vnator

(The Ferret Business pack did shops before this, and did them better, but this modpack made the shop more accessible in the early game).

The modpack entirely revolves around the shop. You can raw resources like ingots and more refined items from both tech and magic mods for money. You can trade that money for ores (especially rarer ones like Ardite/Cobalt), difficult to obtain resources (mob drops, potions, food), or semi-creative items (Thaumcraft Nodes). It lets you exchange the effort you've put in one place to get progress/resources in another place so you can do more of what you enjoy and less of what you don't.

There's a "progression" mode which is an expert-lite that changes only a few recipes to get a chain of progression. It's not a proper expert pack that'll challenge you, but rather force you to go through all sorts of mods to get to the ones you want to. Rotarycraft is in the pack, but is locked behind Enderium whether you play on progression or normal, which is supposed to be a kitchen sink mode.

I came back to this modpack years later, and the progression and rotarycraft blocking is a little disappointing. But the shop still does its thing of helping you play more of what you want, and that's what's important. I should make a sequel soon. (and yup, I'm the modpack developer)

They kept the aesthetics and grandioseness of Project Ozone 2 and cranked it up to 11. But in doing so, they also added a lot of mods that really don't fit into the modpack and only add annoyances and frustration. Embers (debatably), Landcraft, and Lordcraft are big examples of this. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the last two were because their mod devs paid the pack maker to include them for that curseforge ad revenue.

The expertness of it is honestly great in the early game, and Ex Nihilo isn't that frustrating as ore drops are very common so you sifting gives you that dopamine rush when you rack up all of those ores early on. And the mods you use starting out are quite fun and interesting as well.

But it all falls apart once you get to the midgame. In Project Ozone 2, you had Logistics Pipes to help you automate much of the microcrafting, but in Ozone 3, all you have is Project Red. It's a nice mod and does plenty, but there are no auto crafting tables it works well with (There are EnderIO ones, but each individual one is incredibly expensive as opposed to LP's only costing wood and cobblestone and NOT requiring power). So you're stuck manually microcrafting just about everything, even into the late game since that's where AE2 is locked.

Combined with the fact much of the modpack felt like the developer just threw in as many big content mods without actually thinking if they'd fit (eg. shoehorning magic mods in a way that felt like they were for filler content rather than integrating well with the pack), I have to give Gameplay 2 stars.

Aesthetics were decent, though the custom shop coins looked pretty goofy. The shop also felt poorly thought out.

And with so many mods, the performance, stability, and startup time were atrocious. There's even a mod that adds PONG to the loading screen, to give you something to do, but that apparently DOUBLES the loading time. I'd rather browse my phone or step outside while waiting the 20-30 minutes needed for it to load.

All in all, this modpack was incredibly disappointing, especially with the lightning in the bottle that its predecessor Project Ozone 2 was. Ozone Lite, despite being much smaller in scale and incredibly generic in design and mechanics, was more fun than this.

The idea behind this modpack is that it's all about automating everything with Create. It's an idea that's been done well by Create: Above and Beyond, but there have been too few modpacks that have tried to do something similar in a way that is good. This modpack tries and gets far, but falters in a few ways.

My main gripe is that the way the tech tree/things you can automate grows much too quickly in the early game.

For example; ore automation. Mining is an absolute chore without vein miner or tools that make it much faster than base vanilla. Haephestus (aka Tinkers Construct for Fabric) is in the pack, but its pickaxes aren't particularly faster than vanilla ones in the early game. It still takes half an hour of mining to get the materials needed to build a single automation line. I just want to build the automation, not mine for so long! But good news, there's a way to automate ores! However, each ore requires a long and very complicated process to automate which is in no way beginner/early game friendly. If someone very experienced with Create were to go at it, I'm sure they'd be able to cobble together something even in the early game! However, I'm not that experienced with Create, so it's something that will require a lot of time, space, resources, and tools I haven't unlocked yet to set up. So now I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place; either spend my time doing boring tedious mining, or flounder around to set up automation for a single ore and inevitably fail because of the complexity and resources the setup requires.

I'll admit, it's only a single thing and the rest of the pack is probably wonderful. But it's also a MASSIVE pain point that I consider bad game design that robbed all the fun out of playing the pack. I know it's called MINEcraft, but modpacks don't have to stay true to the original minecraft formula/gameplay cycles. Just let me build my factories, start with a few easy challenges that SLOWLY lead up to more and harder challenges, like a narrow cone instead of a stupidly wide one. Don't overwhelm your players with too much to do so early on, and especially don't front-load the tedium. You want them invested in the modpack first before you start introducing challenges that have it.

It's a classic expert pack from an older era when expert packs were becoming the norm (Infinity Expert and Ozone 2 had only come out a while before this). The mod choice in the early and mid-game is unique, especially with Calculator which I haven't seen used much anywhere else.

The only issues are that the tedium can be a lot both early on, and after you set up UU matter replication. All of my runs stopped after that. In fact, I heard that the tedium continues to increase, thus my 4 starts for the gameplay. And that's AFTER I manually added Ore Excavator/Vein Miner to the modpack. I have no shame in doing so, it brought me more fun where it mattered.

Otherwise, there's plenty of clever setups you can make using the mods available (Calculator, Actually Additions, Tinkers 2, Super Circuit Maker, Extra Utilities 2, etc.) These clever setups and inter-mod compatibility is what really defines expert modpacks imo.

Also, stability is so-so, but that's because it's on Minecraft 1.10 than because of the mods themselves.

It's the new gold standard for modpack development. Changing recipes, adding new items, fluids, blocks, etc., and even creating custom events!

My only issue is that there is very little documentation to do anything more complex than changing recipes manually, but their Discord is very helpful. However, that's still dependent on people getting to you. While the volunteers there are very responsive, it still feels frustrating when you have to ask them for so many small things that should have been documented in the first place.

Still, it's way better than CraftTweaker for events because you don't have to worry about dealing with the arcane nature of ZenScript and the lack of IDE support for it. This is JavaScript, it's easy to log everything out and use an IDE to know what's going on with the code.