I cannot recommend Create strongly enough. The conveyer belts and factory stuff is the best implementation of that of any mod, and beyond that the ability to just arbitrarily stick blocks together to make movable multiblock contraptions ranging from trains (full, proper trains with multiple cars, NPC conductors, and the ability to drive through unloaded chunks safely while sticking to their schedule) to elevators to combine harvesters is amazing.

There's a whole new golden era of modding emerging right now. Two things, Fabric (or Quilt) and Create.

Fabric is just a better modloader than forge, forge is really slow and resource-hungry, Fabric (combined with all the optimization mods everyone installs) runs incredibly well even with tons of mods, shaders, etc. The modding community for modern versions of MC is much more mature and a ton of mods are more stable, released for multiple mod loaders, using shared libraries, etc. Much better experience to get and install mods and stuff just works most of the time.

Create is straight up the best tech mod ever made for minecraft. Incredibly well put-together. And it now has a growing ecosystem of addons and expansions and modpacks built around it, along with a bunch of official addons being worked on that will go into stuff like vehicles, actual physics-simulated floating airships, spaceships, underwater, etc.

There's rarely been a better time to get back into modded MC honestly. I recently installed Prism and got back into it, had not played MC in years. Get Prism, get 1.20.1 or 1.20.2, get Fabric loader, go on Modrinth and have fun. Get basic optimization mods like Sodium, Indium, Lithium, ImmediatelyFast, Iris for shaders that run really well, Memory Leak Fix, FerriteCore, EntityModelFeatures & EntityTextureFeatures, Enhanced Block Entities, Continuity, etc. Get the QoL like EMI, controls/mouse/camera stuff, etc. Get incredible terrain generation with stuff like Terralith, optionally Tectonic. There's really good alternatives to Terralith but I personally love Terralith+Tectonic and how good the mountain ranges look. I got Create, then just browed around for addons and whatever looked fun.

Like, not having played MC and modded MC in a long time, I'm absolutely amazed by how good it is now. I can run a modpack with a ton of mods, 64 chunks of render distance, a good shader, and it runs WELL. Insane. I can even push it a little and get the really wild mods like Immersive Portals and it works, it runs well if I lower my shader performance options, the only issue for now is that there's some graphical bugs between it and Iris shaders but those are being worked on.

And on top of that, I recently discovered this new building mod called Axiom that's just been released and basically replaces WorldEdit and also does everything I used to do with VoxelSniper, but it's all 1 mod that does it all extremely well and conveniently, with a really good UI and no commands to type. All of it working seamlessly in-game. Wild.

So yea I guess I typed a bunch of paragraphs about how I'm playing minecraft, woops.