So, here's the idea...
Early game: Use Tinker's Construct, but limit tool materials to non-smeltery resources, limiting the power of the tools while still giving them options. Either provide veinminer upgrades or make the veinminer upgrade relatively inexpensive, or simply provide tool forge early so the user can make a hammer and broad axe. This gives you the ability to harvest resources without having to grind for them endlessly.
The first metals the player will need are going to be copper and tin to make Bronze with. The question is how to provide them with these resources. Factory0-Resources is a wonderful concept, but you still have to build it, so unless I'm going to go the Factorio route, I doubt this is going to be effective. Then again, I suppose I could... make several tiers of ore miners, basic one that runs on burnables, then more advanced electric ones... provide the player with one to begin with? Or we could provide worldgen in the form of small ruins, setting a post-apocalyptic world for our players, which has small supplies of copper or tin in containers in the ruins? But then we have a problem with potentially excessive worldgen all over the place, that doesn't work out if we're using Factory0 to reduce worldgen and all the performance issues related to it. Open to ideas here.
With surface materials, the player can create the alloy furnace and coking oven from IE, however making treated wood is something that goes in Efab, or equivalent. I say Efab because it can easily handle crafting with both liquids and solids, but if that other more reliable mod can do that as well then we may see a swap. Either way, making that will require bronze, and that's going to limit power generation. One thing I really liked about Infitech2 is how the bronze age involved steam power, because that makes a lot of sense, but I'm not so sure that is going to be possible with how we are routing things. If anyone has an idea about this, I'm all ears. The first upgrade to the base miner uses bronze components, and runs faster than the previous, but still runs on fuel.
One major thing I'm going to be doing with this, however, is the remote heater unit that IE uses. Remember, it can basically translate power into fuel if adjacent to a block, and lets it run vanilla furnaces on IE power? I was thinking of using that as a bootstrap technique, and emphasizing it for most of the bronze age, preventing the need to obsolesce fuel-burning machines. Either that, or have the ability to run on either steam or fuel, but I'm kind of liking the ability to power fuel-powered machines, and IE already has a block to do it, so we may do that instead. So once you get power, you can run things off of electricity, but they're still the same machines you were using.
Iron is going to be a thing... I want to hold off on iron access until sometime late in the bronze age. I'm thinking that it may need to be a Blast Furnace recipe to smelt iron ore into iron. I mean, the melting point of Iron is higher than tin or copper, you can't just cook it over a fire, you have to build some kind of kiln or forge to smelt it. Blast Furnace must run on Charcoal, and Charcoal is made in a Coking Oven with wood, not a regular furnace. This gives you wood consumption built into the ore processing system that will never be able to be bypassed. Even once you get into more modern steel production, it will still require charcoal, not coal, for wood consumption throughout the player experience.
Iron components aren't going to be a really big thing in and of themselves, iron is just a step in the process for making various alloys that are then used. Steel will be the big advancement. Once you have steel production up and running, then you are able to fully explore IE's tech tree. Cloche's recipe will either be severely altered to be more expensive or just outright banned.
Thermal Expansion machines aren't available until after steel is obtained, because the thermal expansion machine block's recipe will be altered so that it requires steel components from IE in order to craft. Dynamos will require MV components from IE which require electrum and steel to craft.
Astral Sorcery and Thaumcraft are going to be the two primary magical mods in the pack, Botania won't even be included. Haven't decided yet how they dovetail into the tech progression, but I was wanting them integrated not just segregated as they usually are.
