Most Efficient Start

[Hitmaniac]

I've decided to get back into FTB with all this free time I have, but unlike my first world, I want a good start. I want to get progress that took me a week in my first world, in a day in this world. I am familar with FTB now but I want to get some ideas on how to start off.

1. Whats the best/easiest form of Energy.
2. Whats the easiest way to get Biomass/Biofuel
3. The best storage room?
4. Best mining method?

 

[PeggleFrank]

Biomass can be gained by a turtle tree farm, if you want to be most efficient.

Also, if you want to be REALLY efficient early-game (like crazy OCD efficient) then you should break 3 logs, make a crafting table, some sticks, and some wood and get an axe so you can keep on chopping down the same tree but faster. Instantly get a pick and dig straight down till you hit stone and mine 6 stone so you can get a stone pick and stone axe. Then you go mining for iron. Instant iron toolset 5 minutes into the game, essentially.

Just use a bunch of chests for your storage room. Really cheap.

Strip mining is the most efficient way of mining. Caving is also really good too.

You should get 'free' energy first. Like windmills, solar panels, watermills, redstone engines/stirling engines, just really low power output generators.

Mass quarries is the way to go. Unless you can pull something off using turtles, I would suggest sticking to them.

 

[Lambert2191]

1: there is no best way.
2: there is no best way.
3: there is no best way.
4: there is no best way.

 

[KirinDave]

I've decided to get back into FTB with all this free time I have, but unlike my first world, I want a good start. I want to get progress that took me a week in my first world, in a day in this world. I am familar with FTB now but I want to get some ideas on how to start off.

1. Whats the best/easiest form of Energy.
2. Whats the easiest way to get Biomass/Biofuel
3. The best storage room?
4. Best mining method?

I actually did a thread like this once when I started playing FTB and I realized something since then: There aren't good answers! For a few reasons! For one, what you happen to find strongly dictates your best early form of power. If you happen across a walnut tree sapling in a dungeon, or get lucky with a vein of certus quartz, or find flint and steel and gain early access to the nether... all of it changes the right call.

Instead, what you should do is try and look at what's in your loot chest and say, "What can I make?" For example, I recently started out on a new map where I got lucky and on my first mining trip found two stacks of redstone and almost 50 certus quartz. As a result, I've gone into Applied Energistics really early. But on other maps I'd wait a lot longer before doing that.

This of course demands a sort of wide understanding of the mods in the modpack. If you're not sure which thing to do, then try instead doing a different thing every time. Not sure about Forestry as an early start? Hand-farm peat and use that (this works very well, btw). Not sure about Railcraft as an early start? Just use hobbyists (you'll get a big appreciation of the tradeoffs railcraft makes if you keep your eyes open).

It might also help to watch other Let's Plays where people do weird things and try those.

 

[Zarkov]

1. Getting a fully automated tree farm fairly early is probably a good idea. It's convenient to always (more or less) have an abundance of logs and charcoal. The 25x15 block Steve's Carts farm with oak I usually build can keep 4 max size HP boilers running, two on charcoal and two on bio fuel.
2. SC2 has introduced durability (unless you go highest tier) to the tree farm, so you might want to check out Mine Factory Reloaded if you have it. I haven't tested it much myself, but it seems promising and has the potential for enormous output. Normal saplings have apparently been nerfed, so unless you're into tree breeding you may want to stick with solid fuel. Don't take my word for it though, I need to do more testing.
3. Use Applied Energistics. It's so efficient, convenient, and well, fantastic, that there is no going back once you've used it. It's gotten a bit more expensive in 1.5.x, but seems within reason still.
4. I don't have any data to back this up, but I would say divide your time maybe 50/50 between branch mining at level 11 and caving a bit higher up. Do that until you have a continuous power output and a quarry, then maybe expand to 2-4 quarries over time if you feel like it.

 

[lindyhopfan]

I wouldn't recommend constraining yourself to building whatever is the "most efficient" in an absolute sense.

Not every mod author has the same sense of game balance. While the modpack creators do make an effort to exclude super cheaty "dirt to diamonds" type mods, they do wind up accepting a wide variety of mods, since the interesting mods out there come in such a wide variety of flavors.

If someone were to do research and prove that using turtles with such and such a pre-packaged downloaded mining program was the fastest way to get to X number of diamonds early game, it would not necessarily follow that doing things in exactly this way will result in the most enjoyment for you as a player.

Rather than go out of your way to find the most optimized path, I would recommend instead that you think about what things you would like to accomplish, investigate the options for what mods can help you fulfill your goals, and pick whatever path of mods and tasks sounds like it would be the most fun for you. Sometimes finding your own way can be more enjoyable than following a canned path, especially if you are learning mods along the way that are new to you.

Have a look at the spreadsheet in my sig to help you sort out what tasks you would like to set as goals for yourself, and what mods you would like to try out to help you accomplish those tasks. If you then come back here and post that you have decided to work on doing such and such, and what mods you want to try out, then maybe folks can give you more focused, constructive advice on how to efficiently accomplish those specific goals.

 

[PeggleFrank]

I wouldn't recommend constraining yourself to building whatever is the "most efficient" in an absolute sense.

Not every mod author has the same sense of game balance. While the modpack creators do make an effort to exclude super cheaty "dirt to diamonds" type mods, they do wind up accepting a wide variety of mods, since the interesting mods out there come in such a wide variety of flavors.

If someone were to do research and prove that using turtles with such and such a pre-packaged downloaded mining program was the fastest way to get to X number of diamonds early game, it would not necessarily follow that doing things in exactly this way will result in the most enjoyment for you as a player.

Rather than go out of your way to find the most optimized path, I would recommend instead that you think about what things you would like to accomplish, investigate the options for what mods can help you fulfill your goals, and pick whatever path of mods and tasks sounds like it would be the most fun for you. Sometimes finding your own way can be more enjoyable than following a canned path, especially if you are learning mods along the way that are new to you.

Have a look at the spreadsheet in my sig to help you sort out what tasks you would like to set as goals for yourself, and what mods you would like to try out to help you accomplish those tasks. If you then come back here and post that you have decided to work on doing such and such, and what mods you want to try out, then maybe folks can give you more focused, constructive advice on how to efficiently accomplish those specific goals.

He wants the most efficient method, as he specifically said. Some people want certain things and you can't really change what they want.

 

[lindyhopfan]

It's still worth asking the OP if they have any specific goals, as any advice about efficiency can be more accurate if it is tailored to a specific goal. For example, if the OP wants to rush to a Steve's Carts tree farm as part of the path they have decided to take, I would want to remind them to build a coke oven fairly early, as it takes some time to get the needed amount of creosote oil.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Also, it depends on what the OP considers important that he is optimizing. Do you wish to be time efficient? Do you want to be space efficient? Do you want to be materials efficient? No you can not have all of the above simultaneously.

 

[Hitmaniac]

I am not trying to beat the game super duper quickly. The reason I made the thread is to get a grasp of if anything has changed and it seems the only thing that changed the AE. Thanks for the feedback.

 

[RedBoss]

Tons of stuff has changed. Wait until you have access to 1.5.x mods.

 

[Hitmaniac]

well it looks like i wont even be playing because my account was hacked. nice job mojang

 

[Poppycocks]

12345 is a bad password!

 

[Someone Else 37]

I'd start by smelting exactly two gold ore, five iron ore, and two gold ore in a furnace and crafting a TE Pulverizer with a couple stirling engines to power it. Use the pulverizer and a vanilla furnace for your ore processing until you can make a Powered Furnace, followed by an Induction Smelter. I'm a little OCD about wasting materials- I only ever use vanilla furnaces to smelt things in batches of eight, when possible.

Nether Lava is a popular choice for a power source (via Thermal/Geothermal generators for EU, or Magmatic Engines for MJ), but it's not quite infinite. Sure, there's a lot of it, but you'll need to move your pump every once in a while.
For MFR Biofuel, the Bioreactor treats all the different types of plant matter it accepts- saplings, seeds, nether wart, cactus green dye, probably sugarcane, etc.- as the same thing, but gets an efficiency boost for each different type of material thrown into it. Prior to the somewhat recent nerf in Forestry relating to saplings (I don't know if this nerf is in the version of Forestry that you're using), I believe that the Bioreactor was better than the Fermenter/Still for nearly everything but Saplings. Now, I don't know which is better.
Steam boilers are also excellent for generating Buildcraft power; while the Fusion Reactor is the end on the line IndustrialCraft-wise (if you're using Gregtech).

As for storage, as people will tell you, nothing beats Applied Energistics, once you can afford it. It's expensive, though, so don't mess with it until you've got several chests' worth of stuff built up and a reliable (preferably self-sustaining) power system.

As people have said, there's really no "best" way to do anything in Minecraft, and especially FTB. So try a few different things, and see what works for you.

 

[Ryiah]

well it looks like i wont even be playing because my account was hacked. nice job mojang

Yes, because Mojang is automatically at fault if your account is hacked. Were you using a sufficiently complex password? Are you certain that the computer(s) you've inserted your password into do not have keyloggers?

 

[unspunreality]

Not my thread. But Ive been playing minecraft for over a year. FTB for like 6 months, made my own 1.5.2 modpack and I still dunno whats a tree farm. Someone point me where to start

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Not my thread. But Ive been playing minecraft for over a year. FTB for like 6 months, made my own 1.5.2 modpack and I still dunno whats a tree farm. Someone point me where to start

What mods do you have? There's several types of tree farms, depending on which mods you play with. Probably the most straightforward are either Forestry or MFR, but Steve's Carts has an option as well.

 

[lindyhopfan]

If you want to set up an automated way to harvest trees for their wood you have a number of options. Doing this in Vanilla is extremely difficult, requiring lots of pistons and tons of complicated redstone circuitry. So, some of the mods in FTB provide automated options. It's possible to set up a complicated, but much more straightforward than a vanilla setup, machine to do this using RedPower BlockBreakers, Deployers, Timers, etc. It's also possible to program a Computercraft Turtle to do some automatic tree harvesting for you. But if you want a way to set up a tree farm that doesn't require computer programming or the mind of a brilliant engineer, check out the wiki's for Minefactory Reloaded, Steve's Carts, and Forestry. Each of these mods has a setup for farming trees for which you can just follow the instructions on the various wiki's for crafting and using the needed blocks and you can get a nice tree farm going pretty quickly.

 

[gusgillis1]

A tip for quarries:
Once you get 11 diamonds, ~32 iron ~22 gold, and 5 redstone ezpz, make 3 hobbiest steam engine, aquacrapname accumulator (Just realized I didn't put the resources needed for that#owell) gold pipes, 4 water proofing.
Put the quarry down, landmarks, optional, and place the 3 engines on all sides except the bottom and the side the quarry is mining, put a engine on the side opposite of the mining side, the accumulator under that, water under directly under the quarry block, then water on the other side of the accumulator, waterproofed pipes, going up to the engine, only 4 needed, and put coal in the engines, and let them run. The quarry will automatically dumped all the coal it mines into the engines, resupplying them, and spit out the access into a tube going to chests or something. Really nice for an early game quarry, no refill needed, unless you get REALLY bad luck with coal spawns or something.

I just realized I explained that REALLY badly.
#Badatexplainingthings

 

[Enigmius1]

I am not trying to beat the game super duper quickly. The reason I made the thread is to get a grasp of if anything has changed and it seems the only thing that changed the AE. Thanks for the feedback.

Okay, let's just back up a bit. As someone else pointed out, there is no 'best'. There are things that work and things that don't work and then after tinkering a bit with each of them you decide which one you like the most. That's the 'best'. For you. Nobody else can tell you what you're going to like and thus nobody can tell you which is 'best'.

Additionally, you don't 'beat' a sandbox game. It goes and goes and goes until you run out of ideas. Then you set it aside until you get more ideas and then it continues to go and go and go. So I would suggest for your consideration that you dispense with the notion of 'best' or the idea that at any point you will have 'beaten' the game. Once you understand that, you're in good shape to enjoy the game.