How to start with the mods?
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I've always done it by playing a bit of vanilla MC, doing the really obvious tech trees, and then branching out from there. Back when IC2 used to be easy, it was the perfect starting mod, as everything was simple and make sense, with easy steps to upgrade each of your machines. I had a grand time going from furnace>iron furnace>electric furnace, etcetera. After that I bummed around in this forum until I felt adequate.
I don't know if there is an equivalent mod out there now to old IC2, but I would just experiment! Perhaps spend an hour or two in creative getting familiar with all of the items and the mods.
I don't know if there is an equivalent mod out there now to old IC2, but I would just experiment! Perhaps spend an hour or two in creative getting familiar with all of the items and the mods.
Depends on how you like to play. Combat? Tinker's Construct is a great one to start with. Construction? Play around with Chisel and Carpenter's Blocks. Techy? Ender IO is reasonably intuitive, as is Thermal Expansion. Magical? Thaumcraft is a little obscure to start, but it's incredibly well documented. Botania is a bit slow going at first, but it's nearly as well documented, and has some really fun things to play with.
If you have the ATL launcher, I'd recommend resonat rise lite. There is a RR wiki you can check out, and it's specifically designed for new players/weak computers. It contains a healthy blend of tech, magic, and nature mods. It was one of the first mod packs I tried, and I loved it.
you need to understand 1 of the core mods : TE, MFR, IC2, ender IO, factorization or pneumatic craft. You need to follow one of those spotlight. I think direwolf made all of them. This way you have access to a decent array of machines to play with.
Next step is to go to the wikipages and find mods that interest you and look at the pages from there. Or look at more mod spotlight.
Next step is to go to the wikipages and find mods that interest you and look at the pages from there. Or look at more mod spotlight.
I've written a few guides that might be of use to you, most of them are now up on the FTB Wiki as starter guides, so I'd suggest it as a good starting point. In brief:
Tinker's Construct: It's tools, Jim, but not as you know them. It introduces an entirely new tool crafting mechanic using multiple stations and a staggering variety of materials to make things with. Ever wanted to use something other than wood for a tool handle? Now you can. Also included is new sorts of tools. It's pretty well documented in game with books that show up when you spawn in. Honestly, I am of the personal opinion that this is how tool construction should be done in vanilla.
Team CoFH has a suite of mods they have produced to bring you into the industrial age. The 'core mods', CoFH Core and Thermal Foundation, don't do much on the end-user side, but they give mod pack developers the tools they need to make everything interlock and interweave on the back end. Thermal Expansion introduces a power system called 'Redstone Flux' that has become a staple for many (though by no means all) tech mods. There are dynamos for generating power, and machines that require power to run. These machines have a variety of uses, which are fairly well documented. Thermal Dynamics is where you will find the conduits and ducts to automate moving things from Point A to Point B. There's also a suite of servos, retrievers, and filters to make things even more interesting.
Minefactory Reloaded. Technically in the TeamCoFH group, but it's being handled mostly by Skyboy. Ever wanted to automate a tree farm, the growing and harvesting of your food, or the breeding and slaughtering of cows for leather? Ever wanted to automate sheep shearing and chicken egg harvesting? Now you can do that. It brings a whole new dynamic to the term 'renewable resources'. Oh, and Rednet Cables puts your old redstone wiring to shame.
Thaumcraft 4 is the quintessential 'magic' mod that I have come to love. You have a lot of research to do to really get involved in the mod, but there's always a new carrot dangling juuuuust out of reach to give you the desire to go out and Scan All The Things.
Chisel is a mod which brings a ton of new textures for most building blocks. Let your creativity run wild with the possibilities! Also introduces Marble.
Carpenter's Blocks create a radical dynamic to construction. Rather than creating specific types of blocks, it creates a shell for block shapes that are then able to have nearly any material applied to them! Want glass staircases? You can do that. How about a thatched sloped roof? Easy-peasy. How about a hexagonal wall? Got ya covered. Slopes, staircases, doors, beds, pressure plates... they don't just add static decoration pieces, they add the foundation upon which can rest any material you care to construct in!
Having trouble remembering all these new recipes? Well, There's A Mod For That(tm). It's called NEI, and is considered by most to be a staple mod. In brief, it is a searchable database of every single recipe available to you. Addons bring additional functionality to the mod by adding various machine-centric recipes to the mix. You can also look at what recipes use an item as a material, or what items are used to make that thing.
Wanting to store more items? There's a mod called Iron Chests that makes more expensive chests that have more inventory slots. A single iron chest stores as much as a double chest does, although it does take iron to make. There's also gold chests and diamond chests for even more storage.
With these, and maybe some utilities like a minimap, Inventory Tweaks to make sorting your stuff a snap, and a few other odds and sods, you have a pretty solid lite mod pack. Some other options for the more adventurous:
Botania. Ever wanted to be a long haired hippy freak who gets along by using flower power? Now you can do that. Also, you can protect your lawn from zombie invasion by using flowers to defend it. Gee... I could've sworn I'd heard that somewhere else...
Blood Magic. Ever wanted to go the other route and be that creepy emo sort of magic user? Look no further! Not recommended for all ages, but if you aren't squicked out by the concept of working magic by sacrificing blood at an altar, it's quite interesting.
EnderIO. Once you start playing around with ducts from Thermal Dynamics, you'll soon wish you could run multiple types of ducts in the same square to make things more compact. EnderIO has your back with Conduits. Not as pretty or shiny as ducts, but you can run multiple types of ducts in the same block. And block facades can be painted to look like almost anything. Oh, there's some other things this tech-heavy mod does, but conduits are my personal favorite.
Mekanism. Bringing your production to the corporate scale. Ever wanted to process more than one item at a time per machine? How about seven at a time? It isn't cheap, but it can be done. Also, extremely efficient ore processing can be found here, although the infrastructure required for the higher tiers of efficiency are fairly complex and interconnected.
Hunger Overhaul, Pam's Harvestcraft, and Agricraft are three mods I want to mention in the same sentence because they go together so very well. Ever thought that vanilla food was boring? Getting tired of living on baked potatoes? Hunger Overhaul swings a pretty hefty nerf bat at food values, and provides some additional tweaks to the hunger mechanics that I personally feel should be vanilla. Pam's Harvestcraft has a TON of fruits and vegetables added to worldgen that can be used to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of different food items. Open up your own fast food restaurant chain! Some of the more complex recipes produce foods that, even with Hunger Overhaul, are quite satisfying. And last, but by no means least, is Agricraft, which brings the concept of cross-breeding to produce better strains of crops. We are entirely GMO-free here, but we are growing stronger, more rapidly growing, and more productive plants. Also, an irrigation system which can further speed up your plants production. The combination of these mods makes for a much more interesting and robust food mechanic.
ExtraUtils is... pretty much what it says on the tin: a bunch of miscellaneous utilities that are generally useful. Possibly also paired with OpenBlocks and RandomThings, these mods are the garnish that makes a pack more interesting.
Barrels were originally introduced in a mod called Factorization back in... I think it was 1.3ish. However, the mod itself received an overall lukewarm reception. It is still around, I think, but many wanted barrels without having to have the whole mod installed. For those people, there is a mod called JABBA (Just Another Better Barrel Addon). Barrels can only store one type of item, so a barrel with cobblestone can only hold cobblestone, it won't be able to also hold wood or even smooth stone. However, it can store sixty four STACKS of that one item at a time. Then you can get into the upgrades for even more fun.
If that's not enough, there's Applied Energistics 2. In brief, it's matter-energy conversion that lets you store stuff on disk. Expensive in terms of components required to make even a small storage system, but it can store a truly stupendous amount of stuff in a small space, and interconnect a lot of automation as well.
Anyway, that's the highlights, I've written guides for most of these mods, so you can probably find them either on these forums or on the wiki. It should at least get you started.
Tinker's Construct: It's tools, Jim, but not as you know them. It introduces an entirely new tool crafting mechanic using multiple stations and a staggering variety of materials to make things with. Ever wanted to use something other than wood for a tool handle? Now you can. Also included is new sorts of tools. It's pretty well documented in game with books that show up when you spawn in. Honestly, I am of the personal opinion that this is how tool construction should be done in vanilla.
Team CoFH has a suite of mods they have produced to bring you into the industrial age. The 'core mods', CoFH Core and Thermal Foundation, don't do much on the end-user side, but they give mod pack developers the tools they need to make everything interlock and interweave on the back end. Thermal Expansion introduces a power system called 'Redstone Flux' that has become a staple for many (though by no means all) tech mods. There are dynamos for generating power, and machines that require power to run. These machines have a variety of uses, which are fairly well documented. Thermal Dynamics is where you will find the conduits and ducts to automate moving things from Point A to Point B. There's also a suite of servos, retrievers, and filters to make things even more interesting.
Minefactory Reloaded. Technically in the TeamCoFH group, but it's being handled mostly by Skyboy. Ever wanted to automate a tree farm, the growing and harvesting of your food, or the breeding and slaughtering of cows for leather? Ever wanted to automate sheep shearing and chicken egg harvesting? Now you can do that. It brings a whole new dynamic to the term 'renewable resources'. Oh, and Rednet Cables puts your old redstone wiring to shame.
Thaumcraft 4 is the quintessential 'magic' mod that I have come to love. You have a lot of research to do to really get involved in the mod, but there's always a new carrot dangling juuuuust out of reach to give you the desire to go out and Scan All The Things.
Chisel is a mod which brings a ton of new textures for most building blocks. Let your creativity run wild with the possibilities! Also introduces Marble.
Carpenter's Blocks create a radical dynamic to construction. Rather than creating specific types of blocks, it creates a shell for block shapes that are then able to have nearly any material applied to them! Want glass staircases? You can do that. How about a thatched sloped roof? Easy-peasy. How about a hexagonal wall? Got ya covered. Slopes, staircases, doors, beds, pressure plates... they don't just add static decoration pieces, they add the foundation upon which can rest any material you care to construct in!
Having trouble remembering all these new recipes? Well, There's A Mod For That(tm). It's called NEI, and is considered by most to be a staple mod. In brief, it is a searchable database of every single recipe available to you. Addons bring additional functionality to the mod by adding various machine-centric recipes to the mix. You can also look at what recipes use an item as a material, or what items are used to make that thing.
Wanting to store more items? There's a mod called Iron Chests that makes more expensive chests that have more inventory slots. A single iron chest stores as much as a double chest does, although it does take iron to make. There's also gold chests and diamond chests for even more storage.
With these, and maybe some utilities like a minimap, Inventory Tweaks to make sorting your stuff a snap, and a few other odds and sods, you have a pretty solid lite mod pack. Some other options for the more adventurous:
Botania. Ever wanted to be a long haired hippy freak who gets along by using flower power? Now you can do that. Also, you can protect your lawn from zombie invasion by using flowers to defend it. Gee... I could've sworn I'd heard that somewhere else...
Blood Magic. Ever wanted to go the other route and be that creepy emo sort of magic user? Look no further! Not recommended for all ages, but if you aren't squicked out by the concept of working magic by sacrificing blood at an altar, it's quite interesting.
EnderIO. Once you start playing around with ducts from Thermal Dynamics, you'll soon wish you could run multiple types of ducts in the same square to make things more compact. EnderIO has your back with Conduits. Not as pretty or shiny as ducts, but you can run multiple types of ducts in the same block. And block facades can be painted to look like almost anything. Oh, there's some other things this tech-heavy mod does, but conduits are my personal favorite.
Mekanism. Bringing your production to the corporate scale. Ever wanted to process more than one item at a time per machine? How about seven at a time? It isn't cheap, but it can be done. Also, extremely efficient ore processing can be found here, although the infrastructure required for the higher tiers of efficiency are fairly complex and interconnected.
Hunger Overhaul, Pam's Harvestcraft, and Agricraft are three mods I want to mention in the same sentence because they go together so very well. Ever thought that vanilla food was boring? Getting tired of living on baked potatoes? Hunger Overhaul swings a pretty hefty nerf bat at food values, and provides some additional tweaks to the hunger mechanics that I personally feel should be vanilla. Pam's Harvestcraft has a TON of fruits and vegetables added to worldgen that can be used to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of different food items. Open up your own fast food restaurant chain! Some of the more complex recipes produce foods that, even with Hunger Overhaul, are quite satisfying. And last, but by no means least, is Agricraft, which brings the concept of cross-breeding to produce better strains of crops. We are entirely GMO-free here, but we are growing stronger, more rapidly growing, and more productive plants. Also, an irrigation system which can further speed up your plants production. The combination of these mods makes for a much more interesting and robust food mechanic.
ExtraUtils is... pretty much what it says on the tin: a bunch of miscellaneous utilities that are generally useful. Possibly also paired with OpenBlocks and RandomThings, these mods are the garnish that makes a pack more interesting.
Barrels were originally introduced in a mod called Factorization back in... I think it was 1.3ish. However, the mod itself received an overall lukewarm reception. It is still around, I think, but many wanted barrels without having to have the whole mod installed. For those people, there is a mod called JABBA (Just Another Better Barrel Addon). Barrels can only store one type of item, so a barrel with cobblestone can only hold cobblestone, it won't be able to also hold wood or even smooth stone. However, it can store sixty four STACKS of that one item at a time. Then you can get into the upgrades for even more fun.
If that's not enough, there's Applied Energistics 2. In brief, it's matter-energy conversion that lets you store stuff on disk. Expensive in terms of components required to make even a small storage system, but it can store a truly stupendous amount of stuff in a small space, and interconnect a lot of automation as well.
Anyway, that's the highlights, I've written guides for most of these mods, so you can probably find them either on these forums or on the wiki. It should at least get you started.
Wow, thanks. I didn't plan on wathcing DW's videos, because I somehow forgot that he made actual spotlights for the mods, and I didn't want to start watching the whole LP with 30 mins each. I've already played with most mods, I'm just not ever sure if something changed (like the way AE changed when it went to AE2) Since asking the question I've already started Tinker's Construct (managed to make a smeltery before realizing a tool station and would probably be useful) so I can at least double my ores and I do have basic bronze tools. My biggest problems are trees not dropping saplings almost ever, and goddamn quicksand everywhere. Also getting into AE will be hard with the stupid meteors ( quick question: does anybody have some kind of tip about how to find the chest inside the meteor without spending ours hammering away at the superhard sky stone?) and the fact that I need 4 different types of presses. And I'm a bit low on food, so I'd like to fix that problem too(I've set up a small farm, but it's only a small farm)
Go to top and dig down where you estimate the center is. You should run near/into the chest 
Imo, it's ok to cheat in the other presses when you have one, so this is what I do.
Imo, it's ok to cheat in the other presses when you have one, so this is what I do.
I never had any luck with the meteors. I tried going the middle, the edges, then I just went in a zigzag in every way I could and it took me ages. What I usually do with the presses is if I have enough in number, then I'll just exchange the copies for new ones.Go to top and dig down where you estimate the center is. You should run near/into the chest
Imo, it's ok to cheat in the other presses when you have one, so this is what I do.
Yeah quicksand is literally everywhere. I tried to reduce it with configs but i dont know crap about worldgen. Its not a big problem anymore since i can fly
Re: meteors, I just get a TiCo hammer and go postal on the meteor from the top down. It usually doesn't take long to uncover the chest and then I end up with lots of lovely skystone to build with.
You and I have different definitions of 'lovely' it seems.
Honestly though, the middle does tend to be where the chest is. The quickest way I know is to grab a Leadstone Energy cell and a Mining well. Plonk the well down on what you think the middle is, and set the cell beside it. It should spit out the chest and items shortly.
There's no "middle", it's an even numbered sphere... Hammer on one of the 4 middle blocks, dig down until a chest pops up in ur inventory.