lerariemann

...across multiple worlds and servers with a great many fun people :3 got the ATM Star twice and currently in the very last stages before the GregStar, which i wanted to complete for a while :3

The main quest line of the star, which is probably what most people focus on, may be a little janky and a little annoying at places (looks at you blood magic's foreman's key) but it's compensated by the fact you can do several things at once - especially if you don't just rush progression to the star but do cute things to the side, you won't get frustrated or bored until you ran out of things to do (which in this pack can be a very long time, look at me xD).

Here's my personal favourite things about the pack:

• Sheer breadth of it. In all the time i played it i always had something to do, there always is more to learn and explore and see. Tech, sure, magic, sure, but the little things too - for example the amount of different mobs it has is astounding, and we're making a zoo for all of them :3 Also to me (a relatively new player in modded) it served as a good introduction to the very existence of oh so many mods!

• Related to the previous one: decoration mods! It has a lot without being overwhelming and it works rly well together for cute builds! My faves are handcrafted and dyenamics. Also wood types! I like that you can just use the alchemy table to get whatever log you want, rly good for making specific palettes (though it could use a search function but that's a question to the dev of blue skies).

• Not sure what trick it is they employ or if modern MC is just like that, but in all the crashes and freezes i had with this modpack (a lot, see below) i never ever lost any progress! like, not even a single bit! i find it fascinating! and they even included periodic backups by default in case your world corrupts!

• Controversial take here, but, Gregtech! This was my introduction to it and i'd say, with the amazing work that went into bees and generally unlimited resources and power at your disposal this becomes way less grindy than i expected it to be - still took me weeks of long playsessions to get to UHV, sure, but setting that automation up was mostly fun - the only point i found myself waiting to accumulate resources was with europium in ZPM and at this point, well, the rest of the pack exists! you can go build something! or finish the star! (that's one of the reasons i recommend starting gregtech BEFORE the star, doing them in parallel, so you can distract from one into another if it gets frustrating. the power options ATM provides scale quite well, you don't need creative power before ZPM/UV).

Most of the frustrations I had are such questions to individual mods and via that to the kitchen sink genre in general; most of them could probably be solved by better integration, but ATM is not that kind of modpack - past the main questline of the Star every mod is just what it is without much changes. Over the years I keep thinking I need to find a modpack that's woven more tightly in that regard, but these are rare gems overall! Still here's some things I want to point out:

• The modpack has thirty-three dimensions (i counted! made a hub for all of them in one of the worlds) but there's little incentive to explore most of them past that individual mod's progression. Ad Astra is especially notorious here (having little variety to explore on its own which is expected from a mod about inhospitable planets) - other modpacks might add better ores to the Moon etc. but here it just stands to the side as everything else does. Twilight Forest and Blue Skies have way more cute things to find but also the frustration of the no fly zone and Blue Skies' tool limitations; the no fly zone is intended to make cheesing bosses harder but it honestly only matters for the Ur-Ghast; for long distance movement it can be bypassed with ars spells; but then building becomes a pain, and that's a shame, because these dimensions are pretty!

• Related to the previous one, the mining dim and the Beyond. They are specifically intended for building but they are not pretty >< subjective opinion, yes, but the ATM team's choice of colours is so weird! Red fog and dry grass of the mining dim, the eternally black sky of the Beyond with the sun and clouds still in it, all of that feels uncanny and dead. They are a lawn baser's dream, sure, but i'm here actively trying to have aesthetics around my machinery without lagging too much from the world around! Ended up changing it with a datapack. Out of the box i'd say the best dimension for that kind of building would be Alfheim (pretty, with relatively few things going on lagwise) but it's gated behind all of Botania... Chulak and Lantea would come second.

• Lag, in general, is a weird beast here. My game was prone to freeze the PC and crash every now and then, especially if run with other programs on the computer open; I found Journeymap to be the biggest offender here and it got much better after eliminating it which, hello, why do we have two different minimap mods here in the first place? Here i should also mention the existence of ATM9 No Frills, a lighter edition of this that runs much smoother - I had a bit of experience in it, not enough to judge how much the breadth is reduced in important to me aspects, but i still find it cool as hell that the devs do this! (they recently gave ATM10 the same treatment too with ATM10 Lite which is rad)

• The power curve gets a bit weird, if you play by the quests you can and are incentivised to become a nigh unkillable god with nigh unlimited resources in midgame and then lategame is a mix of specific automation challenges, doing a bite of everything, and big number go poof (looks at you 1.5 million nether stars). It's a vibe, sure, is it my vibe? It used to be, but i think i'm slowly drifting away from it! What's the fun of having two dozen bosses if half of them can be killed in seconds and another third become punching bags while you tank all the damage? (That's why we limited ourselves to allthemodium equipment our latest run and i'd say we could've even stopped before that, though having unbreakable things is nice). On the scale of 0 for nothing 10 for literal creative mode this pack can easily shoot you into 7-8-9 way before endgame and i think it's just past my personal sweetspot.

• The entire Alchemistry/Chemlib mod looks like a viable alternative for many things, but when you actually want to automate it, it's janky, slow, and breaks your setups when it feels like it (compactors on locking mode occasionally stop working at i think world reload, and the amount of times my entire bee processing line stopped because of it is too painful to recite - if you use alchemistly, plan your setups for this!). Some recipe integration with some other mod of better machines could have been made to avoid this problem, but see above, ATM is not this kind of pack.

• FTB chunkloading is restricted to 25 chunks and all other options for it are disabled. Awesome for servers, but a bit frustrating in SP (though it's partially my fault for never getting around to seeing how to change that in configs). The team includes server files separately from SP files, why not have diverging configs between the two?

Overall, I think I'd enjoy most of the content of this pack in a setting where that direction is the main focus (tech / magic / cozy building / bosses / dimensions and exploration / etc.) - which is why the next pack i play after this will probably not be a kitchen sink - but with the kitchen-sinkness of it given, this is a very good and entertaining pack, even if challenging to run on not high-end hardware mode occasionally stop working at i think world reload, and the amount of times my entire bee processing line stopped because of it is too painful to recite - if you use alchemistry, plan your setups for unlocked compactors!). Some recipe integration with some other mod of better machines could have been made to avoid this problem, but see above, ATM is not this kind of pack.

• FTB chunkloading is restricted to 25 chunks and all other options for it are disabled. Awesome for servers, but a bit frustrating in SP (though it's partially my fault for never getting around to seeing how to change that in configs). The team includes server files separately from SP files, why not have diverging configs between the two?

Overall, I think I'd enjoy most of the content of this pack in a setting where that direction is the main focus (tech / magic / cozy building / bosses / dimensions and exploration / etc.) - which is why the next pack i play after this will probably not be a kitchen sink - but with the kitchen-sinkness of it given, this is a very good and entertaining pack, even if challenging to run on not high-end hardware.