Stone Age

Greg Tech: New Horizons is divided up into tiers that mark progression - Stone is the first of these. You have no power other than your own hands, travel is slow and dangerous, and hunger constantly nips at your heels. The Quest Book is here to guide you along, and this page focuses on getting to the Steam Age as soon as possible.

Beginner Tips is highly recommended reading, which straddles the Stone / Steam Ages, and a bit beyond.

Goals

• Basic farms
• Tinkers' Tools
• Cotton plantation
• Coke Oven
• Iron, Copper and Tin

Starting Location

The most important decision in the early game is choosing where to start. Look for a location that's relatively flat or open, near sand/clay, with good access to a body of water at minimum. Minerals will have to be searched for no matter what, and with a relatively flat location it makes it easier to get around and set up early farms. Due to the amount of infrastructure this pack demands you build, it gets progressively harder to move as you advance. Choose wisely.

• Near river or lake. With no infinite water until you get a Railcraft Water Tank, you will be making frequent trips to fetch water. Make sure the water source is large enough, at least 60 blocks. Being near a river is good for setting up kinetic water generators later, but not necessary. Rivers are also not a bad way to get around by boat. Proximity to water also where clay will generate. Large quantities go into making the Smeltery, which is the first step towards better reusable tools.

• Biome with high IC2 nutrient bonus, IC2 hydration bonus, and humidity. Not desert or snowy. InGame Info XML shows humidity but not the other two. If you plan on growing crops later for resources nutrient/hydration bonuses will support plants with higher stats and make them grow faster. The Water Tank auto-fills with water over time, and the speed of this is heavily affected by the biome humidity (90% humidity will fill 3x as fast as 30% humidity.)

• Sand: Desert within reasonable travel distance. You will need sand for many of the early multi-block recipes, and for glass. Later you can automate creating it from cobblestone, but in the Stone Age you have to collect raw sand from the wild.

• Hardened Clay: Proximity to clay mountains or mesa. Hardened clay can be pulverized for clay dust. Used for the Smeltery, Bricked Blast Furnace, Concrete and aluminium elecrolyzing (MV).

• Oil: Near an Oil spout, but no closer than eight chunks (128 blocks). If you are closer, cover the spout with a dirt/cobble roof. Lightning or Infernal Mobs can set it on fire. Oil is harmless to touch but will suck you down, prevent jumping and massively slow movement, so don't fall into the well.

• Village: 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. Iron Golems can be turned into a passive income iron farm. Help yourself to some crops as well. If you're particularly lucky there might even be an incomplete Smeltery in the village.

• 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.

• Roguelike Dungeons: The large brick buildings on the surface with a bed and furnace are 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 multi-block structures. You can cheese the dungeon by going down with only torches and lighting it all up before returning for loot. The other variants of Roguelike Dungeons aren't as profitable as the brick house but can still make for a solid temporary home.

• Wood: You will probably need more than seven stacks for the first three tiers (mostly for charcoal, paper and chests). Some great biomes to look for are Jungles, Swamps, 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.

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.

First Tools

Punch some trees, craft gravel into flint, and make a crafting table. The first tools you can make are not wood but flint. Once you have a furnace up and running, make mortars from stone and flint to process gravel more efficiently. Always keep a mortar around to avoid having to use the 3:1 gravel recipe.

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  Soft Mallet - 6x wood plank, 1x stick

• 

  Flint Mortar - 5x stone, 2x flint

Quests, Coins, & Lootbags

Quests will give you coins, items or lootbags as a reward for completion. Coins are used later to buy things from the Coins, Coins, Coins tab of the Quest Book. They may seem useless right now, but save them. Lootbags will give a variety of random rewards. If the quest book says "Choice Reward" you have to pick one of the options; otherwise you get everything shown. It's not necessary to complete all the quests in order to progress. Mandatory progression quests are marked with a larger, fancier icon. When in doubt about what to do, find one of those and complete it.

Homesteading

Close combat with most mobs is likely to end in your death this early in the Stone Age. Avoid or cheese whatever you can, and run away from everything else. Many hostile mobs have dangerous abilities. Punji Sticks, Quicksand, Natura Berry Bushes or Cactus all make for good defensive barriers. Once you have a bed, sleep immediately as it turns to night (6:32pm). This will prevent hostile mobs from spawning and ruining your day.

Explore the immediate area around your base to ensure there aren't any environmental Hazards. Two in particular to be wary of are Hungry Nodes and Tainted Lands. Hungry Nodes are invisible but manifest as a small localized area of block destruction. Approaching too close is lethal. Tainted Lands are dark purple and spread, slowly infecting and destroying any living things the Taint comes into contact with. Eerie biomes caused by Eldritch Obelisk's nodes and Stone Circles should also be given a wide berth, as they can spawn powerful mobs.

Don't Starve

Beyond the random bits of food quests hand out, there aren't many good food sources available. A basic vanilla farm will keep you from starving to death. Squids are easy to kill and drop calamari, which can be cooked or eaten raw. See Beginner Tips - Food for the best ways to keep yourself fed. Start a small farm plot with Pam's Harvestcraft or vanilla crops. Farmland must be within 4 horizontal blocks of a water source block or it can't be tilled. Tilling non-hydrated grass will yield seeds.

Consider breaking extra Stalk Gardens to find some soybeans and plant a 9 x 9 cropland of that. Soybeans are one of the most versatile crops and process into Tofu for the Healing Axe quest.

Planning Ahead

One of the first milestones is a Coke Oven for torches and charcoal. Massive quantities of charcoal are needed to make Steel later. The sooner you start on mass charcoal production, the better. The alternative is going mining for coal regularly.

Plant a large plot of cotton. You're going to need a ton of string for tanned leather, backpacks and a sleeping bag/beds. Place all of your Pam's gardens that you don't have more than eight of on the ground around your base so they start spreading. Leave at least six blocks between gardens of the same type.

Healing Axe

• Gather Gardens as you explore.
  • You will eventually need 8 of each to submit to the Healing Axe quest (this axe feeds you).
    • Leafy Garden
    • Mushroom Garden
    • Stalk Garden
    • Textile Garden
    • Tropical Garden
    • Nether Garden (I usually try to buy garden bags from the coins shop to get a Nether Garden early on to spread).
    • Ground Garden
    • Berry Garden
    • Desert Garden
    • Grass Garden
    • Gourd Garden
    • Herb Garden
    • Water Garden (You can find these in swamp biomes pretty easily or rivers rarely. Look for shimmering green on the water. They are distinctly different from lily pads).
• Keep your eye out for Natura Cotton plants as well and grab all you see! You can always convert the cotton from Textile Gardens to Natura Cotton but if you find it raw...don't pass it up.
• Keep your eye open for bamboo forests and quicksand (mainly just to be able to complete the quests in tier 0.
• Get carrots, wheat and potatoes from a village if you come across one. This will prevent you from having to wait for carrots to grow.
• Use JourneyMap waypoints to mark things. I think the default key to create one is "B". Mark things like aluminium gravel deposits, villages with bee houses, brick rogue-likes (easy bricks),
• You will need to find 20 of each of the following flowers for the healing axe quest as you explore:
  • Blue Orchid
  • Poppy
  • Dandelion
  • Lavender (the trickier one as lavender fields are rare-ish).
• Keep your eye out for Coconut trees from Pam's and mark them on JourneyMap for you to come back to. You will need them for the healing axe quest.

The crops you're going to need for the healing axe quest are:

• Soybean (pointed out above - can often times substitute tofu for things like eggs and meat so it is pretty useful).
• Raspberry (smoothies).
• Potato (fries).
• Lettuce (burger)
• Tomato (burger, ketchup, pizza)
• Wheat (dough, bread, toast).
• Strawberry (juice).
• Onion (potato cake, supreme pizza, sausage in bread).
• Rice (curry rice).
• Spice Leaf (curry rice, supreme pizza, maple sausage).
• Chili Pepper (curry rice).
• Coconut (curry rice) (these are a tree crop and can be found in wet forests such as tropical or just dense wet areas - you can make make a tree to farm them once you have one).
• Bell Pepper (supreme pizza)
• Maple Syrup (maple sausage) (grows in Pam's Maple trees - like sap grows in rubber trees - can be found in world but tough to spot - can be purchased in coins shop and can use them to make more saplings if you wish).
• Spinach (beef wellington)
• White Mushroom (beef wellington)

You can generally make everything for the healing axe quest before you go to the nether. The only thing you can't make is Rainbow Curry because you will need Burning Blossom (Biomes O' Plenty) from the nether to make that.