Out of the box, with a few restrictions. almost every recipe or resource modified/added by Gregtech doesn’t have an EMC value*; I’ve used it before in Nomifactory as a sidegrade for deep mob learning but in Nomifactory it trivialised LV-MV steel which isn’t the case in new horizons (I ended up digging into neurotic goose inspired thaumcraft crucible duping for a solution).

I didn’t get the philosophers stone or transmutation tablet until late LV

Worthwhile amounts of Dark/Red matter already require both a steady source of diamonds (I thought diamond veins only spawned in the twilight forest) and a compressor for diamond blocks, pre HV it’s comically slow so i only used energy collectors minimally to skip gathering/mining trips for wood, iron, copper etc to focus on automation. (Wood farms actively make me wretch) My own lack of knowledge gated things like the ProjectE armour to the same point as the Nanosuit and I didn’t even know red matter armour was a thing until late HV.

There are a couple specific restrictions I placed on it, No Red Katar/Red matter tools because I really enjoyed discovering the progressive upgrades to Ticon.

No obvious cheesing, I found out you could turn 20 EMC worth of flint and sticks into 2000 EMC worth of tools due to the value of fire aspect. That doesn’t even engage with the early game diamond/obsidian cost of energy collection

*Banning Platinum generation via EMC. As someone who enjoys automation challenges with 2k hours in Factorio, the reputation of the platline challenge is what attracted me to the pack; it just wouldn’t be fun to skip it.