I play a lot of modded Minecraft, and recently I've been playing StoneFactory 2 - 1.16. I'm about 3 weeks in right now. Stonefactory starts with the player in a small cave in a solid universe of stone. They have to smash the rocks around them to form pebbles and form space to work. It's a buildcraft/kitchen sink mod, so sooner or later the player encounters various machines for automating their life, and they discover magical abilities.

This mod has the Smeltery, which is nice for melting various ores. It has the pulverizer, which is a standard feature of this kind of mod and doubles your resource accumulation. It has the tinker's table for crafting customizable and re-usable weapons and tools. It doesn't have Tinker Armor.

I'm starting to breed Fluid Cows. I got a few cows in loot chests and then discovered I can create a lavacow out of lava and leather. No idea how that flesh-golem is able to breed.

I'm breeding magic chickens. A post online said to raise smart chickens until they max their stats, then color the chickens as needed. I've got a couple of 9-7-9 chickens nesting on eggs right now.

I started Thaumcraft. This is a huge magical mod with little missions and a light storyline. It requires scribbling theories on paper ala choose-your-own-adventure, and wandering around the world taking pictures of interesting things for inspiration. It probably has a tech tree as large as all of vanilla minecraft. I'm getting a bit worn out by it because I don't see how it benefits me. I'm learning alchemy, but converting one item into another is mostly a losing proposition.

I spent days digging a spiral staircase up to the top of the solid stone block that makes up the world. Climbing too high teleports one into the bottom of the mining dimension. I'm generally obsessive, so I like digging my orient staircase at 0,0 and running tunnels out along the 100 grid. I built my initial staircase off at -17,23 because it was out of the way of my primary base. Now I'm irritated that my staircase is offset. I found some magical climbing gloves, so I put a Terraria style hellevator to fall down 160 meters into a pool of water and lined things up so I can climb back out as well.

Up in the mining dimension I started a mob farm that doesn't work terribly well, a sheep pasture I didn't want (I was looking for cows and chickens), and three squid pools that don't work. Found tons of minerals though.

Normally when I play minecraft, I start with normal deaths until I lose my pile of diamonds or all my tools into a pool of lava. Then I get frustrated and run /gamerule keepInventory true. Last year while playing Minecraft SevTech: Ages, I discovered the gravestone mod. I like this as a balance between keeping all my stuff and punishing me for dying. When a player dies, a gravestone is created with all their items. Then they have to struggle back out to their death location and rescue their items.

Stalled on Thaumcraft. The next steps require Greatwood and Silverwood. These are either very rare or don't spawn inside the solid universe of stone. However, sieving 8 zombie flesh yields an 5% chance that a sapling will spawn. I use my mob farm to sieve 60 flesh and get only exotic flowers. I add two extra mob farm rooms and hang out and wait.

I also notice that zombie flesh can be gained from zombie flowers which require zombie nuggets which don't seem to ever drop. Apparently there's a soulium dagger that causes these rare drops. It takes my entire stock of soul sand to make soul stone to make soulium dust to make soulium ingots. This alternate process will be even slower than the mob farm, but it keeps me busy and nearby the farm so it can run.

I keep climbing up and down to my base 160 meters below the mining dimension. I realize that I could just rebuild my base in the mining dimension or in the top 20 meters of the stone world. It would shorten my commute, but it seems like a lot of work to move all my stuff.

I got my magic saplings for Thaumcraft and stalled out on steel. That's how these complex Minecraft mods go. I have organized my colored chickens and am converting their sewage into fertilizer. I started carving out a hall of impressive trees, but several of the saplings refuse to grow. I think I need to double thier available growing space.