Techopolis 3

(Pack version 12.1)
Pros:

• Automating the technium tiers is fun
• Researcher mechanic is interesting
• Good spread of comfort mods

Cons:

• Some machines feel arbitrarily slow and you need lots of parallels
• The solidifiers from the casting mod can get laggy (the largest mspt contributor in my run)
• The quality of the questbook wavers closer to the end
• The pack wants to be a peaceful pack, but then adds hostile mobs at the endgame.
• No magnet disabler, but some mandatory automation setups require in-world dropped items

Techopolis 3 feels like a deliberate return to classic Minecraft modpacks, just updated with the advantages of modern 1.21 Minecraft. You get smoother performance through Sodium and Java 21, and AE2 benefits from its newer features. Most performance mods still need to be added manually, but the base experience runs well.

A Modern Pack With an Old-School Feel
The “old” feeling mainly comes from the absence of Create. Instead, the pack leans heavily on Mekanism and its own custom multiblocks for almost all processing, which also means that nearly every recipe is changed. The amount of intermediate materials you need naturally pushes you toward building real automation setups instead of relying on early ME autocrafting. The progression is very tier-based—similar to GregTech—where the strongest automation tools don’t appear until far into the pack with Hellish Technium. The AE2 grind exists, but Tom’s Simple Storage makes the early-to-mid game much more manageable.

Weak Points
The pack doesn’t have many major flaws, but a few frustrations stand out.
Thermal Evaporation Plants are used far too often, and you end up constructing them repeatedly, which gets tedious. A larger multiblock that could output around 100 B/t of hot water would solve a lot of this annoyance, since the demand for hot water becomes huge.

The endgame multiblocks are another weak spot. Unlike the impressive, detailed endgame machines you see in something like GTNH, the Techopolis 3 late-game multiblocks look very simple—basically larger versions of the Technium Compressor or the final Technium machine. They function fine, but visually they’re not very exciting.

My Playthrough Experience
I played through the pack on the official server with one friend, which meant I only had nine force-loaded chunks available. That forced me to build compactly, but it wasn’t as restrictive as expected. With careful planning, it’s possible to fit an entire late-game base into a vertical layout that stays within the chunk-loading limit.

Overall
Techopolis 3 is a strong, progression-driven modpack that successfully blends old-school structure with modern Minecraft performance and quality-of-life features. It has a few rough edges, especially with repetitive multiblocks and underwhelming endgame visuals, but the core gameplay loop is engaging, challenging, and rewarding for players who enjoy structured automation-focused progression.