Fun and challenging for a beta!

I'm impressed with what Void Cube has accomplished with this pack. Everything for the first 20 hours of gameplay (chapter 1 and 2 for me) feels intentional, well thought out, and made with care. I was able to follow along with the quests and encounter some extremely new and unique gameplay and mechanics I've never seen in any other packs. For the first 20 hours, I was ready to give this pack a full 5 stars! Once chapter 3 started, there were cracks in the gameplay that started to show, and I realized why this was still in beta.

Pros:

1. The environments are very well made! I feel like I'm living in a world that was lived in and has truly been ravaged by the apocalypse. I love the level designs and hidden bunker structures. The aesthetics are just top-tier.

2. The player movement and UI feel well polished! The mods used feel like they're meant to be part of Minecraft and I can tell there was a lot of care put into the mods that adjust the behavior of the player's character.

3. The general survival concept and the mods that enable that (fishing, farming, butchering) are exquisite! I really enjoyed the first few days of trying to get my hands on food and learning more from the quest book about how food has changed. My favorite is the butchering system. Felt so real to drain blood from animals, skin them if necessary, and then chop off their parts. Very immersive!

4. Guns from TacZ are accessible pretty early, but aren't SO easy to get that you're gonna be OP really quickly. Ammo is also fairly easy to obtain for most of the starting weapons.

5. The zombies are SMART! They won't run into traps and they'll pathfind to you in interesting and unique ways that make you really think about what you're doing.

Cons:

1. Quests are hidden until you unlock their predecessor. This is common in packs when you have a category hidden until the player is ready for it, but I'm talking entire quests within a category will be hidden from view. This creates a frustrating relationship where I found myself missing out on items that I had no idea I could craft because the prerequisite quest didn't seem worth the resources to complete. I found myself multiple times wondering "is this the best armor I can craft?" because I got far and didn't see any clear progression, as the quests were hidden.

2. The difficulty increases as you play the game. This can be a plus in my opinion, but only if the difficulty increases only to the point where it continues to be fun for the player. The problem with this is that all players have a different tolerance for difficulty. When you have mods that try to gauge when to make the world harder, there are bound to be people who get left behind. This introduced the frustrating reality of having to bring firearms EVERYWHERE to get anything done. I love shooting my gun, but the usage of ranged in every fight really makes me feel a lack of utility from melee weapons, which brings me to my next point:

3. Melee weapons SUCK when the difficulty starts to spike. All zombies seem to spawn in which much more health, and I'm using the best melee weapon that I know of, the sledgehammer. It does 12 damage at its base and hits very very slowly. Without any modifications, it takes 3 HITS to kill the LOWEST HEALTH NORMAL ZOMBIE. If I "sharpen" my sledgehammer (a mechanic they added that allows you to sharpen melee weapons for 32 uses) it becomes 2 hits. This weapon is VERY slow though, and zombies are usually in groups or hordes, so it's easy to get overrun quickly.

4. Enchantments are severely nerfed. What I mean is that you either have to get really lucky and find an enchantment book as loot, or progress until you can craft expensive enchanted books. Enchanting Tables are NOT craftable and are unobtainable in natural generation. The difficulty has already increased exponentially since I started, and I'm still on chapter 3. It's super rough to get by without enchantments when that's the case. I basically have to use the "Defender" set of armor to get by defensively, since I don't have access to the protection enchantments.

5. There are enemies that will practically INSTA kill you if you walk into a structure unprepared. There's not proper warning in my opinion to warrant this kind of behavior and it led to many frustrating times where I felt that I was killed unfairly and had to trek thousands of blocks to get back to my stuff. I didn't feel like my expectations were set properly when it came to any threats that came up. The best way to handle things this powerful is to REQUIRE that the player craft the threat (Wither) or have them set off an intentional set of events that gets them ready for a" boss fight" (Ender Dragon).

6. Starting with Chapter 3, there are missions that you can get sent by an exterior faction called Central. These missions are THOUSANDS of blocks away sometimes. They give vehicles that players can craft to make the distance bearable (I crafted a Biplane which required some Create to get working, including a precision mechanism). Going this distance and then dying is ROUGH if you didn't set up a bed. Even if you had, you then have to get your stuff back within highly contested POIs that have spawners hidden in hard-to-guess places. This can create a fairly frustrating journey to get to your stuff again while having no equipment. Keeping in mind that the world gets harder and doesn't care if you died, so you've got the protection of a fresh-spawn without any of the gear that's been keeping you alive. There's also a quest where the objectives are not achievable in the quest itself, which is extremely frustrating! You actually have to go back to the previous quest location (which could be 4000 blocks away in my case) and harvest more materials from the area. Very frustrating!!

7. Create is NECESSARY to progress through the modpack and you can't get blaze rods, which are a common recipe for many of the TacZ weapons, without setting up a factory line. This is something I was quite surprised by, and it felt a bit frustrating as I had hopes that Create would be an optional element to the modpack. Also, andesite is a lot harder to find naturally, so you have to find it, or diorite, in structures mainly in order to progress with the pack. Same with Nether Quartz. Neither of these changes were mentioned in the quest book.