This modpack is fundamentally pointless: there's no plot, you're just in a room with white materia that you can turn into a million other materia through about 50 production lines and machines, all so you can make the fabled rainbow materia and hit save and quit to title. But the fun, good part of this modpack is that you don't need to know anything to beat it and even if you don't like factorio-style automation and scaling complexity, this might just hook you in and start a hobby far bigger than the pack. It's the best technical/automation modpack I've ever played.

As an idiot with no meaningful automation experience (unless my ATM10 spaghetti setups count), I felt like the room key system gave me plenty of space to start and finish each chapter once I had discovered the y axis, and I'm sure everything I did could be optimized on a second run. All the machines are well drawn and are almost universally easy to route items and fluids to and from. The few mods that are placed into the pack such as actually subtractions are very useful throughout all stages and integrate seamlessly into progression and the aesthetic of the pack. I didn't even notice that the item and fluid pipes were from modern dynamics, though I will say that curvy pipes really does mess up the aesthetic of the mod (and are completely optional!)

One of my biggest complaints about this modpack is the lack of extensive Refined Storage, which the dev said was removed due to balance, and I find the removals very annoying and actively hurting QoL (a wireless crafting grid would have been amazing). I spent the majority of my playthrough with my inventory almost completely full of items and with an inventory sack also almost full, so I was constantly swapping through items and dumping stuff into random chests. It's also not clear that the crafting grid and controller are made through certain colors so I had to click through every variation until an actual recipe came up (which initially led me to believe it wasn't an intended part of the modpack).

A consequence of not having a centralized system for items or fluids (no exporting from RS) is that you are going to run pipes from room to room. There is one door where I've about 3 pipes going through and I can't even walk through it normally. An amazing thing I discovered (and hated not discovering earlier) is that by using extractors and filters on every input/output face, you can have one item network for your entire game. This saved me from so much channel hell.

Speaking of channel hell, some machines and the recipes required for them are a logistical nightmare. On one hand, this forced me to become very creative with how I would move energy and materials from block to block, becoming very conservative in my placements and feeling genuinely accomplished when seeing a line work. On the other hand, it slows down parts of the game due to not being able to easily scale things, leads beginners like me into raging over random outputs going to the wrong place at some unknown location in a 5 step process, and forcing awkward placements. At the end of the game, one recipe required 2 fluid inputs, 1 energy input, 1 item input, and 1 item output with 4 available faces, so I was forced to use a convoluted daisy-chain setup that bottlenecked my production because the machine right next to it was significantly faster but also forced to use every face with no way to move its outputs anywhere except the single bottleneck.

My complaints come from a place of love and should not discourage you from playing, as it makes completion all the more satisfying. On my first playthrough I gave it about an hour every day and with a longer stretch at the end, I was able to complete this in about two weeks. I intend to play again in a speedrun since this modpack is rather short and every bottleneck I had was probably self-inflicted. Great job Tilles, and I hope you can come back to tweaking this.

At the time of this review, i've completed the first four chapters.

Pros

The Crafting Recipes are really unique and fun to automate.
Every Chapter introduces 1-2 unique Crafting Methods, because of that every chapter offers a new unique way to automate that chapter.

Cons

In Chapter 3: where you totally do not have to build a Oil Processing Line. One of the first step is distilling Crude in to three different Fluid, which you then distill even farther.
I feel like the Ratios for the Fluids this Outputs should be adjusted, most recipes at the end of the line are really slow, because you always have to wait for one Fluid, while the other Buffer is basicall instantly full.

An incredibly "compounded", configured pack about making/automating different colored Materia, and ultimately making the Rainbow Materia. My first chance at playing with the Curvy Pipes mod, which definitely makes for an experience, the automation/loop is one of the best I've seen. Using Custom Machinery, the pack is curated into doing x thing at x time, and then upgrading (or ignoring) your previous setups with the new "content" unlocked each tier.
One of my favorite packs, ngl. Might do another playthough when (if) 2.0 drops.

This modpack is very simple yet very complex at the same time: make colored globules to make more colored globules. Frankly there isn't much to it in concept, but in practice it becomes very deep and consuming. The best part? There's none of the typical boring, monotonous garbage that you usually do in Minecraft! You just acquire huge amounts of white globule and turn it into... literally any other globule! So far the microcrafting has been very minimal, and even the microcrafting there is can be very easily automated. I haven't gotten super far yet, but I'm excited for what else this pack has to offer and I'm looking forward to progressing further.

I'll expand on and refine my review later when I have a chance to experience more of the pack, but as of now it's very promising.

Would highly recommend to anyone who likes tech and automation that you give this a try.

I'll preface by saying I'm writing this after completing Chapter 2, which isn't very far into progression.
As someone who doesn't really like how automation (tech) packs are done in Minecraft, the beginning of this pack managed to keep my attention for the entirety of my play session. Everything is stripped down to the bare essentials, just you and an infinite resource you have to manipulate to progress (Being a weirdo that enjoys incremental games on ROBLOX, this really entices me). You can get the first few automated parts going in just a minute or two of gameplay, which is fantastic, and all the basic components are incredibly simple and cheap to craft so you're spending your time figuring out how to actually automate things rather than tediously collecting the items needed.
If there is a point of tedium it is the power logistics. For me, the energy cables just did not do anything and I had to use machines with outputs set (manually for each block) to transfer power.

Short, Tech and somewhat expert?

Btw, you can see my suffering at my youtube playlist (if you like chipmunks talking, this is for you)

Packs nowadays are too big and long, ESPECIALLY if they are export sized packs (dont get me started on 1.12.2 expert packs). If you want something that you could finish in about 2 weeks, this is the perfect pack for you.

This is a skyblock pack, everyone's definition of skyblock will be different (unless we the community create a new term for it), but it's worth noting my definition of a skyblock pack (doesn't mean its the correct one): low to no exploration, where you artificially create materials. (techopolis 3 on a flat world counts as a skyblock pack to my definition). Normally I feel that skyblock packs are "tied" with tech. I haven't seen no one do a skyblock exploration pack or stuff like that.

Now I feel that it being an "expert" pack is pushing it a little bit, I feel that the recipe chains are medium sized, I also cannot say its casual, since you have to be Reeeaaalllyyyy mindful of the space, you cannot really afford losing space.

Into the content!

Now for the content, starting of with what I love, this philosophy should be applied in any TECH heavy pack. Make pipes CHEAP, that's it! In 1 minute of starting you are able to craft item pipes and are able to start automating. I could go on a rant on saying hating on tech packs that make automation horrible to set up.

This doesn't mean that I love the pipes, it's something that the pack cannot fix but instead the pipe mods themselves (am talking about you, curvy and modern dynamics). I feel that atleast 15% of my time in the pack is configuring pipes. What becomes setting up automation is held back by a chore of filtering pipes.

Also the custom item textures and block texture are REALLY, REALLY, GOOD. I think it's worth mentioning that the sound muffler ultra (don't remember the name of the mod) is there for a really good reason, for muting atomic reconstructor sounds, so like mega good.

Hopefully I am able to edit this review as time goes on

I'll preface this review by saying I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of this pack. I never got any frame drops (apart from when initially joining the world, but that is expected) on relatively old hardware (2017).

I also played the one-room challenge, but I'll try to keep my review generic.

The pack offers a pretty nice premise. You are in a room with a limited volume in which to automate. Every chapter, you gain access to a new room. The pack makes pretty high use of in-world crafting to create interesting crafting recipes. The first chapter is especially good in that. Every chapter has its own gimmick, which makes for a pretty good experience automating it.

Now, what I really like about this pack is that the raw resources are essentially infinite, and are never the main bottleneck (unless you go for the one-room challenge...) This means that there is not the typical resource grind we see on skyblock. All expected materials can be created from this basic material you can harvest trivially, materia.

There are definitely points that lack some polish, a lot of which have been addressed by the pack dev as I reported them, but this pack is not meant to be played as a forever pack. You should not come in expecting a fully cohesive, narrative experience. To be clear, the amount of lack of polish I mean is the lack of some JEI integration for custom behavior (that is explained in the quest book instead) or the default configs of some machines being inconsistent. I found many other annoyances when playing the beta that the dev removed almost immediately and, as such, won't be considere by this review.
I also found the pack too easy if played normally. The packdev made power a non-issue from the get go, with very powerful generators (that I only had to upgrade thrice in my entire playthrough). I did not find that the limited space, the main gimmick of the pack, was a real challenge, because the dev provided more than enough space. That is also why I chose to attempt the one-room challenge (which the pack dev previously thought impossible). Still, I could figuratively bang my head at automation puzzles for (mostly) self-inflicted reasons and create a very satisfying machine blob. If you also fear that the pack might be too easy, the one-room challenge is a nice way to make things more difficult without ruining the fun.

Finally, I will mention that the dev was very kind and helpful, and responded very well to my relentless requests. I might or might not have been the reason behind 4 updates.

Overall, if you're looking for a short pack with a quick progression and a unique gimmick that is well self-contained, this is a good pack. If you're looking for a pack to replay 5 times and sink 1000 hours into, this is not the pack for you.