The good mod packs make any grindy request something you are supposed to automate or scale, because you will need the items shortly. The bad ones just want you to grind, and those do in deed suck. Modern Skyblock 3 was a good example of the bad way to do this - it started out OK but by the time you hit chickens it was just amazing how many bullshit steps you had to take for no reason at all.
Age of Engineering is a good example of a pack that does it better.
It has a quest book, and therefore some quests that you probably won’t need the results of. It’s not considered an expert level pack, so the grind isn’t going to be near as bad as those.
That sounds like Life in the Woods. Pretty popular, but I am more on the Blightfall, world ending apocolyptic side of things rather than a walk in the woods ala Thoreau.