This is everything you could want from a modpack. Want to spend all of your time running around dimensions looting structures? Want to create the most powerful weapon ever to destroy bosses with absurd amounts of hitpoints? Want to create complex automations using powerful logistics tools? Want to build a megabase and need something to put in it? Meatballcraft is a masterclass in how to blend different elements of gameplay seamlessly into one experience. There is a huge variety of tasks to complete, every step along the way is learning something new. I recommend this pack to both beginners and experts alike. Unlike other "expert" packs, there is nothing in Meatballcraft to hinder your progress at the start of the pack like a grindy stone or steam age. Very quickly you are thrown into increasingly complex automations using very powerful logistics tools which this pack has no shortage of (AE2, Xnet, Modular Routers, SFM and more). You will construct a multitude of custom multiblocks that are well designed aesthetically and functionally. You will need to power up to survive encounters with difficult bosses and the night life as well as they will destroy the unprepared. The solo experience is fun, but I highly recommend playing with friends together. Anyways I gotta go, I've got some cosmic meatballs to make.

Meatballcraft was something I found scrolling through recently updated mod packs a few years ago. And ever since then it's been one of the best mod packs I've played to the point where I found myself contributing to the packs textures for its custom items and blocks and improving on them thanks to this pack.

The gameplay:

Meatballcraft is an expert pack that revolves around custom recipes, mechanic modifying, new items, blocks, and fluids all to create a harder environment to produce materials, magic and machines. When you get into the world for the first time you will be bombarded with books. (However this is a joke, it should be removed by the time 1.0 comes around.) and you'll be dropped into a world full of custom structures to find, and a huge questbook to start with.

Early on you'll survive like normal, eventually finding the materials in structures to be able to make a blast furnace and create your path towards extended crafting, this is where it 'hits the fan' as suddenly so much opens up to the player, you have so many different directions you'll be able to head in. From magic to tech to resource generation you'll need to make your base of operations and start getting storage. By the time you get through to chapter 3 you might get disoriented, as someone who's used to expert packs in general I didn't have an issue but more newer players can find it a bit hard, I will say just take your time, you're not on a time limit so focus on one thing at a time if you feel like managing 3-5 different sections at once gets chaotic.

Skipping ahead a lot, the mid game to end game also was extremely fun to play through, things become so massive that you need to do creative and crazy setups to produce just a smidge of resources needed to get to the end, but that grind was worth it for me as the feeling of finally making every goal I set for myself was amazing.

Without spoiling, the end of the pack revolves on you making one last item, however for the few that do want to take your base to the extreme, there is an optional ending of making the TARDIS from doctor who, akin to GTNH's stargate the resources and time you need for it are INSANE requiring you to make CHUNK-SPANNING multi blocks and resource generations in the millions. I never got that far in my first proper run towards it, but I at least completed my run and I'm currently playing a new run to try and go for it. Every aspect I had a lot of fun with in the end game.

Performance

The performance of 1.12.2 in general is quite hard to manage, due to its age and also light issues (such as the dimension hopping memory leak issue.) However to counteract this, there are many mods in meatballcraft to help improve the performance of your world, with both community fixes to mods, additions to mods made by people in the very modpack community and cleanroom (a fork of forge which allows 1.12.2 to use java 25 instead of java 8.) the performance increase can be very notable, but of course just be aware that even with such lower end machines may still struggle, but in general the performance additions help this version A LOT.

Aesthetics

I will not touch on this subject much as I've greatly helped in some of the texture production of custom items and blocks, but IGNORING my own work, textures both made by the creator and assisted by other members in the community help to give custom items, blocks (and soon to be fluids!) textures help to really differentiate everything and make it look unique.

Multiblocks are really well designed not just for looks but also for ease of use, the recursive and mythic processors are a EBF like multiblock that changes based on the catalyst block within it, doing a range of functions that the normal machine can't reach the speeds of. It allows you to really compact things and make things look like a full on factory or magical base, specially with some of the more super-massive structures you'll have to make in the mid to end game levels of the pack

Finally, the quest book is jam-packed with lore that is quite well written and thought of, creating a narrative that normally isn't in any sort of modpack that just drops you in without story. For people who do like to be a lore nerd (myself) it's amazing to see more of the story grow just from a simple item being collected.

In conclusion:

Meatballcraft is an expert modpack that has introduced me to alot of good people on its discord, given me an amazing journey multiple times, and offered me chances to improve my own artist talents that I never thought I could. With gameplay that can be hard to start but AMAZING once you get your place in the world, with your base sprawling off into so many places just to ascend a bit higher.

I would 100% recommend anyone to at least try the modpack, get to chapter 2 or 3, and see how you feel about pushing your way through, or work on infrastructure to be slow and smart, or just have fun!

Meatballcraft is my second modpack which I played for a good bit, and first proper expert modpack.
after ATM10 which I dropped after it got too boring halfway through.

I am very early into the pack (chapter 2, but still just short of 200hr), so this review wont touch the later parts but I still though I should recommend this.

An amazing modpack that dips (very deeply) into all parts of modpacks, adventures/combat, tech and magic. The modpack starts out simple (and well, a dozen or two books falling on you), and gradually increasing in complexity. It starts out as a kitchensink pack (with this being the definition of overwhelming with how many mods unlock at once). Fortunately AE2 and void world is super early, so you shouldn't need to bother with more than a few chests (I had about 5 drawers and 7 double chests before getting ae2) for organization.

You get Project E fairly early, and while I don't have any experience with it, lot of people seem to do. It is quite well balanced here, not just get item throw in project e and never have to worry about it. It's mostly for QoL items for decoration, and basic resources which you will have to work on afterwards. This along with the countless resource generation methods reduces the grind by a lot. Most grindy thing so far was getting my first pickaxe in the beginning, and if I wasnt too scared of mobs I would have been faster with caves instead of strip mining.

The quests may not be for everyone, as they don't hold your hand all the way through and tell you which item to exactly craft everytime, instead, it lets you explore and figure it out your own. Personally, I hated it at first too I need my hand holding!, but soon enough I learned to like it, it gives a much greater sense of accomplishment imo.

Even though it starts out as a kitchensink, it doesn't lose it's expert part. 5x5, 7x7 and bigger recipes, recipes made of many mods and requiring many dimensions, gated recipes that are satisfying to complete, massive automation lines to make with the tech and magic mods and countless multiblocks (I personally love them so that's a plus point for me).

The mod has bunch of lore bits if you are interested in that, and many puzzles (with solutions given, if you didn't want to think bout them).

Overall, if you like automation and large expert packs, I definitely recommend giving a try.

As a player who has been playing modded Minecraft for over a decade, this pack has been an amazing breath of fresh air. The mods feel very well integrated with each other which helps it feel more like an actual mod pack instead of a disparate collection of mods. I may not recommend it to those totally new to modded Minecraft, but as long as you have a good handle on the basics, the questbook and JEI can get you through the bulk of it. If you get stuck though, the Discord server is a great place to go. I'm roughly halfway through the standard ending as of now and I'm still as invested as I was hundreds of hours ago. It's fairly tech-heavy, but even the magic mods feel like they're important too, and it has a really satisfying progression where you can continually upgrade your crafts to be more efficient as you go through the chapters. It has a number of great lag prevention systems in place, many of which were made by members of the community specifically for this pack, so as long as you smartly build your base, you can keep it running smoothly even into late game. There's also enough combat and exploration to keep things interesting as well as puzzles that can unlock more efficient recipes or machines that help break up the base building gameplay and avoids letting the pack become monotonous. Hell, it manages to balance EMC even. By the end of this, it will likely rank as my favorite pack of all time. Can't recommend it enough for those looking for a unique experience.

currently at the end of chapter 3, so this review reflects my experience up until then.

meatballcraft is a very "experimental" modpack, and completely builds 70% of its progression out of contenttweaker, custom multiblocks, and custom structures. this virtue alone makes mbc a completely unique experience in its own right -- even if you've played most of the mods in the pack, you have simply not played meatballcraft.

mbc builds its progression on top of incredibly in-depth quest worldbuilding, and experiments with a bunch of very weird/esoteric progression concepts. i think the uniqueness of this pack's progression is the main appeal: most modpacks are pretty homogenous in terms of content, so the prospect of a pack that blends its own creative and silly progression in-between everything is quite exciting.

however, while this pack is very experimental, it's in a way that often feels like it shoots in the dark. for every brilliantly unique and fun problem the pack offers me, it mixes in a problem that is incredibly grindy and uninteresting, so it's like a constant rollercoaster of "very fun problem" and "tragic grind." it's the modpack equivalent of chasing the dragon, i want to experiment and solve all the cool infrastructure and manufacturing problems and play with the fun toys the pack gives me, but i have to put myself through tedious grinds just to get to it.

several imprecise things that i liked:

• i like a lot of the automation/passive/subnet gameplay
• i like how early AE2 and void worlds are
• i like how the questbook is very helpful at leading me through mods i hadn't touched before
• master spells are so fun. favorite modpack concept ever. absolute highlight of the pack being experimental
• first modpack in 10 years to finally make me care enough to learn how to do forestry bees
• furnace dimension

several precise things that annoyed me:

• warning the player that switching dimensions too frequently will cause severe lagspikes is good to know! but then there's abyssalcraft, which is all nested dimensions, so the modpack actively encourages you to spent several minutes waiting for dimensions to load whenever you need to get to omothol. please put the advanced dislocator in chapter 2
• so many times i have been climbing through a crafting chain, only to think that i'm done, and then find that one item (that i assumed i had/seemed easy to get) was actually a different item altogether that's extremely painful to get. for example, the renewable recipe for ice crystal looks simple, so you spend time getting everything else and then right when you're done, sike! the two ice blocks were actually two perpetual ice blocks, you fool, you utter buffoon. this sounds petty, but this kind of crafting recipe frustration happened to me at least a dozen times in this pack. it's a very oddly frequent phenomenon that feels like trolling every time, but not in a way that's fun for me
• i think the emphasis on dimensions and exploring is really cool, but i play modpacks for overt engineering problems, and something in my brain begins to crumble when i'm asked to spend several minutes finding the last "1 of 8 random structures" on this moon, or "go find a frost (rare overworld mob) and put it in a soul vial". like, idk, i think exploring is cool, but with how rare some things are, it's sometimes like playing a slot machine that's constantly filling up space on my harddrive
• chapter 2's progression is a little sad, and basically just says "ok, every magic mod is now unlocked" and expects you to make a little progress in all of them, and they're not particularly changed/different. this would be less bad if some magic mods were staged later in progression (or if there were less of them), because it's definitely the least "meatballcraft" part of the pack.
• don't really know why the extended pattern processing terminal is locked so late in progression, esp considering its just nice qol to avoid packagedauto for a few recipes
• locking the ultimate warp cleanser behind abyssalcraft sounds great, until you find out that you passively gain 500 points of warp when speedrunning abyssalcraft's progression, and so there's a good amount of time in this pack that you simply have to suffer at max warp. which would be more fine if you also didn't have to do significant thaumcraft progression and make 3 custom multiblocks just to get the warp cleanser
• i think the bee stargate is really cool as an option for skipping space, but the questbook claims you have to make a space station regardless, so its like, idk, does it actually skip space if space is required anyways? i may have misunderstood this, though
• several of my personal gripes are less to do with how meatballcraft frames things and more with how my least favorite parts of some mods are just unchanged. off the top of my head, these would be early ender io (please man i dont wanna mow the lawn and collect hedge trimmings to make green gamer dye), abyssalcraft (just a grindy uninteresting headache especially after you've done it once), and gaia 4 (i tried looking up a video on how to do this fight and i found a german youtuber who cheated in and used 6 charm of life IIs, just to beat the fight with the recommended gear)

in spite of all of this, i do think the modpack is definitely worth checking out for anyone interested. i think folks less burnt out of mods than i am will enjoy it, especially since the uniqueness of the pack does a very good job at making it feel distinct to play. just be warned that it is very experimental, both in good ways, but also in ways that will make you want to cheat in an item every so often, and if you ever get that urge, you should take a break and come back later. unless it's abyssalcraft. then cheat that shit in immediately. its a singleplayer game nobody's stopping ya man. ok you could play it in multiplayer too, but if you've read this far, then you're definitely playing in singleplayer. i know your kind

tldr: experimental pack that offers a lot of fun problems, but held back by a lot of frustrating design points that haven't been cleaned up yet. in the first few chapters, the largest ones i experienced were: rarer structures should be more common, advanced dislocator should be ch2, gaia 4 should be optional, and add options to skip abyssalcraft

The questbook is messy and while promising to fix the inventory cluttering on final release, it didn't. Chest organizing is annoying, the UI is messing, inventory is always filled with stuff but it lacks adequate backpacks to fix it, and the world is messing- there is homes with random villagers everywhere, and for 1.22.2, it feels like 1.7.10. Despite all it promises, it ultimately seems, not for me, which is sad.

In every expert modpack i have played before - there was a advanced questbook which shows how to progress and go on. Threre are only quest of particular mod but it isn't anything like progression.

Creators of this modpack should learn how to progress from atm10 or even gregtech nh where even there i wasn't spawned exactly twice random seed on spot where i was killed instantly after generating new world.

I started this modpack right after I finished ATM10 and thought I was ready for an expert Modpack and the first one I saw was meatballcraft and after playing for 2000+ hours, I can say that it was amazing. It was so unique and you can tell how much love was given to it, and for an expert ModPack, it was very beginner-friendly with 95% of the time. If I didn't know how something worked, there would be a tooltip built into the game to tell you how to do it for 1000s of items. I can't explain the satisfaction I have after making infinity armor witch is where I stopped. witch is just before chapter 10.

I loved all the puzzles even if some took me a wile to figure out. And how it forced me to learn mods I really did't want to learn like Thaumcraft, Astral Sorcery, and NuclearCraft.

One big drawback was the performance, maybe it's because I had never played a pack like this before but by the end game, the lag was almost unberabe. It was mostly AE2, and when making the defined ingot, I had to disable channels because of how AE2 works witch made my game a million times better I really recommend turning them off because of how they're coded it makes the game so much laggy. Another big problem was how repetitive it became in the midgame to late game, it just felt like I was making multi-block after multi-block witch became annoying with me taking big breaks because of this. also do NOT update your game version I did this 3 times and it caused a lot of issues. Throughout my play, I almost lost my work 10+ time do to corruption, so make sure you keep a backup.

This pack was really amazing, and I think everyone should give it a try and try to at least make it to chapter 4

I want to start out by saying that after 200+ hours I am still in early game (Chapter 3) and have probably not reached the main gameplay loop yet.

But anyway, Meatballcraft has seemingly infinite content to offer and makes a lot of use of Content Tweaker and Modular Machinery. So even if you are already experienced in the world of expert modpacks you will still have a new and more or less unique experience. If you are looking for a comparison Divine Journey 2 would probably be the modpack that is most comparable as it too has a rather large amount of RPG content.

The RPG content would also be my first criticism, because while not being a majority or even large part of the pack, it is still there and required for progression. And to be honest I am not the biggest fan of those sections. But that is my fault and not the modpack's fault, as it literally describes itself as a "tech-RPG" modpack. I still think this is a great modpack, but if you are here just for the automation it might not be the right pack for you. A couple of friends that enjoy exploration playing along with you could also be a solution if you should suffer from this problem.

The questbook might also not be everyone's jam, as it is pretty linear, while also having kitchen sink characteristics. The main concept is, that there is the central quest line, that roughly guides you through progression and tells you what you should do. And then there all other quest lines which are basically just a wiki of what is in the pack and how it works. This can be just the right way for you, if you want only little regulation/direction, but if you need more guidance you should look into the discord or consider playing with someone more experienced. The same applies for the other direction. Large amounts of content are locked behind progression and you are forced into certain mods at times. That is probably also not for everyone.

The aestectics while they all look like they were done with love and care are stylistically on the older side, with less shading and less saturated colours. For myself this is perfect as I enjoy this sort of texturing, but if you are used to modern mods and modpacks with JAPPA like textures it might feel a bit weird or dated.

All in all Meatballcraft is a great modpack with some unique twists and features, but not one that suits everyone. I can certainly recommend you to try it. But as with almost every modpack I advise you take at least one friend along, especially if you are not the biggest fan of RPG or exploration elements.

'-- The central gameplay loop of the pack is passively crafting increasingly complex and expensive items, but from beginning to end, you explore new, unusual mechanics to unlock these items, giving you breaks from building up your factory and infrastructure.

-- Despite hating combat, I find it a fun puzzle in MBC, because you don't have to be skilled if you can design a weapon build strong enough to beat bosses (at your current stage) in one or two blows, and craft it (which usually requires tech and magic infrastructure). The pack maker changes the metas regularly--the kind of build you'll need in chapters 9 and 10 is very different from what you'll need in 6-8, etc.

-- About 75% of the pack is factory building. But the factory building is extremely varied. I love GregTech, but GT tends to consolidate all things into itself, while in MBC you'll juggle single-block machines from multiple different mods and MBC's own sprawling multiblocks for every build.

-- The other 25% is exploring, doing magic crafts, solving puzzles, dimension hopping, and fighting bosses--just often enough to be a good break from the tech, more than varied enough that you never feel like you're doing the same thing over and over again.

-- The automation challenges are always changing. Some setups will be straightforward, but every now and then you'll face something new, weird, and puzzling, and this never stops, especially not in the final chapters.

-- I've never felt so committed to finishing a pack and so little like it's a slog. The packmaker is very anti-machine spam--instead of building dozens of assembly lines, you upgrade different parts of each process, or upgrade multiblocks to run faster by solving puzzles or fighting bosses.

-- Vibrant and helpful community in the Discord. Lots of beautiful textures from artists in the Discord, and coders are actively contributing mods to improve performance and push the limitations of 1.12.2 Minecraft. Feels like we're all in it together.