Meatballcraft is one of, if not the best modpack I have ever stumbled upon.

After 580hrs of gameplay and having reached nearly the end of chapter 6 of the quests, I am confident that this modpack is an all-time favourite for me.

The progression is almost perfectly paced with a fascinating story alongside it. Combat remains a challenge the whole way while giving a plethora of options to choose from that is actively being expanded upon. Of course, if you prefer one-shotting even early-end-game bosses, you can always use a shuriken! It also doesn't leave you as a glass cannon, and has many armours to choose from wherever you are in the progression.

You unlock powerful technology that helps automation and generating resources and power.
Among them is AE2 is not too far into the questline and is a cornerstone for any and all automation in the pack, which is necessary unless you plan on actively hurting yourself. It also forces you to learn decent cable management as it can get pretty messy.
You also unlock EMC pretty early on but it is far from overpowered. Only base resources found in vanilla dimensions are included, with some exceptions.

There is also a lot of QoL mods and features included, so you can really make your life easy, or you can make it a living hell by giving yourself challenges. One such challenge is playing it without EMC, which is doable but requires a lot of automation and planning.

Above all, the discord community is one of the best there is out there, hands down. Everyone is welcomed and there are no stupid questions. The developer (the great Sainagh) is very active in it and frequently asks for feedback on upcoming features or changes.

Also, thanks to some shady magicians posing as 'programmers', this pack can run on java 22!
It will however need a lot of ram (I allocate ~8Gb and have host a local server on my pc for myself) and will take a lot storage space because of all the exploration. However, there are some dimensions you will never visit again and so you can probabledelete those dimensions outright.