Mechanical Mastery

I've completed this pack multiple times and I'd say this is an amazing pack overall. ProjectE has been utilized amazingly and the automation focus is very well done, however the endgame is very unbalanced because of the watch of flowing time basically negating requiring an actual infrastructure to progress further but rather fixed with 1 item instantly. The optimization could be slightly better.

(completed, 43h) Past the pretty distinct but extremely short early game, Mechanical Mastery will feel like a lot of other skyblock packs of it's time, if more compressed. ProjectE is used on a very surface level where maximizing EMC production isn't actually important for anything since nothing is actually expensive enough and the only other things to spend your EMC on are the vanilla wood types and deepslate. The modpack isn't hard enough to actually "put players tech mod knowledge put to the test" (lightly paraphrased from the modpack page) but it's also not explanatory enough to be that great for beginners. Despite only having 150~ mods the mod bloat is insane ranging from IE existing just for thirty gameplay minutes of coke/steel to the extremely unwelcome inclusion of mandatory Industrial Foregoing, in addition to maybe thirty other mods I didn't notice were in the pack until I saw them randomly pop up in JEI (only god knows why computercraft is here). This (or more likely one specific shitty or poorly configured mod) has a deleterious effect on load times which is especially aggravating when you eat a crash to something as random like accidentally putting the Ultimate Singularity back into the extended crafting table.

Beyond these, the refined mixture recipe double conflict, a low quality quest tree, and important configurations not being made by default such as FTB Chunks fake player chunkloading, I still had a decent amount of fun. It's nice to skip the resource gathering sometimes to just make funky resource lines and even if ProjectE wasn't explored and I had to google all of its functionality it was still a cool mod to mess around with for the first time. The pack just doesn't stand out as much from other skyblock packs of the time as you might otherwise think it would, or at the very least the most unique parts of the experience are mostly limited to the very short earlygame.

Great skyblock modpack for people looking for clear progressive goals focused on automation, while avoiding the usual resource generation methods, which the vast majority of the community has gotten burned out of.

The pack is focuses on automation with create and thermal to craft different tiers of mechanical essence. These items define your point of progression. Reach the next Tier and unlock new items to emc. Obtain more emc by automating mechanical essences. This way you aren't cluttered with a bunch of resources you can't use yet

I think this is a really fun skyblock pack that doesn't overstay its welcome. The pseudo-economy of "selling" essences for EMC with which you can "buy" raw resources is unique and feels more engaging than just spamming sieves or bonsai pots as is common in other skyblock packs. Automation chains can get somewhat complex, but never so much that it gets overwhelming.

My only significant complaint is that Create doesn't really mesh well with the Watch of Flowing Time's tick acceleration, which is pretty much the only way to speed up late-game processes that aren't a Thermal Expansion machine. Having an alternative processing method (maybe a custom multiblock?) for things like Final Star Shards would have been nice.

Ultimately, if you like automation and don't need something super long term you'll probably enjoy this one!

P.S. when you're crafting Power Flowers at the very end, rush for one so that you can plop it down to get easy Final Stars via EMC for the rest. I wasted like 10 hours crafting the Power Flowers in parallel until I realized that :')