Infinity Evolved - Expert Mode

I've been playing expert mode all weekend, and I have to say that "extreme crafting" is not an understatement.  This modpack makes gregtech look like pre-school.  I'm about 8 hours into the pack and I'm still in the early steel-age (manyullen TiCo tools, basic forestry machines, steel armor).

To truly appreciate the insanity of extreme crafting, here's a picture of the 9x9 crafting grid with the recipe for the enderquarry:



This pack unifies the mods in a way that blows my mind.  In order to make any progress beyond the steel age, you have to make progress in several mods simultaneously.  Right now I'm in the "steel age" so I am making forestry machines, basic IC2 machines, and my goal is the bc silicon assembly table.  You can only craft TE machine frames on the assembly table, so the shortest route to getting an induction smelter involves many hours of work.

Oh yeah, all the cheap smelter recipes are disabled, so you have to use thermal expansion to get signalum and enderium for making advanced machines.

This pack turns most of the standard "later game" items, like storage systems and quarries, into "ultra-extra-extreme-late-game."  For an example,

here is a list of the parts for an ME controller::

Yes, you read that correctly, that's 128 iridium just to get the ME controller (energy accepter is uncraftable - there are no short-cuts in this pack).  There are plenty of ways for the clever person to handle storage without an AE2 system, but to build anything late-game requires insanely massive amounts of fully-automated mining, processing, and crafting.

The end-game items have some insane procedures to obtain. Large numbers of unstable ingot blocks are required for most of them. There is even a 30-minute Thaumcraft infusion involving numerous end-game items from ALL of the magic mods to craft an Everlasting Guilty Pool.