Lots of Grinding - Better as a Zen Modpack

Reclamation is a very simple alt-skyblock modpack with heavy progression gating that takes place in a dead dimension that only generates with 10-24 total block types, most of them being a block that's exclusive to this pack, Dried Dirt.

For as far as the eye can see, and even further with Distant Horizons if you so choose, anywhere where you'd normally see dirt, grass, podzol or other grass variants, it's just dried earth. A largely useless block that exists to supply a couple of early game recipes.

Other packs that are in the same vein are Liminal Industries and of course, this pack's main inspiration, Regrowth.

Positives:

1. Well Designed - I never got locked out of a quest or hit a wall where I didn't know what I had to do next. While there's usually only one solution to each problem, the pack doesn't usually struggle to tell you how to get there.

2. Lots of Quests - They only give you XP as a reward most of the time, but this links into my previous positive. Where the guidebooks for the mods in this pack may fail here and there, the quest book is excellent at giving you the exact solution that's expected of you. While some things like "the best way to automate aura" are left up to you, the critical path is designed so that you never get lost. That XP is also great for repairing some low-tier but enchanted gear you'll find from one of the handful of structures out there.

3. Lightweight - Like all other skyblock/skyblock-adjacent packs, it runs fantastically with minimal intrusion or hacky type mods that could crash your game. I don't think I've ever had a crash that wasn't because of the mods I added on myself.

The mods I added for my playthrough are LiteMiner, ClientSort, DistantHorizons, Right Click Harvest and a few aesthetic mods like ParticleRain, Subtle Effects, Punchy and Highlighter.

Negatives:

1. No Breadcrumbs - To actually begin the process of re-claiming the world, you need to perform a ritual with the Enchanted (Witchery) mod in Chapter 3 of the quest book. This is easily a 20 hour job even if you know exactly what you are doing. While most modpacks would drip feed you bits of what that progression could look like, true biome recovery and removal of that ugly brown filter that tinges even the grass you grow, is fully gated off.
   This is NOT Chunk-by-Chunk. You are not a snowball rolling down a hill. You either have it, or you don't. And no, pumping an insane amount of Aura into the environment and praying that it spreads between chunks isn't viable. It's slow, inefficient and doesn't actually let you grow the green grass you're expecting. It's gated hard by Chapter 3. Speaking of gating.

2. Aggressive Gating - I hope you like Enchanted and Nature's Aura. For the majority of your playtime, before you have the ability to automate, you must manually fill that cauldron with three buckets of water. You must perform tens of rituals, many of the same type. If I could give you any advice, it is to focus Mystical Agriculture as soon as possible. It's almost hilarious the sheer amount of stuff the early game requires of you, and rather than reward you for playing clever with hidden quest lines or something, the pack demands you grind out every fiber, flower and line of chalk. Entire life-saving rituals, that you likely could have created early, have been blatantly patched out and paved over with an advancement requirement.

3. Does Not Lean In - You'd be surprised to see how the lore of the pack doesn't match up with the reality of playing it. The water isn't poisoned, the land isn't hot, the enemies are normal husks, skeletons and cave spiders rather than normal spiders, but they may as well be filler. The wasteland suffers from the Space game design problem. There's nothing out there but the same 8-12 small abandoned structures that may or may not have an ender pearl in a chest, and then the countless walls that hold one block of oxidized cut copper. There's no temperature, thirst, or other mod that actually pushes you into desperate straits. In fact, one of the first 5 quests give you a fishing rod. You could set this pack in the Bumblezone and genuinely get a very similar experience playing it. That's how divorced the wasteland is from the gameplay you'll actually experience.

There's plenty of nitpicks I could add here, too many building blocks clogging emi, one of the more disliked bee mods (complicated bees) being present, the fast travel system being via romana instead of waystones or something else, lacking variety in the structures you find or the useful loot available, the drip feed of copper unless you stumble into the house with a basement, an entire chapter in the questbook about photographing mobs, and plenty more, but these are insignificant in comparison to the core of the pack and how it is designed for you to play.

In the end, I think Reclamation is best enjoyed as a slow and zen-like experience. Something more like Sunlit Valley rather than Liminal Industries. It's horrifically dull, but that can be suitable. It's balanced aggressively with no room for you to breathe. If you have 50 hours to burn, and would prefer not to think beyond what the quest book tells you, you could do worse.