Ya know, I've been getting a vibe now, and I may well be wrong, but I figure it's about time I say it.
From what I can tell, karmachanger, you seem to have one very specific way you want every single person to play the pack, and if people start doing otherwise, you change recipes and nerf the crab out of the other ways as much as you can get away with so every single person who plays your pack plays it as close to the way you want it played as possible. I don't intend to offend, but this is how I see it. And honestly, it bugs the heck out of me that unless someone knows your exact stance on early-game hydration (and knows exactly how to do everything and all the recipe changes), they'll either die or have a terrible time trying to get hydration running.
The two biggest issues for me are all the recipe changes and the tedium. I've poked through NEI a version or few back, and if unless you've made massive changes, there's no way I'd be willing to put so much time into a lot of the mid-tier recipes. And not only that, I've used a few of the modpacks before, and all the changed recipes have thrown me for a loop. Most notably is the TiC seared faucet and casting table needing regular bricks. Every other recipe for seared whathaveyous uses seared bricks, and there's no indication that those two would need regular bricks. So I outright stopped for awhile when I saw that I couldn't make them. And it's been like that again and again. There've been times I go to make what used to be a simple recipe, and all of a sudden I need lumps of Galgadorian metal to get something going.
And then comes the tedium. I understand you want a slow pace. I get that. But at the same time, I'm only able to play small chunks at a time because when I see all the hoops I have to jump through to get what should be something simple, or how I need stacks upon stacks of iron just to get through one part of a quest, I just put the pack down like, "No," because I simply don't want to spend all my time grinding for the tiniest little thing that I'll have to spend more time on to get the materials to even be able to get to use, much less the infrastructure to sustain the use of it (and me rushing outside every five minutes to chop down a tree for the charcoal I need, or running out to a spire I've not been to to get more ores is not infrastructure).
In short, I've given up on this pack because it's gone from fun to an absolute grindfest where I'm stuck at my base all the time trying to support myself. And that's actually kind of sad, because I was really getting into it. I used to be like, "Holy balls, this pack is awesome, I can't wait to see where it goes. I bet all those planets have all sorts of cool things to do and I'll go back to each one again and again for all the stuff." But I'll never know because it's so tedious just to get myself comfortably set up that there's no way I can progress. And that's a shame.
