Revisiting the Tekkit Classic modpack for Minecraft

I went back to the first Minecraft modpack I ever tried, now called Tekkit Classic. It is no longer being updated but it is maintained and has a dedicated wiki:

http://tekkitclassic.wikia.com/wiki/The_Tekkit_Wiki

It is based on an older version of Minecraft in which pigs and chickens eat wheat, cocoa beans don't grow, and there is no Wither. It is interesting to see how many things have changed in vanilla Minecraft and its mods in just a couple of years. Tekkit Classic is dominated by two mods: Equivalent Exchange 2 and Industrial Craft 2. It always bothered me that EE2 allows mass creation of matter, much different than the idea of that name from the manga, Fullmetal Alchemist. However, I got over the urge to "fix" that mod or this pack in general. You can make increasing amounts of matter with energy collectors which can be changed into any other kind of matter with an energy condenser. My small collector "flower" is shown below:

I got early matter for condensing from pumpkins, just as I did when I first played this pack. Later on (long after I needed it) I built a system that converted oil from an oil well. This is a strategy that would have been very helpful mid-game. If you want to make even faster progress, you can use the well documented strategy of blaze rod maceration, using some of the matter generated to make redstone to directly power the macerator. My setup is shown below, in my gold and ruby block room: 

Here is one of the places I used item automation with the Redpower 2 mod. That mod is not maintained in current versions of Minecraft, unfortunately. There is not a lot of decorative variety in this pack compared to recent ones, but I built a tower home as usual with some microblock accents and later a mountaintop tower for decoration. I used black and red matter blocks as an ostentatious show of wealth.

I did a few new things this time in addition to the macerator blaze rod system. I built a cobblestone generator for matter - again, long after I needed it. I made a teleporter system from my base to the mountain fortress powered by redstone from an energy collector/condenser system. I really tried to finally get into the IC2 crop system but it still seemed way to finicky for me. I tried, and failed, to use combustion engines without them exploding but found water strainers to be quite useful for smaller power systems. If I were going to "fix" anything in this modpack, it would be to allow combustion engines to run without water without exploding. Also, I have always been annoyed by the wrench mechanics in IC2, so I would make Buildcraft wrenches compatible with IC2 machines and lossless. 

Those few criticisms aside, this is still a very fun pack. If you have never tried it, I recommend that you do. The reward for building up all that matter creation machinery is some really fantastically powered end game items in EE2. You can fly, are basically invincible, can kill all the hostiles with one hit, and can mine huge areas with a single click. Of course at this stage, you don't need to mine anything and, in the nature of these things, once you have attained these items, you are basically done with that world.