Short, Tech and somewhat expert?

Btw, you can see my suffering at my youtube playlist (if you like chipmunks talking, this is for you)

Packs nowadays are too big and long, ESPECIALLY if they are export sized packs (dont get me started on 1.12.2 expert packs). If you want something that you could finish in about 2 weeks, this is the perfect pack for you.

This is a skyblock pack, everyone's definition of skyblock will be different (unless we the community create a new term for it), but it's worth noting my definition of a skyblock pack (doesn't mean its the correct one): low to no exploration, where you artificially create materials. (techopolis 3 on a flat world counts as a skyblock pack to my definition). Normally I feel that skyblock packs are "tied" with tech. I haven't seen no one do a skyblock exploration pack or stuff like that.

Now I feel that it being an "expert" pack is pushing it a little bit, I feel that the recipe chains are medium sized, I also cannot say its casual, since you have to be Reeeaaalllyyyy mindful of the space, you cannot really afford losing space.

Into the content!

Now for the content, starting of with what I love, this philosophy should be applied in any TECH heavy pack. Make pipes CHEAP, that's it! In 1 minute of starting you are able to craft item pipes and are able to start automating. I could go on a rant on saying hating on tech packs that make automation horrible to set up.

This doesn't mean that I love the pipes, it's something that the pack cannot fix but instead the pipe mods themselves (am talking about you, curvy and modern dynamics). I feel that atleast 15% of my time in the pack is configuring pipes. What becomes setting up automation is held back by a chore of filtering pipes.

Also the custom item textures and block texture are REALLY, REALLY, GOOD. I think it's worth mentioning that the sound muffler ultra (don't remember the name of the mod) is there for a really good reason, for muting atomic reconstructor sounds, so like mega good.

Hopefully I am able to edit this review as time goes on

Controlling is 100% a requirement of modding as every mod seems to have controls that conflicts with everyone else. The ability to easily search and manage conflicts is indispensible for speedrun correcting weird overlaps. A must-have, 10/10.

Civilis was a great recently updated pull I discovered that encourages building in a new way beyond just having a 'i'll build a house eventually' lawn base. It has multiple add-ons to help compatibility with other mods and their building blocks, and one of the only drawbacks is that all these calculations seem to put a measurable amount of stress on the server - not in a bad way, just in a way that you should be aware of when deciding how heavy/lite of a pack you want to create. Beyond being listed at the top of the modlist in spark though, it's a mod I'm happy to integrate into my gameplay to conquer hostile mob areas and to build my own fortress against them.

AMWP is a neat mod that allows you to find plushies exclusively as a loot/gacha item rather than crafting than on demand (which is how I personally prefer these things to be). Plushies can be found in the wild (finding a 'suspicious tree' in the forest), by using a gacha plush box that randomly drops a plushie, or just in chests. The models are well-done, and many plushies have alternate forms changing their pose and features.

Gameplay wise, it's more of a seasoning than a full content mod and works best with adventuring/exploring modpacks that encourage you to encounter them. I haven't encountered any big performance issues with it, and it has a good set of config options (note that config is 'AMWPlushies' rather than the full mod name) that allows you to add or remove plushies, control if plush boxes can be dropped by mods, spawn in the wild and if you can just start with a few boxes to kick it off. Notably, none of the config controls the single structure the mod adds (a shrine with one of the plush boxes) so you'd need an additional utility mod or datapack for that.

All-in-all, a nice mod for messing with friends by randomly putting freddy fazbear in the windows of their base, solid 4.5 out of 5.

The Winter Rescue, extremely Ambitious and sadly unfinished. Dumped onto a hostile frozen planet, your goal is to survive, thrive and industrialize. But just how well did this work as a concept? Managing hunger, thirst, and temperature right from the start poses a challenge as every expenditure has a cost and finding food in the barren wastes is not easy. But after following the first chapter in the questbook you can set yourself up for greatness early on and start to thrive.
The early game is where I had the most fun with this pack. Its unforgiving but has so much sauce. Getting wet makes you cold but staying near campfires dry you off and keep you warm. River water will make you sick, so boil it first before consumption. And turning logs into charcoal doesnt exist so instead we have Terrafirmacraft adjacent charcoal pits to get us early game fuel. If thats not enough, Caupona has you covered with an extremely intricate set of ways to make a variety of soups that will not only fill your belly but keep you warm as well. I generally dont like cooking mods as a tech player since cooking mods generally only add aesthetic but Caupona breaks the mold by allowing you to make a variety of soups with higher efficiency and stacking potion effects into them while also being quite portable. This lets you stretch your food reserves and makes exploration much easier which is quite important because foraging for wild mushrooms and hunting animals is the only way youll obtain food outside of limited quests as farming is a very long ways away.
Now lets talk about the most interesting part of this pack in the mid-game. The Heat Generator is the cornerstone of this modpack. It does it all, makes heat, makes power, and keeps you alive whatever more could you want. But the journey to build it is quite a long one. One of the main mechanics you'll utilize before you can craft it is the research tree. All research is done via a resource collection, insight and puzzle minigame in order to unlock more and more tech. Insight is earned via quest completion and exploration and is spent unlocking new tech. Most tech requires resources to be turned in along with research papers being completed. Which while not too difficult does tend to get a tad tedious after you've been doing the same research puzzle over and over and over again. But it does lead to one big problem, there is a bug that completely resets research completion and if it happens to you then you better hope that you have a backup because having to redo hours of research is a major morale killer.
Anyways, the Tier 2 generator is when the gameplay really starts to take off. With it you can finally make SU in a manageable way, prior to this you generate thousands of SU via the Steam Engines and Flywheels which while powerful are massive fuel consumers which makes running them 24/7 unfeasible And at this point you also run into the biggest hurdle of the pack. Fully automating fueling of the Generator. Something this pack does very poorly is letting you understand when you can actually start doing some automation. The questbook will make you think that a tier 1 generator suffices for growing trees and crops but with its poor efficiency and high fuel costs the best a tier 1 generator can do is keep you from freezing to death during a blizzard. Once you unlock the Tier 2 generator and auxiliary heat units you can actually do some automated tree and crop farming.
This is where managing SU becomes important. Unique to The Winter Rescue, all Create Contraptions use SU based on rpm and number of attached items which means that you cannot design large automated farms without running out of SU very quickly. A solution for this is lowering the RPM down until the SU needs are just barely met. Normally this wouldnt be an issue as SU is easy to come by but you become extremely limited in how much available SU can be drawn from the Tier 2 generator. When I finished what was available, the tier 2 generator could sustain a tree farm, fuel farm, and steel making machine without room for much else, let alone crop farming. At that point what was supposed to happen is that you continue to upgrade the generator with Steam to support more SU production but I for the life of me couldnt figure out how to keep up steam production at the rate we burned fuel. Perhaps with later research fuel efficiency would increase to support it but as it stands the other systems in the modpack dont exist.
The Winter Rescue was being developed by a team but at the time of this video, development has been stalled for over a year and there isnt much hope that it will get any further development. They have great ideas and an amazing theme but for now this modpack will have to stay on the backburner until it gets a few more key updates to really push it over the edge and unto greatness.
If youre looking for a challenging modpack with interesting tech then definitely keep the Winter Rescue on your watch list because if it is finished one day, I think it will be great.

Cryogenic Simulation by IterationFunk, is a master class in what a modpack should be. If I were to define what makes a good modpack it would come down to three main criteria. A strong central theme, a well curated mod list, and well balanced progression. But what makes for a great modpack? Innovative ideas, structured progression, and breaking the mold for what makes a standard minecraft playthrough different.
We start our journey in a void world, nothing but a monitor with some lore and broken portals. This central hub is the base for our exploration of the different simulations that the pack asks us to beat. Each simulation provides a different challenge and progression that must be accomplished before you can move on to the next. For example, in the first simulation your main goal will be to produce steel and that same steel production will follow you throughout the remainder of the playthrough as steel becomes a key resource that will be used in crafting more advanced materials. The guidebook, while a bit nebulous at times, provides for structured support on how you are meant to be progressing and giving out specific tasks and goals to accomplish in order to finish that specific simulation challenge.
The simulations is where this pack shines, each simulation has its own theme and set of challenges that test you in different ways. Generally I have found that exploration and combat in modpacks is either undertuned making it unnecessary or completely broken making levels of progression get completely skipped. Cryogenic Simulation managed to make exploration challenging and rewarding without being overpowered. Certain key resources are hidden from the player, in simulation 1 this is in the form of experience books, in simulation 2 this is sooty marble in the dimensions dungeons, and in 3 its the certuz quarts hidden underneath the high bedrock layer. This really shines in simulation 2 and 3, while necessary in simulation 1 exploration only serves to locate key resources like Clay. They could have taken the easy way out and just made all the ores/resources you need found underground in caves and have you go mining but instead Simulation 2 has dungeons spread across the land and your reward for conquering each dungeon is a slew of resources that you can use in that worlds progression which saves a lot of time over doing tedious crafting and locating raw resources. Simulation 3 has what I would call Battle Towers for being so tall and dangerous but the tower itself can be torn down for usable resources and inside holds more key resources for that simulations progression. You're never finding some random late-game items; it's always loot tailored to that specific simulation's demands and are easy enough to find to be useful.
Now lets talk the mid-late game, After unlocking simulation 3 and getting access to Applied Energistics the modpack slows down like a car in gridlock traffic. Its at this time when you have to take a huge stepback and start building out centralized storage and passive automation of many key resources in order to set yourself up for the late-game. Automated quarries and simple mob farms are going to be key here because of how crafting and automation heavy the pack is going to become. Now unlike alot of other modpacks Cryogenic Simulation warns you in advance that its going to start getting automation heavy and outlines a number of key resources that you should automate now to save you time later on. I liked this alot because usually what ends up happening in the late game comes across like a suckerpunch to the head. Many modpacks dont provide a good ladder for the grind and just kinda drop you into it. If youve ever played UniversIO you know what I'm talking about. Its as if the author didnt know how to resolve the end of their pack and simply wanted to pad the gametime by introducing a massive resource grind. Cryogenic Simulation does the opposite, it lets you know that the grind is coming and gives you cheap tools to automate it. AE2 items are very cheap compared to other packs which makes building out automation more about the puzzle and less about the grind. Now the final end-game grind to finish out the pack does have some super massive resource sinks taking millions of items but even that grind wasnt too bad because you are given extremely powerful ways to generate raw resources. The World Wyrms while flavorful present a unique challenge in powering them but the reward is resource post-scarcity. I would say that the kinda out of place Crop item grind was a bit of a slog as you need 9 different farm crops in the amounts of tens of thousands in order to finish one of the final items but apart from that every other crafting challenge up to that point felt rewarding to accomplish.

In addition, what I enjoyed the most out of this modpack is the variety of crafting puzzles that were presented. While resources are cheap, the challenge is setting up passive automation to produce the final outputs. Hyper Nutritious Wyrm milk for instance, took multiple resources processed in different ways in order to produce it. All the input items by that point are extremely cheap but the challenge was feeding them into the system in efficient ways. The Thermoelectric generator is a good one as well, an early multiblock machine that produces massive amounts of energy that will get you to the end-game before nuclear options. Keeping it stocked full of fuel provides a neat challenge early on before you can easily produce its fuels via simulation chambers and automated mining. The changes to Botania were probably my favorite, usually Early game botania is spam endoflames to make mana until you can unlock the better flowers later on. But by removing that entirely and replacing it with The Primal mana resource, producing Botania’s end-game materials didnt feel like a massive slog where you are always waiting around for more mana.
At a playtime of around 75 Hours to complete, assuming an advanced understanding of modded minecraft, Cryogenic Simulation is a great modpack that I would recommend to people looking to dip their feet into modded minecraft. It makes tech mods very approachable while explaining the key insights needed in setting up automation chains and general resource management. It doesnt rely on you already being an expert level player. This is something that quote unquote Expert Modpacks always seem to miss at least for me, an expert level modpack should mean that there will be crafting and automation challenges to solve and not that crafting bread will first take 30 steps and 15 different machines.

Out of all the "Optimization packs" out there, this is the most feature complete one. If I want to play Vanilla or make my own modpack, there's no reason not to use FO. Performance-wise it is as good as it gets, and includes all the features I would expect. Pretty much what Minecraft should be like from the get-go.

I have found this modpack while browsing on Curseforge and after the first try out I can say it's like an expanded Minecraft.
The Quest Book's chapters is nicely arrenged, the tasks are easy to read and it contains useful tips.
And it's good the mods are gettin updated/replaced with forks.
I can recommend this modpack to both new and advanced Minecraft players.

The second of the ten mods every pack on 1.12 should install, no questions asked.

The vanilla item id limit can be reached by installing a single mod in some cases. Bring the power of The Flattening to your instance and forget this problem ever existed with REID.

CraftTweaker is a powerful packdev tool, and this addon expands that capability tremendously with targeted improvements that fill in critical gaps in the base functionality.