TFG thoughts:
Goddness GRACIOUS ok I get why GregTech is like One of the Big Mods now.
So the first tech mod I really ever touched was Mekanism, right? It's still in beta and all, but I enjoyed making upgrades for machines and trying to find ways to make automatic processing lines. One of the things I discovered playing it, though, was that almost everything felt very linear; often getting higher ore yields was just a matter of adding one or two steps/machines at the start of the existing process. Sometimes you had to make something to enable that step, but even then it just made the machine for that step Bigger(tm).
GregTech, on the other hand? I'm enthralled by the... interconnectedness of all the recipes? I'm always doing something with nitrogen or oxygen or hydrogen, and a lot of processes have different "atoms" of the process you can recycle perfectly as long as you put in the logistics for it. For example, there are a few recipes trees that start with Chlorine as an input that, later down the line, end up producing a byproduct of hydrochloric acid. You can just save it for other recipies (gotta make circuits after all) OR you can electrolize it back into the original chlorine BUT you have to deal with whatever hydrogen came out with it! Other recipes also have the acid diluted so you have to separate it from the water first if you want to recycle the chlorine this way.
So already the crafting logistics are much more interesting (in a way that makes EMI's recipe tree effectively mandatory, admittedly) (great work on that mod, by the way, holy cow it's so useful). This all EXPLODES (fun) when you get the Large Chemical Reactor!!!
The Large Chemical Reactor (LCR) is a multiblock, so you put it together using lots of smaller pieces. There's blocks for power, blocks for checking the status, blocks for fixing the internals with duct tape maintenance, so on so on. The most important part is the ingredient input and output blocks, though! The LCR lets you attach up to FOURTEEN (I think...?) different input/output blocks! This gives LCR's REALLY awesome but VERY tricky one-stop crafting possibilities! Where a line of regular reactor machines (the one-block sized ones) requires a lot of filters and pipes and space to manage looping or shared inputs and outputs, the LCR's output blocks (but not inputs!!!) have filters built right in!
The effect is getting to arrange the individual parts of this sizeable machine so that all the chemicals dip in and out in such a way that smaller machines that orbit it can recycle, pre-proccess, or buffer all kinds of stuff!
The whole thing turns a machine that could have been "one-block machine but more expensive bigger and faster" (looking at you, Mekanism evaporation tower) into a rewarding puzzle of finding the best way to route chemicals WITHIN a machine!
