I don’t typically enjoy tech packs, but this is an exception. This pack made me get automation online and enjoy doing it. I spent about 193 hours in this pack.

Here are my thoughts!

Praise:

-Ambient sounds are so cool in this pack. Aesthetic is on point

-Thank god there isn’t a wire monster. Would’ve been very easy to market the pack to children and focus really bad horror mods for clickbait. Opting to not do this was a fantastic decision.

-Mod integration is very well done. To make progress in one mod, you need the others, which I appreciate

-The mods for the most part progress together and the scaling for what mods you get access to and when was really well done

-Almost no recipes are left untouched, and I love that. These mods are integrated super well with the environment

-I like that there are a so many different ways to do certain things. I got to design farms as I pleased and do whatever I felt necessary, with only some minor nudging in the quest book. Things like “it may be best to automate this process” or “do not progress further without some automation otherwise the next chapters will be hard” are really nice to have as someone that doesn’t play many tech packs and would’ve squeezed by with the minimum necessary resources. This pack pushed me out of my comfort zone in a lot of ways while not making it an unpleasant experience.

-Locking water wheels behind more of an expensive recipe + not buffing their stress units was a great way to prevent water wheel spam. This plus making copper blocks, pipes and tanks spawn in the rooms really pushes the player to get a steam engine online

-The pool rooms are cool as hell, love that the ability to get some more difficult to craft items like AE2 controllers and crafting terminals lowers the barrier to entry with the mod and may push players to explore it instead of sticking with create storage or drawers. Same for the cake eating flower from Botania. I wasn’t lucky enough to find it, but I like that it’s possible

-This pack’s version of the nether is incredibly creative, and portal linking being such a useful form of navigation was really fun. The nether never becomes irrelevant to progression the way it tends to in packs

Critique:

-Sculked mobs are a cool idea, wish they were executed better. Having them be so few and far between was a great decision, I wish they were more than retextured and buffed vanilla mobs

-Magma cubes can only be spawned by a bucket of magma being specifically placed down by the player. Deployers and dispensers don’t work. The only solution I was able to find was using auto-placers, which isn’t actually mentioned anywhere in the guides. I don’t know if this is intentional, but I feel it should be communicated or fixed so dispensers and deployers work as well

-I would like more Botania integrated into the main questline, or explained a bit more as an option in this pack. Maybe not more forced progression with it, because I know a lot of people dislike it, but I would love to see it shown off more here. You can get by with just using the endoflame if you’re patient enough, and given that the pack tackled water wheel spam pretty well, I’d like to see a solution to endoflame spam from them at some point.

-Need more clear communication about the Ender Chests and how they work. I had to do external research to figure out that they can be independently linked if you dye the bands on them. This probably isn’t an issue for people that know the mod already, but would be good for people that don’t (aka me)

-Not sure how I feel about the igneous extruder and the infinite resource mechanics in this pack. I think they’re okay for now and for progression reasons, but I’d like to see this part of the pack revisited to avoid the “mc block that just does stuff without any input” thing.

-Eidolon feels a little out of place in the later game since it is such a crazy challenge to automate the crucible in comparison to the other mods present. I would like to see the mod revisited or maybe replaced with Botania mechanics in some aspects

-GIVE THE SCULK TENDRILS AN ASSIGNED DESTRUCTION TOOL PLEEEEEASE

-Light blocks. Wish the devs would make it so they’re overridden by plants growing and deployers placing things, or include a disclaimer about them in the quest book. It took me quite awhile to figure out why some bamboo just wouldn’t grow, and why my deployers couldn’t place blocks on certain spots. Plus my elven gateway wouldn’t activate because of one being in the way. It’s not major, but it is super annoying.

-Chapter five was a bit of a let down. It went back to more conventional magic box tech mods which I don’t typically enjoy. This pack taught me I reeeeally don’t like Ender IO and Mekanism. Most of the quests at that point don’t have descriptions or guides, so I really struggled here as someone that was unfamiliar with almost every mod in play. It needs work, and doesn’t flow near as well as the previous chapters in my opinion. Plus, I feel like I’m just messing around in GUI after GUI, and making a million tables that just felt like reskins of each other. I believe chapter 5 is unfinished because of these things, so I’m a lot more willing to give leeway, but it was not as good as the rest of the pack.

Disclaimer: I attached photos of the pool rooms and nether. Keep in mind I’m running Complimentary Reimagined shaders, which I don’t believe come with the pack by default. They look nice, but they break the antiblock effect in the pool rooms. I recommend disabling shaders in the pool rooms as a result. They also break some stuff with the ‘overworld’ so disable them before going though your end portal. If you want to run shaders in the main backrooms level I’ve found no conflicts or issues so far. I added Create Better FPS and Entity Culling to my client to help with performance when running shaders

Almost everything is so well made, so well thought out, and beautiful. The ending stage drags on if you don’t start working on the Eyes early, but up until then, every chapter is well-paced, and each gate of progression felt amazing to break through.

I didn’t know Create very well, and this pack has made it one of my favourite mods. Not getting to use the tools I’m used to being so easy and available in other packs, having to rethink how I do factories – it was so much fun!

I had to learn KubeJS and make nine automatable recipes for items that weren’t pleasant to make in bulk, but beyond that, the recipes were reasonable, and I’m happy this was my first expert pack – even if I had no idea it was an expert pack until maybe the second chapter.

The secret chapter was my favourite part, but I won’t say any more about that.

What struck me the most was how the sculken mobs made me feel genuine fear. I haven’t felt afraid of Minecraft in *years*, and it was so refreshing to feel my heart pounding.

Even with its flaws, this is the best pack I’ve played yet, and I worry I won’t be able to enjoy packs that don’t stand up to it.

This modpack takes an incredibly unique spin on exploration/tech packs. I’m typically not a fan of “one block” tech mods like thermal series or ender io, but this mod blends them seamlessly with create to make a well rounded experience.

To get it out of the way, the visuals, atmosphere, and exploration of this pack is immaculate. Every new unique room we found was such a joy, and sometimes scary. (highly recommend using the MCVHC shader pack.) Exploring to find new resources never got old (though we did get lucky by having every renewable resource right by our base.)

The tech progression of this pack is really good. There are a few tedious aspects to it that prevent it from getting 5 stars, mainly the machine frame -> void chassis -> steel casing crafting tree getting old by the end of the pack. This pack fixes my biggest problem with Botania, mostly by skipping early game mana generation and letting you find a Kekimurus if you can brave the poolrooms. It also actually integrates Botania into the main progression in a way that makes sense.

I highly recommend playing this pack with a friend, as I imagine playing it solo could be pretty rough, but that goes for most modpacks. I played it with one friend, so your play time would likely be about double ours, which was 54 hours.

Overall, this is one of my favorite modpacks I’ve played since the classic era. It solves a lot of my gripes with tech packs, and properly integrates exploration into the tech progression. A solid 4.5/5, only brought down by some crafting recipes being a little much, and being disappointed in how little there is in the Nether/Infinite Library compared to the poolrooms, which I hope gets expanded on if this pack continues to get updates.

Liminal industries is aesthetically extremely strong. Each of the dimensions you have to go to are interesting and fun to explore, and while the poolrooms can get a bit repetitive, there is more than enough generation designed for the backrooms to make every journey away from your base unique and unsettling.

The tech progression itself is solid, but I wish it was more entangled with the setting. The first two chapters feel like they take advantage of the backrooms really well, but as the tech tree spreads out into all these different mods it feels like the cool, integrated elements like echo shard production and having to route items from your igneous extruders in different dimensions get drowned out by all the noise.

That being said, a modpack with the same progression but without Liminal Industries incredible setting would still be like a 6/10, and overall it is more than impressive enough to be a 5/5 in my book. Lastly, as others have already noted the late game is a bit bare.

Liminal Industries has a strong aethetic design, the generation of rooms is well dont, each room has design and care put into them, and it is very interesting to explore. I have put so much time exploring the different rooms and still find new secret passages and rooms.

The game performs well, other than a visual glitch (? its possibly intentional) that I’ve experienced where textures will have individual pixels horizontally stretch at the edges of the screen, that makes long sessions nauseating

(If it is intentional, I’ve found no way to turn it off)

The beginning progression of the game I’ve found enjoyable, but it quickly becomes reliant on the Create mod for all progression, with only small bits that require the use of the other tech & magic mods.

While I don’t mind the emptiness and lack of enemies overall, some people do find that boring. Hostile Mobs tend to only spawn in specific ‘sculked’ areas with exception to ravagers which I believe (can’t confirm) can spawn in unsculked areas

There are a few small glitches as well, like I discovered an exploit where if you use the soap item on a dyed cooler (which can be easily found around the backrooms) then it will duplicate all the items inside it

But overall its a very enjoyable experienced, I wouldn’t suggest trying to go through the progression, instead giving this modpack a go just to explore the world

I was considering leaving a lower star score for this pack because of how weak the late game is, but it made me hopelessly obsessed with Create which I feel probably meant it did it’s job at least in some way.

The backrooms are a perfectly executed and absolutely fantastic setting in this pack. The environment is generally very chill so it’s a lot of fun to find new rooms, figure out where you want to set up shop, and it lets the few unsettling parts it has hit a lot harder.

This is one of the most fine tuned Create experiences I’ve seen, and it accomplishes this with basically a single add-on; the presence of Create Low-Heated allows the pack to make actively heated Steam Engines the second source of stress generation you get after Hand Cranks and in tandem with Create 6’s Chain Conveyors allows the Steam Boiler to be the core of your base that you get to gradually expand as you progress and it feels great.

The biggest flaw with the pack is that it feels like it doesn’t have enough faith in it’s Create experience; late into the pack you will be interacting with other mods a lot more that don’t go together that well with Create. I stopped building out my automation somewhere halfway through Chapter 4 and at that point it became ferrying materials between various tech mod progression machines. The inclusion of Immersive Engineering is a massive negative after early game especially considering a particularly intrusive bug involving the Mixer interacting with Create pipes.

At some point it stops holding your hand and it feels like it expects a lot of previous knowledge about the mods involved, which gets especially rough with mods that have been updated and mods that have messed up quests associated. There is a quest in Chapter 5 that asks you to make the Osmium Compressor from Mekanism; it doesn’t do anything, and the associated github issue has not been touched for months. I got kind of confused and exhausted at this point since it has been years since I last played with Mekanism.

Other notes;

– Late game eyes feel like afterthoughts; one is essentially “throw 1000 managlass into the alfheim portal” and the other is “summon dragons breath ten times at the Eidolon brazier and then break your mouse spam right clicking”. The eyes in general could’ve been more involved to add more credence to the “industries” part of the pack name.

– Performance is great due to the low mod count and simple environment, although in singleplayer watch out for the potentially required Nether train chunkloading your base if you don’t chunkload both ends and spiking your ram usage when you’re exploring away from it.

– There are a handful of mods I didn’t really get to explore fully; for those I think this pack might be better enjoyed with friends to divide the labor up. Some mods are included to help with that such as Simple Voice Chat and Simple Radio.