moondog

currently at the end of chapter 3, so this review reflects my experience up until then.

meatballcraft is a very "experimental" modpack, and completely builds 70% of its progression out of contenttweaker, custom multiblocks, and custom structures. this virtue alone makes mbc a completely unique experience in its own right -- even if you've played most of the mods in the pack, you have simply not played meatballcraft.

mbc builds its progression on top of incredibly in-depth quest worldbuilding, and experiments with a bunch of very weird/esoteric progression concepts. i think the uniqueness of this pack's progression is the main appeal: most modpacks are pretty homogenous in terms of content, so the prospect of a pack that blends its own creative and silly progression in-between everything is quite exciting.

however, while this pack is very experimental, it's in a way that often feels like it shoots in the dark. for every brilliantly unique and fun problem the pack offers me, it mixes in a problem that is incredibly grindy and uninteresting, so it's like a constant rollercoaster of "very fun problem" and "tragic grind." it's the modpack equivalent of chasing the dragon, i want to experiment and solve all the cool infrastructure and manufacturing problems and play with the fun toys the pack gives me, but i have to put myself through tedious grinds just to get to it.

several imprecise things that i liked:

• i like a lot of the automation/passive/subnet gameplay
• i like how early AE2 and void worlds are
• i like how the questbook is very helpful at leading me through mods i hadn't touched before
• master spells are so fun. favorite modpack concept ever. absolute highlight of the pack being experimental
• first modpack in 10 years to finally make me care enough to learn how to do forestry bees
• furnace dimension

several precise things that annoyed me:

• warning the player that switching dimensions too frequently will cause severe lagspikes is good to know! but then there's abyssalcraft, which is all nested dimensions, so the modpack actively encourages you to spent several minutes waiting for dimensions to load whenever you need to get to omothol. please put the advanced dislocator in chapter 2
• so many times i have been climbing through a crafting chain, only to think that i'm done, and then find that one item (that i assumed i had/seemed easy to get) was actually a different item altogether that's extremely painful to get. for example, the renewable recipe for ice crystal looks simple, so you spend time getting everything else and then right when you're done, sike! the two ice blocks were actually two perpetual ice blocks, you fool, you utter buffoon. this sounds petty, but this kind of crafting recipe frustration happened to me at least a dozen times in this pack. it's a very oddly frequent phenomenon that feels like trolling every time, but not in a way that's fun for me
• i think the emphasis on dimensions and exploring is really cool, but i play modpacks for overt engineering problems, and something in my brain begins to crumble when i'm asked to spend several minutes finding the last "1 of 8 random structures" on this moon, or "go find a frost (rare overworld mob) and put it in a soul vial". like, idk, i think exploring is cool, but with how rare some things are, it's sometimes like playing a slot machine that's constantly filling up space on my harddrive
• chapter 2's progression is a little sad, and basically just says "ok, every magic mod is now unlocked" and expects you to make a little progress in all of them, and they're not particularly changed/different. this would be less bad if some magic mods were staged later in progression (or if there were less of them), because it's definitely the least "meatballcraft" part of the pack.
• don't really know why the extended pattern processing terminal is locked so late in progression, esp considering its just nice qol to avoid packagedauto for a few recipes
• locking the ultimate warp cleanser behind abyssalcraft sounds great, until you find out that you passively gain 500 points of warp when speedrunning abyssalcraft's progression, and so there's a good amount of time in this pack that you simply have to suffer at max warp. which would be more fine if you also didn't have to do significant thaumcraft progression and make 3 custom multiblocks just to get the warp cleanser
• i think the bee stargate is really cool as an option for skipping space, but the questbook claims you have to make a space station regardless, so its like, idk, does it actually skip space if space is required anyways? i may have misunderstood this, though
• several of my personal gripes are less to do with how meatballcraft frames things and more with how my least favorite parts of some mods are just unchanged. off the top of my head, these would be early ender io (please man i dont wanna mow the lawn and collect hedge trimmings to make green gamer dye), abyssalcraft (just a grindy uninteresting headache especially after you've done it once), and gaia 4 (i tried looking up a video on how to do this fight and i found a german youtuber who cheated in and used 6 charm of life IIs, just to beat the fight with the recommended gear)

in spite of all of this, i do think the modpack is definitely worth checking out for anyone interested. i think folks less burnt out of mods than i am will enjoy it, especially since the uniqueness of the pack does a very good job at making it feel distinct to play. just be warned that it is very experimental, both in good ways, but also in ways that will make you want to cheat in an item every so often, and if you ever get that urge, you should take a break and come back later. unless it's abyssalcraft. then cheat that shit in immediately. its a singleplayer game nobody's stopping ya man. ok you could play it in multiplayer too, but if you've read this far, then you're definitely playing in singleplayer. i know your kind

tldr: experimental pack that offers a lot of fun problems, but held back by a lot of frustrating design points that haven't been cleaned up yet. in the first few chapters, the largest ones i experienced were: rarer structures should be more common, advanced dislocator should be ch2, gaia 4 should be optional, and add options to skip abyssalcraft