metalman

it's a pretty standard kitchen sink. lots of little mods to do. the questlines guide you through a lot of the bigger content mods very well, but smaller ones like dyson cube project or roots have nothing.

the ATM star exists more for spectacle than challenge. it has lots of components that are incredibly difficult to automate, which is why there's an alternative recipe that can be accessed after making some the hard way. the open-ended nature of the ATM star was really fun, it feels like the epitome of kitchen sink packs. use whatever you want and however you want to make a big difficult item.

it's a standard experience. nothing too special other than the big questlines.

the pack feels like a good successor to Above & Beyond. just that though: good, not great

all the locational resources are done excellently, they were interesting to set up and gave an excuse for a big train network.

the tech chapters are relatively simple, with long production lines. the magic chapters are weird, with things like quark corundum automation or automated wither killing.

the chapter balancing is iffy. magic chapter 3 (out of 4) is easily the hardest one, with a convoluted system of multiple loops dependent on each other. this chapter is made significantly easier with AE2, but it's only unlocked after the chapter is finished. magic chapter 4 is hilariously easy by comparison, which was quite underwhelming.

many things in this pack are filled with needless waiting. so much waiting for no good reason. wait on trains, wait on corundum, wait on crop farms, wait on source time crystals, wait on PCBs, wait wait wait wait wait. the recipe costs at the end of the pack are exceedingly expensive and suggest you should multithread your factories, but that's horrid design in a pack centered around create. you have to choose between either building your complex factories again (really boring and unfun, plus you'll tank your TPS), or just wait.

the pack author in the discord straight up said players are expected to just wait for about 8 hours after they finish automation of one of the final challenges. do yourself a favor and poke around in the kubejs files to edit annoying recipes if you find them too frustrating (i suggest changing the obelisk crushing recipe and increasing flight orb liquid output).

but that feeling of finishing a factory, especially in this pack, is amazing. things get weird and fun, especially in the magic chapters. do yourself a HUGE favor and learn Integrated Dynamics, you are given it early on and it is an incredibly powerful tool with its readers/writers and all the logic programming. if you learn ID the pack will become easier and much more fun.

the scope of this pack is far too large, which worsens everything else about the pack.

balancing is absolutely abysmal. if you're not a mage then give up. mages get many different curios to boost their spell damage, and the pack provides a way to increase your curio slots, letting mages scale infinitely. every good armor set is a mage set. there is no reason to not be a spellcaster.

numbers overall are bad. the earlygame is enjoyable with some balanced fights, then it quickly falls into the usual RPG pack standard of "one-shot the boss or get one-shot" which isn't fun.

because of how much content there is, nothing is balanced or gated all too well. if you poke around in JEI you can very easily get super overpowered gear with minimal effort. enchanting is easy, combat is easy, everything is easy, until you hit bosses with specific resistances and infinite armor piercing (ignis, nightwarden, ender guardian).

the custom content is amazing, the shop and orbs are truly unique and make progression more enjoyable. but those aspects are nullified by how terrible everything is balanced after the earlygame. once you complete one or two paths, you have effectively played the entire pack and will now be repeating that for another 30 hours. there is nothing unique or interesting after the first dozen bosses.

the custom classes are also balanced incredibly poorly. some are giga OP and scale you to infinity (spellblade with its spell projectile duplication) while others have mechanics that are frustrating to work with and provide basically zero benefits (monk's super jump is tedious for zero reward, and meditation is only useful against bosses that can actually land hits, which is also when it becomes unusable cause you can't stand still).

it doesn't help that whenever the author updates the pack, there are 10 new memory leaks and 50 new bugs. i started on version 1.7.9 and the pack got updated to 1.8.2 as i was playing, the performance worsened immensely with almost every update, especially after 1.8. there were also a few bosses that did not function or just crashed my game and i had to cheat to continue progressing.

seriously, the performance was so bad that by the midgame i had to frequently restart my game entirely to purge memory leaks, even after i set up extensive garbage collection with java arguments and gave the pack 8-10gb of ram.

TL;DR
too much content, abysmal performance. let the author work on this for a few years. come back in 2030