Zodmad

TL:DR. I think too much of the progression can be "skipped" because exploration is overpowered lol.

By "almost" I mean the modpack is actually quite good, it just needs some tweaks to the progression. Right now there are tons of modifications to recipes to make them harder or to integrate them with each other and absolutely no reason to ever touch 90% of them because you'll just find them during exploration instead.

For example, if you look at the recipe list, refined storage is functionally end-game. It requires you to visit the wasteland and luck out into specialized molds into order to manufactor them which requires BOTH a create and immersive engineering setup. Or, you can just loot an office building and never touch the recipes. It sort of makes all the recipe changes feel pointless. Or at the very least, exploration is incredibly overpowered and you can skip a LOT of progression just by exploring. Not saying to remove it entirely. But maybe instead of just getting an entire refined storage system in one building you get some parts to help you craft one so you need to engage with create/IE to put one together?

Actually, loot abundance, while insanely satisfying, is also kind of my main "gripe". There's this awesome food and water system that you think would require you to get into food/drink production, starting a farm, automating it with create and setting up defenses around it to stop the zombies from destroying it. however, what actually happens is you loot a single food building and it literally lasts you until the end-game with food/drinks it provides. So despite having two of the best production mods, create/IE, you actually almost never have to use them. In my playthrough that I beat the story on I only used create and never touched IE at all. And even then create was just used to make a mechanical crafter and an elevator to get around my base since I took over a building and it's fairly tall.

It could be that the pack is intended to be more kitchen sink than progression but if that's the case it feels weird to include the modified recipes and tiered weapons/armors at all.

Honestly I can go on forever as I feel liked looting kind of breaks a LOT of the progression possible.
Food variety problem is solved by looting, not farming.
Weapon variety is solved by looting, not crafting.
Bullet automation questline can be ignored by looting, no bullet assembly lines needed.
Storage is solved by looting, not creating factories to assemble the parts
Steel manufacturing questline can be ignored through looting
The advanced materials questline can be entirely ignored in favor of looting

Temperature progression is done pretty well despite the fact that you can eventually just buy the end-game material, it's still only sold at the master level so there's a bit of work to get to it and even then you can still overheat/freeze in the right conditions so it's never forgotten entirely.

Now, despite what is basically a novel in length that looks like I'm complaining, I actually had a TON of fun. The looting is, despite the issues, really fun. The loop I was hoping for was that I would establish a base, need resources, go looting/mining for them, bring them back and make some sort of factory using them to create the thing I wanted or that was needed for the quest. However, in actuality I went looting looking for resources to craft the thing I wanted, and instead, just found the thing I wanted straight up already made and allowed me to skip 5 crafting steps in the process. So all in all, I just think some attention needs to be brought to rebalancing the progression. Because, as it is right now, despite all the love and care into the custom recipes and unique world, the pack is really easy to just play through ignoring 90% of the effort put into it and then drop because you ran out of long-term goals to progress towards.

Added a TL:DR to the top because this ended up becoming quite the wall of text. I just cannot imagine the author would make all these modifications to recipes and targeted questlines focused on progression /automation and then intend for you to skip it all through exploration.

really fun pack though, I loved it I promise!