Diary of a One-Seven-Two Newbie
Background: I have zero knowledge of GT 1.7. Or any 1.7 mods. I've read no tutorials or watched any videos. I will stumble badly due to lack of preparation.
Part 3
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"same old, same new"
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Woke up in a brand new world...with friends! (SMP)
Got things started in the usual way: picked a place on the horizon and booked it. In this case, there was an interesting desert in the distance. I like deserts, because I like easy-to-gather sand.
Crossed the desert, picking up the odd cinderpearl (free blaze powder ya know). On the other end, I find a swamp. Now, most people hate swamps. In fact, when I paused there, I was immediately asked "Don't you hate the green water?"
Fortunately, I'm color-blind, so: setting down roots. My main reason? Swamps have shallow water, which means lots of easy clay. (Also, maybe IC2 crop preferences in swamps, not sure about that.)
First day is spent gathering sand, clay, tons of wood, and a few berries to survive the night.
"coal coke oven is your friend unless you're smart"
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Pyure's tip #1: don't do what I did above (gunning for coal coke). Its not "wrong" per se, but I suspect you're better off running for the hills. Specifically, look for lignite/coal veins. Alternatively, look for Ignis veins: you can make an auto-smelting Shovel that will produce you a coal coke oven (insta-bricks) in no time. But...I didn't do that. So, it took me a couple steve-nights to get my coal coke oven working.
But we now have coal for torches, and we can mine. Huzzah!
"Good luck?"
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Decided to dig down to level 15 today. Good thing too: abandoned mineshaft right below my base. Great!
Ran into cave spiders almost immediately. Not sure what I'll do about them: I dunno how to stop from getting poisoned, and they're in a cavern with a bunch of skeletons who keep shooting me when I'm nearly dead. I've blocked them off for now.
The abandoned mine has produced some other fine luck: a copper vein, and even better, an iron vein.
Pyure's tip #2: You cannot mine the iron in an iron ore vein with your wussy stone pick....EXCEPT for the brown iron. I forget what its called. Its called brown something ore. But there's lots of it, so mine that. Get some iron picks, and then mine the rest.
"Ug ug...stone bad. Iron sort of less bad."
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Things moving along nicely. Cave of shame is nicely hollowed out and squared off. Have two ovens making me charcoal.when I feel like I need charcoal.
Pyure's tip 3#: Steal tips from Spankx and declare them as your own. (He mistakenly calls himself Spwnx btw). In this case, convert some of your iron into nuggets, and then smelt those nuggets into wrought iron nuggets. This is just such an awesome early-game nobrainer that I have to repeat it: MAKE WROUGHT IRON. Particularly important if your iron supplies are low. The tools last, I dunno, around 50% longer (probably more like 30% but whatever).
I was feeling really clever, so I blew some iron making buckets, so I could run my furnaces off lava. Why? Converting nuggets into wrought iron is expensive in fuel, and I'm cheap.
"Quest for Tin, Part I"
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Asked a friend which way I should search for tin. He suggested north-east, since it was mostly virgin territory.
Spend three hours boating around, looking at mountains and trying to identify tin/cassiterite veins from exposed rock faces.
Pyure's Tip #4: Find mid/high elevation ores by looking at hills. Props to greg since this seems like realistic "prospecting" compared to vanilla branch-and-prayer mining.
In my case, apparently I'm cursed? My journey ended up with something like 15 magnetite veins (many of which had gold), several lignite veins (in case I ever need coal), and zero tin.
"Quest for Tin, Part 2"
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But wait! Friend says "check this out", points me to the closest mountain near my base, and sure enough, if you stare long enough, you sorta see the tin. What was I saying about color-blindness being fortunate? It sucks. It SUCKS. Tin is, like, invisible.
Mined a couple stacks of tin; left the rest for others, cuz, you know, frenz. This means....
"Finally we're getting somewhere"
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I'm not sure what the best way to go about getting bronze is. I mean, I have like half a stack from pillaging temples and raiding villages. Btw, that reminds me:
Pyure's Tip #5: When you find bronze and steel stuff, smelt it into ingot form. Trust me, you're carrying enough crap already without 6 helmets and 3 leggings taking up space.
Back to order: I converted some of my ore to ingots via an Ignis (auto-smelting) pick. Interestingly, I tested several ores: some auto-smelt, some don't. I don't know what the rule of thumb is.
Pyure's Tip #6: Some ores have AE2 Grindstone multiplier bonuses! You can see them in NEI. From what I can tell, its "pure" ores which do this. So "copper ore" and "tin ore" would give a 75% dust increase, whereas tetrahedrite would not. Also interesting: cassiterite gives two ingots when ignis-pick-smelted, instead of 1. So, furnace recipes apply here. Yay.
I vanilla-smelted a bunch more iron and copper. I had some stray "dirty" dusts of each kicking around, so I smelted those too. Then I made a wrought-iron mortar, grounded a lot of this to dust, mix it all together, boom, we have our first bronze dust.
"End game! Right?"
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What to do with all this lovely bronze? Flipping through NEI for early-game steam generators, I see we can make a solar steam boiler now! I am actually very excited about this. It won't run at night, but I'm super clever, so I don't care. I've already auto-smelted three stacks of glass, so making 4 vanilla liquid tanks is simple.
In case you missed it, my base is in a swamp bordering on the desert. I plonk my solar boiler in a desert block, just in case, you know, it matters. (It probably doesn't). This is where I start to feel "cheaty".
I really wanna do bronze pipes here. I wanna. But: a) they're expensive, and b) I can't see fluids moving through them. So, I'm a wank: I do BC pipes.
A bit of pipe-sealant collecting later (shears on tiny desert cactus equals sealant), I have a pipe running from my generator into a 4-high stack of tanks in my base. I'll be buffering steam since I can't generate it at night. I'll likely quadruple this buffer.
The generator begins to heat up. I wait....and wait. I watch the temperature gauge. Is it moving? Do I have the pipe attached to the right place? Do these boilers even work properly? (Checked wiki...). Wait longer...HOLY CRAP I'M GENERATING STEAM.
Dunno why it looks like lava, but who cares, I have steam.
"Setbacks can blow me"
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Ok I have steam, what the hell do I do with it?
The obvious thing would be a steam macerator. Look at the recipe...goddammit, it needs diamonds.
Now, I just want to be clear about something. This entire world, I have not branch-mined once. Not a single damn time. I have caved, I have searched-and-pillaged, and I have hand-quarried some veins, but I haven't done any branch mining. So... I have no diamonds. Incidentally, I have no redstone too.
There's a bit of good news. There's a graphite vein down in that abandoned mine. Now, apparently one of my colleagues went through it a bit already, but I gather the damn things have diamonds in them, and maybe there's some stray diamonds left over, so the next order of business is to go look for leftovers. Alternatively, I think I have a diamond horse armor kicking around somewhere, so I'll see if I can somehow grind that into diamonds. I'm not confident.
"What's next?"
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Gotta make some steam machines. Not sure which ones first, but likely whatever saves me the most resources. Extractors, Macerators, hammers, that good stuff. If there's still a smelter, that too.
