LostPhoeniix

Do we even have to talk about this? As usual, the ATM team delivers a modpack packed with mods and mechanics that sound interesting, but the experience ends up falling short in many areas.

First of all, this pack is a kitchen sink in its purest form. You can literally do whatever you want and explore whichever mod interests you. While that freedom can be nice, it also means that most progression feels unfocused. You end up blazing through many mods because almost nothing is gated behind anything meaningful.

Resource generation in the late game is another big disappointment. It basically comes down to bees and nothing else. Want a new item? Get a bee for it. While that system works early on, it quickly becomes repetitive and makes the endgame feel boring and shallow.

Then there’s Modern Industrialization, which is actually a very interesting mod and takes a fair amount of time to progress through. Unfortunately, it isn’t required for the ATM Star, which feels like a huge missed opportunity. It could have added a deeper and more meaningful progression path, but instead it’s mostly just tacked on for players who feel like doing it.

Overall, the pack offers a lot of content on paper, but because of the lack of progression and meaningful integration between mods, the experience ends up feeling less engaging than it could have been.

Techopolis 3 feels like a deliberate return to classic Minecraft modpacks, just updated with the advantages of modern 1.21 Minecraft. You get smoother performance through Sodium and Java 21, and AE2 benefits from its newer features. Most performance mods still need to be added manually, but the base experience runs well.

A Modern Pack With an Old-School Feel
The “old” feeling mainly comes from the absence of Create. Instead, the pack leans heavily on Mekanism and its own custom multiblocks for almost all processing, which also means that nearly every recipe is changed. The amount of intermediate materials you need naturally pushes you toward building real automation setups instead of relying on early ME autocrafting. The progression is very tier-based—similar to GregTech—where the strongest automation tools don’t appear until far into the pack with Hellish Technium. The AE2 grind exists, but Tom’s Simple Storage makes the early-to-mid game much more manageable.

Weak Points
The pack doesn’t have many major flaws, but a few frustrations stand out.
Thermal Evaporation Plants are used far too often, and you end up constructing them repeatedly, which gets tedious. A larger multiblock that could output around 100 B/t of hot water would solve a lot of this annoyance, since the demand for hot water becomes huge.

The endgame multiblocks are another weak spot. Unlike the impressive, detailed endgame machines you see in something like GTNH, the Techopolis 3 late-game multiblocks look very simple—basically larger versions of the Technium Compressor or the final Technium machine. They function fine, but visually they’re not very exciting.

My Playthrough Experience
I played through the pack on the official server with one friend, which meant I only had nine force-loaded chunks available. That forced me to build compactly, but it wasn’t as restrictive as expected. With careful planning, it’s possible to fit an entire late-game base into a vertical layout that stays within the chunk-loading limit.

Overall
Techopolis 3 is a strong, progression-driven modpack that successfully blends old-school structure with modern Minecraft performance and quality-of-life features. It has a few rough edges, especially with repetitive multiblocks and underwhelming endgame visuals, but the core gameplay loop is engaging, challenging, and rewarding for players who enjoy structured automation-focused progression.

This is a big modpack with some very interesting challenges. It gates AE2 behind so much grind that you might think you can beat the pack after unlocking it—but you’d be dead wrong. That’s actually when the mid-game begins.

This pack is grindy and relatively long. It took my friend (who didn’t have much time toward the end) and me a combined 400 hours and about two months of real time. We played on an always-on server—which is important, because while it’s totally possible to finish without one, it’s substantially harder and takes much longer.

In the end, it’s a really fun challenge and a great modpack if you like older versions. And as always, skyblock fans will find this one especially appealing—skyblock is, in my opinion, the superior way to play a modpack.

also my base was the most janky thing you can imagine...

a very good but unfortunately kind of short modpack.
nice progression and exploration aspects and a nice endgame.
Imo there are two bad parts about it, the thirst and heat mechanic not playing a role after the mid game since they are so dominant in erlygame progression, and the endgame now i know i said the endgame is good and i mean that apart from the fact that there really isn't an endgame and while advanced rocketry is by far the best rocket mod out there you don't really gain anything from it and it doesn't fit narrative imo.

in conclusion i really like this pack (50% nostalgia) but definitely skip the last quest where you have to find the stupid tree sapling.

great spin on the skyblock Game play.
Alchemestry forces you to invent interesting workaround to generate some items in acceptable quantities or at all (for example getting tons of bonemeal + two high flowers plus a dissolver for a lot of rare metals)