Bit of a rant, bit of a victory.
I got to the witchery quest where I had to go to the Otherworld/Spirit World (can't remember the exact name). I'd learnt from a prior game that potion effects last. So I brewed up one of the magic crops super dooper potions (with all 6) quaffed it and went to sleep. I then spent the next 15 minutes or so running around looking for enough of the nightmare cotton. I actually ran enough to deplete my food bar to nothing, so I was taking damage (but regeneration was keeping me alive).
Now the victory. I was then able to make the dream catcher thingy so on the second attempt, I then got into the dream world rather than the nightmare world. Because I hadn't accepted any reward for the first infusion stone quest, I was then able to claim skeleton essence seeds for the dream world. This meant that I was able to storm (within reason) through the progression so I now have an ender chest.
For anyone who wants to do this without resorting to carrying stuff over via a mod (I'm aware of the tinkers belt and a few others, but I prefer the challenge). The steps that I more or less went down are
Get Flint tools
Upgrade pickaxe to Nether (so you can mine copper)
Grout is available as world gen. Get enough to make the smallest possible smeltery (this is 1x1x1, so it can smelt a single block at a time).
Start melting cobblestone so you can make a bigger one, keep increasing it until you can remake it to a decent size.
Once you have iron, you can make an alumite pickaxe which is sufficient to get gold (You can get obsidian via the Mariculture Vat). This allows you to make a cobble gen with a stripes pipe from BC.
Get Oysters, as that is your source of Ender Pearls. You'll need 6 to get Ender seeds, one for the runic altar, 1 for an infusion stone, 4 to get Ender Seeds.
You'll need mutandis to get Mushrooms (earth rune) and Netherwart (Fire rune)
You'll need to get Blaze Seeds. Along the way, you'll need to get Nether Seeds, you can get Copper, Iron, Tin and Dye, but you only need a single essence to get the second tier Infusion Stone.
If you have access to lots of bones, then this is a lot easier, as you need a decent amount of floral fertilizer to complete various essence quests, as well as clay etc. This is why I collected the rewards for the first tier infusion stone so that I could get them here. While it made it a bit harder starting out, I generally found that I wasn't waiting for plants to grow, and I could collect a reasonable number of bones at dawn anyway.
