HotFemboy

This modpack is fundamentally pointless: there's no plot, you're just in a room with white materia that you can turn into a million other materia through about 50 production lines and machines, all so you can make the fabled rainbow materia and hit save and quit to title. But the fun, good part of this modpack is that you don't need to know anything to beat it and even if you don't like factorio-style automation and scaling complexity, this might just hook you in and start a hobby far bigger than the pack. It's the best technical/automation modpack I've ever played.

As an idiot with no meaningful automation experience (unless my ATM10 spaghetti setups count), I felt like the room key system gave me plenty of space to start and finish each chapter once I had discovered the y axis, and I'm sure everything I did could be optimized on a second run. All the machines are well drawn and are almost universally easy to route items and fluids to and from. The few mods that are placed into the pack such as actually subtractions are very useful throughout all stages and integrate seamlessly into progression and the aesthetic of the pack. I didn't even notice that the item and fluid pipes were from modern dynamics, though I will say that curvy pipes really does mess up the aesthetic of the mod (and are completely optional!)

One of my biggest complaints about this modpack is the lack of extensive Refined Storage, which the dev said was removed due to balance, and I find the removals very annoying and actively hurting QoL (a wireless crafting grid would have been amazing). I spent the majority of my playthrough with my inventory almost completely full of items and with an inventory sack also almost full, so I was constantly swapping through items and dumping stuff into random chests. It's also not clear that the crafting grid and controller are made through certain colors so I had to click through every variation until an actual recipe came up (which initially led me to believe it wasn't an intended part of the modpack).

A consequence of not having a centralized system for items or fluids (no exporting from RS) is that you are going to run pipes from room to room. There is one door where I've about 3 pipes going through and I can't even walk through it normally. An amazing thing I discovered (and hated not discovering earlier) is that by using extractors and filters on every input/output face, you can have one item network for your entire game. This saved me from so much channel hell.

Speaking of channel hell, some machines and the recipes required for them are a logistical nightmare. On one hand, this forced me to become very creative with how I would move energy and materials from block to block, becoming very conservative in my placements and feeling genuinely accomplished when seeing a line work. On the other hand, it slows down parts of the game due to not being able to easily scale things, leads beginners like me into raging over random outputs going to the wrong place at some unknown location in a 5 step process, and forcing awkward placements. At the end of the game, one recipe required 2 fluid inputs, 1 energy input, 1 item input, and 1 item output with 4 available faces, so I was forced to use a convoluted daisy-chain setup that bottlenecked my production because the machine right next to it was significantly faster but also forced to use every face with no way to move its outputs anywhere except the single bottleneck.

My complaints come from a place of love and should not discourage you from playing, as it makes completion all the more satisfying. On my first playthrough I gave it about an hour every day and with a longer stretch at the end, I was able to complete this in about two weeks. I intend to play again in a speedrun since this modpack is rather short and every bottleneck I had was probably self-inflicted. Great job Tilles, and I hope you can come back to tweaking this.