Opinions wanted on "best" initial setup for me

[ZROGST]

As title says, looking for your opinion on the best (most efficient in terms of resources and time with highest quality results) way I should start a settlement with the FTB mod pack. I'm new to mods in general, but have spent a few hours looking over the wikis in preparation for my play.

I recently started on an SMP server and found a great spot to settle on the edge of a Savannah, with a thick Jungle and Snow Wasteland (complete with NPC village and large NPC farmplots) within walking distance. Now I need to start gathering materials to build my home. While I don't have a lot of knowledge of new blocktypes, I think I am aiming for a wood (logs and planks of all kinds) and glass house, covered in a natural-looking rooftop garden.

I've built some stone tools and gathered an initial supply of logs (I am running on charcoal at the moment) I've begun mining ores in some of the surface tunnels nearby.

What is the best way to start gathering wood and glass resources for building? I know sand is a byproduct for some of the forestry machines, for example. I will also need a fair amount of dirt to cover the building after it's built.

 

[SilvasRuin]

Stirling Engine + a Pulverizer gets you 200% yields from metal ores and is cheaper to make than a Generator + Macerator. The Pulverizer will also get an extra bit of dust to smelt from metal ores. It requires two Gold ingots, but if you find Redstone, Gold won't be far behind. Both the Pulverizer and Macerator can turn Cobblestone into Sand. The Sawmill is from the same mod as the Pulverizer, which means it's convenient to use both, and will give you 6 planks per wood and 1 charcoal per 8 wood in the form of Sawdust.

You will want to either enchant a pick with Silk Touch or Fortune III eventually, or work your way through IC2 to craft a Rock Cutter for a rechargeable Silk touch tool, though that will require a Blast Furnace to make Steel. The Macerator will double the yield for ores you cannot pick up without Silk Touch, which include some things that even Fortune III doesn't effect, as well as eliminating the randomness of Redstone Dust from its ore, generally getting you as much if not more Redstone than Fortune III. You'll want to work your way to Steel and IC2 power generation either way so you can make the Mining Drill and Chainsaw, Pickaxe/Shovel and Axe/Sheers/Sword multi-tools that run out of power instead of break. They are inferior to their vanilla tool equivalents when enchanted at level 30, but it's nice to have tools that will never break, even if their charge runs down faster than normal durability would.

The Igneous Extruder can get you Obsidian in item form without having to mine it. You will definitely eventually want to upgrade from the Stirling Engine. The Steam Engine (note: not the Hobbyist, Commercial, etc.) can be kept cool with the help of an Aqueous Accumulator. Work your way towards Redstone Conduits and Energy Cells to break free of the weakness of Buildcraft power, its tendency to waste or lose energy.



Of course, this is all assuming you don't want to scar the landscape. If you don't mind doing so, make a Quarry asap. No, you can't double your Redstone, Lapis, Diamonds, Uranium, etc. via Silk Touch and/or Fortune III, but it will mine up a lot of ore you wouldn't have found.

 

[Exedra]

If you were wondering on a good set of machines, I reccomend ThermalExpansion machines. They are brilliant.

 

[AliasXNeo]

I havn't really compared all that much, but I setup a steam engine rather than a stirling engine at first to power my pulverizer/powered furnace. I'm not positive, but I feel as if it lasted way longer burning through coal than a stirling engine.

 

[SilvasRuin]

I find the Steam Engine preferable, but it's definitely more expensive to craft and requires bucketing water into it until you've got enough resources to craft an Aqueous Accumulator. Stirling Engines are quite cheap for an "initial setup" as it's primarily made of Cobblestone rather than some sort of metal as the better engines are.

 

[Zelfana]

Magmatic engines are a good choice if you keep empty cells with you when out mining and fill them with lava. Then you can use liquid transposer to get the lava out of them and it gives you the cells back. No need to use buckets that don't stack for material preservation this way. you get 64 lava opposed to just one in one slot. The liquid transposer only uses a small amount of MJ, you can power it with a redstone engine.

Don't hit me but isn't the sand a byproduct by the farms that need sand as a material anyway? So, it's just giving you a bit of the sand back, not generating it.

I'm also a fan of thermal expansion machinery, definitely better in early game than IC2. Here's a wiki link: http://thermalexpansion.wikispaces.com/

 

[Stanekk]

Yeah you need sand in humus and bog earth recipe!

 

[Bibble]

One of the more interesting things with FTB is that there are a number of different ways of doing things, and none are really much better than the others.

This time around, I was fortunate enough to get a couple of diamonds and some gold fairly early, so I made a boiler powered by a tree-farm and a powered furnace. I'm aware that scaffolds give more energy than charcoal, but a stack of charcoal can give you a fair amount of time to run around and do other things, rather than jsut sitting there feeding the beast.

 

[madaffacca]

The only way I've come up with so far to generate sand is generating cobble first and then macerating/pulverizing it.

 

[Bibble]

The only way I've come up with so far to generate sand is generating cobble first and then macerating/pulverizing it.

You can get sand a few ways. When a peat farm is my starting farm, I'll usually settle in a desert biome and harvest the nearby sand dunes for supplies. A tree farm does produce sand from dirt (dirt > humus > sand), but not quick enough to keep up with a peat farm. I think you need about 3. Or you can macerate cobble.

 

[thedeester1]

Find somewhere with a lot of water! I made the same mistake you did/are making. To start with your gonna use generators and they eat coal like a fat man eats chips. Then your gonna go to coke furnaces...They are slow but no loss. generators still eat coke like a fat man eats chips. So for the best early ballance your gonna use steam engines...Less you got plenty of water around your gonna be Baulked. Your either gonna go solar or nuclear. But at first you need a power source that is gonna give you a decent amount of power.....You can use coal-coke but its slow (you will need it though). Coke lasts 4 times longer than coal. You could go geothermal but that uses up all your tin on cells...so to start you need steam...and that means lots of water. Use the MC's that need engines on steam and the ones that need electricty on generators and batboxes. You need both types of machine to get a good footing. You can find coal anywhere...But to for clay for a coke oven you need to find that in water. Dont get all exited about a quarry. Build a mining turtle with your first 3 diamonds and set it to "excavate 10".....Power it with 1 coal and wait for it to come back. Take its Items and give it one more coal...Go 2 if its not got enough and you are safe in the dark. As soon as you can get to the Nether, get what you need for a jetpack. Get some rubber and wool and make rubber boots....Take the mining turtle with an Iron Pick axe and fly into the hole it made. Set it to tunnel 10 at about level 12.

The rest is upto you.

 

[Sara Dr In te House]

My favorite fire and forget tree farm is a Steve's Carts cart with a saw-blade tool, coal engine, and either side chests or top chest for storage. Costs 5 diamonds, one of each vanilla saplings, and some creosote for the tracks. It is as costly as the Forestry logger in diamonds the but takes a some iron and a bit of time to build. It can use the saplings (for a large farm sapling still outproduce its usage) or wood tree blocks for coal engine fuel. No need to make an automated humus production. The only bad negative is that this system don't help for rubber production.

 

[Zelfana]

My favorite fire and forget tree farm is a Steve's Carts cart with a saw-blade tool, coal engine, and either side chests or top chest for storage. Costs 5 diamonds, one of each vanilla saplings, and some creosote for the tracks. It is as costly as the Forestry logger in diamonds the but takes a some iron and a bit of time to build. It can use the saplings (for a large farm sapling still outproduce its usage) or wood tree blocks for coal engine fuel. No need to make an automated humus production. The only bad negative is that this system don't help for rubber production.

It can replant the saplings? So it would be fully automated like Forestry? I would look into that if that's possible and see which I'd like more.

 

[Sara Dr In te House]

The cart will plant the saplings on both sides of the track and space them 1 space apart. Just give them the saplings in its interface and you can forget them after. It totally beats Forestry in all my tests. Since it does not limit the growth height for the trees you still get the massive oak trees. More bang for the buck plus. It don't do rubber at all but it makes up for the tree production. I like a 24x4 oval track for massive amounts of wood. A nice and simple 12x4 will produce quite well. With the cargo manager the system is fully automated. I set the cargo manager to unload the cart storage than refuel the cart. A wooden pipe and redstone engine to get the goods out slow enough for the cart to refuel but fast enough to get the wood out without causing a backup.

 

[Zelfana]

Can the carts use planks as fuel or would you need to charcoal some of the wood?

 

[Sara Dr In te House]

So far I have tried with Coal Coke, Coal, Charcoal, wood blocks, planks, sticks, saplings, blaze rods, scaffolding, and buckets of lava with no problems. Lava cans don't work. Lava is an awesome long lasting fuel and cheap to get with TE. I prefer using the wood or saplings from the farm because I can just ignore it.

 

[Zelfana]

Simple autocrafting table setup to craft planks to use as the fuel would be my choice.

 

[Greyed]

Simple autocrafting table setup to craft planks to use as the fuel would be my choice.

That. Also one could just stack hoppers. When I was first starting out I had 2 steams hooked up to a single aqueous. Any time I needed the engines to run for a while without me baby sitting them I'd craft up 6 stacks of scaffolding for each and feed 'em into the hopper. 1 in the engine, 5 in the hopper.

Also, to the person who suggested rubber boots for the nether, no need. If you can get to the nether that means obsidian which means Long Fall Boots. Far better than rubber boots.

 

[Bibble]

Also, to the person who suggested rubber boots for the nether, no need. If you can get to the nether that means obsidian which means Long Fall Boots. Far better than rubber boots.

Unless you're making the rubber boots as a part of the hazmat. With the entire suit, you are immune to environmental damage (such as, say, fire from lava or blazes), but you do need the entire suit for it to take effect.

 

[Bibble]

can you swim in lava with hazmat?

Yup, it's usually my method of lava collection early on. Grab a few stacks of empty cells, and do a few lengths of a lava lake. Usually keeps me going until I hit tier 3. Plus the geothermals only burn when needed, which removes the need for the batboxes.