A tutorial to the tech modding scene
Reputation ranks
Ranks only ever go up; points can drop but your rank stays.
About reputation ranksThanks to Feed The Factory I learned to appreciate conduits and mass-crafting.
Premise
Feed The Factory’s premise is simple. No worldgen, no hunger, no pesky monsters to worry about. Only a mining drill, a questbook and a dream to build the biggest, meanest factory. The core gameplay loop is about gathering resources and feeding them to machines that create research, needed to unlock more advanced technology.
Tech
There are 5 tiers of research in total, each unlocking more advanced logistics, power generation and production technologies. You start with hoppers and minecarts, moving to conveyors and conduits. Windmills and coal burners make way for complicated petrol refinement facilities, and those are needed to unlock nuclear power. And with enough perseverance and knowledge of tech mods, it’s possible to make an ore processing chain that turns a single ore into 294 ingots. Because of the gating, you WILL have to go through each tech mod. That is the first time I actually progressed in Immersive Engineering beyond the Blast Furnace. The entire modpack is basically a giant tutorial for some of the main tech mods, but it challenges advanced players too.
Appearance
The style is gritty and technological, and the machines from various mods don’t explicitly clash with each other. I could have appreciated if the sprites of the machines were changed to correspond to each research tier, with machines for each new tier bearing an increasingly futuristic, powerful appearance. But that’s a small complaint.
Performance
Runs on 4-5 GB of RAM, perhaps even less than that. When the modpack is set in a superflat world and centered around the few key tech mods, there’s really no need to worry about performance.
Conclusion
Feed The Factory is a very well-designed modpack, perhaps one of the exemplars in how to design a tech-centered modpack. All gameplay elements not related to the tech premise are removed, and the progression is strictly linear. This allows the player to focus on exploring the tech mods, helping understand their strengths and weaknesses.