More Liminal than Industries

I was considering leaving a lower star score for this pack because of how weak the late game is, but it made me hopelessly obsessed with Create which I feel probably meant it did it's job at least in some way.

The backrooms are a perfectly executed and absolutely fantastic setting in this pack. The environment is generally very chill so it's a lot of fun to find new rooms, figure out where you want to set up shop, and it lets the few unsettling parts it has hit a lot harder.

This is one of the most fine tuned Create experiences I've seen, and it accomplishes this with basically a single add-on; the presence of Create Low-Heated allows the pack to make actively heated Steam Engines the second source of stress generation you get after Hand Cranks and in tandem with Create 6's Chain Conveyors allows the Steam Boiler to be the core of your base that you get to gradually expand as you progress and it feels great.

The biggest flaw with the pack is that it feels like it doesn't have enough faith in it's Create experience; late into the pack you will be interacting with other mods a lot more that don't go together that well with Create. I stopped building out my automation somewhere halfway through Chapter 4 and at that point it became ferrying materials between various tech mod progression machines. The inclusion of Immersive Engineering is a massive negative after early game especially considering a particularly intrusive bug involving the Mixer interacting with Create pipes.

At some point it stops holding your hand and it feels like it expects a lot of previous knowledge about the mods involved, which gets especially rough with mods that have been updated and mods that have messed up quests associated. There is a quest in Chapter 5 that asks you to make the Osmium Compressor from Mekanism; it doesn't do anything, and the associated github issue has not been touched for months. I got kind of confused and exhausted at this point since it has been years since I last played with Mekanism.

Other notes;

• Late game eyes feel like afterthoughts; one is essentially "throw 1000 managlass into the alfheim portal" and the other is "summon dragons breath ten times at the Eidolon brazier and then break your mouse spam right clicking". The eyes in general could've been more involved to add more credence to the "industries" part of the pack name.
• Performance is great due to the low mod count and simple environment, although in singleplayer watch out for the potentially required Nether train chunkloading your base if you don't chunkload both ends and spiking your ram usage when you're exploring away from it.
• There are a handful of mods I didn't really get to explore fully; for those I think this pack might be better enjoyed with friends to divide the labor up. Some mods are included to help with that such as Simple Voice Chat and Simple Radio.