Enigmatica 9 - E9 - 1.19.2

Some context: I played this pack on a community server with 10-20 people, usually less than 10 online at any given time.

Coming from someone who hasn't played much of modern versions and tech, E9 serves as a pretty good introduction to its mods. I mainly used Mekanism throughout the whole pack, with a couple other mods throughout. It's beginner friendly with good quest descriptions, not the greatest but it told me what I needed to know to get started. Late-game Mekanism, the quests started to degrade and I was forced to use the wiki and multiple tutorial videos. Quests weren't in the best order either and the quest rewards in the beginning felt super OP. However, for a kitchen sink pack, this felt rather polished compared to others I've played in the past but definitely not perfect. I still enjoyed this much more than E6, that's for sure. I recommend picking a specific mod in this pack and going through it fully, especially if you're new.

I will say the exploration, caves, and mobs felt pretty barebones. The modlist is fairly tame compared to most kitchen sinks, but it seems like it's intentional. Personally I think this pack could've used a bit more to spice it up (especially the caving) but it wasn't a big deal to me as I was inside my base working on tech 95% of the time. I rarely even went to other dimensions as there wasn't much reason to, aside from plopping a digital miner in the Nether and going back home.

E9 has a lot of potential for a polished experienced with great inter-mod compatibility but drops the ball on a few aspects. A big pet peeve of mine was the fact that there were multiple versions of the same ingot. Osmium for example had the Mekanism version and the "enigmatica" version. It was really annoying when going through recipes and having to find recipes and uses for a specific ingot.

I'm very curious to see how E9: Expert compares to this, but as a beginner when it comes to tech, I still had a blast learning all the systems. It felt open-ended with enough direction to not have me completely lost. EMI is a blessing and blew my mind when I first saw what it offers. Plenty of QoL in the pack but could use more (cough, Carry On). E9 could use more building blocks as well, definitely sad at the lack of chisel (i like the cool tech blocks 😭). You really gotta get creative to make some nice looking factories.

As far as performance and stability, the first half was pretty much perfectly fine. I would've rated it 5 stars if the server crashes didn't start coming in half-way through. Issues and crashes started to become common as more players got ahold of complicated tech, but I don't entirely blame the pack for that. Any kitchen sink would struggle with the amount of players we had, so I only deducted 1 star.

All in all, if you want a somewhat-polished, easy, and fun kitchen sink pack to play with a bunch of friends where everyone can be satisfied, give E9 a try :)