I tried this pack and bounced after about 30 mins. This was due to the nerf the player receives to their block interaction range. It seems to be about 50%. When combined with the early game use of in world crafting stripped logs to make any planks generates a miserable experience. The move speed and health debuffs are able to be compensated for with skill and provide an interesting challenge. However the block interaction range makes interacting with anything in the game more tedious, finicky and needlessly time consuming. This includes things such as: opening crafting tables, placing blocks, breaking blocks, and attacking mobs.
It also includes the tree chop mod which I personally dislike but given that mods download count, I am clearly in the minority.
Aesthetics had some minor cohesion improvements.
I had no issues with stability or performance thought I am on a very new computer.

This pack is not hard. It's filled with unfair trolls. This is a troll pack.

EVERYTHING kills you.. including picking up clam shells. This is not dark souls hard. This is "haha the carrots exploded" hard. If you enjoy this kind of experience, you can just set a timer that randomly kills you - same effect. This feels like a "getting pranked by falling anvils randomly" pack more then any cohesive story or magic pack.

The mod author nerfs the player to 5 hearts (which might as well be half a heart since mobs one-shot you anyway) and then gives every mob the ability to one-shot you and teleport to you. There is NO counterplay, no tactics, no defense... it's just getting killed over and over and over again for the sake of "difficulty".

If you want this to be anything other then an immediate uninstall and blacklist, then you need to make the starting experience a LOT better. Set the pack to peaceful until the player at least can aquire some hearts / armor / weapons (and I am not talking about your nerfed swords that break in 2-3 hits... if they even hit anything... another braindead decision...).

And for the love of... why give mobs armor that reduces the damage you do to literally 0 with early game weapons.. and then set them against players that don't even have an axe yet? How did you expect this to go? Have you done ANY balance checking or do you just cheat in armor / tools when you test? It shows...

Go play a good pack like RLCraft if you want to know what difficult is. This ain't it.

I'm very much enjoying this modpack. While it's difficult, the progression is clearly well thought-out and the mod integration is done wonderfully. While it's not a building-focused pack, builders (including myself) will find no dearth of options, between Wizard's Reborn, Create, Supplementaries, and Quark, not to mention Oh the Biomes We've gone and Astrological, there are more than enough building options to make all your magic automation beautiful. The dev is active on Discord and the community is great. If you want some challenging gameplay with amazing mod integration, I would highly recommend!

So far so kinda good

from what i can see the modpack is still in development, there's so much more to get to and to achieve in it still, from the player side and the Modder side as well.

an almost perfectly balanced Expert questing Modpack, that actually has custom recipes, and fairly good challenges, and a vast enjoyable world PLUS so much satisfying progression that gives a self-fulfillment sense when you actually do or achieve something without it being ridiculously hard .

1- Questing
Quest are actually well made, rewards are balanced, the progression is satisfying
Explanations on the quests is thoughtful, well written, Actually Helpful

**2- Is it actually "Expert?", and "Custom Made?" **
Yes!!, and no?.....
The modpack is a genuine Expert modpack with a lot of really good custom stuff from recipes to items to even world progression.

Wait world progression?
Yes mobs get stronger as you progress! .
Items/Tools actually make a difference as you go to different tiers!.
Materials have STATS? and PERKS? so everything is highly customizable? Definitely!.
Loot is actually appropriate to dimension and structure!

So...is it hard? not the RLCRAFT hard, nope,
even better difficulty balancing than DDSS?, Almost.

DDSS? is it a copy of DDSS?, NOPE, even tho it's heavily inspired, it still has it's unique picture and feel to it, is it better than it? not yet but it really has a huge potential to be! it's still in dev i assume.

to clarify the modpack is a Medium-Sized Expert pack not an Extra Large one so keep in mind!.

3- World gen/Exploration
honestly my review would be longer than it already is if im gonna dive into details but just to give a fair general idea

World gen/Exploration is really cool and full of stuff, bioms are nice and mobs/entities are everywhere each biome/dimension has it's kinda own mobs/entities AND THERE'S a lot of hidden stuff like Mythcal creatures! and Realms!!

to make it short you will never get bored exploring the world!.

4- Mods....
it has a whopping 288 almost finely tuned and optimized mods
SO A LOT THEN.
there's some pretty good quality of life mods in it and as always Quality of life mods are always a huge deference.
are these mods Better?
EXACTLY !, Better Mods!
Better animations! Better brightness! Better FPS Better Treasure maps!
better Combat! Better Smithing tables! Better advancments!
AND BETTER LILY PADS! ?
aside from word play yep there's much more quality of life mods other than the better mods like FTB, JE mods/ Just enough items/professions/recources clomps and the easy mods, curios ect.

So then optimization?.... ummm

5-Optimization
not much to talk about, so there isn't? No there IS but that's how modpacks work they're always under optimization/bug fixing

but overall it's fairly optimized and fully playable with a bug every dimension or so?
yes there's bugs and stuff to fix but that's expected since it's not done yet why?
because mods are constantly updating and there's a lot of work for the modder to do behind the scene!

ALSO IT'S ON THE LATEST RELEASE?
umm YEP almost? it's on 1.20.1! so yeah

**so in conclusion? LOVED IT! **
there's a lot to work on but i'm satisfied with it my only regret which i'm hoping to see in the future is shaders support as integrated in-modpack shaders .

you can just manually do it btw it's really easy
but it would be really cool if it's there automatically.