smart-fella

Despite the massive overhauls to Vanilla such as removing or reworking entire portions of the game as well as many great opinionated changes, it doesn't feel as far away from Vanilla as I would've liked?

Even though the pack cuts out the End entirely, it feels more like cutting out a tertiary part of the game rather than a radical overhaul, which is fine, but it feels like the problem that the presence that the End caused has been passed down to the Nether rather than being extracted entirely. A significant portion of content in the pack is specifically Nether Fortress gated; tool progression in the overworld ends quickly where four whole end game tool materials and a significant portion of Create are locked behind the Blaze Burner while the five special weapons are locked behind Wither Bones. Not only is the Nether itself largely untouched save for a new Piglin variant and a tower structure that seems to just be there to mess with your ability to locate the Fortress with Exopearls, if you rush to the Nether, you will pretty much run into the same issue as Vanilla players do with rushing to the End where your motivation to continue playing quickly dries up.

The underground has new mobs, new mob behaviors, but also a pretty severe inventory issue. There's several new ores, new not ores, new create blocks that can be milled into ores, new mob drops, new rare mob drops, vases that drop random things. To compensate for this, you get early access to Supplementaries sacks which are basically Mini Shulkers, but you get so many things that even that doesnt feel like thats enough, and its not a superior solution to a backpack mod in any way outside of the fact that Sacks feel more vanilla.

The choices of mods to include also feels kind of scattershot; Oreganized's Lead struggles to justify its inclusion and I still don't know how to actually use the Silver Mirror. The pack is very reserved in its choice of biome mods and the Nether has none which is a shame because I love collecting weird new building blocks from the Nether in other packs that had mods like Infernal Expansion. There is a surprisingly massive selection of more niche and smaller mods to hone the vanilla homesteading experience most of which I will probably never get to touch because the pack's main way of communicating their existence to you is having them just sit around in EMI; the presence of Advancements in this regard are not adequate beyond progression.

Performance is kind of middling for a Vanilla+ pack; RAM requirements are on par for a standard modded experience of this scope, framerates are kind of low and the pack has a surprising issue with particle spam such as with the underground unstable rocks simeltaneously exploding and tanking your fps with ten thousand block break particles being spawned in at once (and this is not the only instance of something like this in the pack).

What this pack does in absolute terms is make a variety of highly opinionated changes around the game; you'll notice stuff like Cooked Fish and Cooked Salmon being merged into Cooked Fish, which is a change I appreciate because I'm a weird nerd, but what the modpack doesn't do is provide an immediate radical agenda like Musketeer with its choice to remove both the End and the Nether, nor does it carve out a niche like the Beta 1.7.3 mods do. And without a massive content dump to compensate, I'm left with an experience that's essentially parallel to Vanilla where everything is slightly different but not enough to keep me playing or for me to want to talk other people into playing it with me.

I was considering leaving a lower star score for this pack because of how weak the late game is, but it made me hopelessly obsessed with Create which I feel probably meant it did it's job at least in some way.

The backrooms are a perfectly executed and absolutely fantastic setting in this pack. The environment is generally very chill so it's a lot of fun to find new rooms, figure out where you want to set up shop, and it lets the few unsettling parts it has hit a lot harder.

This is one of the most fine tuned Create experiences I've seen, and it accomplishes this with basically a single add-on; the presence of Create Low-Heated allows the pack to make actively heated Steam Engines the second source of stress generation you get after Hand Cranks and in tandem with Create 6's Chain Conveyors allows the Steam Boiler to be the core of your base that you get to gradually expand as you progress and it feels great.

The biggest flaw with the pack is that it feels like it doesn't have enough faith in it's Create experience; late into the pack you will be interacting with other mods a lot more that don't go together that well with Create. I stopped building out my automation somewhere halfway through Chapter 4 and at that point it became ferrying materials between various tech mod progression machines. The inclusion of Immersive Engineering is a massive negative after early game especially considering a particularly intrusive bug involving the Mixer interacting with Create pipes.

At some point it stops holding your hand and it feels like it expects a lot of previous knowledge about the mods involved, which gets especially rough with mods that have been updated and mods that have messed up quests associated. There is a quest in Chapter 5 that asks you to make the Osmium Compressor from Mekanism; it doesn't do anything, and the associated github issue has not been touched for months. I got kind of confused and exhausted at this point since it has been years since I last played with Mekanism.

Other notes;

• Late game eyes feel like afterthoughts; one is essentially "throw 1000 managlass into the alfheim portal" and the other is "summon dragons breath ten times at the Eidolon brazier and then break your mouse spam right clicking". The eyes in general could've been more involved to add more credence to the "industries" part of the pack name.
• Performance is great due to the low mod count and simple environment, although in singleplayer watch out for the potentially required Nether train chunkloading your base if you don't chunkload both ends and spiking your ram usage when you're exploring away from it.
• There are a handful of mods I didn't really get to explore fully; for those I think this pack might be better enjoyed with friends to divide the labor up. Some mods are included to help with that such as Simple Voice Chat and Simple Radio.