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About reputation ranksProject Architect 2 is, genuinely, my favorite modpack in ALL OF MINECRAFT! This is coming from someone who has been playing Minecraft since Beta 1.7.3 and played modded Minecraft during the era of Tekkit Classic. This ISN'T the OBJECTIVELY BEST modpack, it's just my favorite!
Project Architect 2 gives the player ABSOLUTE control over ProjectE and challenges them to break the game by generating massive quantities of items to complete quests within a comprehensive guide.
This review is long, so I'm providing a quick tl;dr here for the average gamer who just wants a quick rundown.
- If you love tech/magic automation and ProjectE, PLAY THIS!
- If you don't know what ProjectE is, YOU SHOULD STILL PLAY THIS! And I'm jealous because my first time with ProjectE (Equivalent Exchange 2 back in my day) was magical!
- If you like a guided experience and challenges, PLAY THIS!
- If you hate any of the mods in this pack, YOU WILL BE FORCED TO PLAY WITH THEM. There are no alternative paths.
- If you love the challenge of combat, YOU MAY BE DISAPPOINTED. You get god-tier armor and weapons relatively quickly and the main focus of this pack is AUTOMATION. You will not be very challenged from a combat perspective whatsoever.
- If you hate automation or tech, DO NOT PLAY THIS!
With that out of the way, here's my review:
If you haven't played with the mod ProjectE I need to lay out the premise. ProjectE, at its core, incorporates the idea of items being converted into energy and becoming another item. Take, for example, dirt and diamonds. What if you could take dirt and turn it into a diamond? Dirt has an "energy value" of 1, and diamonds have an "energy value" of 8192. This means, with the help of a Transmutation Table, you could turn 8192 dirt into 1 diamond. This "energy value" is known as EMC. Players can only convert energy into items that have already been learned. You couldn't manifest a diamond if you've never seen one! Sounds OP, right? Not with Project Architect 2!
This pack grabs ProjectE by the collar and demands that it be thoroughly whipped into a well-oiled machine of EMC production. As the player, you are tasked with utilizing a variety of tech mods alongside ProjectE to accomplish various automation tasks.
Players start with an Transmutation Table from ProjectE and continue to build up their EMC knowledge from there! The quests guide players starting fresh and carefully leads them along the path to EMC mastery. This includes automating EMC generation using a variety of logistics/tech/magic mods! These mods are supported by Project Expansion; a mod that expands upon ProjectE and adds even MORE tiers of matter and tech compatibility! My favorite thing to do in Project Expansion was connect my entire Applied Energistics 2 system to my trasmutation knowledge! This means that if an item had EMC and was in my system, I could freely extract that item from inside of AE2; automatically spending EMC for me!
Once mastered, the quests push your game to its absolute limit by having you compress a variety of blocks up to 9X (that's over 387 million blocks compressed into one!) to complete "Under Pressure", hunting various mobs thousands of times to complete "The Wild Hunt", and crafting RIDICULOUS post-creative items to complete "Beyond Creative".
I had a TON of fun with this pack and having ProjectE integrate with so many of my favorite mods was an absolute dream! I always found that ProjectE was a difficult mod to integrate within a modpack because of how overpowered it is. The incredible thing about this modpack is that it acknowledges this and creates challenges that respect the power of ProjectE. I spent 476 hours playing this pack and at no point did I feel that quest progression was "too easy" towards the end. The pack consistently asks the question "How far can you push ProjectE before it breaks?"
Speaking of breaking, let's talk about the pack's performance grade. It gets BAD, but that's to be expected when you're working with automation producing this much stuff! The performance is really up to how the player is running machines. Layouts can be optimized, setups can be condensed, and mods can be installed (such as Observable) that can tell you exactly what machines are using up the most ticks. A big example was the Pipez mod, which while using the Creative Pipe Upgrade, would tank the server's performance with certain machines. Adjusting your setup to optimize these workflows is part of the fun in my opinion, but is not for everyone.
This pack was created by youtuber ChosenArchitect and he has an entire playthrough of this pack on his channel! If you ever find yourself questioning how to complete a quest, I would recommend finding the video associated with that challenge and following along.
All in all, this is my favorite pack of all time and I wouldn't be doing it justice if I didn't write a lengthy review for it. I loved playing it and I learned so many mods and automation tips from my experience playing. I highly recommend it 5 OUT OF 5 STARS!
