FTB Infinity Evolved (Expert Mode; Custom Ore Gen) - Now with even more hardness

[deemera]

So, I'm expecting RAM for my new PC to show up next week, and I'm thinking of starting a new FTB Infinity Evolved (Expert Mode) playthrough. But since I'm a bit of a masochist, I'm considering adding in Alternate Terrain Generation, Highlands, and Custom Ore Gen. So my world will be full of giant mountains, with ores concentrated into a few lodes and veins (about half the normal density of materials per chunk from my testing).

So with this setup, the usual issues people seem to have with Expert Mode will be compounded even further. The bucket will be pushed even further back, because before I can get one, I'll need to find an iron vein. And most basic machines in Expert are gated behind the Thermionic Fabricator and Assembly Table which means I'll need to find veins of copper, tin, redstone, gold, and diamond. And once I find a vein a particular ore, I won't have to worry about that type for awhile, but since I'll have no way of knowing how long it will take to find the next one, I'll have an incentive to make each scrap count.

I'm considering adding Reasonable Realism - Harder Ores for the early game prospecting options (detection flowers growing above ores, panning for nuggets with sluices). Also wondering what the best way to find ores will be; I'm usually a branch miner, but this time around it might be better to look for ravines, caves, or exposed stone mountainsides in hopes of finding an exposed vein.

For awhile, I'll be in a sort of "stone age", with no ores of any kind available. I'll have basic stone/flint Tinker's tools. I can do basic Agricraft/vanilla farming for a variety of organic materials (sugarcane, wheat, leather, string, wool). So I'll probably be covered for food, backpacks and leather armor. If I can find a village, I can start trading my agriculture produce for emeralds. I could do forestry bees in bee houses, though without any mutations or machinery I'm not sure how useful that would be.

* Is this too crazy?
* Would this make an interesting Community Showcase thread?
* Anyone know any other legitimate ways to find veins of ore in the early game? I know about the IC2 device that searches for ores, but that would be for later after I already have some infrastructure.
* Alternatively are there in game ways to locate ravines and/or caves?
* Anyone know any good no-ore hidden gems?
* What about when I find my first vein; anyone know any great options that only rely on a single ore type? Obviously I'll be hoping for iron so I can finally get that bucket (my farming until then will be reliant on natural water and irrigation ditches, plus the bucket gives me lava for the smeltery), but are there other ores that can give me a similarly great early game item to get a leg up?
* Anyone know any great villager trades for these trying circumstances?

 

[Celestialphoenix]

Nothing is too crazy.
Depending on your ore gen- you could add tinkers gravel ores on the surface [or other surface features], or a biome based ore gen.

Don't worry about the bucket- relying on 'natural' water for farming/irrigation is actually a lot of fun in itself. Been doing it for years

You might find iron/buckets in dungeon loot, or possibly Forestry cans​

 

[BrickVoid]

You should make an early mob trap if you can get it low enough so that hostile mobs, zombies in particular, will generate. Zombies will rarely drop an iron ingot as loot. It might have to be a manual killing method at first, but a lot of natural overhangs will yield a lot of hostile mobs just waiting to blow up, shoot, or hit you to death! Plus there'll probably be Endermen and spiders, too. And if you're not allergic to rotten flesh it makes a surprisingly good food source until you can worry about the farming situation. The mobs are probably also going to be your main source of primitive armor and weaponry, plus the occasional shovel!

I guess it would depend on the level of 'roughing it' you want to take it to! ;-)

Cheers ...

BrickVoid

 

[deemera]

Found a couple neat items in a test world. I had forgotten all about IC2 scaffolds. And apparently Tinker's adds wooden rails that don't require any metals. Now if only there were a way to get minecarts without iron or to speed them up without redstone...

Thanks for the mob trap idea. Though as you say, it'd need to be manual killing. I can get enough cobble to put together a mob tower early, but without that first bucket to move water up to the killing floor, I'd be hard pressed to find a way to get mobs pushed to their doom.

 

[BrickVoid]

Found a couple neat items in a test world. I had forgotten all about IC2 scaffolds. And apparently Tinker's adds wooden rails that don't require any metals. Now if only there were a way to get minecarts without iron or to speed them up without redstone...

Thanks for the mob trap idea. Though as you say, it'd need to be manual killing. I can get enough cobble to put together a mob tower early, but without that first bucket to move water up to the killing floor, I'd be hard pressed to find a way to get mobs pushed to their doom.

I don't know if it's enabled - most probably not - in the Evolved version of Infinity, but tin made me a bucket once - or was it aluminum - on the default setting. Anyway, no matter, you'd probably be hard pressed to find either of those gravel ores early on anyway - if they're even enabled that is!

I just had a thought on the mob trap idea, does Sugar Cane still make Punji sticks? It might be a little difficult to collect the mob drops though there might be a pattern you could put them in to make it easier to get some early mob loot.

Cheers ...

BrickVoid

 

[deemera]

Nothing is too crazy.
Depending on your ore gen- you could add tinkers gravel ores on the surface [or other surface features], or a biome based ore gen.

Don't worry about the bucket- relying on 'natural' water for farming/irrigation is actually a lot of fun in itself. Been doing it for years

You might find iron/buckets in dungeon loot, or possibly Forestry cans​

As for biome-based ore gen, I believe Custom Ore Gen already covers that. Copper is more common in jungles, iron is more common in cold biomes, redstone in deserts, etc. It doesn't guarantee I'll find what I'm looking for, but it does increase the frequency by quite a bit.

Also, ditch-based irrigation early on shouldn't be a problem. I kind of like the natural look it has anyway. I'm mostly concerned about the bucket for smeltery activation. If I find copper, tin, etc, but no iron, any ores I use will be of the 'undoubled' variety. But, yeah I could go walkabout looking for dungeon loot. Between Witchery's "magic circles", and vanilla "desert temples" (edit: or thaumcraft "spider trees") it shouldn't be too hard to find a chest or two of loot. Maybe I'll get lucky. Though, those desert temples will probably be spawning mostly at the equator (in Alternate Terrain Generation, there are East-West stripes of equator/poles/equator). With about 10km between the hot and cold regions, I won't really be able to visit deserts much if I'm heading toward the poles to look for the higher iron concentration.

I don't know if it's enabled - most probably not - in the Evolved version of Infinity, but tin made me a bucket once - or was it aluminum - on the default setting. Anyway, no matter, you'd probably be hard pressed to find either of those gravel ores early on anyway - if they're even enabled that is!

I just had a thought on the mob trap idea, does Sugar Cane still make Punji sticks? It might be a little difficult to collect the mob drops though there might be a pattern you could put them in to make it easier to get some early mob loot.

Cheers ...

BrickVoid

Not 100% sure on the tin/aluminum bucket (away from my PC at the moment), but it sounds like something that'd be disabled. Too easy. The gravel ores might help a bit, though I'd have to get really lucky to get the 11 I need for the first bucket (5 for the forge hammer, 6 for the 3 iron plates). Still worth looking for on my early travels though.

Spent some more time last night playing around in my test world. I fiddled around with Agricraft seed breeding. Managed to get 10/10/10 wheat, carrot, potato, and almost there for industrial hemp and wolfsbane. In the current configs for this pack, 10/10/10 crossbreeds produce 5/5/5 offspring, so getting these all maxed means that my next crops (sugarcane, pumpkin, etc) will get a jumpstart.

I also figured I'd mine up some cobble and try out some mob trap designs. But at around y60 (started at y100ish on a hill where I'd set up a temp farming base near a natural spring), I found a vein of poor copper ore (railcraft). It's pretty bad normally, since each block of poor copper ore smelts into 2 nuggets of copper (9 blocks for 2 ingots). And according to NEI at least, all the traditional doubling options don't work on it. But early game in this pack setup, I'm quite excited to have my first bits of metal.

I spent awhile trying to track the full extent of the vein. Poor copper appears to form very thin veins, so sometimes it skips a block (or two!). It snaked around quite a bit, and I uncovered about 30 ore blocks or so when I broke through a wall into a chamber right above a lava lake. But I was a bit distracted from the lava by the sight of copper ore (the pure kind) embedded in the lava on the other side of the pool. So I bridged my way over and started following that vein and I appear to have hit the mother lode. I'm estimating I've found at least a stack of ore, maybe two.

So now I'm in that situation I mentioned. I've got ore, but it's copper. I poked around in NEI a bit, and it looks like the Pam's Harvestcraft cooking implements (pots/pans) can all be made with copper. Between that and the 10/10/10 agricraft seeds I'm working on, I'd be all set for food. It might be a good idea to just finish with these crops, make some projectred backpacks to carry all my stuff, and head north to start looking for iron.

 

[deemera]

I added Reasonable Realism - Harder Ores and have started a new test world. During some initial exploration, I found some kind of volcano made of stone, with a couple bits of copper sticking out. Following the vein led me to bauxite (aluminum), poor iron, and tin veins. Went looking for clay on the beach, and found limonite too (it's a poor iron-containing ore found with clay in beaches). Got a coke oven up and running, and used the Harder Ores millstone to process the limonite. Took about 50 limonite (2 nuggets per block), but now I've got a bucket. Note: The Harder Ores millstone requires a windmill structure to power it, which takes 12 wool. Luckily some nearby sheep and my early copper to make copper shears allowed me to get there without waiting for my industrial hemp or cotton.

Had to go looking for gravel, but found some in an exposed cave system. While exploring it, I found poor gold ore, electrotine, and lead for later. Built a 2x2 smeltery.

Went after some surface lava in a meteor crater on my minimap, and found a large, walled village nearby with an Agricraft greenhouse. So now I have a couple chests full of random Agricraft seeds (including netherwart). And on the way over, I found a ravine with yellorite, redstone, and silver visible at the bottom.

So now, I've got my smeltery setup going with a portable tank full of lava.

 

[deemera]

Finally got my new PC going, and started my new FTB Infinity Evolved (Expert Mode) playthrough.

Added Mods:
* Alternative Terrain Generation
* Highlands
* Custom Ore Gen

I had considered Mariculture (for the cool undersea environments) and Harder Ores or Ore Flowers (for the prospecting), but decided against both. Mariculture adds in recipes that could sidestep some of the difficulty of the pack, and I found the ore flowers to be a bit too cluttered without being super useful. It turns out that even with COG veins, most ores are pretty much everywhere.

So, it's mostly going to be the default Expert Mode pack, just with very different world gen.

Over the weekend, I put in maybe 10 hours, with my roommate joining by LAN for about 5 of those. We've got our low tech base started: drying racks for jerky, hillside ditch-irrigation vanilla farming (I'm not ready to deal with agricraft weeds just yet), 16 slab furnaces, basic stone/flint tinker tools. I've started construction on what I hope will be a neat base design, centered around a greatwood tree. I plan to have a couple floors above this one, with the tree growing up through a hole in the floor of the upper levels, then probably a glass dome to cap it off.

Haven't found any metals yet, but I did stumble on a vein of coal while putting in the floor around the greatwood tree (quarried stone and birch, with dark oak accents). Probably just going to leave it there for now, as our manual tree farming and bank of slab furnaces easily handles our fuel needs at the moment.

Spent a little time exploring a nearby village. They had a greenhouse full of agricraft weeds, which I presume were plants at some point, but got taken over while I puttered around collecting quarried stone and farming. Still, I got a rolling machine, a steam engine and 3 pistons, plus a few glowstone. Also a smattering of various metals.