Gated, quest-driven packs I have played and would send you to next. The stars are my own rating. The order is by popularity, most downloaded first.
The modded skyblock that defined the genre: one block in the void, and you automate your way up through tech and magic from there.
Skyblock turned inside out. You start sealed in solid stone and dig a base out of it, with a full kitchen sink of mods and quests to follow.
Staged progression from the stone age to space. Ores, items, recipes and even mobs stay hidden until you unlock the age they belong to.
Large, polished quest-guided packs. The Expert editions rewrite the recipes so tech and magic gate each other all the way up.
An enormous quest pack with well over a thousand quests and three difficulty modes, from relaxed to brutally long.
The Create team's own challenge pack: a chain of automation puzzles built around Create that ends in space.
The longest road in modded Minecraft. Almost every recipe is rebuilt around GregTech's tiers, with thousands of quests to guide you through it.
FTB's expert tech pack: heavily altered recipes and a quest book that walks you through a long, demanding progression.
You start in a dead wasteland and bring it back to life, growing your resources first and building up to magic and tech.
Set in endless Backrooms-style spaces. You scavenge the furniture for resources and industrialize the place until you can leave.
A quest-driven GregTech factory pack, rebuilt on the community edition of GregTech. Demanding, fair, and very well paced.
Start from nothing and build your own universe, one element at a time, with chemistry, automation and a little magic.
Stranded in an empty dimension, you escape by synthesizing everything you need through chemistry.
A story pack that starts in the End and has you rebuild the other dimensions, with choices that change how it goes.
Stranded on a barren planet, you restart civilization from scraps. Skyblock scarcity, without the void.
Exiled to a volcanic planet with no ores in the ground. Everything you need has to be traded for through a portal.
Download counts are from CurseForge, October 2026. A series is counted as the total of its main packs, and its link goes to the most downloaded one. Packs that are also distributed outside CurseForge, such as GregTech: New Horizons and the FTB packs, are more popular than their number here suggests.