Well I might provide a more deep explanation to what I do.
Normally I start building a house and place a waypoint on it. For this I harvest some wood (I prefer birches, but I chop down oaks at the start to get apples) and build the basic tools, a furnace and a crafting-table. I also build a door and a touchplate.
If the finish with this before the night starts I go wander around a bit to explore. I normally want to find other biomes (desert for cacti etc.), reed, rubbertrees and such. While wandering around I harvest some seeds and if I'm lucky I find pigs or cows for meat or even a village to get potatos or carrots. Before I go back inside I'm hopefully able to plant some rubber-trees and some wheat.
After I'm back I start mining (it is night anyway). To get some early torches I use some of the wood I harvest to produce charcoal. I then start digging down for gold, redstone and eventually some diamonds. I start my journey down with a stone sword, but normally I happen to find iron or tin and copper to make an iron-sword and pick or a bronze-one. I need the tools for mining anyway and having something better than a stone-sword isn't that bad.
After I'm back normally with some gold, lapis, redstone, iron, copper and tin (sometimes even with some diamonds) I start to build some machines. A Magma-Engine (oh... I most likely also found Silver) and a Powered Furnace are the first things I build, followed by a Generator and an Geothermal Generator, I also build a bucket. If I happen to find diamonds I normally build a pulverizer or a macerator (I have the alternative recipies enabled for both). If it is day again I harvest some more rubber and wood and create more charcoal. I also look for my wheat, but it will not be enough to feed me yet, but I might be able to harvest and replant some (the farm will grow, since I get more and more seeds). With a big amount of charcoal I will also start to light the whole area up so that monsters can't spawn near my house (or my cave whatever I use).
With the bucket at hand I will start to build a netherportal and get some netherrack and if I'm lucky I also might get some glowstone. Since I have a lot of netherrack building a compressor to get netherbricks is a good idea. I use the netherbricks to build a magma-crucible which will feed the magma into a BC-Tank (so I can take it out easily with a bucket). Since the process is time-consuming I might build another crucible which feeds directly into a magma-engine and maybe even a third one that feeds into the geothermal (I haven't tried that yet, I normally pump the magma, but it should work). With an unlimited supply of magma (well as long as I don't run out of netherrack). I try to get diamonds for a macerator. At this point I normally already have 3-4 Stacks of coal, which could be turned into diamonds with the macerator, so I normally build the macerator before the pulverizer, but I use the pulverizer for ores, because of it sometimes creates additional ores and outputs into the furnace itself. Also the wheat-farm now is large enough to provide a stable supply of bread.
From this point onwards everything is very... open. I could again go for a village, I could go for bees, I could do a little crops, I could build some farms, I could go further into IC2/Gregs with a centrifuge etc. I could even go full bronze and look for a netherfortress.
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