Unfortunately, modpacks won't solve the issue, because the internal structure of Starbound archives contains holes of useless padding (currently 35 Megabytes out of 1 Gb archive) between the records and the files inside of archives are stored with no order at all, since these are not really archives but databases with filenames smeared all across the file. Not sure about other OSes, but in Windows NT 5.x you'll have to launch the game and let it load at least once so its data would be kept in RAM cache and load much (25-50 times) faster until the next reboot.



In other words, if you have a classic HDD, it will need to physically read tiny 64-128 byte long pieces to enumerate all the files inside of .pak (currently over 34 000 files) and .modpak.



This is ineffective by design, because modern hard drives are reading in huge blocks and would have to re-read them over and over again (note the internal HDD cache is usually limited to 32 Megabytes, and about 10-15 reads will be enough to purge it entirely).

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