Modpack version:
2.8.0

The request: Re-balancing automated extended crafting automation

Reasoning: This pack mostly excels at automation. It's an important thing for the players to work on, it influences how you build your base, it's in the quests, it's in the load screen tips, and that's great and why I am here.

Until: You hit early chapter 11, make an extended crafting table, and have no (feasible) way to automate this, until partways through chapter 25 (if I am interpreting names and icons in the questbook correctly). I'm only in late chapter 17, but already the extended recipes just keep coming up, and worse, they are starting to be multi-step (Hellfire forges, made with a bunch of items you likely autocraft, then back into regular (So auto is at least possible) for a demon crystallizer, and then back out to extended again for the abyssalcraft crystallizer). This makes resource planning, gathering, etc, very frustrating. As well, I'm only halfways through the stretch to chapter 25 and already I hate the extended table for no reason other than it's an annoying manual chore to use it. It feels contrary to the entire spirit of the pack to want to automate all of these things, and then just have these arbitrary things that you simply cannot, for almost the entire game. Especially when the recipes are parts of chains.

What else you have tried:
I have made a start at setting up something awful with ID in an attempt to automate these, so that I could link this into my crafting network, but the sheer size of the recipes makes this incredibly tedious and mostly unworkable. I started this due to the will automation quest requiring 6 hell fire forges, and realizing that the (demon) crystallizer was itself a sub-component for the other crystallizer, which I will in the future desire more of, I suspect.

Additional context:
I can entirely see spending some time in chapter 14 working with the occasional extended crafting recipe without any automation involved, as end-state items. But more and more items as we progress are requiring the extended table, and it feels bad to have all of this excellent automation and the only way to even solve the dependency chains is some sort of janky fake recipe outputting components to a box: All that means is an awful, hacky automation of someone having to then go craft it themselves. I like dependency chains, as an engineering problem to solve, and to efficiency tune, and make choices about passive vs active, etc. I even like the extended crafting recipes for pure "flavour". But the idea of spending a lot of very late chapters with no ability to automate it at all feels very discouraging. I'm not honestly sure why this is gated so incredibly late; It doesn't stop anyone from crafting with the extended tables, it just makes it really annoying to do so, which feels a lot like a stick, not a carrot. I'd really rather work towards something I want, as opposed to working on being punished less. Especially as an expert pack where I am expecting to make large amounts of things exactly like forges and crystallizers.

Solutions: I'm most familiar with the packaged auto and extended automation interfaces methods of automating these, but I feel like there could be more. If not, that could be moved to somewhere more like chapter 15, or early in 17 at the very worst, though even 17 feels too late. Even just the automation interface, since most of the items seem to have a reasonable number of components, could work fine without pAuto. Are there other automation methods possible with the tables? Is there some specific reason for the automation to require really incredible things like late game space travel? I like the extended recipes so I wouldn't want to gate those later (And this sounds like far too much work for a simple feature request). I'm certainly open to other approaches to this, did I miss some way to automate them?

Finally, thanks for reading my wall of text, and for all of the work done so far, there is a lot of really fantastic integration done in this pack. Also, jokes.

I use extended crafting less than I do arcane crafting which is also manual crafting, not sure it’s a big deal to have automation gated later for the tables.

hrm, that sounds like a feature request I'll have in the future then, for arcane!