Simple quality of life improvements

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Remaker

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Jul 29, 2019
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I'm looking for simple, easy-to-make items that make everyday tasks easier. I assume that everyone knows about sorting machines, jetpacks, ore doubling, and so on, but what I'm looking for here is simple stuff that can be made with minimal resources and low mod knowledge, and that might be overlooked by some players. This is, of course, a subjective standard. Here are mine, I'd love to hear about yours!

Vertical Transit
Personal Flight: Yeah, yeah, there are a zillion ways to make your character fly, from jetpacks to wings to spells. Most of these are pretty advanced, so I'm just mentioning them here so people don't think I forgot about them.

Scaffolds (Industrial Craft): Much, much better than using random blocks to pillar up to high spaces. They're self stacking, and a tower of them breaks down from the top block down, making it quick and easy to retrieve them when you're done. I always keep a stack of these on my hotbar.

They are also the single most efficient wood based fuel, but I view this more as a design oversight than a feature. Your game, your decision.


Rope Ladders (Open Blocks): One of the fastest and safest ways to to establish a vertical route when you are starting high and trying to get low. I consider these to be an essential spelunking tool. My biggest gripe is that getting enough string to make useful stacks of these things can be hard without some pre-existing infrastructure.

Tools
Survivalist's Pickaxe (Forestry): Bronze tools that can stack up to 24 tools into a single inventory space. They have less durability than normal bronze tools, but broken survivalist's tools can be recycled for 2/3 of their metal. A half dozen of these allow for long mining trips without the hassle of needing to constantly replace your tools. Eventually you'll just make a powerful and permanent tool using one of the other mods, but I've found that there's definitely a window of opportunity where the survivalist gear is handy.


EDIT: I'm leaving this entry on the list, but I've recently discovered the Tool Box from Inventory Tools, and it has all of the advantages of the survival's tools and more.

Sickle (RedPower, Thermal Foundation): Harvests grass, leaves, and crops within a 3x3x3 cube. Much more useful than it sounds.

Dolly (JABBA): Even if you don't want barrels, you should consider using JABBA anyway, just to get this tool. It lets you pick up and move chests, barrels, and most machines without harming the contents. It's especially nice when you need to move one of those cantankerous Industrial Craft machines, but you forgot to bring your wrench.

It's not entry-level, but I'd like to mention that there is a diamond upgrade to this tool that can also move mob spawners. Didn't notice that for a long time.

Ironwood tools and armor (Twilight Forest):
Kind of on the edge of "easy" because you need a diamond to reach the Twilight Forest, but unlocking the TF is probably the single best way to spend your first diamond. Ironwood tools cost half as much iron to make, and have slightly better durability. If you are like me, you have a lengthy period of time between using iron tools and reaching sustained use of the advanced tools (eg diamond, thaumcraft artifacts, high-end tinker tools, whatever). Cutting the iron cost of these tools in half is a pretty nice bonus, and I now interleave the TF into my progression, instead of treating it like a standalone adventure like I used to.

Traveler's Gloves (Tinker's Construct): Wearing these improves the harvest speed of all of your tools, including your bare hands. The effect can be improved considerably by upgrading it with redstone. It uses a specially provided slot, so it doesn't take up any space.

Wand of Exchange (Thaumcraft): Thaumcraft is a daunting system, but this wand is pretty low on the tech tree and greatly speeds up several tedious tasks. Mine out giant coal seams with a single click by swapping the coal for cobble. Replace a wall with sand for easy demolition. Remodel your home in different colors of wood with just a single click. Pick up those diamond ores and save them for when you have access to Fortune III. You can even use it as a sneaky way to harvest obsidian without needing diamond tools.

Safari Net (Minefactory Reloaded): Lets you painlessly capture and move animals. This can save you hours of work if you need to move a distant herd of animals closer to your home. The cheap version can only be used once, but all you really need is to capture two animals to start a breeding stock. There's a reusable version, but you need ghast tears and enderpearls. The golden lasso from Extra Utilities also works, but that requires an Eye of Ender.

Watering Can (Extra Utilities):
When used on crops, it speeds up growth. When used on grass, it has a chance of spawning flowers. Works on a 3x3 area. Reusable. There's an upgraded version that works on a 5x5 area.

Improved Crafting
Yeah, yeah, I know about the complicated autocrafting machines. I'm talking about the simple entry-level stuff.


Crafting Station (Tinker's Construct): Oh my. I was ignoring this because I wasn't ready to start learning TC yet. Big mistake. Everyone should use this, even if they are otherwise uninterested in Tinker's Construct. You can make it when you are still in the tree punching phase, and it is a billion items more convenient than the normal crafting table. It has the internal inventory that we've come to expect from modded workbenches, but it also allows you to draw crafting materials from an adjacent chest, while still crafting. This feature has saved me incredible amounts of hassle.

Workbench Backpack (Backpacks): I added Backpacks to my personal modlist just to get this item. It's the most powerful portable crafting station I've seen. First off, it's a small-ish backpack with 9 spaces of storage. It can be activated by hotkey, so it doesn't need to use up one of your precious hotbar slots. It comes with a special backpack slot, so it doesn't even need to take up space in your inventory at all. It has a configurable auto pickup feature. And of course, the backpack GUI includes a crafting interface. You can give it both a size and a "smartness" upgrade. The first one improves the storage space, and the second one allows you to save up to 9 different recipes in the pack's memory, allowing for one-click crafting of complex items.

Factory Manager (Steve's Factory Manager): Extremely powerful sorting and autocrafting functions with modest resource costs and extremely low space requirements. Get the Steve's Addons expansion sub-mod, it lets you move the manager with the JABBA dolly without breaking it's programming, and also lets you save your programs externally.

Workshop Table (Steve's/Ewy's Workshop): Lets you cram up to four crafting tables or furnaces (or any combination therefor) into a single block. Having multiple crafting/smelting windows available on the same interface is luxurious, and makes iterative crafting much easier. It can be outfitted with upgrades for better speed and fuel usage, internal storage, autocrafting, autotransfering, and other powerful options.

Inventory Management

Miner's/Digger's/Forester's/etc Backpacks (Forestry): These are great. I've done very little with the complicated systems introduced by Forestry, but the utility of these packs means that I will always have Forestry installed. They have a lot of non-obvious features, so be sure to check the wiki. My only gripe is that you have to have them on your hotbar to access them. But that's why we have...

Traveller's Belt (Tinker's Construct): Gives you a second hotbar that can be accessed via hotkey. Very useful. TC introduces a special belt slot on your paper doll, so it doesn't even take up inventory space.


Quick Hotbar: A mod that lets you swap out your hotbar with a row of your inventory, controlled via configurable hotkeys. Combine with traveller's belt for hassle free hotbar management. I like to put all of my forestry bags on the bottom row of my inventory so that they're always just one click away (and can be banished back into my inventory with another click).

Tool Box (Inventory Tools): You can load up to 18 different tools in the tool box and pull them out at will. This isn't yet another backpack, its behavior is quite different. The toolbox actually becomes the tool that you select. When the tool breaks, the box tries to replace it with an equivalent tool. If it doesn't have one, it reverts to tool box form. You can keep multiple picks, axes, and shovels on a single hotbar slot and have them all be just a click away. The definition of tool is quite broad. You can store fishing rods, wands, your Thaumnomicon, wrenches, weapons, almost anything. I love this thing. It gets high priority when starting a new world.

Knapsack (Traveler's Construct): This requires use of the Smeltery, so it's more very-low level rather than entry level, but the resources involved are trivial. It's another backpack, and it goes in yet another specially created slot so that it doesn't clutter your inventory.

Iron Chests: This old workhorse of a mod lets me make metal chests with increased storage space. It's good, but I feel that it's been supplanted by the lesser-known...

Enhanced Inventories: Like Iron Chests, but more flexible. You can make double metal chests now, and you can even make vertically aligned double chests called lockers, which are great for conserving floorspace. The chests can be custom colored, can be placed next to each other, and can be upgraded with sorting, hopper, and redstone abilities.

Movement
Traveller's Boots (Tinker's Construct): Gives you the very handy high step ability, and even doubles as leather armor. Sure, sure, Thaumcraft's Boots of the Traveller are better, but these boots are much cheaper and don't require any complex meta-mod knowledge. You can get this on day one, easily. If you find a ghast tear, you can add a double jump upgrade to it. For two lily pads, you can also add water walking.

Traveller's Wings (Tinker's Construct):
Improves your jump height to two blocks and also acts as normal leather leggings. You need an Enderpearl, but it's not like Endermen are impossible to kill or anything. There's a cheap upgrade that adds a featherfall effect as well.

Traveller's Vest (Tinker's Construct):
A leather breastplate that grants swift swim. You can add invisibility and projectile dodging powers later on.

Archimedes' Ships: This mod lets you build custom air/water ships. You can make a small but servicable flying platform on day one. The hardest part is getting enough string. It's great for doing your intial survey and locating prospective base locations. Later on, you can expand your ship and make something super fancy.

Hang Glider (Open Blocks):
A fun vehicle that lets you cover horizontal distances very quickly, provided that you start from a high place. Can be made on day one, assuming that you don't mind wiping out the local cow population.

Intra Linked Books (Mythcraft): Even if you don't want to play around with ages, you should look into making intra linked books so you can make a teleport network.

Speed Boat (Mariculture): I hate vanilla boats with a passion. The speedboat is faster, doesn't break, and can be quickly and easily picked up with a single punch. It requires 3 aluminum, but you can probably find that in a surface gravel ore deposit pretty quickly. I try to always carry one when doing any serious overland traveling.

Resources

Flax (Biomes o Plenty): Flax naturally occurs in most grassy biomes, and can be harvested with shears. Nine flax gets you a single string. Flax can't be cultivated and doesn't spread naturally, so it is a limited resource. Still, string can be really hard to get during the first few days, and any extra source is appreciated.

Cotton (Pam's Harvest Craft): A better source of string, providing that you don't mind making a cotton farm, and that you have Harvestcraft installed.

Oreberry Bushes (Tinker's Construct): Laugh all you want, but I didn't realize that you can pick up and move these things until very recently. Plant them near your base for a small but steady trickle of metallic resources.

Iron Furnace (Industrial Craft):
If you aren't intending to climb the IC tech tree, you might still want to build one of these. It smelts faster and more efficiently than a normal furnace. It's a good stopgap until you finally have electric power.

Nether Furnace (Natura):
A furnace made of netherack. It has double the usual fuel efficiency. There are lots of ways to get obsidian in modded minecraft, so the nether rack requirement isn't as bad as it sounds.

Coke Oven (Railcraft):
It's a complicated multiblock structure, but it only needs sand and clay, both of which can be found in shallow ponds. It upgrades coal into coke, which has quadruple the fuel value of coal. Production of coke is slow, but it's a nice thing to have running in the background. The real value isn't so much that it saves coal (I always have more than I can use), but that you need to refuel your generators fours times less often.

Storage
Improved Barrels (JABBA): I can't imagine that people don't know about these things, but just in case, JABBA barrels allow for easy, GUI-less storage and retrieval of single types of items. They also can be configured with several powerful sorting options.

Storage Drawers (Storage Drawers): A lot like barrels, but with a different look and a convenient centralized sorting function. I have a bank of these things that I use to manage my Harvestcraft backstock.

Miscelleneous
Traveller's Goggles (Tinker's Construct): An improved leather helmet that grants you telescopic vision. Can be upgraded with togglable night vision powers later on.


Poppets (Witchery): You need to horse around with Mutandis to get these, so it's a little more advanced than most of the things on this list, but most of the poppets are still pretty easy to get. Poppets are like voodoo dolls that can sacrifice themselves to save you from specific kinds of death. The really powerful ones require advanced materials, but there are several entry level ones that are still good. The fire protection one in particular can save you from a dreaded lava death, the single most common source of rage quitting a world. A poppet shelf lets you gain their benefits without having to carry them around, but that's a more advanced project.

Pressure Plates (Obsidiplates):
All kinds of custom pressure plates. You can make plates that are only activated by you (great for auto doors), or that are only activated by mobs (great for defensive traps). Yeah, yeah, Thaumcraft already does that, but obsidiplates also offers silent and shrouded options, which can make your plates invisible and/or inaudible. You can rig your protected area with deathtraps without leaving it looking cluttered and stupid, and you can use silent plates in high traffic areas so you don't have to keep hearing that infernal click-clacking sound.

Angel Block (Extra Utilities): Angel blocks can be placed in open air. Very handy to have a few of these tucked away in one of your backpacks. Breaks instantly, even if hit with your hand, and automatically returns to your inventory without having to be picked up.

Sound Muffler (Extra Utilities): Oh God yes. Dampens sound within a small radius. Makes those damned sheep shut up. Be sure to check out the Rain Muffler, which filters out the sound of rain in a very large radius.

Compressed Cobblestone (Extra Utilities):
A recipe compresses 9 cobblestone into one block. Compressed cobblestone can be similarly made into double compressed cobblestone. This iterates all the way up to octuply compressed blocks. Get that damned cobble out of your inventory already!

Building Guide (Open Blocks): Creates a ghostly 3D blueprint to guide construction. Can be easily configured for several different shapes and sizes.

Quicksand (Biomes o Plenty): This block shows up in some of the biomes. It can be harvested and redeployed for base defense. I like to set up a ring of the stuff around vulnerable areas. It's always satisfying to walk out to my garden and see a bunch of creepers stuck like flies on flypaper.

Tuberous Flux Capacitor (Thermal Expansion): A redstone flux battery made out of a potato. I think we've all had situations where we have a remote machine that needs just a little bit of power, but you don't want to set up a proper generator. Can also recharge personal items, such as jetpacks.
 
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RenzosNips

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Jul 29, 2019
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Steve's/Ewy's Workshop (Ewy's version is more current) is a great early game mod. A combination of up to 4 of furnaces/crafting bench in one block? It's great.
 

Remaker

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Jul 29, 2019
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Oh my, that sounds wonderful. Thanks! Is there a better description of the features somewhere? The author only offers us this:

To figure out what they all do download the mod and see for yourself.

Which is not the kind of documentation that I like to see :/
 
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Zarkov

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Mar 22, 2013
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This is, of course, a subjective standard. Here are mine, I'd love to hear about yours!
Great list! Some minor additions:
  • Natura berries for food. Only gives 0.5 bar, but can be quickly grown and expanded.
  • Leather recipe using rotten flesh from zombies in redstone furnace. Not always available (the recipe is disabled by mod packs).
 

RenzosNips

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Jul 29, 2019
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Oh my, that sounds wonderful. Thanks! Is there a better description of the features somewhere? The author only offers us this
Which is not the kind of documentation that I like to see :/
Well you craft the workshop itself, and then you add a mix of crafting benches and furnaces to it. It has a fuel slot, which works for all the furnaces in the block.
The upgrades are pretty cool. There are global and local upgrades. Local affects one bench/furnace, global affects them all. There is a lava-fuel upgrade, which I use pretty extensively on Skyblock early. The core ones I use are storage upgrades, which add 9 storage slot under the local bench, a queue upgrade for furnaces, an auto input/output upgrade (I use it to auto output my furnace stuff). There's a solar fuel upgrade, fuel efficiency upgrade, and a few others I can't remember off the top of my head.
 

Adonis0

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Jul 29, 2019
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The vinculotus from botania, whilst it's an investment, if I have access to botania, it's the first thing I make a beeline for within the mod.

It forces any endermen within teleportation range of it to teleport to it when they attempt to teleport anywhere, trapping them at the flower. (It can be made into a floating island version which is recommended to prevent endermen stealing the dirt block and making your flower despawn)

Very handy for getting ender pearls early-ish (Requires a nether portal for netherack), especially effective in the rain if you make a roof over the flower. (once again a recommendation, as this will waste all of your mana if you don't do so)
 

Lethosos

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Jul 29, 2019
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Icarius is a good way for early, scalable flight. Lowest tier is leather, I believe.

Sent from my Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron using Tapatalk 2
 

InThayne

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Oct 14, 2013
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Concerning the TC crafting station- hate it, can't use it- what am I doing wrong?
When populating the crafting grid from an adjacent chest and am done click crafting the needed number of items I can't for the life of me find how to get the source items back into the chest (ctrl, shift, space, alt or quick triple click with furrowed brow). Its either one at a time back into my inventory and then over to the chest or a drag and drop to the chest for each one. I am better off breaking the station, swooping everything up off the ground and then redepositing back into the chest. For me its a 'hey use this and you can double your frustration and crafting time with one simple block'...how do normal people use this?
 

AuricPolaris

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Jul 29, 2019
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Personally I love the crafting halo and assembly halo from Botania. Both enable on the go crafting and the assembly halo can compress items in your inventory for you. So while you mine, compress all that coal, redstone, lapis, cobble, sand, gravel, <insert modded stuff here> and off you go!
 

LuisAdeur

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Jul 29, 2019
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Storage can also be ironchest mod. pretty good only taking 8 ingots for any chest of the desire level.
 

Steampunkr

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Jul 29, 2019
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If you have Immersive Engineering, you can pick up one of the Wooden Storage Crates in it's village building. They keep their items upon breaking so its a useful extra inventory while exploring
 

Remaker

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Jul 29, 2019
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Thanks people, I'll update the list with some of the suggestions here. I'm only including things that I've actually used, so don't feel bad if I don't mention your suggestion, it probably just means that I don't have the mod that you talked about. I a few new personal discoveries, and they're worth mentioned separately here:

Factory Manager (Steve's Factory Manager): Holy cow. Very powerful sorting and autocrafting options, using a built-in graphical programming language. You only need some gold and redstone to make an entry level system. It's so good that it's maybe a little too good. Still, if you want a compact autocrafter/sorter, this is probably the final word. I've got a simple script that autocrafts the various gears, frames, servos, pistons, and other tedious subcomponents for me. You definitely want to get the Steve's Addons expansion, which allows you to save your programs externally and use them again in new worlds.

Enhanced Inventory: A "modern" version of the Iron Chests mod. Does everything Iron Chests does and more. You can make double chests, vertical double chests (excellent for saving floor space), make custom colors, and a few other nifty things.

Inventory Tools: I haven't seen anyone mention this one. It lets you craft a Tool Box, which can store up to 18 tools, where "tool" seems to be defined as "not a world block item, not a stackable item, not a piece of armor, and not food." If you're holding it in your hand, you can press a custom defined hotkey and get a GUI pop up that lets you select any of the items stored in the box with one click. The tool box then becomes that item. You can press the hotkey at any item to swap it out for any other tool, including the original tool box. If the tool breaks, the tool box automatically replaces it with an indentical item, if one is available.

Starting out, you'll probably just want to pack it full of stone picks, shovels, and axes, so that you almost never run out of durability while in the middle of a job. Later on, you'll want to start packing it with all of your oddball tools that you sometimes wish you coudl carry but can never justify the inventory space. You can pack almost any tool at all: wands, your Thaunomicon, Thaumometer, mariculture fish scanner, sickles, harvestcraft bakeware, weapons, almost anything. If it lives on your hotbar, you may as well make it part of a tool box group. I keep one tool box full of melee weapons, one tool box full of harvesting tools, one tool box full of missile weapons, and another one full of random jank. I don't have to remember where I put that IC forge hammer, I don't have to run back to base to get my wrench, I don't have to miss a chance to capture a valuable animal because I didn't bring my lasso with me, I always have all of these items and more tucked away in one of my zero-footprint tool boxes.