as a mod suggestion: keep your eyes on inductive automation 1 or 2. (
manual first version,
link github second version). It is a bit grindier then most mods (and to be honest the fact that it has its own power system doesn't help either). However this mods loves its byproducts when crafting anything and even when making power you can expect byproducts. This means that for a pack dev you have a lot more options to do cross mod interactions and as a player gives a lot more options to get stuff.
Another thing that you may want to look for is to disable the usual recipes/ways to get certain resources and thus force people to find other ways.
Blaze rods in the infinity modpack are a great example of where you could do this. The usual way to get them is by killing blazes but there are some other ways.
One way is provided using thermal expansion and IC2
First we take some redstone and we melt this. (thermal expansion or any other mod that can melt redstone)
We then combine the molten redstone and glowstone to produce blaze powder (thermal expansion)
5 blazepowder can be turned into 1 blaze rods thanks to ic2
(If this method causes an overflow of redstone compared to glowstone, using witcher you can make 2 glowstone using 1 blazepowder. Oh, look for as long as we have redstone we can make glowstone thus solving that "problem" and throwing yet another mod in the mix)
Now, of course we can stop here and call it a day or we can go further and look into alternative ways to get redstone and/or glowstone. Witches come to mind, which means that if we have a mod that let us create spawners.....
Of course, this can quickly become grindy if you go too deep in the rabbit hole (I think that just making it harder/impossible to farm blazes for their rods is deep enough) but even if you go to far, at least the player needs to actually use some knowledge about the mods he is using, especially so as we didn't change any crafting recipes. (Unless you count killing blazes to get their rods as a crafting recipe).
Another thing about cross mod recipes. Sometimes you don't want that. Lets say you have 2 methods of creating steel.
Railcraft's method and because I like inductive automation lets have that one as well.
Now, we all know railcraft's method. It is cheap to setup but takes a ton of charcoal and is also very slow.
Meanwhile Inductive automation's method is a lot more expensive, needing lava procesed coal and a good bit of energy just for the process itself.
However, the nice thing about IA's machines is that they can run at 1 operation per tick and as IA's steel creating crafts 2 steel at a time we can make a machine that produces 2 steel per tick.
Now, I as a player have a choice to make. Go with the cheap railcraft option and get steel eventually, go with the more expensive IA's option or even start with railcraft and later on switch.
You as pack dev can defiantly influence my choice and making me go with the third option is probably the best because if you do that suddenly both options have value to me, no cross mod recipes needed.
On the other hand, if I decided to go with only 1 way to create steel the other option may as well not have existed or even worse it allows me to make a wrong decision and lets be honest no one likes to be wrong.
(Don't you like it when what was supposed to be a simple post about a single mod that you likes ends up as a giant post......
. Oh, if you feel mean, just install the mod
grue and tell no one about it. )
