Engineer’s Life 2 is a semi-expert pack with a large focus on less popular mods or mods that often get crowded out by the competition, especially Immersive Engineering which is arguably the core of the pack. There’s a strong highly custom early game, a lot of fun and weird mods to play around with, and then you get dumped into the various quest trees which are less goals and more just guidance; as far as I can tell there’s no end game here, you just explore the mods. And at the point where I realized a significant portion of my following playthrough would mostly just be doing seemingly untampered Immersive Engineering stuff, I gave up? Funnily enough, I looked online and saw a playthrough series from Mischief of Mice where he dropped the pack at the same point.

I think the choice to make this more of a semi-expert pack instead of a full expert pack was the inherent folly; when you imagine something like a pack called “Engineer’s Life”, you can probably imagine a lot of complicated stuff to put together basic machines, and for the early game at least it captures that essence with making you smoke your early clay parts on a campfire to put together a blast furnace to get ingots, but then it kind of just ends, and you’re just playing untouched Modded Minecraft. I’m not really feeling immersed in the experience anymore, and the mod selection present doesn’t give you the more immediately available factory building capabilities to satisfy automation nuts; Immersive Engineering is a slow burn, but there’s nothing here left to fill the gap.

I think the weird mod selection featuring stuff like Tetra, Project MMO, Vanilla Food Pantry and Serene Seasons adds a big novelty factor, but you’re going to potentially run into issues with just how many things this pack wants to “overhaul”. For example, I wanted to get into Productive Bees, and silk touch is really annoying to get because Tetra, so I wanted to make an advanced hive to counteract the need for that. Unfortunately, you can’t craft a regular campfire; you have to throw stuff on the ground and firestart it TFC style. That’s fine, I’ll craft a soul campfire which still has a recipe somehow, except 700 blocks in any direction from 0,0 in my nether was an endless BYG green forest sludge (pictured below) with no soul sand in sight, which is also apparently a common issue. Funnily enough the most frequent sources of frustration or confusion were the more popular mods or mods from more popular creators, like the unintuitiveness of YUNG’s Better Portals ||(note; you can pick up the reclaimers. do not be me or the people on reddit who also suffered this and warp back to the overworld 3000 blocks away from spawn)||, Quark Deepslate being here alongside Caves and Cliffs Deepslate for some reason, or this version of Tetra being quite old so you can’t see a lot of important info like your tool’s stability level.

RAM usage is initially excellent but the pack seems to leak a little bit and you will run into a lot of stutters (this pack is best run on Java 17 which will fix long GC pauses and some of the stuttering).

This pack is a 3 out of 5 mostly because I was genuinely enjoying myself up until the point where I decided to stop playing, which is a strong point in favour of the pack even if you personally prefer something that feels worth taking to the end. The rest of the modpack doesn’t really seem to be what I was hoping for, though.