent phenomenon that feels like trolling every time, but not in a way that's fun for me
• i think the emphasis on dimensions and exploring is really cool, but i play modpacks for overt engineering problems, and something in my brain begins to crumble when i'm asked to spend several minutes finding the last "1 of 8 random structures" on this moon, or "go find a frost (rare overworld mob) and put it in a soul vial". like, idk, i think exploring is cool, but with how rare some things are, it's sometimes like playing a slot machine that's constantly filling up space on my harddrive
• chapter 2's progression is a little sad, and basically just says "ok, every magic mod is now unlocked" and expects you to make a little progress in all of them, and they're not particularly changed/different. this would be less bad if some magic mods were staged later in progression (or if there were less of them), because it's definitely the least "meatballcraft" part of the pack.
• don't really know why the extended pattern processing terminal is locked so late in progression, esp considering its just nice qol to avoid packagedauto for a few recipes
• locking the ultimate warp cleanser behind abyssalcraft sounds great, until you find out that you passively gain 500 points of warp when speedrunning abyssalcraft's progression, and so there's a good amount of time in this pack that you simply have to suffer at max warp. which would be more fine if you also didn't have to do significant thaumcraft progression and make 3 custom multiblocks just to get the warp cleanser
• i think the bee stargate is really cool as an option for skipping space, but the questbook claims you have to make a space station regardless, so its like, idk, does it actually skip space if space is required anyways? i may have misunderstood this, though
• several of my personal gripes are less to do with how meatballcraft frames things and more with how my least favorite parts of some mods are just unchanged. off the top of my head, these would be early ender io (please man i dont wanna mow the lawn and collect hedge trimmings to make green gamer dye), abyssalcraft (just a grindy uninteresting headache especially after you've done it once), and gaia 4 (i tried looking up a video on how to do this fight and i found a german youtuber who cheated in and used 6 charm of life IIs, just to beat the fight with the recommended gear)

in spite of all of this, i do think the modpack is definitely worth checking out for anyone interested. i think folks less burnt out of mods than i am will enjoy it, especially since the uniqueness of the pack does a very good job at making it feel distinct to play. just be warned that it is very experimental, both in good ways, but also in ways that will make you want to cheat in an item every so often, and if you ever get that urge, you should take a break and come back later. unless it's abyssalcraft. then cheat that **** in immediately. its a singleplayer game nobody's stopping ya man. ok you could play it in multiplayer too, but if you've read this far, then you're definitely playing in singleplayer. i know your kind

tldr: experimental pack that offers a lot of fun problems, but held back by a lot of frustrating design points that haven't been cleaned up yet. in the first few chapters, the largest ones i experienced were: rarer structures should be more common, advanced dislocator should be ch2, gaia 4 should be optional, and add options to skip abyssalcraft