greggy, but not challenging

cool pack if you think that chemistry/engineering/programming is cool, if you dont, you will never understand why other people enjoy it.
its definitely not perfect though.
the gameplay is fine, what you would expect for a gregtech pack.
the performance could have been a lot better. i know its java and all but if you look at performance profiles its like 20% of the mods causing 80% of the lag, generally ordered like techguns->gregtech->ui rendering for fps and gregtech->serene seasons->mob ai for tps, with an obligatory mention of horrific worldgen lag. its usually not bad unless you have a truely collosal base, but structures often use techguns mobs with its horrific rendering code can drop your frame times by a good 8ms regardless of the hardware.

the aesthetics are good but a little questionable.
the modpack has lore, but you dont get to know much of it. all you get is that there used to be some sort of a highly advanced society that has reached the terminal stage of capitalism and fractured, leaving behind bandits and occasional federation military assets, with some sort of a clean up being made to restore earths nature to explain why the terrain is so untouched. and you also know that bandits somehow have drop pods that they use to just drop on your head quite often. thats it. aside from getting bandit raids it is basically irrelevant to what you are doing, and you can guess all of that by walking around and seeing the strucures for like 10 minutes.

the structures look nice and let you basically skip primitive age and half of steam age if you raid bandit camps. while the early game is quite boring im not sure about how i feel about being able to just skip most of it depending on if you stumble into some good structures or not. they also offer a good distraction from the grindy parts and provide a good alternative to flat world villages when you want to see how big of an explosion a bomb creates.

the game doesnt really restrict you to a specific way of playing, at least not now. your base can be as horrific as you want as long as it works.
the complexity only really stems from the chemical processing chains. and once you get the general idea of how certain chemical processes happen, it becomes trivial to automate things.

once you get above the mindset of big chain->hard, the entire pack is trivial.
at no point you are forced to actually use your brain, once you learn how to find what you need to make, look in jei to see how to make it, place down machine chains to make it for you, you will know enough to beat the pack.

the devs intentionally dumb down complex things like nuclear reactors and logistics.
the reactors are the biggest disappointment in this pack. they are simulated well, but they pose no challenge to operate. you literally have to steal a design from minebird on discord, wire it up, and click the "magically run it for me" button in the gui. after you are done with that, for as long as you have a water supply (free, infinite, doesnt take energy) it will never explode or have any abnormal behavior. you might aswell forget that its a nuclear reactor and treat it as a water + expensive fuel rod -> steam machine. they couldve made it require at least a basic redstone circuit that would lower the rods if a certain temperature threshold is reached, but no, thats built in.
the second biggest disappointment in the pack is updating it..
aside from being a little clunky to update, entire chains get reworked pretty often. automating something only to have to do it again but with a recipe thats 3 times longer is fucking soul crushing, and not being able to keep up with how much is being changed from under my feet compared to how much i can play somewhere around hv is a big reason to why i havent de a proper run despite having hundreds of hours in the game and probsbly thousands of hours of trying to write programs that deal with it. the chains get longer but thry dont really get any better from it you know? realism is nice and all, but certain industrial catalysts that are used once in a single recipe and take 12 hours to handcraft because you wont need more than 1 make you reconsider why you are even doing this

for some reason once you get ~500 hours in susy and a certain someone whispers the mk ultra code word into your ear, you stop playing the pack and start thinking about how you can automate your automation. ive seen quite a few people now trying to use a json dump of all recipes and items in the pack to try to beat it without playing the game, all inspired by the legend of marvnet being able to beat susy in 2 hours or something like that without even needing a player to log in, which may not even be true as no one except its developer has ever seen it work in game. and its honestly more fun to look at the recipe graph than to look at jei.

also multiplayer exists. playing with friends can definitely speed things up by a lot

srp is in the pack but unless you edit the config they wont infect the dimension you are in. it is surprisingly not bad to play against after late mv, but srp can just eat your ore deposits no matter how well protected they are so its kinda pointless.

also space kinda taking a while to come out. not like i have a base that would make a rocket but you know it would be nice if it was there. also there is a general lack of cool screenshots to be made in susy without shaders, but shaders make everything look cool so that doesnt count. there arent many impressive looking things like gtnh has with the god forge
also i think its nice that susy has decent recipe times for most things. if you are ever stuck waiting for a machine to finish a batch craft you can probably get like 3 more of these machines and it will be enough for your batch crafting needs forever. there is no waiting unless you just plan things poorly
thanks for reading my yap