Great experience overall, some things still WIP

Finished this pack yesterday (*up to the second ending) and I think there is a lot to say here.

The pack

This is a fairly long pack with main focus on automation, exploration, and puzzle solving. Unlike most other long packs, most content in the pack is custom-made for the pack, with several dozen custom multiblocks, hundreds of custom materials, custom dimensions, custom automations, and custom structures (and crafts of course, this is kinda a given). The rest of the content is exploration of worlds from AoA and DRPG and various magical crafting mechanics which mostly have to be automated (Botania, Thaumcraft, Blood Magic, Salt Fission, Draconic Fusion, Woot, etc.)

Since most content is unique to the pack, there is little reason to fear that playing another pack will cause this pack to
feel repetitive (or the other way around), which I like. A lot of the custom automations of the pack are also quite involved and fun, unlike many packs which have "magic boxes" or "multiblock magic boxes" to do things (some examples of this are Thaumcraft taint automation for Ichor, nuke exploder for Californium-256, mob-based line for Chaos Shards, lucky block opening for Electroblobs' trinkets, some upcoming things that I did not experience due to being on a fairly old version of the pack, etc.)

Unlike other expert packs, Meatballcraft gives basically all automation tools very early, with AE2, SFM, XNet, Modular Routers, Packaged Auto, Mystical Agriculture, Void Ore Miners, Woot, etc. all being available only a few hours into the pack. The pack also unlocks EMC very early into the game, and instead of it being used to skip automations, it's only used to bootstrap them by providing them with basic resources (and some QOL things like item filters, drawers, etc.)

Outside of the automation the pack has 77 dimensions (30 of which are unique to Meatballcraft), almost all of which contain custom structures and puzzles that have to be solved to continue progressing, many also contain some bosses that have to be defeated, so not all time is spent automating things.

The pack has multiple endings, the canon one is Cosmic Balance that took me 466 hours to reach, but takes some players upwards of a thousand, after which there is a lot of new automations and RPG content, used to unlock various recipe upgrades to create TARDIS. Path from Balance to TARDIS is usually said to take around the same time as path from start to Balance. I did not go as far as it is not intended to be fun, but there's fun endings even beyond the first one.

The good

I absolutely appreciate the love the authors put into the pack, in terms of: custom buildings in dimensions, custom automations being designed, and animated or just cool-looking textures for most of the custom content in the pack. The multiblocks' visuals too (see the screenshots). Most of the content added is pretty fun to engage with, and I love quirky automation stuff. I was playing the pack on an older version, and the newer ones have updated many textures to make stuff look even cooler.

I like how the pack unlocks infinite resources and very powerful tools very early, so the grind is extremely minimal. There is never a case where a resource has to be obtained manually for more than just a few of it, or where I had to wait on a recipe with nothing else to do, and very few cases where I had to place more than one machine on a recipe, or fight the same boss more than once. I also like that you have to use many different ways to produce those infinite resources in tandem; makes things feel more rewarding than when everything is made with just EMC or seeds.

The pack is quite replayable with a bunch of different challenges that you can set up, and just different slices of content you can interact with. The previous expert pack I have beaten was Divine Journey 2, which basically only has one way to play with very minor variations on what can be played differently.

The QOL in this pack is incredible, with even things like Vajra and Infinity Booster card for AE2 are unlocked early.

The performance of this pack is also awesome early on (if you don't make serious mistakes with base composition, which I did a few times, but thankfully they were easy to fix), I never had lag from exploring. Well maybe like 1 or 2 times.

The LORE. It is not fully written yet to my knowledge but it is awesome to see lore in a pack. Simply can't be neglected.

The bad

There have been several instances of rather grindy gameplay (the main two that come to mind: getting all the banners for Standard of Shyre Empire and wherever else they were used earlier; and leveling AoA skills - even though skill crystals are easily available through Wooting a boss this still takes a while). I genuinely did not like these because a lot of manual work is involved. My rating of the gameplay would genuinely go up if the banner section is made less annoying somehow.

Due to a lot of item bloat and recipe bloat, level maintainers/SFM are often the best way to do something, I am not a fan of this because they're far too powerful for their simplicity. But as the fastest TARDIS runs show, you do not need either, so that's a relief.

Lag management is necessary to some extent, though that is mainly relevant with the higher endings; I finished at 14 TPS, which is still playable, but makes me unable to go higher (not like I wanted to). Being on a consumer grade laptop probably contributed to it though.

The early chapters are rather forgettable due to many dimensions, which are often the same. Kind of a proof of this is that when calculating the number of dimensions for the review, I initially forgot 4 until I checked the pack's CF page. Though there's work currently being done in making them less of the same dimension, which is awesome.

There are several sections involving biome changing, while their existence overall is relatively unique, and XU2 Terraformer is quite convenient to use, they get tiring after a few times.

Chapter 9 spoiler: Most bosses after chapter 8 are crimson cultists with shields from Twilight Forest, which get old after a while.

Chapter 8 spoiler: There is a boss rush section at the end of chapter 8 which involves spawning a bunch of bosses that can explode drops from the other boss (you need drops from every boss spawned), which is extremely annoying to deal with. Some of them give nausea as well. I like the idea of a boss rush but in the current version it was quite frustrating to do.