A very good expert pack with lots of challenges and no time-gated grind

TL;DR if you came here and wonder "should I try this pack?" yes you should. "will I like this pack?" well this I can't answer lmao.

To put things into perspective: I played somewhere around 300 hours and got to chapter 19 (out of 30), then quit because of lack of free time and lag induced by Thaumcraft.

The pack starts with dimension exploration (Nether, TF optional, Atum, Erebus optional, Aether, Iceika and the End) followed by a short technical block, at the end of which ME Interfaces are unlocked in chapter 13 (around 80-250 hours into the pack depending on how focused you are). Then comes the key thing of this pack which is passiving, aka you have to set up lines producing every item in the game from raw items, and scale them throughout the pack. After a bit more dimension hopping in chapter you begin the magic block, which involves having to set up many processing lines in those mod's machines and altars, which then requires scaling the prior lines higher, and higher, and higher... Most of the pack's remainder has this gameplay loop: unlock new item, try to passive it, (sometimes) find out you're out of 100500 different components, upscale their production. This is further amplified in chapter 24 and beyond when Mystical Agriculture is unlocked, with apparently "hundreds of thousands of an item being used for literally one craft which you have to do a few hundred times".

Despite this loop, there is almost no time spent doing nothing and waiting on the recipes to complete. I probably only afk'd a couple hours total (+ however much time was spent dimension hopping if that can be considered afk'ing). There is like 1 recipe early on which takes 10 minutes to execute, and then not setting up resource generation will force you to be in the cave for a few hours, but afterwards I haven't ever ran into this again.

Also wow this quest book. This quest book is legitimately amazing. The best one I've seen in any pack (I haven't played GTNH as early game things like steam age GT is too annoying for me to go through)

Now for the bad parts of the pack in my opinion:

• Despite this innovative gameplay loop, the gameplay ends up pretty repetitive as you have to set up hundreds of automatic crafting tables from the mod of your choice, and then dozens (or hundreds) of automatic runic altars, thaumatoriums, etc.
• The pack also includes a quite basic collection of mods that are present everywhere, so if you're into "inherently more interesting" mods this is not for you (some examples of this include Extreme Reactors, Galacticraft, IE), although they're usually turned on their head which is quite nice.