Anyone on the know willing to shed some light into the matter? Many of the mods don't have dedicated sites or F.A.Q.S or even nothing more than a single thread on a forum, so idk what many of them do.
Tekkit has it's own wiki.
But have a quick run down anyway.
First off, EE is OP. It's idea is like FMA's Alchemy. A Diamond is worth a little over eight thousand cobblestone for example and you can use a Condenser to trade for such. However it breaks pretty fast. You mine up like 17 diamonds, use Lava Buckets to forge a portal to the Nether, then work on making a "power flower" out of MK3 Collectors and Relays which creates couple thousand EMC per second to 'dupe' anything you want. And within that system is rings and boots for flight, often banned items that shoot explosives and lava, oh and the EE Gem armor that let's you infinity explode like TNT without damage and shoot lightning, while flying around. Absolutely the best part of this Mod is the Alchemical Bags, they are not OP and work like Minecraft's Endor Chest. Except the remain in your inventory and have like 90 storage slots and you can get one of each color. I like to keep the White Bag on me and the rest of the Bags within it, red holds all the Redstone stuff, Orange holds my IC2 stuff, etc. Who needs lootable chests when you can pack it all?
Buildcraft adds in a bunch of stuff, 90% of it is crap. Steam/Redstone Engines are a waste of time to build. The note worthy items are Quarries which mine up stuff while you do anything else. An Energy Link is one of those minor misc mods, it converts EU over to BP(?) letting you run them using IC2 stuff. Also Buildcraft pipes suck and create more lag then Red Power 2. Oh, and the Turtle (mines stuff sideways rather than down) tends to be disabled as well due to ignoring anti-griefing mods.
Red Power 2 is a Redstone lovers wet dream. Red Stone wire works exactly like Redstone Dust, but goes on walls or ceilings and can be dyed. Not to mention the system offers things like RS Nor & XOR gates as a single block entity rather than having to construct the land eating alternatives. I think Filters come from this mod, which when place next to a chest sucks any or certain items out and dumps them into a pipe (or another chest). Combined with the Crafting Tables, you can actually set up shops that mine, sort, craft, and dump assembled items into a chest for you.
Industrial Craft 2 is my other favorite mod. It uses a fancy thing called EU, just think of it as electricity. You can craft IC2 machines and upgrade them to process materials faster. Like a Macerater turns a single ore block into two dust, which can be smelted into two ingots or 2-for-1 deal if you take the time and effort to set up and power these things. IC2 also gives you Teleporters created by linking two together and Force fields (awesome!). IC also adds the Quantanium Armor, ice paths and Q. Leggings let you move faster than Creative Mode's Fly but good luck making them. Also you can build a nuclear power plant, and make a mistake so it blows up via melt down ^_^.
Railcraft can goto hell. Rails are already the most expensive way to get around and this thing makes it a hell of a lot harder to even craft a standard rail. It attempts to make up for it by offering High Speed Rails, but meh. Creating, linking, and using Teleporters uses not even one tenth the resources or effort and completely mitigates additional costs for increasing distances.
Too Many Items is that list of items on the right hand side. Hit escape and kick it over to Recipe mode to click on and see crafting recipes for the item, or mouse over and hit U to see what the item is used for in crafting. If TMI is in "cheat" mod and you are in Single Player of have Op access if gives you a stack of the item you click on.
Rei's Minimap is made of win and self explanatory.
The Weapons mod adds a couple weapons, big deal. Cannon tends to be disabled due to griefing reasons.
The chest mod gives you bigger chests, spiffy.
Endor Chest mod (remember 1.2.5 has no Endor Chest) gives you a color coded chest. IE Red/Blue/Yellow chest accesses the same 'bank' as every other Red/Blue/Yellow chest. Often used in tanget with Quarries to port materials back to your main base no matter how far away the Quarry is. Often 'hacked' by other people to steal your stuff passing through it.
There is also some plant system that lets you cross breed. Don't care about it, but I know Flax can be used to farm String without having to kill Spiders *yank yank*.
There is a Diamond Saw that cuts blocks thinner for you, also makes poles. These are for decoration, you can make finer detailed creations than one huge block after the next. Dunno the pack name.
Lastly it tweaks Minecraft in various ways. Inventory sorter, ambient music, support for HD textures, various mob art so you have three zombie models instead of one, etc.
***
If your using a hacked client to play Minecraft you'll either have to find a hacked Tekkit Launcher or install the mods your self. Which is an added bonus, only reason Tekkit doesn't support 1.3.2 is because Bukkit's development is stagnate. IC2 for instance not only supports 1.3.2, they are working on 1.4 support and their 1.3.2 release even includes new items. Buildcraft, Red Power 2, and Rei's likewise have long since been updated. You should be able to run all the key components of Tekkit using a newer version of Minecraft if you take the time to hunt them down, it's just you'll be limited to local only until Bukkit makes hosting a Tekkit Server retard easy.
If you ever buy rights to an official copy or just find a way to run Tekkit, PM me some time.
