Tinkers Construct good starting tools

So I found an NPC village with a tinkers construct house in it and now I got a bunch of stuff. Im wondering what are some good tools to start out with(I've played for less than an hour, and most of that was exploring) I dont have much resources yet, so i want an Ideal pick and shovel to last for some time

 

It vastly depends what you have available. Frankly just making stone tools with it would stop you from replacing them constantly early on. However if you get *really* lucky like I did in my SP world and find an obsidian pick axe head, That thing will mine anything in the overworld almost, and saves you from the need to spend diamonds on a pickaxe, allowing you to jump straight to quarries or what have you that needs diamonds. That said if you find any free materials in the chests, use them, they are free. See what you got and make as much as you can. That said it's best if you can actually repair them. (My obsidian pick was actually a PITA to repair early early on.)

EDIT: Also if you have EE installed, get some stone bricks and use the stone on them for some mossy stone brick, take nine of those to a crafting table, get a ball of moss, put on tool. Slowly SLOWLY repairs it. Invaluable for anything you cant easily repair though. So you can alternate between an iron or stone and obsidian pick

 

For a pick I got an Obsidian head, no tool rods, and wood or Slime bindings. And If I have an obsidian head do I need obsidian to repair it?

 

Indeed you do, that's why I recommend rushing the ball of moss for it. Use it for valuables your other picks cant repair and you'll be golden. Though I do believe obsidian can mine obsidian so there is that. Also if I remember correctly the slime binding increases durability which would be useful, but don't quote me on that.

(IIRC the repair material is decided by what the head is made of.)

Hope that helps.

 

A better strategy that doesn't involve as much luck would be to travel to a swamp, kill some (green) slimes and create a slime pickaxe. It can mine obsidian as well (albeit very, very slowly). Once you get your first piece of obsidian create an obsidian pickaxe which is a lot better at mining obsidian.

 

I have a obsidian pickaxe head should I use that?

 

If you haven't already you should consider actually crafting the tinker's contruct worktables. They are all rather easy to make and the bonus is that when you craft them a book called "materials and me" or something like that will automatically spawn in your inventory. Its the red one. There is some excellent documentation within that book on all the tools and the stuff you can make them with. Some materials have special abilities that you may have noticed. The ones I remember are Stonebound and reinforced. Stone has the stonebound ability so a tool with any part of it made with stone will have that ability. It means that as the tool loses durability, its mining speed increases. Reinforced simply increases durability. Iron has reinforced 1 and obsidian has reinforced 2. The only thing I wouldn't recommend using obsidian for is for the tool rod because it has a handle modifier of less than one (0.8 to be precise). I think this means that part of the durability calculation involves multiplying the durability by 0.8. Obsidian is ok for the tool binding and the axe head.

Equivalent exchange also provides an easy, handy way of making obsidian from wood once you have access to a minium stone (requires minium shards which is a rare mob drop [not too rare] and 4 iron and one gold and some stone.) Hopefully you will have come across gravel ores. If you haven't been caving yet but have gotten your hands on some of these gravel ores (hopefully iron) then you can make good iron tools. A stone tool rod with an obsidian binding and an iron axe head is a nice beginner tool (or you can use all iron). All you need to do to make an iron tool be able to mine obsidian is add a diamond onto it. I would suggest that it is a good first use for diamonds.

I would also suggest rushing a smeltery. Get all the clay, sand and gravel that you come across, combine it and bang it in a furnace. You get seared bricks that are used to make the smeltery components. Other than that all you need is a bucket of lava to power it (hopefully you have come across a surface lava pool) and now your aluminum and a bit of copper can come into play. The smeltery is able to double your ore yield early on and will eventually give you access to the cooler things in the mod. You also get another good book to browse through. If you have ambitions of going to the nether, consider working towards obtaining alumite when you get situated. Tinker's contruct is just a brilliant mod that makes the early game really fun in my opinion so I hope you enjoy working towards the awesome stuff you can get in this mod.

 

Once you get later in game and have decent power options. I highly suggest just making the tool head the matieral you want and everything else paper. This will give you a lot of modifer slots. The down side is really low duriblitiy. but you can go around that by making the tool eletric and it will only loss durablity when it is out of power. And if you got MPS that will auto rechange off the MPS batteries make that a rare event.

But thats all later game but someting to look foward to.

 

For t1 tools the binding doesn't do anything outside of adding the material effect (unless that was very recently changed). What you'd want is an obsidian head with a slime tool rod, but even then that's kind of weak. My suggestion for once the v0.7 version comes out is rush an upgraded tool station so you can make tier 2 tools. This will allow you to have a hammer for clearing out stuff quickly and you can have a separate pick for precision mining. Sure, it costs a lot more materials to make T2 tools, but they're very worth it. Another thing to note, due to how hammers work, you can put an obsidian head on a hammer, a slime rod, and add more durability by using two steel plates. If you use slime plates dur will skyrocket, but your tool speed will be reduced and even with the steel plates as long as the hammer head is obsidian it will only need obsidian to be repaired.

As for what I like to start with - stone headed tools with wooden tool rods, so stone longsword (for the charge jump), stone pickaxe, stone axe, stone shovel, and unless I find a chisel head a stone chisel. All of those with wooden tool rods will give them more dur than when made purely out of stone.


Edit: Also, for tier 2 tools it seems redstone is only .05 speed increase per rather than .08 like it's supposed to be on t1 tools. This means for mining speed cobalt plates on the hammer increase the speed a lot more than paper plates combined with redstone. Also, hammers eat through the electric upgrade very, very quickly.

 

Yeah, but I was just suggesting it to the people who weren't that lucky.

 

My ideal starting tools would be:
Bronze/iron head (steel if I've been lucky with my loot), obsidian binding (might be different for swords, not checked), and slime handle (for the awesome multiplier).

If I've managed to get steel, I can ignore the obsidian bit (as well as not needing any alumentium tools for cobalt).

 

So I got a bunch of slime balls, should I make a complete Slime pickaxe? And what level can that mine at?

 

Slime can mine at obsidian level, but is very slow. Normally you'll want slime as a supplement for its durability that is only rivaled by manyullyn. This means you'll mostly be using slime for tool rods.

 

So Slime as a tool rod, steel as pickaxe head, and something for binding

 

paper makes a nice binding which allows extra modifiers

 

Just note that this only applies for T1 tools. The new T2 tools are very different in their construction since several parts can affect speed and durability, as I mentioned above with hammers and the metal plates.

 

No, no, no lol. Don't worry about the slime balls, just use your obsidian head to make a pickaxe and mine obsidian without needing to waste diamonds to mine obsidian. Slime is only for people who aren't lucky enough to start with an obsidian pickaxe head.

 

What is a very good pickaxe that doesnt require nether materials then?(I think that was my question, just I worded it very oddly)

 

(Green) Slime for the rod, Obsidian for the binding, Iron for the top. I'm not sure about steel, though. I don't have any mods that add it so I'm not sure if it is a good thing to add.

 

For an early-game pick, here's some tips and suggestions:

Slime makes for an excellent rod, a poor head, and an abysmal binding. Quite frankly, it will be the best rod you can make before hitting the Nether.

The head can depend on what you have available:

Obsidian can mine anything in the Overworld. Not too shabby. Steel can as well, if you luck into some in a chest or somesuch. Failing that, Bronze or Iron are not bad for a first 'serious' pick.

For the binding, I really only have two options: paper or Obsidian. Obsidian gives you Reinforced 3, which really lengthens the lifespan of your tool. Paper has the 'writable' property, which gives you an extra upgrade slot. For your first pick, before you hit the nether, I'd suggest Obsidian personally... it isn't going to be the last pick you make, so dumping valuable resources into it is going to be counter-productive.

Once you hit the Nether, go with a Cobalt Head, Mannyllium rod, and Paper binding. This *will* be the best pick you can make with TC.

Cobalt is the fastest mining speed of any material, so unless you plan on mining actual Mannyllium (which I've never had to deal with), Cobalt is the best head. However, Mannyllium DOES have the best durability multiplier, so use it for your rod. With the extra property from the paper binding, you can get Fortune3 from Lapis, Auto-Smelting, Speed, and either Electric or Mossy to keep it going. Lemme tell you, the combination of Fortune3 and Auto-Smelting is just... really a lot of fun.