Beautiful and Immersive, but Frustrating

It's obvious a lot of love and care has been put into this pack so that it aligns with the vision of realism and immersion. Many mods are customized so that they can fit together tightly, including the shader and LOD mods. The visuals while exploring are spectacular as a result, though somewhat performance heavy. This pack is at its best when you simply try to experience it rather than progress through it.

While actually playing the pack, I found myself grow frustrated with a number of mechanics. Most notably, the combat, stamina, and nutrition systems. Pretty much everything is an insect that poisons you, and getting hit is more likely due to the swing animations on weapons and because running costs stamina. So you can burn through food pretty quick. But you can't rely on a consistent food source because any given meal will stop healing you if you eat it more than a few times. I had 4 slots dedicated to different high-value meals, and their nutrition was still decreasing gradually. All this makes caving and exploring on foot very arduous.

However there are a lot of great mechanics, too. Temperature is well implemented and works usually exactly as you expect, so make sure to bring waterskins when you adventure in an extreme season. Food spoilage is manageable. Enchanting has been totally reworked into "research", where you can craft enchantments and easily transfer them or freely repair items. Create helps you automate some survival resources when you reach that point.

In terms of progression, the general goal is to simply survive. But, there is an end goal that requires you to leverage minecolonies. Personally, I found that minecolonies in this pack did not respect my time because rain is frequent and nights cannot be skipped instantly. There was a lot of just waiting, which is time you could use to build, I suppose.

I would recommend this pack if you are looking for a challenging survival experience and don't mind just existing in the pretty world for of long periods of time. The dev is also very responsive to feedback, they seem committed to fixing bugs and improving the pack.