tips:
1) dig into side of a hill to start. make indoor corn farm - corn = most lovely indeed. Cook the cobs to get a nice food source, cook the spare seeds to make popcorn.
2) first goal is a little tin, copper, iron, gold, and redstone. With these materials make 1 aqueous accumulator and 2 to 4 hobbyist steam engines.
3) after steam engines, are set up, get a pulverizer and an induction furnace and a powered furnace. Now you have everything you need to double ores, cook things, and get rich slag which you can use to create any ingot you want in a pinch.
4) now that you're doubling ores and getting slag for the specific ores you need, choose a tech tree!
- IC2 if you like winning
- Thaumcraft if you are awesome
- More thermal expansion if you want to automate more things (quarries, builders, magma crucibles, bees, etc)
- Red power and Railcraft for sorting and for being a baws (<3 bluelectric alloy furnace, bluelectric furnace, and the frame motors)
IC2, steves carts, buildcraft and computer craft give you the tools for automated mining, which is always one of my first priorities once I'm done worrying about food and shelter and ore doubling. They all have their advantages and disadvantages, but one of the easiest to get is a mining turtle (3 diamonds req). Put it on the surface, put a chest directly behind it, and then tell it to "excavate 20" and it will start digging a nice hole for you. It will even fuel itself off the coal it finds and also return periodically to the chest to drop off mined ores.
Some of the easiest research projects to do in thaumcraft are the metal transmutations. As a hint, research things that tend to change along with the metal you want to transmute into (or something similar to the metal you want to transmute into) (another hint, you need to do gold first). This will give you more options if you're out of rich slag, though it does tend to pollute the environment if you do it en masse.
The IC2 electric jetpack is amazingly cheap to build for what it grants you, and can be charged in a battery box. Even if you're not doing the IC2 tree, greatly consider getting a basic generator, a batbox, and a jetpack just for the power of flight.
You can create the recipe for bog earth and plant it down near water by yourself. It will turn into peat that you can dig up with a shovel. This is basically a better version of coal that you can use to fuel all your goodies (works great as a source of steam). Later on you can automate the process with a peat bog. Never use coal for fuel unless you absolutely have to. Coal is for IC2 grinding and railcraft steel. make torches with charcoal (or if you add gregtech, with sulfur). Use peat and charcoal for fuel.
The twilight forest costs 1 diamond to enter, but when you do you will find a world of proper dungeons and mazes, abundant resources (except for copper which spawns above layer 40 while the twilight forest is only around 36 layers tall at ground level), and a means to create an xray map that can find ores for you.
Use a mystcraft world to create your thaumic goodies. This will keep the flux levels away from your main base while providing an easily accessible infusing and thaumaturging zone.
Use redstone energy conduits to conduct buildcraft power (MJ) as soon as possible. conductive pipes suck in almost every situation.
the bigger you make your steam boiler, the more efficient it is in the long run, but the less efficient it is when you first start it up.
mob spawners count as 200 soul shard souls. this makes T5 blaze spawners surprisingly easy to get, and allows you to use blaze rods as a renewable source of fuel.
did i mention steam is really efficient? steam is really efficient. a single hobbyist steam engine attached to a powered furnace will do almost a stack of smelting from 1 piece of charcoal if it's heated up.
automatic renewable bluelectric power actually works surprisingly well with the bluelectric engine converting to MJ. It automatically throttles when it's not needed, and is always on, providing a slow trickle of power that will fill any energy cells you need overnight (only in SMP, avoid this in SSP as bluelectric conversion is awfully slow if it's not loaded 24/7)
steam is really efficient.
zeppelins from traincraft don't need to have fuel in them to hover.
mobs can't intentionally sink in water. suspend water over signs stacking sign>water>sign>water to provide yourself an elevator out of your base and a mob proof door on hard mode.
steam is really efficient.
industrial centrifuges turn lava into goodies at 32 eu/tick
steam can be used to make EU at the initial cost of 600 steel and 99 steel every 42 hours of consecutive 100% operation. If you do not use all the power all the time, it will throttle itself down and last weeks.
a nanosuit makes it very hard for blazes to kill you. You can make a nanosuit out of coal, redstone, glass, and rubies.
ruby, sapphire, and green sapphire tools have more durability than iron ones, and mine as fast as diamond ones. they cannot mine obsidian.
thaumium tools have the durability and mining speed of iron but enchant like gold, allowing you to have things like fortune III, unbreaking IV, efficiency IV thaumium pickaxes.
Always have a linking book back home on you at all times. This will save you from lava death in the nether and from mob death elsewhere. it will also keep you from getting lost in the mysts.
steam is really efficient.
If you put a combustion engine on top of an aqueous accumulator, and a lever on the ground next to it as a means to turn the engine on and off, the redstone signal reaches the accumulator. by default, redstone signals turn accumulators OFF and you will get an explosion. Be sure to keep your accumulator in "redstone signal disabled" mode in order to stop all redstone interactions.
Thermal expansion machines automatically push their products through their output face. they don't need wooden pipes or redstone engines. They do need such engines or hoppers or something in order to get items into their inventory. You can put 2 TE machines next to each other and set one to output into the other directly.
i'm outta tips for now :c
