I have been a fan of FTB ever since they got their start way back in it's hayday. FTB has been a symbol of quality from the Direwolf packs to the classic packs like Attack of the B-team.

I am happy to say, this pack is no different.

With mods new and old I was able to problem solve and I liked how I was able to branch out. The quest book was thorough and knowing what I do now if I ever do a 2nd playthrough I know how I would go about things.

Positives:

• Fun experience
• Custom content was overall good
• Includes a story that is narrated
• Exposed me to Just Dire Things, Oritech, Nautech (this one took me way too long to sleuth out)
• Consistent sci-fi theming

Negatives:

• Final objective was a little much
• I wish that loot scaling with player quests was communicated, I ignored airdrops through the whole midgame
• Reliance on Mystical Aggriculture

Exploration felt atypical and rewarding in the water world. Good mix of tech mods and resource generation. The quest book helped guide building the right items, although nautec felt finnicky for using. Most exploration was enjoyable except for the final dimension boss was a bit of a slog.

Early Game

For context, I played with this modpack on a server with a small group of friends. Throughout my experience, I never researched anything about the pack, and I had never played an FTB pack before.
The start of Oceanblock 2 was great. You choose a starting ship and explore from there. The gimmick of the world being only a large ocean was actually a fresh take on early minecraft progression that focuses more on exploration. I didn't expect to enjoy the ocean world as much as I did.

Mid Game

I had a lot of fun problem solving with the multitude of tech mods in this pack such as Mekanism, Oritech, Immersive Engineering, Refined Storage and Applied Energistics 2, and Nuclear Reactors. This pack introduced me to a lot of tech mods and mechanics I had never seen before, while also integrating them together in interesting ways. It does feel like a kitchen sink pack at times since there is little thematic elements except for some ocean-related mods like PneumaticCraft.

Late Game

For me, the weakest part of this pack was the end game. Spoilers: The end goal of the game is to beat a boss and reach the overworld. To reach the dimension where the boss resides, a lot of setup and tedious grinding is required. The dimension itself is pretty cool build-wise, but the builds are empty apart from the same mobs and barrels scattered around. In general, the dimension felt slightly soulless. The final boss fight was super easy and uninteresting. By just completing the questbook progression, the final boss barely lasted a minute. Finally reaching the overworld was pretty underwhelming too, as it seemed basically unchanged from a regular modpack. The ocean world was far more interesting, and it would've been cool to see something different about the overworld. The ending was anti-climactic and didn't feel like it was worth the effort.

Overview

Despite my feeling about the ending, I had a lot of fun with this pack. There is hours of content to explore and the questbook ties a lot of the mods together to make a fun, cohesive experience.

So this modpack is pretty light in all ways. Playtime, Grind and performance. It took me around 36 hours to fully beat it with all side quests completed(Except for fully occultism page which is added for no reason I guess).

Mods - I guess it's pretty standart mods like Mekanism, AE2, EnderIO and some others. But I don't know why the just added tons of useless mods like AA, Extreme Reactors, Immersive Engineering, Powah which got almost zero impact on gameplay adding like 1-2 necessary recipes, but there are Occultism and Ars Nouvea with absolutely zero impact on gameplay but having tons of quests, even more than every other chapters combined. (No Create mod in newest modpack? Am I dreaming?).

Quests - There are 4 main chapters which is great but getting worse in late game and you got like "craft some random shit to end the pack" ahh gameplay and it varies from craft empowered items from AA to craft Quantum computer core from AE2 which I didn't even touched to this moment cuz I'm good with ID storage(I spent 8 out of 36 hours on crafting this core).

Despite the everything i said above, I enjoyed playing this pack with that watery vibe(Such watery that you even need to plant seed only underwater) and custom progression with custom dungeons.

And yeah, gambling, gambling for dirt, gambling for netherrack, gambling for creative things and obviously gambling against time for more gambling.