Roguelike Adventures and Dungeons is an action-packed exploration and combat RPG with a wide variety of melee, ranged, and magical options. It has a lot of the greats like Thaumcraft, The Betweenlands, the Aether, Vampirism, Dungeon Crawl, DungeonTactics and more. There is a thinly-veiled tech option found in the complicated world of Embers for those out there wanting a tech-ish experience. It also includes my favorite magic mod of all time, Electroblob's Wizardry. At times, it can be a little overwhelming as it shows its borderline kitchen-sink side, but it could definitely be worse.

Performance is generally very good, even with a lot of mobs around. However, using texture packs (especially mod compat ones), at least in my case, cripples my FPS. OptiFine fixes this, but it also causes the pack to crash on startup 50% of the time.

Even today, in 2026, eight years after its creation, it's still updated and it's still just as fun as it was all those years ago. Give it a shot!

This pack really delivers a cohesive and unique experience through artistic integrity and meticulous attention to details: most, in not all of the base game and mods have seen some form of tweaks and additions, all to achieve the incredible atmosphere and cool gameplay. You can see how much love and care went into crafting a pack like this. I really recommend it for everyone to try, it’s one of the top tier packs out there

This modpack really is that amazing. It's so much more than the sum of its parts. The terrifying zombie hordes give you a perfect justification to really engage with the industrial system. The overall questline gives a high level reason to be doing it all. I put this as a side event on my server expecting to just have a little fun for a few hours and instead we sunk 40 hours over the space of two weeks. It really is that good.

I turned up the healing rate of the Recovery modifier by 4x in the configs. It felt too slow for multiplayer where people didn't want to sleep nights and we would end up spending hours just sitting in base slowly applying plasters.

This modpack is really what it says it is, its full of vibe, liminal spaces, and many gameplay changes that just makes it really unique! It has a clear vision of itself, and you can see that many thought went into this creation. Very fun and well done, I recommend it for trying for everyone that's searching for a modpack that's not a kitchen sink

This pack is great it runs well and it has strong design philosophy however the pack has a relatively high amount Of friction with mildly confusing progression and lacking in familiar features of modded and vanilla Minecraft; such as campfires or atlases.

Very good betapack and I’d imagine it would have great nostalgia value for someone who played Minecraft in 2009

Meatballcraft was something I found scrolling through recently updated mod packs a few years ago. And ever since then it's been one of the best mod packs I've played to the point where I found myself contributing to the packs textures for its custom items and blocks and improving on them thanks to this pack.

The gameplay:

Meatballcraft is an expert pack that revolves around custom recipes, mechanic modifying, new items, blocks, and fluids all to create a harder environment to produce materials, magic and machines. When you get into the world for the first time you will be bombarded with books. (However this is a joke, it should be removed by the time 1.0 comes around.) and you'll be dropped into a world full of custom structures to find, and a huge questbook to start with.

Early on you'll survive like normal, eventually finding the materials in structures to be able to make a blast furnace and create your path towards extended crafting, this is where it 'hits the fan' as suddenly so much opens up to the player, you have so many different directions you'll be able to head in. From magic to tech to resource generation you'll need to make your base of operations and start getting storage. By the time you get through to chapter 3 you might get disoriented, as someone who's used to expert packs in general I didn't have an issue but more newer players can find it a bit hard, I will say just take your time, you're not on a time limit so focus on one thing at a time if you feel like managing 3-5 different sections at once gets chaotic.

Skipping ahead a lot, the mid game to end game also was extremely fun to play through, things become so massive that you need to do creative and crazy setups to produce just a smidge of resources needed to get to the end, but that grind was worth it for me as the feeling of finally making every goal I set for myself was amazing.

Without spoiling, the end of the pack revolves on you making one last item, however for the few that do want to take your base to the extreme, there is an optional ending of making the TARDIS from doctor who, akin to GTNH's stargate the resources and time you need for it are INSANE requiring you to make CHUNK-SPANNING multi blocks and resource generations in the millions. I never got that far in my first proper run towards it, but I at least completed my run and I'm currently playing a new run to try and go for it. Every aspect I had a lot of fun with in the end game.

Performance

The performance of 1.12.2 in general is quite hard to manage, due to its age and also light issues (such as the dimension hopping memory leak issue.) However to counteract this, there are many mods in meatballcraft to help improve the performance of your world, with both community fixes to mods, additions to mods made by people in the very modpack community and cleanroom (a fork of forge which allows 1.12.2 to use java 25 instead of java 8.) the performance increase can be very notable, but of course just be aware that even with such lower end machines may still struggle, but in general the performance additions help this version A LOT.

Aesthetics

I will not touch on this subject much as I've greatly helped in some of the texture production of custom items and blocks, but IGNORING my own work, textures both made by the creator and assisted by other members in the community help to give custom items, blocks (and soon to be fluids!) textures help to really differentiate everything and make it look unique.

Multiblocks are really well designed not just for looks but also for ease of use, the recursive and mythic processors are a EBF like multiblock that changes based on the catalyst block within it, doing a range of functions that the normal machine can't reach the speeds of. It allows you to really compact things and make things look like a full on factory or magical base, specially with some of the more super-massive structures you'll have to make in the mid to end game levels of the pack

Finally, the quest book is jam-packed with lore that is quite well written and thought of, creating a narrative that normally isn't in any sort of modpack that just drops you in without story. For people who do like to be a lore nerd (myself) it's amazing to see more of the story grow just from a simple item being collected.

In conclusion:

Meatballcraft is an expert modpack that has introduced me to alot of good people on its discord, given me an amazing journey multiple times, and offered me chances to improve my own artist talents that I never thought I could. With gameplay that can be hard to start but AMAZING once you get your place in the world, with your base sprawling off into so many places just to ascend a bit higher.

I would 100% recommend anyone to at least try the modpack, get to chapter 2 or 3, and see how you feel about pushing your way through, or work on infrastructure to be slow and smart, or just have fun!

Beside of problem with chickens, there are different recipes or none for any mod planks or wood which doesn't make sense.
There aren't connected mods with themselves into one flow so you can use create mod but mechanical press don't have any use and many more.

Spawngen without coal or diorite or andesite ore isn't possible to progress with questbook and create mod or anything else because every recipe is connected with machine press. If you cannot craft andesite alloy and go on.

At first, i was stunned and might it was accident but then i opened to LAN to change playing mode for inspecting - creative and yes - it wasn't generated into world LOL

There's really not much to go into detail on here, it helps compile all of your "guide books" from mods like Tinkers Construct into one Akashic Tome, which can transform into any book you've inserted into it via shapeless crafting.

I've found it extremely useful and time saving, as well as saving my poor inventory from the.. heaps of books that can appear in some larger modpacks. 5/5, likely to have prevented at least 5 cases of manslaughter.

Meatballcraft is my second modpack which I played for a good bit, and first proper expert modpack.
after ATM10 which I dropped after it got too boring halfway through.

I am very early into the pack (chapter 2, but still just short of 200hr), so this review wont touch the later parts but I still though I should recommend this.

An amazing modpack that dips (very deeply) into all parts of modpacks, adventures/combat, tech and magic. The modpack starts out simple (and well, a dozen or two books falling on you), and gradually increasing in complexity. It starts out as a kitchensink pack (with this being the definition of overwhelming with how many mods unlock at once). Fortunately AE2 and void world is super early, so you shouldn't need to bother with more than a few chests (I had about 5 drawers and 7 double chests before getting ae2) for organization.

You get Project E fairly early, and while I don't have any experience with it, lot of people seem to do. It is quite well balanced here, not just get item throw in project e and never have to worry about it. It's mostly for QoL items for decoration, and basic resources which you will have to work on afterwards. This along with the countless resource generation methods reduces the grind by a lot. Most grindy thing so far was getting my first pickaxe in the beginning, and if I wasnt too scared of mobs I would have been faster with caves instead of strip mining.

The quests may not be for everyone, as they don't hold your hand all the way through and tell you which item to exactly craft everytime, instead, it lets you explore and figure it out your own. Personally, I hated it at first too I need my hand holding!, but soon enough I learned to like it, it gives a much greater sense of accomplishment imo.

Even though it starts out as a kitchensink, it doesn't lose it's expert part. 5x5, 7x7 and bigger recipes, recipes made of many mods and requiring many dimensions, gated recipes that are satisfying to complete, massive automation lines to make with the tech and magic mods and countless multiblocks (I personally love them so that's a plus point for me).

The mod has bunch of lore bits if you are interested in that, and many puzzles (with solutions given, if you didn't want to think bout them).

Overall, if you like automation and large expert packs, I definitely recommend giving a try.