# It’s GregTech without the Greg

*please note that this review is made while I’m in midgame – I have not finished the pack yet*

If you’re unfamiliar with what that exactly means: it’s GregTech without all the tedium, nanocrafting (as I’ve come to call it) and overall labor that goes into it. It’s not New Horizons, which you shouldn’t even think about finishing, nor is it Omni/Nomi/Monifactory, which streamlines the torture of GregTech. It’s something else.

StaTech Industries removes the “Greg” from the “Tech” completely, creating a much friendlier and approachable version of a factory-sim. It’s still extremely complex, having multiple tiers, advanced processing lines, a deep, deep quest book and a lot of mechanics that are almost the same as in GregTech. If you’re familiar with the distinction between rougelikes and rougelites, it’s kinda exactly like that – it’s a Greglite, not a Greglike.

But all the recipes are a bit simpler, the machines are easier to get, nothing explodes in your face, there aren’t a million byproducts to every recipe and every single processing chain is about ten times faster by default. For me, this is awesome – GregTech has always been extremely overwhelming and way too punishing for me, especially with the prices of new machines and the time it took to get to the “meat” of the pack (optimizing and setting up production lines).

The downside is, of course, that the meat isn’t as well seasoned as in GregTech. Challenge invites satisfaction (yes, I did quote Hamilton, what are you gonna do about it?) – and less challenge brings a little less of it. There are points in the pack where I felt like automation could be skipped completely by someone with enough grit, which feels like a cardinal sin of a factory modpack. I also missed some of the parts of GregTech, namely the advanced ore processing and extraction and a few of the more complex crafting chains.

The biggest flaw of the progression has been, at least to me, a very weird split of unlocking AE2 in half. You get a bunch of cables and interfaces first and only unlock the storage a siginificant amount of time later. Since the pack already has an early-game storage solution, this feels needlessly convoluted and misleading (and it’s the star taken off from gameplay).

A big benefit over GregTech is also that the pack is beautiful and much more stable. All the textures are from Modern Industrialization and there are a bunch of industrial-style deco mods in the pack as well – not to mention a bunch of really cool multiblocks that take away from the “magic box tech pack” feeling a lot.

Overall, a huge recommendation for people who always felt like they would love GregTech, but felt overwhelmed by it, as well as for anybody who fees like giving factory modpacks a shot.

Time to complete: ~200 hours

StaTech Industry is basically just Modern Industrialization, plus some QoL mods, plus some weird extra mods added on to the side. Generally speaking, whether or not you like this pack will depend on whether or not you like Modern Industrialization.

For me, this meant it was a bit of a miss. I was intrigued by the idea of a modern-GregTech-but-different mod in Modern Industrialization, but I found the way that it handled overclocking to be very frustrating. I’m not familiar enough with MI to know if any substantial changes were made to the recipes in this pack, but it seemed like many of the recipes were probably default. The quest book primarily walks you through MI progression.

In addition to MI, there are some QoL mods included, such as Applied Energistics. Unfortunately the way MI’s overclocking works, and the fact that most crafts required assembling in a machine rather than a crafting table, meant that trying to do any autocrafting via AE was more-or-less a nightmare.

The progression of the pack inexplicably uses Create for the first chapter and then more-or-less just leaves it behind immediately afterwards. This felt like a rather weird choice; I think it would have been better to just omit Create altogether, or to integrate it more in the pack’s progression.

Finally, there were a handful of mods included that just felt out-of-place, or tacked on for no particular reason. These were generally not integrated into progression in any meaningful way, and served more as a distraction than having any useful purpose.

Time to beat: ~330h with a moderate amount of building but progressing relative quickly.

The first 5 chapters can be progressed through at quite a reasonable rate and for me were definitely the most enjoyable parts of the pack. Once you reach the final chapter, material costs suddenly shoot up and it becomes a bit of a grind to reach the end – you’ll either need to keep upgrading all your existing infrastructure, or do what I did and just AFK a lot…

Generally, the gameplay is very enjoyable, although my only real gripe is the MI overclocking/efficiency system which I have to say I’m not a huge fan of when it is the only way to speed up machines. Essentially, there is only one version of each machine (unlike GT where you can craft LV/MV/HV macerators, for example), and these can be sped up by repeatedly crafting the same recipe, which increases their efficiency, which overclocks the machine allowing it to draw more power and run faster. You can increase the maximum overclocking of a machine by adding upgrades, however this only increases the maximum speed that can be reached, and there is (as far as I can tell) no way to increase the base process speed. So, if you have a recipe that takes 2 minutes, you can throw as many overclockers as you want at it, but the first craft will still take 2 minutes to complete, and if you want it to run at say, 2s / craft, you’d have to leave it running for quite a while to reach that efficiency, and if for whatever reason it cannot continue crafting (run out of power / no input item / output full), you lose all that efficiency and you’re back to square one, which can be frustrating. This system pushes you to have one machine dedicated for every recipe, and you’ll want to have essentially every component being generated passively, as opposed to doing any on demand crafting. This has the knock on consequence of severely nerfing the effectiveness of AE2 autocrafting with machines, so you do have to approach this pack differently to a lot of other modpacks and can’t rely on AE2 as heavily.

I usually stay away from GregTech 5+ modpacks because they tend to be extremely tedious and boring. Not hard or complex, just boring. But in StaTech everything is just-enough. Access to MI quarry early is very nice, quest book is detailed and is enough to learn unfamiliar mods without googling. You are not forced to go deep into Create. Space exploration can be done in a few hours and never touched again.

I recommend adding ftb ultimine or similar because provided alternatives are not that good.

Also, I think machine sounds should be off by default.

Unlike other commenters, this is not a greg pack, not even close. But, it is a very neat, very fun little pack to play around with, with friends. Tech mods are plentiful and the quests are very helpful in learning what they do, and how they work. The magic mods added do add a dash of color, but with the restraint of fabric, there’s not much that can be done with them. Overall gameplay was pretty neat, exploration was fun to mess around, but without the recipes bound together, it wasn’t too much beyond that.

I was surprised how easily everything fit together, the quest book is the best I’ve seen.

You can hop in and not have any idea of what you’re doing, I’ve had to take a break because I’m still learning about everything, it can get overwhelming, but I’ve never felt like it was unfair.

I wish it had default ore gen, as preposterous as it sounds but I think its alright, i just dont like wondering around to find one type of ore.

Yet even with that gripe, i cant find another modpack that rivals how carefully and lovingly this was crafted, its insane. Everyone needs to at least take a look at this pack, trust me. You’ll get sucked in.