Emery

Played through the early game a couple times but haven't finished it yet, have seen a few videos though so I know all about the later game stuff.
Recently got a friend into modded Minecraft and began replaying this and, man, the atmosphere of this pack is unmatched.

The quests are all meaningful and give new info in each one; from what I've played through, there's never any points where it slows down as long as you've got your automation done. The real gripe I've seen is with that automation; if you don't plan ahead and automate everything by Chapter 5 you may have a tough time completing the pack, however in the early and mid-game it's a consistently smooth experience.

The main way you get resources is by looting whatever miscellaneous items you can find around the seemingly infinite stretch of space that is the backrooms. Furniture for wood, silverfish hiding in the floor for food, damp carpet on the floor for water, concrete under the carpet to get lava, and even various real-life tech like microwaves and pipes to get metals later. No(well, minimal) mobs spawning means it's easy to get lost in the looting frenzy. It drives you crazy the way you think, "Well, maybe if I just go down this way there'll be something good..."

Create is the main gateway to the early automation; the buffed steam engines are a lot more fun than spamming waterwheels, which you only unlock later.
This may not seem like it, but it is in fact a Create pack like Arcane Engineering or Above & Beyond, so that's a big focus until close to the end; even then, there's a lot of recipes involving spouts, presses, and mixers. Whether that's a positive or negative is up to you.
Pretty much every crafting recipe is redone to have something to do with the items you find scattered around the backrooms, adding to its cohesion.

As I mentioned earlier, the aesthetic design is unmatched by any other pack. It's unnerving without being completely jumpscare-y, no dwellers or "noodle" monsters like many other versions of the backrooms have.
Visually, the textures are all really nice-looking and consistent. All the mods with "vanilla+ textures" like Farmer's Delight or Create feel very consistent together, and the later-game stuff, although unchanged visually, also feel like they match with each other.

Performance is pretty decent, I had no problems or anything. I've heard gripes with some of the loading in stuff and the sculk mobs , but I had zero issues personally.

I'd recommend this pack to everyone even remotely interested in tech; I don't think it's a good beginners modpack, but if you have a friend who plays modpacks and knows at least the basic mods, I would definitely recommend it for multiplayer. It does assume you have a bit of basic knowledge on how some stuff works, especially Create as I was saying before, but nowadays with pondering, guidebooks, and the pack's great quests, there's not much you can't figure out in-game.

TLDR; if you know anything about tech mods, play it. It's worth it.

Been looking to play the OG Sky Bees pack(or perhaps its sequel Sky Bees 2) for a good while but haven't gotten around to it until recently. When I went to try it out, I saw there was a remake for modern versions which excited me as I'm more of 1.20.1 or 1.21.1 player lol.
Actually playing it has... disappointed me a bit. To sum it up in a word, I felt pretty whelmed.
The AI profile picture should have been my first sign but, annoyingly, I wanted to l look past it.

It's not necessarily a bad pack, it just feels... kind of lazy. Questbook is decent and there is a sense of progression to be certain, but crafting recipes and stuff are for the most part unmodified.
Apart from some mildly intriguing Ex Nihilo(or rather Ex Deorum) at the beginning, it's your standard modded Skyblock with a bee mod thrown in.
You've got your drawers and backpacks, crouching for crops, botany pots, Productive Metalworks, and although I haven't gotten quite that far yet there's your standard Mekanism, IE, AE2, etc. No Create though, which as much as I love the mod is always a plus.
Questbook is present and at the very least better than Skyfactory(not that that's a high bar lmao) but it's still sort of the bare minimum, once early game ends you have to fight for yourself.

I'm really focusing on the negatives here but for the most part it's just, as the title says, a standard modded Skyblock pack. Performance is obviously perfectly fine, even with shaders(I used Euphoria Patched Complementary), as most Skyblocks tend to be.

Visuals are fine, they're not particularly bad or anything, just default textures; no real consistency there.

All in all, if you want a fairly barebones modded Skyblock I would recommend it, otherwise go play ATMTTS or something.

One of the first packs I've actually completed(although I'm not quite at the end lol, close enough!).
Unlike most similar packs there's no sieving or ex nihilo-esque stuff of any kind, there's a very unique early game that uses vanilla brushes, with a bit of villager slavery to automate it later.
The whole pack is centralized around crafting with and upgrading a device known as the World Engine. The texturing and theming for it is great, and it's not the most intuitive thing in the world at first but a very great questbook gives you enough to figure it out.
Speaking of, the questline feels great. It's got a sort of asymmetrical layout where you work on three different quest chains per chapter, and at the end of each questline is an upgrade for the World Engine(which unlocks new crafts to progress through whichever mods you want or need). Completing each quest gives a bit of money to purchase things at the spawn's shops. These shops are fully voice-acted characters which you talk to throughout the quests.
The quests are not fully exploration or crafting/techy stuff, I think there's a great balance. If you get bored of one or the other it's great to have two other quest chains to go through.
Mods are a nice mix of the ol' standards and some I hadn't really heard of until playing this pack. You've got your Mekanism, Ars, AE2, Apotheosis, etc.; Create is here but not super necessary like in SB3 or a lot of other packs, which is great. Two great mods that were new to me were Just Dire Things and Roost Ultimate.
Exploration is a mix of custom dungeons and bosses, mostly L_EC or Twilight Forest. The dungeons are all themed around one specific thing; there's a Create dungeon, a Portal dungeon, a puzzly MFFS(a forcefield mod) dungeon, etc. which are all very fun to go through.
Overall, progression never felt blocked in any way. It was like when going through a certain mod for the questline you'd watch a great cutscene as your World Engine grew and gain access to everything you'd need for that mod. The grind is minimal, and AE2 is very much buffed so once you get autocrafting it becomes even less tedious.

This pack's 100% worth playing, even if you're not a huge skyblock enjoyer I think it's worth it for the custom stuff alone.