Let me describe an early game scenario. This is the intended progression, and the quest book doesn’t tell you much of any of this:

Common occurance in any modpack. You need steel quite early, so how does one get steel in E6E? Via coke coal. Your best options are the induction smelter, or the Create mixer. The Create mixer uses less coke coal but requires superheating. The induction smelter takes RF which you may not have early on.

To get coke coal, you make a coke oven. To make a coke oven you have to, I kid you not – In-world lightning craft arcane stone, make multiple CONDUITS to get an Ars Nouveau enchanting crafter(A cooking pot requires a conduit to craft, wtf?), find a way to generate the source required for it, use the enchanting crafter to make sunmetal out of gold/silver, then lightning craft that to make a golden scarab, build an Atum 2 portal to go to another dimension and get a papyrus plant, use that to craft a petal apothecary(1 conduit per apothecary), use that to craft a pure daisy(1 conduit PER PURE DAISY), use that to get livingwood(which does not accept normal logs, only 1 special less common kind of log which is stated nowhere), make an Eidolon setup to get soul shards, make a blood altar(Needs another conduit lol also you can’t make a self sacrifice dagger until T3 altar), infuse the livingwood planks in a blood altar to get Eidolon polished wood, which can be used to make Create brass casings, which you need to make the mechanical crafters, to make the Create crushing wheel, so you can grind Netherrack into cinder flour which can finally be turned into coke bricks with a Create mixer, then a Create sequenced assembly, FINALLY giving you coke coal. Which… As you can guess, isn’t steel, you’re just part of the way there…

And if you think that process now has you all set up for even the next step – you haven’t even set up a Nature’s altar, Astral sorcery altar, Runic altar, Eidolon altar, birthing altar, ritual of the forest, occult ritual, mana infuser, so on and so on. There’s so many altars and infusers that the process to make that steel is just a microcosm of what’s to come.

We know E2E was a rock solid pack, it ran with the ‘Expert’ style that started in IE:E – and I think many would hope E6E would be more of that. After all, it’s of the same namesake.

That’s not really how E6E is, though. It’s trying to be unique and set itself apart from the standard ‘expert’ fare. Rather than separate lines of progression with the occasional overlap, magic and tech are deeply and forcefully combined in a relatively linear form of progression. On its own, that doesn’t sound so bad but the scale of that intertwining and use of several “altar” type crafts creates a pack where recipes have more micro-crafting than GTNH but without the consistency of GTNH’s (Screws, rods, etc). Recipes are highly arbitrary, and used as a gating mechanism or to overcomplicate the pack’s early/midgame.

It forces Pneumaticraft without alternatives, greatly overcomplicates the Create Sequenced Assembler recipes (4,500x times through to unlock the decent IE multi’s… Really?), pushes you into Blood Magic without being able to make a self sacrifice dagger, makes you progress into Eidolon which is an abandoned/unfinished mod, and much more tedium that just feels excessive.

Quests feel very unfinished and at times feel like they are leaving out quite a bit, and the non-expert E6 quests are included which do not account for the Expert progression chain. Major mods do not have quest series, and it feels a bit random which mods do/don’t. I have around 10K hours in modded Minecraft but still had an incredibly difficult time finding out what I was supposed to do next in a crafting chain, I easily spent ~20% of my gameplay staring at NEI, feeling burnt out, and not really wanting to progress due to it being kinda un-fun to get roadblocked constantly.

Despite all of my ranting, pretty much every single recipe in the game is changed – and if you like altar and Create style crafting then the sheer quantity of it makes for a decent auto-crafting challenge. There was clearly a ton of effort put into tweaking every last inch of progression to fit what the developers intended, and to make sure that items unlock when they wanted. But I feel like there was nobody around to ask “Why though?” on some of these decisions.

In short, E6E doesn’t feel like expert mode, it feel like extreme-spaghetti mode.

Some less relevant stuff:

That’s the core of the pack out of the way. But I find a good bit of polish lacking, Apotheosis does what Apotheosis does and can spawn mobs that randomly one-shot the player in very sudden ways.

Valhesia, Roguelike dungeons, Guns without Roses, and many other custom structures have their generation frequency quite high (Default values I assume? Come on guys) to the point that you can’t really stand anywhere without 2-3 custom structures in render distance at all times. It can be convenient in the early-game when running around looting, but everyone knows that the 30th time you see a custom structure it has lost its meaning and purpose.