VeeArr

Time to complete: ~200 hours

StaTech Industry is basically just Modern Industrialization, plus some QoL mods, plus some weird extra mods added on to the side. Generally speaking, whether or not you like this pack will depend on whether or not you like Modern Industrialization.

For me, this meant it was a bit of a miss. I was intrigued by the idea of a modern-GregTech-but-different mod in Modern Industrialization, but I found the way that it handled overclocking to be very frustrating. I'm not familiar enough with MI to know if any substantial changes were made to the recipes in this pack, but it seemed like many of the recipes were probably default. The quest book primarily walks you through MI progression.

In addition to MI, there are some QoL mods included, such as Applied Energistics. Unfortunately the way MI's overclocking works, and the fact that most crafts required assembling in a machine rather than a crafting table, meant that trying to do any autocrafting via AE was more-or-less a nightmare.

The progression of the pack inexplicably uses Create for the first chapter and then more-or-less just leaves it behind immediately afterwards. This felt like a rather weird choice; I think it would have been better to just omit Create altogether, or to integrate it more in the pack's progression.

Finally, there were a handful of mods included that just felt out-of-place, or tacked on for no particular reason. These were generally not integrated into progression in any meaningful way, and served more as a distraction than having any useful purpose.

Time to complete: ~500 hours

DJ2 takes you on a tightly-tailored journey through a wide variety of mods. Progression is carefully structured to ensure a curated experience through each of the modpack's 30 chapters, with most chapters building on the work done in previous chapters. This progression applies not only to the tech aspects of the pack, but also to the exploration aspect, with various dimensions being gated behind achieving certain tech milestones, and then further tech advancement being gated by needing materials acquired through exploration.

The mods featured range from ubiquitous mods like Mekanism to less-frequently-seen mods like Bewitchment and Divine RPG. Many of the mods, especially those in later chapters, pose unusual-but-not-insurmountable automation challenges that helps to break up the typical endgame recipe-encoding-simulator portion of many expert modpacks.

If I had to choose a weak element for the pack, it would be the exploration segments, particularly those featuring the Divine RPG dimensions. The custom-made structures are really neat, but the mobs in these dimensions range from annoying-behavior-with-unbelievably-annoying-sound-effects to incredibly-frustrating-and-now-I-hate-all-ents. Practically speaking, though, these represent a small fraction of the time most players will spend playing the pack.