...across multiple worlds and servers with a great many fun people :3 got the ATM Star twice and currently in the very last stages before the GregStar, which i wanted to complete for a while :3

The main quest line of the star, which is probably what most people focus on, may be a little janky and a little annoying at places (looks at you blood magic's foreman's key) but it's compensated by the fact you can do several things at once - especially if you don't just rush progression to the star but do cute things to the side, you won't get frustrated or bored until you ran out of things to do (which in this pack can be a very long time, look at me xD).

Here's my personal favourite things about the pack:

• Sheer breadth of it. In all the time i played it i always had something to do, there always is more to learn and explore and see. Tech, sure, magic, sure, but the little things too - for example the amount of different mobs it has is astounding, and we're making a zoo for all of them :3 Also to me (a relatively new player in modded) it served as a good introduction to the very existence of oh so many mods!

• Related to the previous one: decoration mods! It has a lot without being overwhelming and it works rly well together for cute builds! My faves are handcrafted and dyenamics. Also wood types! I like that you can just use the alchemy table to get whatever log you want, rly good for making specific palettes (though it could use a search function but that's a question to the dev of blue skies).

• Not sure what trick it is they employ or if modern MC is just like that, but in all the crashes and freezes i had with this modpack (a lot, see below) i never ever lost any progress! like, not even a single bit! i find it fascinating! and they even included periodic backups by default in case your world corrupts!

• Controversial take here, but, Gregtech! This was my introduction to it and i'd say, with the amazing work that went into bees and generally unlimited resources and power at your disposal this becomes way less grindy than i expected it to be - still took me weeks of long playsessions to get to UHV, sure, but setting that automation up was mostly fun - the only point i found myself waiting to accumulate resources was with europium in ZPM and at this point, well, the rest of the pack exists! you can go build something! or finish the star! (that's one of the reasons i recommend starting gregtech BEFORE the star, doing them in parallel, so you can distract from one into another if it gets frustrating. the power options ATM provides scale quite well, you don't need creative power before ZPM/UV).

Most of the frustrations I had are such questions to individual mods and via that to the kitchen sink genre in general; most of them could probably be solved by better integration, but ATM is not that kind of modpack - past the main questline of the Star every mod is just what it is without much changes. Over the years I keep thinking I need to find a modpack that's woven more tightly in that regard, but these are rare gems overall! Still here's some things I want to point out:

• The modpack has thirty-three dimensions (i counted! made a hub for all of them in one of the worlds) but there's little incentive to explore most of them past that individual mod's progression. Ad Astra is especially notorious here (having little variety to explore on its own which is expected from a mod about inhospitable planets) - other modpacks might add better ores to the Moon etc. but here it just stands to the side as everything else does. Twilight Forest and Blue Skies have way more cute things to find but also the frustration of the no fly zone and Blue Skies' tool limitations; the no fly zone is intended to make cheesing bosses harder but it honestly only matters for the Ur-Ghast; for long distance movement it can be bypassed with ars spells; but then building becomes a pain, and that's a shame, because these dimensions are pretty!

• Related to the previous one, the mining dim and the Beyond. They are specifically intended for building but they are not pretty >< subjective opinion, yes, but the ATM team's choice of colours is so weird! Red fog and dry grass of the mining dim, the eternally black sky of the Beyond with the sun and clouds still in it, all of that feels uncanny and dead. They are a lawn baser's dream, sure, but i'm here actively trying to have aesthetics around my machinery without lagging too much from the world around! Ended up changing it with a datapack. Out of the box i'd say the best dimension for that kind of building would be Alfheim (pretty, with relatively few things going on lagwise) but it's gated behind all of Botania... Chulak and Lantea would come second.

• Lag, in general, is a weird beast here. My game was prone to freeze the PC and crash every now and then, especially if run with other programs on the computer open; I found Journeymap to be the biggest offender here and it got much better after eliminating it which, hello, why do we have two different minimap mods here in the first place? Here i should also mention the existence of ATM9 No Frills, a lighter edition of this that runs much smoother - I had a bit of experience in it, not enough to judge how much the breadth is reduced in important to me aspects, but i still find it cool as hell that the devs do this! (they recently gave ATM10 the same treatment too with ATM10 Lite which is rad)

• The power curve gets a bit weird, if you play by the quests you can and are incentivised to become a nigh unkillable god with nigh unlimited resources in midgame and then lategame is a mix of specific automation challenges, doing a bite of everything, and big number go poof (looks at you 1.5 million nether stars). It's a vibe, sure, is it my vibe? It used to be, but i think i'm slowly drifting away from it! What's the fun of having two dozen bosses if half of them can be killed in seconds and another third become punching bags while you tank all the damage? (That's why we limited ourselves to allthemodium equipment our latest run and i'd say we could've even stopped before that, though having unbreakable things is nice). On the scale of 0 for nothing 10 for literal creative mode this pack can easily shoot you into 7-8-9 way before endgame and i think it's just past my personal sweetspot.

• The entire Alchemistry/Chemlib mod looks like a viable alternative for many things, but when you actually want to automate it, it's janky, slow, and breaks your setups when it feels like it (compactors on locking mode occasionally stop working at i think world reload, and the amount of times my entire bee processing line stopped because of it is too painful to recite - if you use alchemistly, plan your setups for this!). Some recipe integration with some other mod of better machines could have been made to avoid this problem, but see above, ATM is not this kind of pack.

• FTB chunkloading is restricted to 25 chunks and all other options for it are disabled. Awesome for servers, but a bit frustrating in SP (though it's partially my fault for never getting around to seeing how to change that in configs). The team includes server files separately from SP files, why not have diverging configs between the two?

Overall, I think I'd enjoy most of the content of this pack in a setting where that direction is the main focus (tech / magic / cozy building / bosses / dimensions and exploration / etc.) - which is why the next pack i play after this will probably not be a kitchen sink - but with the kitchen-sinkness of it given, this is a very good and entertaining pack, even if challenging to run on not high-end hardware mode occasionally stop working at i think world reload, and the amount of times my entire bee processing line stopped because of it is too painful to recite - if you use alchemistry, plan your setups for unlocked compactors!). Some recipe integration with some other mod of better machines could have been made to avoid this problem, but see above, ATM is not this kind of pack.

• FTB chunkloading is restricted to 25 chunks and all other options for it are disabled. Awesome for servers, but a bit frustrating in SP (though it's partially my fault for never getting around to seeing how to change that in configs). The team includes server files separately from SP files, why not have diverging configs between the two?

Overall, I think I'd enjoy most of the content of this pack in a setting where that direction is the main focus (tech / magic / cozy building / bosses / dimensions and exploration / etc.) - which is why the next pack i play after this will probably not be a kitchen sink - but with the kitchen-sinkness of it given, this is a very good and entertaining pack, even if challenging to run on not high-end hardware.

Welcome to Antimatter Chemistry! Here's a questbook where we'll railroad you into doing a linear series of extremely specific not necessarily required things but not tell you about anything else. Don't worry, there's some really good stuff waiting for you at the end of all of this after I drag you by the scruff through vanilla nether, and then the cave dimension, and then vanilla Atum, interspersed with fun quests like making a fishing rod and then telling you to not use the fishing rod. Were you expecting to do something tech related? Don't worry, you will, maybe a dozen hours from now. While you wait for other functional machines to use, have a pink generator. Trying to fuel this is definitely a good use of your time. What do you mean you dont want to go into the vanilla cave dimension to gather ore blocks of ores you already had a bunch of? We love meaningful quest rewards so here's a bunch of useful things and also 8 pieces of bacon that are inferior to the three stacks of cooked potatoes you're probably carrying around. Don't worry, you can go do something else, you certainly don't have to worry about things like end of chapter timewalls and gamestages to pressure you to not take your time.

I think I'm probably just going to go and try to get my alchemistry fill somewhere else.

Break Out is an immaculately designed beginner xblock experience; it's short, it's simple enough that you are never going to get lost while allowing you to get to the goal in your own way, every mod is thoroughly well explained through the quest book. It definitely falls into some modded stereotypes, but that's for the better of the goal of the pack in my opinion, and it successfully balances having a traditional modpack mod flow while still being it's own thing.

If there's anything I noticed on this replay, it's that there's generally not a lot to do sometimes; it's very much pure progression and that progression is relatively simple, which is what helped make it the first modpack I beat all those years ago, but you're likely to get timewalled by Botania or something unless you have full recollection of the progression flow, and if you are not new to modded, it might become a little bit of a bore. I think that's the main reason I didn't put this up at 5 stars; not to make it sound like it was an insufferable replay, since everything bad about the pack is absolutely assuaged by the runtime and the other freedoms it allows to you.

Other notes;

• It's very optimized. The optimization mods are maybe a little bit aggressive by today's standards, but the rock bottom resource utilization here is gonna mulch any newer pack.

Early Game

For context, I played with this modpack on a server with a small group of friends. Throughout my experience, I never researched anything about the pack, and I had never played an FTB pack before.
The start of Oceanblock 2 was great. You choose a starting ship and explore from there. The gimmick of the world being only a large ocean was actually a fresh take on early minecraft progression that focuses more on exploration. I didn't expect to enjoy the ocean world as much as I did.

Mid Game

I had a lot of fun problem solving with the multitude of tech mods in this pack such as Mekanism, Oritech, Immersive Engineering, Refined Storage and Applied Energistics 2, and Nuclear Reactors. This pack introduced me to a lot of tech mods and mechanics I had never seen before, while also integrating them together in interesting ways. It does feel like a kitchen sink pack at times since there is little thematic elements except for some ocean-related mods like PneumaticCraft.

Late Game

For me, the weakest part of this pack was the end game. Spoilers: The end goal of the game is to beat a boss and reach the overworld. To reach the dimension where the boss resides, a lot of setup and tedious grinding is required. The dimension itself is pretty cool build-wise, but the builds are empty apart from the same mobs and barrels scattered around. In general, the dimension felt slightly soulless. The final boss fight was super easy and uninteresting. By just completing the questbook progression, the final boss barely lasted a minute. Finally reaching the overworld was pretty underwhelming too, as it seemed basically unchanged from a regular modpack. The ocean world was far more interesting, and it would've been cool to see something different about the overworld. The ending was anti-climactic and didn't feel like it was worth the effort.

Overview

Despite my feeling about the ending, I had a lot of fun with this pack. There is hours of content to explore and the questbook ties a lot of the mods together to make a fun, cohesive experience.

It's GregTech without the Greg

please note that this review is made while I'm in midgame - I have not finished the pack yet

If you're unfamiliar with what that exactly means: it's GregTech without all the tedium, nanocrafting (as I've come to call it) and overall labor that goes into it. It's not New Horizons, which you shouldn't even think about finishing, nor is it Omni/Nomi/Monifactory, which streamlines the torture of GregTech. It's something else.

StaTech Industries removes the "Greg" from the "Tech" completely, creating a much friendlier and approachable version of a factory-sim. It's still extremely complex, having multiple tiers, advanced processing lines, a deep, deep quest book and a lot of mechanics that are almost the same as in GregTech. If you're familiar with the distinction between rougelikes and rougelites, it's kinda exactly like that - it's a Greglite, not a Greglike.

But all the recipes are a bit simpler, the machines are easier to get, nothing explodes in your face, there aren't a million byproducts to every recipe and every single processing chain is about ten times faster by default. For me, this is awesome - GregTech has always been extremely overwhelming and way too punishing for me, especially with the prices of new machines and the time it took to get to the "meat" of the pack (optimizing and setting up production lines).

The downside is, of course, that the meat isn't as well seasoned as in GregTech. Challenge invites satisfaction (yes, I did quote Hamilton, what are you gonna do about it?) - and less challenge brings a little less of it. There are points in the pack where I felt like automation could be skipped completely by someone with enough grit, which feels like a cardinal sin of a factory modpack. I also missed some of the parts of GregTech, namely the advanced ore processing and extraction and a few of the more complex crafting chains.

The biggest flaw of the progression has been, at least to me, a very weird split of unlocking AE2 in half. You get a bunch of cables and interfaces first and only unlock the storage a siginificant amount of time later. Since the pack already has an early-game storage solution, this feels needlessly convoluted and misleading (and it's the star taken off from gameplay).

A big benefit over GregTech is also that the pack is beautiful and much more stable. All the textures are from Modern Industrialization and there are a bunch of industrial-style deco mods in the pack as well - not to mention a bunch of really cool multiblocks that take away from the "magic box tech pack" feeling a lot.

Overall, a huge recommendation for people who always felt like they would love GregTech, but felt overwhelmed by it, as well as for anybody who fees like giving factory modpacks a shot.

HELLLLLAAAA good progression and TONS of customizations just for builders alone. it is a very chill modpack in my opinion that could lowkey be a good way to familiarize yourself to big mods.

The progression line is lowkey not it, most of my journey was doing my own gameplay and less of following the quest book because the quest book just ain't it. However, the modpack has everything you want from beginner to advanced mods

I have played with 3 friend in a hardcore world, it was very fun and imessive, have only one try helps a lot with the "terror" part of the modpack, each of us experimented with playing a different role. I used the Born in Chaos mod quite a bit, while my friends used Hexerei and Biomency. We spent a lot of time playing that mod pack.

Spectral Creation is a small modpack consisting of Create, Spectrum, and a handful of tiny content mods, performance mods and QOL mods. Beyond that, there is a small custom guidebook that's kind of rough to use due to poorly formatted entries. The few mods in the pack are surprisingly buggy, like Scout and ExtendedDrawersAddon (all related bugs to which are fixed in the 1.21.1 version). It can be a genuine bother, and why I would say this is probably not the ideal way to experience Spectrum, much less Create, and also probably not that suitable for building your own Spectrum focused pack off of.

it was a smooth steady gameplay for my friend and I, its a little rough early game. However, the "gambling" system makes it a little easier for early game, until mid game gets way easier and more enjoyable if you were to follow quests.