I'm playing BeyondReality as well with GT, and I'm already lost. I need a good beginner's guide or something. Right now I have a good source of coal and spruce wood, and I've got my food supply covered thanks to a tiny little pond that spawns squid (and their delicious Pam's Harvest calamari) like you wouldn't believe. I know I'm supposed to get to the Bronze age with steam power, but yeah, that tin and copper... I spawned in a Spruce Forest way up at elevation 80-90 with exposed mountainsides all over the place, but I think I've only found 4 or 5 small tin and small copper ores so far and I've explored all the exposed faces carefully. I doubt I missed any tin. So now what? Just start digging randomly into the mountains? What is my best strategy to get enough tin and copper to be able to make bronze ingots? Should I dig (go vertical), or should I expand my exploration of the terrain out even further (stay horizontal)?
Also, any other tips for a beginner are appreciated. What is the first tools I should make? The first machine? I built an AE Quartz Grindstone like I always used to do right away... but it's useless and sitting idle. Grinding coal ore gives me coal dust which doesn't seem to have any use right now. I smelted all my coal ore, one coal gives 8 coal in a furnace, so I net 56 coal for every stack of coal ore. And what is this "Lignite Coal Ore" (or similar)? What do I do with that? NEI doesn't show anything? I also found a bit of "Bismuth" ore, no idea what that's used for. And at the very top of a mountain (y=100+) I found a huge vein of... hmmm... Tetrahedrite maybe? Not sure what that is used for either. The
wiki page for GT oregen is not up to date for all the version 5, sadly. But it does say this:
"In newer versions, when Tetrahedrite Ore is Macerated or smashed with a Hammer, it returns Tetrahedrite Dust. This dust is functionally equivalent to Copper Dust. When smelted straight, Tetrahedrite Ore returns Copper Ingots.
Tetrahedrite Ore can be mined with an Iron Pickaxe or better."
If that still applies, then once I find iron and figure out how to make an iron pickaxe, I guess I'll have plenty of copper! I hope I don't need bronze to make an iron pickaxe, but I bet that's certainly gonna be the case... sigh