Enigmatica 6: Expert - E6E

First of all: I am a pretty slow player (while playing many different expert packs), I played somewhere around 90 hours (a large % of which was building) and got to the beginning of Mekanism (which is I think around midgame, although maybe I was still in pre-early game! not sure), then quit because of ridiculous amount of apparent grind required to go through the midgame.

Before I go through the downsides, I would like to highlight some cool things I really liked myself:

• Requiring the use of certain dimensions to do Blood Magic (undergarten) and Occultism (atuum) before lategame
• Minor amount of required bees (I kinda hated it at first but then decided it was actually ok)
• Lack of power storage until midgame (also both a blessing and a curse, blessing because it forces you to think about cool things)
• This was the first time I saw create and actually made me kinda like it (now you won't catch me download a create pack like, ever lmao)

Now, for the downsides...
Every time I hear people say anything about this pack I just bring a whole list of random bs that the pack does:

• Thing ZERO: Apotheosis mod in the expert pack so you randomly get owned by bees
• The first thing about this pack is that it keeps the quests from Enigmatica 6 (Non-expert) and only adds a few own quests. Since progression order is often inverted between E6 and E6E the quest book is only there to mislead you lmao.
• As a consequence, it's very hard to know about the existance of some recipes. Example: to complete the tutorial up to Steel you need somewhere around 10 Hearts of the Sea (see also review by Flandre that goes more in depth on this). There is a recipe for HotS that is done in a Blood Magic machine, which is usually available after you progress a bit into BM, so you immediately go like "yea nah" and then spend 10 hours looking for buried treasures. Yea I think that machine is the intended way to get HotS's, but requires some ridiculously rare ores only found beneath oceans (thankfully there is Scannable, but not going to lie, I had to google how to obtain that ore and the only thing that popped up was a reddit post). "Awesome" start already.
• The quest book for magic mods is also really bad. It does not explain anything at all and when the mod doesn't either (see: Eidolon)
• The pack includes Bountiful to skip parts of progression. For example I was able to make an Atomic Disassembler 20 hours in, even though Atomic Alloy is supposed to require Fission, and I've seen ppl get things like Dimensional Storage Stabilizers from the board. This also made me spend a lot more time then I should have since you need to get a power generator early, and I ended up buying parts of waterwheels from bounty boards before I could make one (then someone on Discord said there are solar panels from Engineer's Decor, which is very much not a mod I would think of checking, bruh, fml).
• Talking to more experienced players, apparently backpacks are the primary endgame way of storing items (also compacting drawer requires elven trade so your early-mid game storage is just ass); many also whined about RS being worse than AE2 (maybe, I don't have a lot of experience with the former).
• And more...

I think this should give a good perspective on how this pack actually plays.

If you are like me and love E2E, and feel its the gold standard for how an expert pack should be designed, run away from this follow-up. fast.

It does the exact opposite of what E2E did; instead of looking at the past and keeping the good and correcting the bad. it kept the bad and threw out the good.

I have tried to complete this pack numerous times, but I can never motivate myself to continue. Its just not worth your time

Don't go in E6E expecting E2E2. It's an absolutely different experience, maybe explained by the version gap.
Unlike E2E where you can safely ignore 50% of the magic mods early on and focus on the tech first in order to obtain a mass storage network as soon as possible, E6E forces you (but you don't know that yet, since the questbook does not give any real practical advice on how to grind the materials) to batch craft copious amounts of magic items.
If mods like Eidolon or Ars Nouveau are your thing, maybe the modpack is for you but you won't get away with "a little magic" in this one. I completely gave up after around 30 hours of gameplay when I realized the amount of grind that was still between me and real automation.
I really wanted to like you E6E ;(

This pack actually took me three tries to get past a day or two of playing. The start is heavy focused on magic and Create, very cliche. Once I was able to get past the start, the middle of the pack was pretty generic and smooth. There is a heavy reliance on Modular Routers for the automation that Refined Storage is unable to do. Towards the end, you are expected to build very large multiblocks, ending on huge tree. The problem is that when the multiblocks are enabled, you get huge lag. I had to remove the controller whenever I was not using the block. I was able to semi-automate this with a piston. I understand the huge multiblocks look cool... but did they not realize that when they are active that it tanks the TPS? Was this never tested?

It was enjoyable in parts, but I doubt I would ever play through this again.

In such a new version, it's difficult to create an expert modpack of similar quality to E2E. The progression, however, is plain annoying, without any guide on many things like how you're supposed to get a conduit to make a simple cooking pot of all things. Mods within do not mingle well, and progress does not feel nearly as rewarding as it seems to be intended to.

Let me describe an early game scenario. This is the intended progression, and the quest book doesn't tell you much of any of this:

Common occurance in any modpack. You need steel quite early, so how does one get steel in E6E? Via coke coal. Your best options are the induction smelter, or the Create mixer. The Create mixer uses less coke coal but requires superheating. The induction smelter takes RF which you may not have early on.

To get coke coal, you make a coke oven. To make a coke oven you have to, I kid you not - In-world lightning craft arcane stone, make multiple CONDUITS to get an Ars Nouveau enchanting crafter(A cooking pot requires a conduit to craft, wtf?), find a way to generate the source required for it, use the enchanting crafter to make sunmetal out of gold/silver, then lightning craft that to make a golden scarab, build an Atum 2 portal to go to another dimension and get a papyrus plant, use that to craft a petal apothecary(1 conduit per apothecary), use that to craft a pure daisy(1 conduit PER PURE DAISY), use that to get livingwood(which does not accept normal logs, only 1 special less common kind of log which is stated nowhere), make an Eidolon setup to get soul shards, make a blood altar(Needs another conduit lol also you can't make a self sacrifice dagger until T3 altar), infuse the livingwood planks in a blood altar to get Eidolon polished wood, which can be used to make Create brass casings, which you need to make the mechanical crafters, to make the Create crushing wheel, so you can grind Netherrack into cinder flour which can finally be turned into coke bricks with a Create mixer, then a Create sequenced assembly, FINALLY giving you coke coal. Which... As you can guess, isn't steel, you're just part of the way there...

And if you think that process now has you all set up for even the next step - you haven't even set up a Nature's altar, Astral sorcery altar, Runic altar, Eidolon altar, birthing altar, ritual of the forest, occult ritual, mana infuser, so on and so on. There's so many altars and infusers that the process to make that steel is just a microcosm of what's to come.

We know E2E was a rock solid pack, it ran with the 'Expert' style that started in IE:E - and I think many would hope E6E would be more of that. After all, it's of the same namesake.

That's not really how E6E is, though. It's trying to be unique and set itself apart from the standard 'expert' fare. Rather than separate lines of progression with the occasional overlap, magic and tech are deeply and forcefully combined in a relatively linear form of progression. On its own, that doesn't sound so bad but the scale of that intertwining and use of several "altar" type crafts creates a pack where recipes have more micro-crafting than GTNH but without the consistency of GTNH's (Screws, rods, etc). Recipes are highly arbitrary, and used as a gating mechanism or to overcomplicate the pack's early/midgame.

It forces Pneumaticraft without alternatives, greatly overcomplicates the Create Sequenced Assembler recipes (4,500x times through to unlock the decent IE multi's... Really?), pushes you into Blood Magic without being able to make a self sacrifice dagger, makes you progress into Eidolon which is an abandoned/unfinished mod, and much more tedium that just feels excessive.

Quests feel very unfinished and at times feel like they are leaving out quite a bit, and the non-expert E6 quests are included which do not account for the Expert progression chain. Major mods do not have quest series, and it feels a bit random which mods do/don't. I have around 10K hours in modded Minecraft but still had an incredibly difficult time finding out what I was supposed to do next in a crafting chain, I easily spent ~20% of my gameplay staring at NEI, feeling burnt out, and not really wanting to progress due to it being kinda un-fun to get roadblocked constantly.

Despite all of my ranting, pretty much every single recipe in the game is changed - and if you like altar and Create style crafting then the sheer quantity of it makes for a decent auto-crafting challenge. There was clearly a ton of effort put into tweaking every last inch of progression to fit what the developers intended, and to make sure that items unlock when they wanted. But I feel like there was nobody around to ask "Why though?" on some of these decisions.

In short, E6E doesn't feel like expert mode, it feel like extreme-spaghetti mode.

Some less relevant stuff:

That's the core of the pack out of the way. But I find a good bit of polish lacking, Apotheosis does what Apotheosis does and can spawn mobs that randomly one-shot the player in very sudden ways.

Valhesia, Roguelike dungeons, Guns without Roses, and many other custom structures have their generation frequency quite high (Default values I assume? Come on guys) to the point that you can't really stand anywhere without 2-3 custom structures in render distance at all times. It can be convenient in the early-game when running around looting, but everyone knows that the 30th time you see a custom structure it has lost its meaning and purpose.