Promising idea that didn't land

At first glance, this looked like the kind of chill modpack that I'd always wanted. Exploration-focused, some silly powerscaling on the player's side, a little bit of gated progression, custom bosses and dungeons.

Technically, all of those are true. But the overall result was quite disappointing nonetheless.

Mod selection
There are a few mods which just... exist in the pack, and feel tacked on. For instance, Wizard's Reborn (sic) is included, but none of the quests (mandatory or optional) make any reference to it, and at no point are you required to interact with it at all. Apotheosis also felt pretty pointless, since you can easily outscale just about everything without having to ever interact with it.

ProjectE is a required part of early progression, so if you dislike that, be warned. I do love me some ProjectE silliness from time to time though, so no complaints on that front.

The """story"""
I'm not usually someone who cares too much about well-written storylines, but it's hard to ignore in this pack. At the start and end of every chapter (i.e. entering a new dimension / defeating that dimension's main boss), you'll get an annoying, Star Wars-esque text scroll with accompanying voice over, reading another hundred words or so of the plot. It occupies the middle 80% of your screen, is painfully slow, you can't move during it, and all that nonsense (but is thankfully skippable if you hold a button for like 5 seconds).

Having been forced to read a few sentences' worth of the plot every time this happens, I can't help but feel like it reads like the whole thing was generated by AI. I don't like throwing these kinds of accusations around baselessly, so here's an excerpt for you to judge on your own (relatively lategame spoilers, if you care):

The sun-chaser and the moon-hound fall silent at last. The key to Asgard gleams in your hand, heavy with the weight of every realm you have conquered, every spirit you have claimed. You are more now than you were when you crawled from the grave in Helheim. The stolen strength of Gods and monsters runs through you like molten rune-metal. You are nearly what you once were. Nearly. But the serpent does not wait for 'nearly.' The earth splits. The sky blackens. Nidhoggr rises; not as a shadow, not as a whisper, but as the full and terrible truth of what has been stalking you since the beginning. His jaws close around you before the scream leaves your throat. Darkness. The stench of acid and ancient death. The churning belly of something that has devoured Gods. You have been here before. This is where it began. Inside the corpse-gnawer, swallowed and broken and spat into Helheim like offal. Your memories stir; not yet whole, but enough. Enough to know that you and this serpent have unfinished blood between you. Fight. Not with the desperation of the condemned, but with the fury of one who finally remembers what was taken from them. Tear your way free.

FTB little helper
This is essentially an annoying allay sidekick that follows each player everywhere while dropping quippy one-liners about almost everything you do, including dying, placing/breaking blocks, and yes, it has lines for you being AFK. It also sometimes gets in your face and messes up your targeting. It was so annoying they added a command to despawn it, but (at least in this version of the pack) it respawns every time you die or return to Helheim anyway. Also, the hide command doesn't work while it's in the middle of saying something, so if you're dying repeatedly to a boss... yeah.

The whole idea behind this thing (presumably) was that killing major bosses allowed you to upgrade it with the skill tree, so it could cast buffs or shoot at enemies. Naturally, none of those systems work if you've hidden it, so I guess this is your reward for suffering through the constant annoyance?

Skill tree
This pack has quite a few skill trees, but most of them feel pretty extraneous. You have a magic skill tree (improves Iron's Spells attributes, actually pretty helpful!), the Little Helper skill tree (see above), and one skill tree for each dimension.

I liked the implementation of the magic skill tree, because you're drip-fed skill points from random magic-related quests, which incentivises you to interact with magic mods beyond what is mandatory for progression.

The dimension skill trees are much lamer. Most of those upgrades just... exist as incremental buffs (e.g. +2 max health, +0.05 natural health regen, +10 stamina... what even is stamina?). Additionally, completing all quests in a particular story chapter (which isn't as hard as it sounds, since most have about 15-20 quests, and 90% of them are mandatory) typically gives you all the skill points needed to claim everything in the associated skill tree, so it's not like there's any meaningful choices to be made - just click everything.

Progression
Frankly, the progression is fine for a modpack of this genre. It felt a tad barebones for my liking, but that's probably because I'm more used to expert packs. The relatively unique start of "make Philosopher's Stone, transform mobs to get different mob drops" was pretty cute and thankfully did not overstay its welcome.

I have mixed feelings about the GeOre system (which basically makes most ore types spawn as geodes, much like amethyst). It means that once you find a particular geode, you'll have a pretty sizeable amount of that resource on hand (not that it usually matters, because most base materials have EMC). However, it's not easy to find the geode you want, and it's not very clear how they spawn (I don't think they inherit the spawning y-levels of their original ores, for instance). Looking for netherite in Muspelheim was particularly annoying.

Powerscaling is trivial; I rocked an unenchanted, unupgraded (!) set of Shadow-Walker armor from Iron's Spells and never came close to dying at all on any of the bosses (with the exception of Geburah from Qliphoth Awakening, but that boss has instakill mechanics and we couldn't figure out how to damage it - not sure if we failed reading or if it really isn't explained in-game at all). Then I just spammed arrows with Archangel's Smite and basically shredded everything.

There's plenty of tech / automation stuff crammed into the pack, which you never really need to worry too much about, other than (maybe) setting up a Powah reactor near the last chapter to do some DE fusion crafting recipes. Everything else you can just craft it by hand and move on (and you'll probably never need that item again, since it's usually just for summoning the chapter boss). This means that automating most things (or interacting with AE2 in any capacity) is pointless because your setup becomes obsolete about 3 minutes after you finish it. That said, this never was meant to be an expert pack, so you might be okay with this.

The following issues were addressed later on, but I still think it's pretty inexcusable that they managed to release 4 versions without catching any of this stuff. (I even intentionally waited a week or so after release before playing, hoping they'd have ironed out all the major issues. They hadn't.)

Structure spawning issues
Structures containing optional bosses spawn far too infrequently, especially in certain dimensions. The Explorer's Compass was unable to find any matching structures within a 3000+ block radius; my friend and I ended up teleporting at intervals of several thousand blocks to re-scan with the compass. We had to do this for Ignis (in Muspelheim) and Coralssus (in Jotunheim). We gave up on the latter search after half an hour (yes) and spawned it in. (relevant bug report, not by me)

Dragon pruning
The final main progression chapter requires the use of Dragonforge recipes, which means either hatching your own dragon or setting it up near an existing one. Now, for some inane reason the devs had a script which ran every couple of minutes that /kills all dragons. This was apparently supposed to run only in Helheim, but somehow it ran everywhere, killing every loaded dragon at random intervals, including ones we were in the middle of fighting in Midgard. Eventually, it killed two dragons we'd just hatched as well, and that was the point where I dumped the pack.

I have no clue why the devs felt the need to do this, since:

• Dragons only spawn in Midgard, so the intended use case of pruning Helheim dragons makes no sense, and will only blindside players trying to raise their own dragons in their private team bases.
• There is no in-game warning that this "feature" even exists, so a bunch of players would probably have gotten their dragons telekilled even if the script had been working as intended.

Additionally, I find it hard to believe anyone actually reached this part of the pack in testing if they managed not to catch this, and that's ridiculous because this was part of mandatory progression.

All in all, the concept was cool, but it was kinda undercooked and there was a lot of broken stuff, so the pack just left a sour taste in my mouth overall. At least my friend got to learn a few new mods.