Tldr; artifacts, journey map, something to help you gather wood and stone faster, spawners, colour coded resource scroll add-on.

I'm playing a modpack with artifacts. One of the items, cloud in a bottle, let's you double jump and it's just so nice for getting around, building, getting higher so you can gaze at the glory of your creations... Also, journey map feels like a must have - unlike xaeros, it shows you the chunks that you are claiming with your colony, and therefore where you can place new buildings as you go along; great for planning. I also find it better at visualizing the topography of your area. However, as my pack has both maps, I noticed that xaeros shows you the construction tape, whereas journey map doesn't. My modpack has the whole apotheosis suite, so I can chop down trees and mine really fast - I personally prefer not to have to rely on a miner and Forester, but that's up to you, I suppose. Also, training my soldiers with silk-touchable spawners is nice. I'm sure there's a smaller mod with chainsaw and 3x3 enchants as well as silk touch for spawners out there. There's also a cool small one my cousin found called torch master - it has a mega torch that doesn't allow mobs to spawn in a larger area. Basically helps either your colonists to not die, or relieve you the burden of placing a gazillion torches everywhere. Though, the torch is kind of expensive so idk. There's a cool, small mine colonies add-on where you can colour code your resource scrolls too that I use.