The First Time I Enjoyed Automation

I don't typically enjoy tech packs, but this is an exception. This pack made me get automation online and enjoy doing it. I spent about 193 hours in this pack.

Here are my thoughts!

Praise:

-Ambient sounds are so cool in this pack. Aesthetic is on point

-Thank god there isn't a wire monster. Would've been very easy to market the pack to children and focus really bad horror mods for clickbait. Opting to not do this was a fantastic decision.

-Mod integration is very well done. To make progress in one mod, you need the others, which I appreciate

-The mods for the most part progress together and the scaling for what mods you get access to and when was really well done

-Almost no recipes are left untouched, and I love that. These mods are integrated super well with the environment

-I like that there are a so many different ways to do certain things. I got to design farms as I pleased and do whatever I felt necessary, with only some minor nudging in the quest book. Things like "it may be best to automate this process" or "do not progress further without some automation otherwise the next chapters will be hard" are really nice to have as someone that doesn't play many tech packs and would've squeezed by with the minimum necessary resources. This pack pushed me out of my comfort zone in a lot of ways while not making it an unpleasant experience.

-Locking water wheels behind more of an expensive recipe + not buffing their stress units was a great way to prevent water wheel spam. This plus making copper blocks, pipes and tanks spawn in the rooms really pushes the player to get a steam engine online

-The pool rooms are cool as hell, love that the ability to get some more difficult to craft items like AE2 controllers and crafting terminals lowers the barrier to entry with the mod and may push players to explore it instead of sticking with create storage or drawers. Same for the cake eating flower from Botania. I wasn't lucky enough to find it, but I like that it's possible

-This pack's version of the nether is incredibly creative, and portal linking being such a useful form of navigation was really fun. The nether never becomes irrelevant to progression the way it tends to in packs

Critique:

-Sculked mobs are a cool idea, wish they were executed better. Having them be so few and far between was a great decision, I wish they were more than retextured and buffed vanilla mobs

-Magma cubes can only be spawned by a bucket of magma being specifically placed down by the player. Deployers and dispensers don't work. The only solution I was able to find was using auto-placers, which isn't actually mentioned anywhere in the guides. I don't know if this is intentional, but I feel it should be communicated or fixed so dispensers and deployers work as well

-I would like more Botania integrated into the main questline, or explained a bit more as an option in this pack. Maybe not more forced progression with it, because I know a lot of people dislike it, but I would love to see it shown off more here. You can get by with just using the endoflame if you're patient enough, and given that the pack tackled water wheel spam pretty well, I'd like to see a solution to endoflame spam from them at some point.

-Need more clear communication about the Ender Chests and how they work. I had to do external research to figure out that they can be independently linked if you dye the bands on them. This probably isn't an issue for people that know the mod already, but would be good for people that don't (aka me)

-Not sure how I feel about the igneous extruder and the infinite resource mechanics in this pack. I think they're okay for now and for progression reasons, but I'd like to see this part of the pack revisited to avoid the "mc block that just does stuff without any input" thing.

-Eidolon feels a little out of place in the later game since it is such a crazy challenge to automate the crucible in comparison to the other mods present. I would like to see the mod revisited or maybe replaced with Botania mechanics in some aspects

-GIVE THE SCULK TENDRILS AN ASSIGNED DESTRUCTION TOOL PLEEEEEASE

-Light blocks. Wish the devs would make it so they're overridden by plants growing and deployers placing things, or include a disclaimer about them in the quest book. It took me quite awhile to figure out why some bamboo just wouldn't grow, and why my deployers couldn't place blocks on certain spots. Plus my elven gateway wouldn't activate because of one being in the way. It's not major, but it is super annoying.

-Chapter five was a bit of a let down. It went back to more conventional magic box tech mods which I don't typically enjoy. This pack taught me I reeeeally don't like Ender IO and Mekanism. Most of the quests at that point don't have descriptions or guides, so I really struggled here as someone that was unfamiliar with almost every mod in play. It needs work, and doesn't flow near as well as the previous chapters in my opinion. Plus, I feel like I'm just messing around in GUI after GUI, and making a million tables that just felt like reskins of each other. I believe chapter 5 is unfinished because of these things, so I'm a lot more willing to give leeway, but it was not as good as the rest of the pack.

Disclaimer: I attached photos of the pool rooms and nether. Keep in mind I'm running Complimentary Reimagined shaders, which I don't believe come with the pack by default. They look nice, but they break the antiblock effect in the pool rooms. I recommend disabling shaders in the pool rooms as a result. They also break some stuff with the 'overworld' so disable them before going though your end portal. If you want to run shaders in the main backrooms level I've found no conflicts or issues so far. I added Create Better FPS and Entity Culling to my client to help with performance when running shaders