FabricoMachina

I want to first say this pack has an amazing premise, and the satisfaction from completing the pack is greater than what I've experienced from almost every other pack I've played. Having said that, the modpack has tons of problems that make it hard to recommend to anyone but massive skyblock fans and I certainly can't recommend this to beginners.

First is the fact Botania is legitimately a miserable experience in this pack. The grind for mana is a pain, because you simply don't have enough space to make the really interesting methods of mana generation. This isn't a knock against Botania as a whole, but the mod is not properly leveraged here beyond being a cool way to craft some stuff you need for other items. Botania being replaced with a different mod would've made the pack flow better.

The other main issue is that Thermal Expansion is so much better than the other options at the crossroads, that picking any of the other options first will lengthen your completion time considerably. I once tried this pack years ago when it was new, and dropped it because I picked Botania first and had no idea how massively I messed up by doing that. I just thought the pack's progression was like that. Whereas this time I picked Thermal Expansion first and had a vastly smoother time playing the pack.

AE also feels pointless being here. You both don't have enough space to make an ME system make sense and because it seems that Sky Stone is finite I was paranoid I wouldn't have enough to make a proper system. It wasn't a big deal regardless, because I had plenty of other compact ways to move things around. However AE is somewhat required due to a custom crafting recipe, and it was a real slog to make the 64k drive I needed (the Inscriber is effectively manual only, which sucks). I think the drive should've been given to the player so they could skip AE completely if they wanted to.

However the biggest reason I can't recommend this pack to beginners (despite the pack description claiming it's "accessible to new players") is because the quest book is not very helpful. The book fails to mention several really important things that would make a player's experience smoother (such as crafting Invar tools, upgrading machines, using enchanting, and using the mods included to their fullest). Thankfully I was very experienced with all the included mods and was able to make the pack easier than perhaps intended, however a beginner would not know these very important things. My advice to anyone playing this is to focus on getting enchanting and an Igneous Extruder as soon as possible, they are both a big help.

There are also some smaller complaints that don't ruin the pack, but added friction that doesn't need to be there. Small things such as the quest rewards often being weak, the obsidian at the bottom of the sphere being annoying and just padding the playtime (I literally never bothered to clear it), many blocks not being compressible for the heavy sieve, the cube's final layer being round (when it being flatter would've made making animal pens and Botania setups less frustrating), the Munchdew quest giving the player an Openblocks block placer but not instructions on how to use it (I never bothered to set it up, was too buggy for my tastes), BetterFPS caused several rendering issues so you might want to remove it, no way to see animal breeding cooldowns (I suggest adding WAWLA to the pack), nerfing food just making food frustrating, cows having a milk cooldown (for some reason), the Botania orechid being way worse than the ore lens, and the Empowerer not having a progress indicator (not a big deal with the machine normally, but this mod uses the block a fair amount).

For all my complaints in this review, I still had plenty of fun. The water strainers made dirt farming a breeze (compared to most other skyblock packs, where dirt is annoying), the game has a good selection of mods (with Thermal Expansion working amazingly in this pack), the sense of constantly wanting more space even when you get more is a great feeling, and I appreciated just how useful agriculture was for the pack's progression (many modpacks make farming and ranching a waste of time).

Overall I did have more fun than not, but the pack had many papercut issues that made it less enjoyable than a hypothetical sequel would be. I really hope someone does make another pack that leverages a lack of space, a couple have tried but tend to make space a non issue during the midgame. I think a pack similar to this but with better midgame pacing, less Botania, and some better quests would be a phenomenal pack to play.

I am only in the early game, but I am loving this pack so far.
This is a great Skyblock pack that does everything important right, and is a great introduction to people who want to learn GregTech in a less punishing environment.
The pack quests are all easy to follow and well designed, with modest but helpful rewards sprinkled throughout. The included QoL mods really cut down on the grind, with only cobble being a bit of a slog (nothing a good autoclicker can't solve). I also appreciate the pack having a clear focus and not including distraction inducing mods that don't contribute to the core experience, something many Skyblock packs struggle with.
The real highlight is the performance, being choosy with the mod list has paid off. This pack runs at a solid high framerate on my PC, something many newer modpacks struggle with.
My only complaints are minor (which should speak to the high quality of this pack) and are as follows:
Silkworms are supposedly able to go into the Vanilla Composter according to EMI, but they don't work.
The light level overlay used in this pack uses dark blue crosses, which are hard to see.
Some useful quest categories are at the bottom of the quest chapter list, these should probably be higher up due to how important these quests are.
I wish there was a Programmer Art friendly resource pack or two to make the textures work better with those who prefer using the old Minecraft textures, though this is an easy fix for the player.
That's really all I found less than perfect playing this pack, which is great to see. This pack is awesome, and one of my favorites I've played on newer versions of Minecraft.

First, I want to compliment the custom menu and loading screens, they look great and are the standout feature of this pack.
Sadly, everything else isn't very good. The performance is especially poor, with this modpack running worse than nearly every other modpack I've played. The performance is at its worst when the difficulty isn't on peaceful, making me suspect one of the mob adding mods is at fault. Also the loading takes much longer than other packs, this seems to be caused by Diagonal Walls (which is a superfluous mod considering the pack has many other mods that add wall/fence options).
JourneyMap feels like a poor choice of map mod, the mod has tons of bloat and runs worse than other map mods.
There are also way too many structures, which makes progression a joke (I got tons of food, iron, and tools very easily).
Overall this mod feels like a hodgepodge that just doesn't come together, and I can't recommend it.