Leaving early game fast ?

[Waisse]

I'm on a custom pack playing with 2 other friends, here's the modlist : http://pastebin.com/bix0yxjm

Obviously a quarry should be the first goal along with a good power production, what do you guys think ? Which mod should we focus on to get into mid/late game ?

Lastly, any good mod recommendation ?

 

[Photoloss]

Greatly depends on your definition of "lategame", which kind of capabilities do you want to unlock quickly? Because producing 20k iron/second won't help you beat the Gaia Guardian 2.0, nor will a T6 Blood Altar produce RF unless there's an addon for that.
You don't have TiCo, so you probably want a fast XP farm and/or an early tool set. My main suggestion if you're familiar with the mods would be to progress several in parallel: Start Botania as soon as you can or if passive decay is on as soon as you have a treefarm, it has great tools and baubles. Start Blood Magic as soon as you can automate slates and feed the altar whenever you run by, you basically want to reach T4 asap. Get RF going with a mix of TE and EnderIO, their machines upgrade quite well. Do Thaumcraft whenever you have some time to spare and aren't fed up with scanning/researching.
Meanwhile beeline for specific items and mechanics you're interested in, for example with ExtraUtil's Cursed Earth you can farm tons of mob drops, feed an MFR spawner and use that to synthesise materials from specific mobs (redstone+glowstone from witches, wither skulls, blaze rods, ender pearls, villagers for the blood altar if it isn't T4 yet)
For storage definitely use drawers and AE.
If you don't mind ruining the overworld with a quarry you can easily power it by pumping lava from the nether, or with a tree/biofuel farm.

 

[Azzanine]

Progressive Automation lets you automate mining pretty early. The mod looks tacky and it gets out classed by most tech mods, but wood and stone level farms have the ability to get you out of the early game faster.

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[lenscas]

Progressive Automation lets you automate mining pretty early. The mod looks tacky and it gets out classed by most tech mods, but wood and stone level farms have the ability to get you out of the early game faster.

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Unless I am missing something about the miner from progressive automation isn't it kind of pointless? By default it digs a one by one hole to bedrock just like mining well but also needs the appropriate tools and doesn't mine diamond unless you upgrade it all the way to iron.
Now, I know you can upgrade its range but that costs 1 redstone per block and I believe 8 (might be wrong on that as it is a while since I used it) of the same material as its level.
The tools also gain damage on their durability and thus need to be replaced every so often thus in summary:
You either have a machine that can only mine things you can mine with a stone pickaxe, as a result it won't be possible to upgrade it with the materials it mined as it can't mine redstone. However other then that the upgrades are relative cheap. The machine also needs a lot of maintenance due to tools breaking and needing to be replaced.
Or you go up to iron in that case
You get a machine that can't be fully automated and although it can in theory upgrade itself with the items it gathers the needed upgrades are a lot more expensive. The cost at keeping it running also increases (due to it needing an iron pickaxe if you want to take full advantage of it).

Where as with an mining well from buildcraft you can also rather easily mine a 1 by 1 hole, doesn't need to consume tools and it may even be faster if you give it enough power (never tested that). I am also not certain about the costs of the 2 machines.

Note that I am not trying to bash it or anything, this is just my view on that machine and I am interested to know if there is something I am over looking.

 

[Azzanine]

I will say it's mining definitely not great, but it's pre BC quarry mining. If you know how to tech fast Progressive Automation falls flat.

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[Inaeo]

I've considered adding ProgAuto to my pack if only for the early game tree farm. I hate playing lumberjack, so automating lumber production is a high priority for me. If you were to use this with Botania, you could easily set up Endoflames to provide enough mana to work your way through.

So far as the mining goes, it is definitely more hands-on than a BC Quarry, but it's a decent option for a starter setup, as well as a second quarry option for more targeted resources (for example, place it inside an Extreme Hills biome for Emeralds). Once you have enough resources to obsolete it, it's already served its purpose, and now it's one more engineering project to fully automate when you have time.

 

[Azzanine]

The only advantage to ProgAuto is that you can technically automine at day one with little spelunking. Of course spelunking or even branch mining ends up much quicker and only marginally less safe. The machines are cheap enough to place In rows despite their poor range. And the tree farm can assist with fuel for the things. It's not going to net you diamonds it can get you some good early iron though.
The mod even has some cheapish mob farms.
Shame it looks so tacky, I feel like maybe making a texture pack for it.

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[Waisse]

Made an MFR treefarm to power my RFTools quarry. Now I just need to step up my power production and I'll be good. I'm also working on mana production with gourma fed bread.