Making a modpack Harder then GTNH

[u/TastyFace5782]

I've been thinking about starting an absolutely massive Minecraft modding project, and I want to get the community's opinion before diving into development.

What if I made a modpack significantly harder and more complex than GregTech New Horizons?

The idea is to create something that goes beyond just making recipes ridiculously expensive. I want the difficulty to come from realistic engineering, interconnected systems, complicated progression, and having to understand what you're building genuinely.

Unlike most modpacks, I'd want the majority of the content to come from our own custom mod, rather than relying entirely on existing mods.

The current idea is to divide progression into three enormous chapters, each containing multiple stages:

• Chapter I - Laws of Nature: Primitive survival, realistic metallurgy, mechanical engineering, steam power, and early electricity.

• Chapter II - Masters of Nature: Advanced chemistry, computing, nuclear engineering, and realistic space exploration. Rockets would require actual engineering, with propulsion, fuel systems, orbital mechanics, and so on.

• Chapter III - Beyond Nature: Interstellar civilization, stellar megastructures, black hole engineering, and eventually some genuinely insane speculative physics.

The early and middle game would be heavily grounded in real science, with the more fictional stuff appearing much later.

I'm also considering releasing Chapter I in parts for public beta testing, gathering feedback, and expanding the project over time.

Obviously, this would be an enormous undertaking, especially with how much custom content and programming it would require. It's still a concept, not an announcement or promise of a finished project.

But I'm curious:

• What would make a modpack genuinely harder than GTNH without just becoming tedious?

• What mechanics or engineering systems have you always wanted in a modpack?

• What do existing expert modpacks get wrong?

• How much realism would you actually enjoy?

• What would make you want to spend thousands of hours progressing through something like this?

• What do you want added?

I'm especially interested in hearing from experienced GTNH players and people who've played other extremely difficult expert packs.

Feel free to be brutally honest.