Beginner Tips

= Welcome! = So you heard about this "really hard" modpack that takes Gregtech to the Nth degree and want to join in on the fun? Well first let's sit down and talk about what GTNH is and isn't, and who this modpack targets.

Philosophy of this modpack
GTNH is about taking the usual modball of magic and tech mods and making all the recipes Greg-ified. This means there's really nothing easy any more. All recipes are gated and modified - even vanilla ones. Even a door will need advanced tools you won't get until the Steam era at least. That means lots of hard work.

It also means a major sense of accomplishment when you open that gate to the next stage. Getting ingredients to make your first decent food. Making your Electric Blast Furnace. Your first Thaumcraft wand. Launching your first rocket. Building a full scale chemical refinery. Instead of simply being a minor event in a game, each of these becomes moments of joy that you have now reached the next level.

Target audience
As stated above, this modpack is for people who enjoy hard challenges, and are willing and able to commit serious amounts of time to them. At the beginning, this may mean hours of searching for the right ores. Later on you'll spend time building and rebuilding your technology infrastructure to handle the latest resource demand. By the end, you'll practically have degrees in Gregtech chemical and electrical engineering - even a mage needs a technological base to supply resources!

By its nature, this pack works best on servers, where players can work together to search for resources and share information. Playing SP is inherently more difficult since every orevein must be found solely by you. You are welcome to come to the Discord and commiserate with all the other players who have spent hours searching for that one redstone/lapis/mica/nickel vein.

= Starting the game = Because of the amount of mods included, starting GTNH can take much longer than other modpacks. On lower end PCs, 30 minute start times are normal. On even high end PCs, expect 5 minute start times. If Minecraft looks like it has locked up, wait a few more minutes. Low End PCs has tips and configuration suggestions to help with playing on potato-PCs.

Also, default Java parameters usually don't work well, so its best to optimize your memory setup and other configuration options.

If you have problems installing the modpack, have a look at Installing and Migrating.

= First day = Fair warning, nights in GTNH are *dark* (gamma correction is disabled, on purpose). And you won't get a steady supply of torches until well into the game. And there are terrifying Infernal mobs that can do nasty things to you. Expect to wall yourself in a hole in the ground during the night until you get your first bed. Torches will be in short supply until your first coke oven when excess creosote, wool and sticks can make torches in quantity. (Tip. to have only a tiny bit of orientation in your absolute dark dirt shack, press f7 to know where the floor is). If you're lucky and find a coal vein, you can smelt the ore to make coal for torches. There is also a guide on the Questing Mechanics. Coal may drop from Small Coal Ore, but it's not a guarantee. One of the first quests offers five torches in exchange for wood, which you are strongly advised to pick.

= Starting Location = The most important decision in the game is choosing where to start. If you're a beginner, look for these important factors when choosing a new place to start.
 * Near water: With no infinite water, until you get a Railcraft Water Tank, you will be making frequent trips to fetch water. Make sure the water is large enough, at least 60 blocks. Being near a river is good for setting up kinetic water generators later, but not necessary.
 * Near sand: You will need sand for many of the early multiblock recipes, and for glass. Later you can automate creating it from cobblestone.
 * Near exposed minerals: This is difficult in GTNH since ores spawn in veins. Sometimes you might get lucky and find a vein on the surface, but it's pretty unlikely. Always mark any you find.
 * Near a lava pool: Handy for refilling your smeltery.
 * Villages: A great place to setup a base. Villages however should be avoided until you have a bed, otherwise the villagers will be slaughtered while you hole up at night. Steal a door - you won't get one until you smelt iron. Walled villages are especially good if you can light them up inside the walls.
 * Roguelike Dungeons: The large brick buildings on the surface, with a bed and furnace, perfect for starting a base. The stairs down can be blocked off to prevent monsters from coming up. Also, the bricks can be cannibalized later for multiblock structures. You can cheese the dungeon by going down with only torches and lighting it all up before returning for loot.
 * Wood: No duh! You will probably need more than 7 stacks for the first 3 tiers (mostly for charcoal, paper and chests). Some great biomes to look for are the Jungle biome, any type of forest (the dense or ones with big trees are especially great), and most of all, the sacred spring, Which has massive trees but is a rather rare biome.
 * Wet and mid-temperature biomes (NOT desert or anything snowy): This will help greatly with gathering water in the first couple ages. The railcraft water tank auto-fills with water over time, and the speed of this is heavily affected by the biome. Swampy is best for this reason and a few others (better for IC2 crops, clay sources, ect.).

Look for a location relatively flat, near sand, with good access to a body of water. Minerals will have to be searched for no matter what, and with a relatively flat location it makes it easier to get around. If possible, be relatively near an oil spout - ~128 blocks. If you are closer, cover the spout with dirt/cobble roof. Lightning or infernal mobs can set it on fire.

= Food = Food is going to be one of your first concerns. Almost every early game food is heavily nerfed in hunger/saturation value. No longer can you dine indefinitely on steak or golden carrots. Spice of Life means that you have to obtain and eat a variety of foods or suffer diminishing returns. Eating new foods will gain points towards permanent HP increases, so it's worth the effort to try as varied a diet as possible.


 * Early quests often have a food reward, which can tide you over until you make a decent farm.
 * Till non-hydrated grass blocks for a chance of Wheat, Barley, Cotton and various Witchery seeds. Cotton isn't edible but you'll want lots of it anyways, for string and woven cotton.
 * Pam's Harvestcraft Gardens - these can be broken for 2-3 random food item drops, or right-clicked to be picked up for replanting elsewhere. Gardens will slowly spread to nearby empty grass/dirt blocks until there are 5 or more gardens of the same type within 3 blocks.  Pam foods can be converted into their seed form in a crafting grid and planted on tilled farmland.  Must be within 4 blocks of water to till soil.  Soybeans in particular are very versatile, substituting for both milk and meat in most recipes.
 * Natura Berry Bushes - Blueberry, Raspberry, Blackberry and Maloberry bushes are found in the wild. Look for slightly lighter, brighter green spots on your map.  The bushes can be broken and moved and grow up to three blocks tall.
 * Fruit Trees - Pam's Harvestcraft adds edibles to some trees, which may spawn with one, two or three types of produce. Harvested tree produce can be crafted with an appropriate vanilla sapling to make a new fruit tree.  Immature fruit nodes can be broken to drop their produce, but this is both very slow and permanently removes that fruit generating block.  Two bonemeal will instantly grow both fruit and fruit tree saplings.  Most fruit trees spawn in temperate to warm/humid biomes.
 * Animals - meat isn't a good food source on its own, but combined with other edibles it can make good sandwiches, soups and meals. Animal Traps are a lag-friendly way of getting various animal drops without needing a large farm (and with 100% less explosions). Natura's Barley can be used to breed animals and will not cause them to crowd/follow.
 * Most fruits can be turned into juice, yogurt, smoothies, jam and sandwiches. Mortar sugar canes for sugar.
 * Iron unlocks the Pot, Skillet, Sauce Pan, Mixing Bowl and Cutting Board. The Pot is the most versatile, as many soups don't require any other tools and only 2-3 ingredients. Flint + stick gives a knife, which can make bowls.
 * Soft Mallet substitutes for juicer/press, knife substitutes for Cutting Board, GT mortars substitute for Mortar and Pestle, Rolling Pin subs for Baking Dish, though the Pam's tools are worth eventually upgrading to as they have unlimited durability.
 * Foods that don't require any special tools beyond flint/wood include berry medley, beef wellington, raw meaty stew, the various salads, potato on a stick, and the various doughs/breads. GT dough recipe is easier since it doesn't require salt.

= Transportation = Horses are actually very useful early/mid game. Find or craft a saddle and lead per the quest in Transportation. If you can, craft a Golden Lasso as well - horses don't do well crossing water.

Make paths going the cardinal directions from your base. Smooth them as much as possible, and use stairs to go up/down. Upgrade the paths with Concrete later to go faster.

Once you have your first Bricked Blast Furnace, you can make a hang glider which helps with exploring and traveling long distances. Setup a tall launch tower at your base. You can use the electrotine and coal powered jetpacks to launch you into the air and switch to the glider to go long distances. If you hold down the jump and crouch keys, the pack will lift you and the glider will launch you forwards at high speeds. Don't exceed the speed of your chunk loading!

= Storage and Hauling = Like all large modpacks, there are a multitude of items you'll want to bring home - more than can easily fit in your inventory. Early game options for extra portable storage include the Forestry backpacks, Backpack’s Backpack if you luck into a single steel ingot from looting, Lunch Bag/Lunch Box for food items only, and Seared Tanks for liquids.

Forestry’s backpacks have set lists of themed items they can each accept. The most useful for early game are Digger’s (dirt, gravel, cobblestone, etc.), Miner’s (ore blocks, dusts, and crushed ores) Forester’s (plants and tree products), and Hunter’s (mob drops). Each can hold 15 stacks of items, and be upgraded later on for more space.

One of the early quests gives you a Lunch Bag (3 food slots), and access to iron will unlock the Lunch Box (6 food slots), both from Spice of Life. The Backpack item from the Backpack mod is the first store anything option available, gated behind a steel ring. Steel ingots or blocks can sometimes be found in loot chests, otherwise this option isn’t available until you build a Bricked Blast Furnace. The Tinker’s Construct Seared Tank holds four buckets of most liquids and will retain its inventory when broken. Identical empty or full tanks stack, making carrying a large quantity of lava feasible.

For at-base storage, the quest book will point you at the Iron Chest mod, JABBA barrels and Storage Drawers.

= Exploration & Resources = In early game, you should have at least the surface 256 blocks around you explored. Once you get a horse, explore further out. After you get steel, you can make a hang-glider and quickly explore thousands of blocks away from home.

Keep an eye on the sun! It gets really dark, really fast. If you don't have a bed, you'll have to shiver in a hole until daybreak.

Watch out for blood moons! If this occurs, you cannot sleep through the night. If the torches in your area start looking reddish, IMMEDIATELY stop and build an emergency fort.

Key minerals
Copper and Tin are going to be the first minerals requiring dedicated searching. Many players start with a nomadic lifestyle until they hit upon a copper or tin vein. Copper is used more often, but can show up in more ores (malachite and chalcopyrite). Tin is rarer. Look for Cassiterite or Garnet sands. Iron is relatively plentiful, with many alternate sources.

Other important resources to make it into the steam age include Redstone, Calcite, Gold & Gypsum, so keep track of these if found. Redstone is a primary, while Calcite spawns rarely in Lapis veins, Gold spawns rarely with Magnetite, and Gypsum is found with both Basaltic and Granitic Mineral Sands.

JourneyMap comes equipped with a GT Ore vein overlay which will automatically register deposits, so long as they are at least 200 blocks away from spawn (chunk 0,0) in both directions (known issue). Once you get an Ore Finder, simply walking close enough to the vein with the corresponding ore in the finder will add it to your map. Bring a backpack with one of every discovered ore when out prospecting. It can be used to quickly test new ore chunks without digging by putting them one at a time into the Ore Finder while near sea level or slightly below. Small ores other than iron/coal will generally correspond to a nearby ore vein, so those should be tested first if spotted. NEI has an excellent module for GT ore veins, showing composition, world type, scarcity and depth.

Preferred processing paths
Once you get to MV, there are some minerals that benefit from chemical baths vs orewashing/thermal centrifuging/centrifuging. (Needs checking)


 * Iron ore - Chemical bath with Sodium Persulfate to get additional Nickel
 * Copper ore - Chemical bath with Sodium Persulfate to get additional Copper


 * Gold - Chemical bath with mercury to get additional Gold
 * Silver - Chemical bath with mercury to get additional Silver
 * Lead - Chemical bath with mercury to get additional Silver

Once you hit HV, you should be using an HV macerator to get additional byproducts, both with the ore block and after thermal centrifuging.

How do I get...

 * Wood - 2x2 jungle trees are efficient and grow their own ladders. Once the Tool Forge is unlocked, they're an ideal tree to cut down with the lumber axe.  Biomes o' Plenty's Bamboo grows quickly, can be used as a stick substitute and requires no tools to break.
 * Slabs - requires a saw, gated behind iron.
 * Water (infinite) - Cactus can be grown on IC2 Crop (sticks), and eight cactus juice yields one bucket of water. Post iron, the Railcraft Water Tank passively generates water, dependent on the biome's relative humidity.
 * Paper - Mortar four wood logs to get eight wood pulp. Combine with a water bucket to get two paper. Combine one paper with a jungle sapling for a paperbark tree and easier, renewable paper for the future.
 * Lava - craft multiple Seared Tanks, carry them down to a lava pool. Load them with an iron bucket. Full tanks will stack, and can be safely carried out all at once.
 * Glass - mortar sand into quartz sand, combine with flint dust into glass dust. Melt glass dust in the Tinker's Smeltery, chisel it into vanilla glass if needed.  Saw glass blocks to get panes.  Tinker's Construct Clear Glass can be broken and replaced without losing the glass block.
 * Redstone Alloy - combine 1 copper and 4 redstone dust in the Tinker's Smeltery.
 * Obsidian - Requires steel pick with fully levelled Mining XP. Or left-click with a chisel.  Obsidian dust can be bought with XP buckets, useful for that first few Obsidian Glass for BC Factory tanks.
 * Steel - requires the Bricked Blast Furnace (BBF). Save up plenty of coke, coal, or charcoal.
 * Rubber - raw rubber dust obtained from sticky resin, slime or rubber tree logs in the Steam Extractor, with sulfur from the nether. Combine 3:1 in the Steam Alloy Smelter. Both are also purchasable with EXP buckets.
 * Slime - Slimy saplings, from Slime islands. Look up, way up, and get lucky.  Islands are quite rare.
 * Glowstone (renewable) - Glowflowers on IC2 Crop (sticks). 2 Glowflowers in the Steam Extractor yields one glowstone dust.
 * EXP - EXP Oreberry farm. Grows slowly, but provides a risk-free passive source of levels.
 * Aluminum (renewable) - Aluminum Oreberry farm. Plant on IC2 Crop (sticks).  Must have a low light level to grow.  Can be harvested at stage 3 for 0-2 oreberries, which are one nugget of metal each.  Same can be done with Copper, Iron and Gold, but with the exception of gold those metals are faster to mine from a vein.  Gold can be scarce and may be worthwhile farming with oreberries, particularly once gold blocks can go under the crop. This increases the oreberry yield to 6.
 * Blocks of metal - gated behind the Steam Compressor. More advanced metals, notably aluminum, require even more advanced infrastructure.
 * Vanilla saplings - GregTech's Branch Cutter can be made with four plates, two rods and a screw of most metals. Iron will be the first you can access.  The branch cutter gives a 100% drop rate on leaves for vanilla saplings only. Does not work on rubber trees, silverwood/greatwood, or any other modded leaf block.

Locations to note
Use your Journeymap to set waypoints.


 * Villages - scavenge for useful materials, Witchery books, smeltery blocks. Note any interesting trades for later. Once you can make Golden Lassos, you can bring back villagers to your base. Note you can't skip the quests for the smeltry as you have to craft it, but you can expand it.
 * Stonehenges - These can have chests or droppers with good loot. Beware of witch spawners!
 * Obsidian totems or obelisks - 1x1 spire of obsidian or floating pillars in an obsidian circle - avoid these. May be surrounded by difficult to kill mobs.
 * Aluminum Gravel - Always gather any you see. Aluminum veins cannot be found in the Overworld. Later in MV you will electrolyze clay dust for aluminum. Only process the bare minimum of the gravel, you want to save it for HV so you can get bauxite for titanium later.
 * Rubber trees - Gather until you have ~16+ saplings. Keep the wood too for centrifuging later. Frequent around rivers. Look for trees that have a 3 leaf tall spire at the top, or a brown spot on the side.
 * Vanilla clay - Rivers and lakebeds have clay - gather all/as much as you can. To make mining less frustrating, make a cobblestone wall around the outside of the clay patch, and fill in the water with sand/gravel. Then mine it all out. Otherwise mining underwater can be pretty frustrating since no infinite water means the water drains, pushing you around. Or you can try breeding clay bees.
 * Gravel - Initially you will need gravel for flint tools, but once you start mining you'll have plenty from that. Later you can forge hammer cobblestone into gravel or sand.
 * Mountains/Mesas - Look for mountains with stained clay - good source for mass quantities of clay dust instead of vanilla clay once you build a macerator. Layered mesas contain more clay, but has different colors.
 * Silverwood trees - Very rare, may need to travel several thousand blocks to find them. Or just use seed 4292492439225141544 and you'll have 4 in view. They have a distinctive blue color. Look for Cherry groves or Sacred Springs, they're more common than magical forests.
 * Slime islands - Mark for later - Not super common but there should be at least a couple with ~2000 blocks of you.
 * Roguelike Dungeons - Explore the surface levels and mark for later. Easier to cannibalize the bricks from the red brick house version than making your own.
 * Pam's gardens - Don't break them, gather them instead (rightclick). You can plant them back at your base and they will spread. Once you have 3-4, then you can break excess. For those who hate the Hunger Overhaul/Spice of Life, there is a quest for collecting every Pam's garden that rewards a Healing Axe that restores food.
 * Bee Hives - mark them for later gathering, as Forestry's beealyzer is gated behind polyethelene and aluminum ingots.
 * Meteors - Gather all the stone, save it for later. Ok for building since it has good blast resistance. The center will have a Sky Stone chest which is also blast resistant. Keep the contents for later.
 * Red/Black granite/Basalt/Marble - Ok for building since it has good blast resistance. Black granite can be difficult to see.
 * Snow - Gather a few stacks if you can find some. Good for smoothies/Delighted meals later.
 * Lootgames dungeons: These are large green cube areas underground with a simon-says minigame inside. A great source of loot for early game, with good chances of really useful stuff.
 * Tainted Land - purple, slimey and covered in fibrous taint. Spreads rapidly, only halted by water or air, and hazardous to cross.  Avoid building near this biome, and/or turn off taint spread in the Thaumcraft configs. It's exceedingly hard to clean up early game.
 * Mystic Grove - these are an easy source of glowflowers, which can be grown/processed later into renewable glowstone. Watch out for poison water pools.

= Learning to use NEI = Not Enough Items is the mod that shows you a search bar at the bottom of your screen, and a list of matching items on the right. When typing in the search bar, you can double-click the search bar to turn the outline yellow, and it will dim your GUI and highlight any matching items. This can be useful to find a specific ingot or dust in a large inventory. Double click again to remove the highlighting.

It also enables a couple of keybinds that can be used over items in inventories.


 * R - Recipe to make this item.
 * U - Recipes that use this item.
 * A - Bookmark this item. Hold down Shift then click-drag to rearrange bookmarked items.
 * T - Smoke from chests, etc nearby that have this item. Doesn't search your backpacks, however.
 * O - toggle NEI visibility on/off
 * Backspace - go back to the previous item.
 * Shift (hold down) - stop item icon cycling where a recipe accepts multiple options.

If you are in a crafting GUI while hitting R or U, you can click the ? button to populate the grid with an outline to fill manually, or shift-click ? to auto-fill it with items. Click on the [#] at the top left to toggle the bookmarked item display between full page and single column. Items in the quest book can be bookmarked or recipe checked directly with NEI shortcuts. Keybinds can be modified by opening the inventory, clicking on the wrench button in the lower left, then Keybindings > Inventory.

When looking at how to create an item, it can be confusing because of large number of ways to obtain it. When looking at how to make an alloy ingot, here are some tips:


 * Focus on certain creation methods, in this order: Shapeless (dust), Mixer (dust), Alloy Smelter (ingot), Blast Furnace (ingot/hot ingot), Vacuum Freezer (ingot).
 * When looking at a long list of recipes in a specific machine, click the left arrow on the bottom to go to the last recipe. That is typically where you can find the basic ingredients recipe.
 * If an alloy has two ingredients, the alloy smelter is usually the fastest way to make it. For example, cupronickel can be made with dust or ingots of copper and nickel directly in the alloy smelter instead of mixing the dusts in a mixer and then smelting.

= Base building = When building your base, there are a couple of primary concerns:
 * Chunk boundaries: Don't ever build a multi-block machine across chunk boundaries.
 * Take a look over on this page for a general overview on GT electricity. For the purposes of being "safe", never, ever over-volt your machines or your cables. Over-volting machines result in explosions, and over-volting/over-amping your cables and wires result in fires, which in turn may lead to more explosions. This not only applies to cables and machines, but also to energy and dynamo hatches. Plan your machine layout and designs thoroughly (preferably in single-player first!).
 * Certain multiblocks have their own set of rules, some of which may not be fully documented in the tooltip shown in NEI. Following the multiblock's rules could save you from an explosion. For every new multiblock you build, it is best to either check this wiki for documentation on how that multiblock works, look it up on the ftb gamepedia page, or ask the friendly people over on the Discord help channel.
 * Cover your machines: Rain on or next to a GT machine will cause it to explode. Be careful when setting up machines away from your base - don't forget to cover them up!
 * Spread apart: GT power generation and smelting will generate pollution. Mostly it's not enough to matter, but when you have multiple blast furnaces operating continuously it can really build up. Put them a chunk or two away from the rest of your production and/or house unless you like wearing hazmat suits. Worst pollution sources are EBF, Pyrolyse Oven, Implosion Compressor.
 * Blast proofing: Everybody eventually does something to cause an explosion. Mis-wiring a transformer, forgetting to cover a machine, putting water into a hot boiler, etc. Try and localize the damage by using tougher, more blast proof materials. Marble, basalt, granite, concrete help.
 * Be sure to read the electrical guide for more information on base building requirements.

Nice to have
Scaffolds: These blocks are like ladders that don't need to be attached to a block. Destroy the bottom block and the whole thing falls to the ground.

Monster repellator: Once you get to LV, you can build these to keep monsters from spawning - they can still walk/teleport into your base. Without power, they work a reduced distance, and higher tiers also work better. Only works on single player. On servers, claim chunks instead.

= Your first tools =
 * Flint - Once you have a furnace up and running, make mortars from stone and flint to process gravel more efficiently into flint. Always keep a mortar around to avoid having to use the 3:1 gravel recipe.
 * Tinkers - a shovel, mattock and pickaxe will all come in handy. Remember you have to level up your pickaxe's mining level again each time you switch heads.  Tools must be fully repaired to swap out parts.
 * Iron - the quest book will give you your first iron pickaxe head. Ensure you have access to an iron vein before attaching it, as you will need materials for repairs.
 * GT Tools - Access to iron opens up the File, Screwdriver, Saw, Wrench, Wire Cutter and Hammer. NEI’s limitations means that finding the recipes for these tools in a specific material is quite difficult.  Memorize or set a Worktable recipe, because you will be using them a lot.  Iron, and later Wrought Iron will be the most plentiful thing to make them out of for the steam age.  Steel and alumite are technically better, but the 2-3x extra durability isn't worth it.

= Your first boss fight = The Naga in Twilight Forest is probably the first boss fight you'll do. It's gating Thaumcraft, so if you want to become an archmage, you'll need to kill it and gather the scales.

Getting to the twilight forest will require building a portal generator in the assembler. While the surface of the TF is "safe", the frequent caves and canyons will spawn monsters who can walk onto the surface at any time.

Having a glider makes exploring the forest much easier and safer.

Once you find the nearest Naga area, bring a decent crossbow. You can probably win with a bow and arrow

= Miscellaneous = The smeltery does not produce aluminum ingots, but it can create aluminum brass alloy for making molds. Also, you can't make iron blocks from the smeltery either!

Always check and recheck common recipes as you get new machines and advance in tech. Something annoying now (like circuit boards) may become much easier with just the right machine (like an assembler). Even recipes like chests have an assembler version to save on resources. In fact, it has two! So be sure to check recipes often.