Making Your First Tools

This tutorial covers making your first GregTech Tools following the quest "Important Tools" in the Stone Age and provides you with hints as to how to look up making more.

Note that your textures may be different than those depicted in this guide.

By now, you have probably gotten used to using NEI and searching for recipes through the NEI interface. However, GregTech tools will be one of the first times you will encounter items made from all of the possible GT materials. As such, there may be 30+ pages of recipes to sort through.

Here we will cover how to make each of the five tools that will help start you along the much longer journey to come.

We will start with the basic hammer. It's pretty easy only requiring 6 metal ingots and a stick.

The hammer is used to make plates (mostly), crush some items poorly, and in a few other crafting recipes. Plates are used to make other tools, machines, armor plating, etc.

Next is the wrench. The wrench is used primarily for machine and pipe interfaces, which you'll be using later. It is also the primary way you should be dismantling anything Gregtech (most machines in this pack).

If you simply mine later machines with a pickaxe, you will break them. If you use a wrench, you will be able to collect the machine without breaking it.

Note how the hammer you just made earlier is needed to make a wrench. This is common in this pack. Tools beget tools and all.

Next is the file, which is just two metal plates and a stick.

But how do we make plates? Well, we will need to use the hammer again.

Note that you need two metal ingots per plate. Later on, you will have compressors and other machines that will reduce your iron use, but for now every plate costs you 2 iron. That's fine. You can always mine more.

Now we can finally make the file.

You might have noticed by now that I'm making two of everything. No, it's not one for me and one for you, it's multiple so I have to craft these less time in the near future. As you might have noticed, tools have durability and get used up in every recipe they are used in, just like soft mallets made out of wood you've probably been using for smoothies and juice from berries. (Thankfully, iron is more durable than wood, so you will get a lot more uses out of them, but they will run out. Later on you can make tools out of more durable metals and they'll stick around even longer.)

Next up is a screwdriver made from a stick and two metal rods:

How do you make rods? I'm glad you asked. We need to use that file we just made.

Note that this is a SHAPED recipe, along with the others made so far. So you'll need to ensure that it looks like the pictures. Putting ingots next to the file or under the file doesn't work.

And now we have our screwdriver:

Note also that the order of the tools is important. If you switch the hammer and file as in the picture...

Sadness ensues.

So at this point, you might be wondering how you look up these tool recipes for other tools that aren't covered in this tutorial.

Recently, the developers of GTNH have improved the lookup of tools if you ever need to figure out how to make something out of your current material instead of seeing 30+ pages of random metal hammers, etc.

In the quest book you should already know how to click on a task item to see the recipe, which will bring you to this page (as of version 2.1.2.1):

Now you can click the second tab and try to work out how to make things from the layout of the various metals (in this case looking at how to make a saw):

But... that's kinda useless at the moment, because we don't know how to make a saw blade off hand. And different saw blade materials may require different processing methods.

HOWEVER, it turns out that earlier tools tab is actually quite useful. (By the way, if you're looking up sub-parts, you can hit BACKSPACE to go to the last recipe you were looking at. No need to re-lookup the original recipe)

You'll note there is a saw in the Gregtech Material Tools page midway through the first row of the largest box of items (as of this writing, clicking on them or hitting R does nothing), but there is also a saw blade in the third position of second row of the top-right box:

You CAN click on that.

When you do you'll be sent to another page that's probably useful for shortcuts in the future... but for now, we only care about how to make it. So hit the crafting bench tab (the third tab).

Ah ha! Now we only have one recipe to look at. Much simpler.

Two plates, a file and a hammer in order give us:

And thankfully the final recipe is easy enough:

Now you should be fully proficient and prepared for your future tool-making endeavors.

Go forth and GregTech!