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!