Curunir

The fastest method of vertical travel is falling. But until you get your fall-damage-negating boots, falling is unfortunately fatal. And still, even a one-block layer of liquid will cushion your fall and negate fall damage, which you can use to your advantage. You could opt to use a drop shaft to quickly get down into your mining area, and a separate ladder or stairwell to get back up. A 2x2 shaft with 2x2x1 liquid at the bottom should do nicely. Make sure to keep the shaft walls smooth and the exit at the bottom small, so you don't accidentally hit an edge and die anyway.
 
Bonus hint: Almost any liquid will work, although some have harmful effects. If you fill your drop basin with milk, you'll come out with an instant buff for a few seconds. Don't use Resonant Ender for giggles (and instant random teleport), though. You will retain the fall speed through the teleport and still have it when you materialize.
Which will hurt. Trust me. I tried.
 
Bonus hint 2: I think it also works with cobwebs instead of liquids. Try at your own risk, though.

I dropped a comment about my lava-to-diamond processing chain elsewhere, and somebody got curious. So allow me to elaborate on it a little.
 
1. Prelude
First, what happened so far in the Equivalent Exchange universe. EE2 was part of the old Tekkit, and can still be used in Tekkit Classic. It was a very big, very powerful and very server-taxing mod because of its extreme empowerment and endgame options. You were basically generating blocks, any kind of blocks, in any amount desired at some point. A whole chunk of diamond blocks? That was kid's stuff when you had Dark Matter, or even Red Matter. Also, massively overpowered endgame armor and equipment above and beyond what even power armor can do.
 
EE2 is gone, closed source, abandoned, most likely never to return. So a friendly coder set out to remake it from scratch in friendly open-sourced EE3, and that has been lingering in pre-alpha stages for so long now that people were wondering why Tekkit was still dragging it around. But no matter how glacial the development pace, something usable is here now. It is quirky, very limited yet, and resembles a humble little alchemy mod more than the old galaxy-size EE2, but there is power here.
 
2. What is EMC?
Blocks have value. Not just usage value, but EMC value. The rarer and harder to get, the higher. EMC stands for Energy Matter Currency, and simple blocks like dirt have EMC=1, with diamonds at EMC=8192. In Tekkit, press shift while hovering over a block to see the EMC value displayed through Waila. Not all blocks have it, although in a theoretically ideal modpack, all should have a value (cut the Tekkit people some slack, that is tons work).
 
3. What to do with it?
EE3 has not terribly many blocks of its own. You will want a Calcinator, an Aludel and a Glass Bell, all quite simple and cheap to produce.
 
3a. Calcinate!
You can place any block with EMC value in the top slot and add any vanilla fuel in the bottom one. It is basically a furnace, with different results. As this is alchemy, you will get magickal dusts for your efforts.
very low EMC value = ash (worthless) low EMC value = Verdant Dust (green) medium EMC value = Azure Dust (blue) high EMC value = Minium Dust (red) For now, we just want the Minium Dust. It seems that anything over 8000 EMC will yield it. Yes, that means you will have to sacrifice some diamonds or emeralds here. Do this only if you have some to spare, otherwise advance some more in the game until you have some to spare. The absolute minimum to get started is 8 Minium Dust, so 8 diamonds or emeralds have to be burned.
 
Update: It seems like you can also calcinate fully repaired pieces of gold armor for minium dust. This comes in handy when you generate those with an MFR Grinder or a Peaceful Table. Keep in mind that you can simply repair-craft two identical items to get one with higher durability, which will eventually get you fully repaired ones without using an Anvil. Credit goes to SirLappy for that find.
 
3b. Get Stoned
Craft yourself an Inert Stone from 1 gold ingot, 4 iron ingots and 4 smooth stone (I rely on your ability to look up recipes in NEI by pressing R). Now you need the Aludel. Place the Glass Bell on top of the device, otherwise it is not complete. If you open it then, there are three slots. The lower one is again for vanilla fuels, the middle one will take your dusts, and the top one your "target item". Place the Inert Stone there, add 8 Minium Dusts below it and fuel the whole thing. You will be rewarded with a Minium Stone.
 
4. Alchemy!
Contrary to popular belief, the EE wiki is not dead. You can see a barebones EE3 recipe list here, which should give you a first idea of your newly gained powers. Not all recipes work right now, but a few crucial ones do.
 
5. An Example: Lava To Diamonds
This process chain harnesses the power of several mods besides EE3, namely Thermal Expansion and Extra Utilities. You should only start it when you have enough diamonds to make a handful of Minium Stones. You need at least three Minium Stones for automation, but you could just opt to jiggle it all manually with a single Stone and no Cyclic Assemblers. In that case, do yourself a favour and use at least a Machinist's Workbench.
Use an Ender-Thermic pump in the Nether and connect a Tesseract for (nearly) infinite lava. This is a tested process, look up the details with the usual guides. Build yourself a battery of Igneous Extruders. They need no power, just lava and a water supply, and generate obsidian. Why obsidian? Because it has EMC=64, which is not huge, but high enough to make this viable. Don't forget to change the Extruders to obsidian in the interface, as they default to stone. I am running eight Extruders, but more will make things go faster (no idea how many one pump can sustain, but more than eight for sure). Set up a Cyclic Assembler. Feed it the obsidian from your new generator. Write the Obsidian-to-Iron-Ingot recipe to a schematic and place at least one Minium Stone in the Assembler's inventory, as the stone is an ingredient (In case you did not follow that link, 2x2 Obsidian with a Minium Stone added to the crafting grid). It will not be consumed, but degrade over time, so you need to refill Minium Stones at some point. I prefer to set up another Cyclic Assembler at this point to craft the resulting Iron Ingots to iron blocks. Why? Transmuting works with blocks, too, and will take fewer charges from the Minium Stones in the next steps. Next Cyclic Assembler. The concept is the same like in the first Assembler. Write a schematic for Iron-To-Gold (8 iron blocks and a Minium Stone yield one gold block), feed the iron blocks in and place at least one Minium Stone. Final Cyclic Assembler: Same procedure, just with eight gold blocks. Which will yield one diamond block. The process will yield many more diamonds than are consumed in the making of the Minium Stones. As long as you have lava, it will slowly fill your treasury with diamond blocks. Feel free to pipe in excess iron and gold from your quarries at the respective points. Of course, all of these transmutations can be reversed to get back gold, iron, or even obsidian. Just keep in mind that the Stones degrade.
 
Enough for now. Feel free to chime in with your own insights and ideas.

Please take all issues to the tracker.
Judging from the funky effects you experience, your computer is probably infested with gremlins. Or smurfs. But we shall still see what can be done if you >give us a chance.

I updated and cleaned up some parts of the text yesterday that were a bit ambiguous, and added a few details that I simply didn't know when I first wrote it.
 
As for the curtain, this is a method that can be employed easily in a running Quarry by just moving along the edge of the pit. You can of course flood it before you even start, but that will spread the liquid over more blocks, which has two disadvantages:
Performance might drop more, because more water blocks are generated and updated. The water will impair your sight more than a curtain would, so it is harder to spot problems from the edge. You avoid these if you only start flooding when the arm has already reached y=20 or so, but at this point a single water source block will not be sufficient any more. Of course, if the Quarry starts at a sufficiently high y level, even a single corner-placed water source block will cover the entire pit once it reaches lava level. I have no idea how high it needs to be for that, but for a 64x64 pit, this might require higher placement than sea level. Do respect the chunk update storm that all this water will cause. It should be safe in singpleplayer, but multiplayer may be different story.
 
Also note that Cryotheum will (slowly) drop like Sand or Gravel, so you cannot just splash it into the pit. It needs to rest on the edge and flow over it for the source block to be preserved. Alternatively, you could place it on a single solid block above the Quarry frame area. I never said a curtain was the only way, it's just my way.
 
If you have copious amounts of Cryo to spend, here is a truly elegant option: Flood the entire Quarry pit with Cryo one block high using a Buildcraft Floodgate. The cryo carpet will sink eventually as the Quarry progresses, and you can suck it back out with a Buildcraft Pump at the end. You do the math on how many buckets that will take - even a 9x9 standard pit will already need 81.

Thanks for all the hints and alternatives. This rounds the topic quite well, save for that fiendishly hard endeavour - quarrying in the Nether.
 
 
1. Why bother?
Tekkit has Nether Ores enabled, so you will find all sorts of ores also in Netherrack-enclosed variants down there. This should not matter much, given you can get copious amounts of ores from plain old Overworld quarries, but there are some sought-after loots here:
Nether Quartz - not necessary in large amounts, but needed for a few recipes; also nice decorative building material Glowstone - I have not hit that yet, but the quarry should harvest it just like everything else Nether Platinum - there is no Platinum in Tekkit, so this will pulverize to Shiny Metal, which is extremely rare and precious Nether Diamond - can't hurt to get more of those, unless you already mass-produce them with EE3 Nether Redstone - this is very useful if you smelt it and then pulverize the ensuing Redstone Ore to get some Cinnabar (byproduct) So, we are doing this mostly for Teh Shiny, because Cinnabar can be induction-smelted with Ferrous Ore to get a guaranteed Shiny Ingot, and Nether Platinum will yield it directly. This also means that Nether quarrying is more of a mid-to-late game thing, when Shiny Metal becomes the limiting factor of your progress. Until then, pulverizing Ferrous Ore should provide just enough to get by.
Unlike manual mining, the quarry has the great benefit of never causing any ores to explode. It will also - to my knowledge - not attact the ire of Zombie Pigmen.
 
 
2. What Is Different?
Placement is an issue, as you probably want to avoid putting your quarry above a lava ocean. Try to find a "dry" place and invest some time digging/climbing upwards. The Nether (bedrock) ceiling is at 128 blocks, so you could theoretically place your quarry on height level 123 for maximum working space. You will have to carve out the space for your Landmarks, but the quarry will do the rest and eliminate all blocks inside once you start it. If working that way, stand by with a few buckets, in the event the elimination should uncover lava source blocks. There will be no "lakes" this high up, but single lava blocks can spawn here, and make a mess of your quarry. So be quick and skim them off, or relocate your quarry altogether.
 
2.1 Water?
Water cannot exist in the Nether and will evaporate if placed. This makes the occasional enclosed lava source blocks a big problem, as you cannot deal with them by flooding the pit. You could opt to closely observe your quarry and bucket the lava out once it is uncovered. But this is a tedious manual process that only serves as a fallback.
 
2.1 Cryotheum!
It is possible to use oil instead of water for flooding, but it will eventually catch fire and can be a hassle after that. Enter Thermal Expansion's Gelid Cryotheum: The anti-lava can exist fine in the Nether and will do the same job as water to turn that lava into obsidian. It can also be made into a "Cryo Curtain", effictively using only one source block. Do note, however, that it flows as slowly as lava, and will often take some time to reach where you want it to be.

 
 
2.2 Copious amounts of Netherrack
The filling material being Netherrack, enormous amounts of it will arrive in your storage. There is no really elegant solution to deal with it, as Extra Utilities has no compression recipe for Netherrack. These are your options:
pulverize it for gravel, which can be compressed, also obtaining sulfur as a byproduct smelt if for Nether Bricks, which can be combined into Nether Brick blocks, thus saving three quarters of the space and providing large amounts of cheap building material for your monuments (if you like them to be dark red) feed it into a void pipe for destruction simply store it for posterity, for which another Deep Storage Unit should be ideal  
3. Cryo Limits
Cryotheum will deal nicely with single lava blocks and smaller groups of them, adding obsidian and some cobblestone to the quarry output. However, since lava flows a bit faster in the Nether and Cryotheum does not, Cryo will often lose race conditions against lava, which will arise when you try to drive your quarry pit through a lava ocean (sidewall lava blocks may generate adjacent cobble or obsidian faster than the Cryotheum is able to reach it, thus preventing the lava from ever being converted). This can send your quarry into an infinite loop and will effectively turn it into a Cobblestone and/or Obsidian generator. That is why I recommended finding a "dry place".
So, if you hit a lava ocean or large lake, feel free to harvest some of it as obsidian and cobblestone, but be prepared to abort operations once the quarry gets stuck. The distribution of rare ores seems entirely random in the Nether, so you probably gain nothing by brute-forcing your way through that layer and going deeper down.
 
3.1 Alternative
In case you are surrounded by lava oceans, or good quarry space is scarce for a different reason, you could opt to pump the lava out first. The Ender-Thermic Pump (ETP) from Extra Utilities is very convenient for that, as it will replace the lava with stone. You may want to set up an EE3 diamond generator running on that lava. Note that the ETP reaches quite far and deep, but not necessarily to the bottom of a lava lake, so you might need to relocate it eventually. In a pinch, a Buildcraft pump will also do, but it won't neatly turn the lava into stone. It does have the advantage of pumping out everything below it and whatever other liquid blocks it can reach from there, until its nozzle hits something solid.
 
 
4. Conclusions
If you use Cryotheum, quarrying in the Nether can be actually easier and more convenient than in the Overworld. Mostly because there is no oil here to get in the way. It also creates the unsightly pits very far from home, and will eventually supply all the ores you need in quantity, not just most of them.
 
4.1 Lag
Somebody pointed out that collapsing a water curtain will seriously lag the server out in Multiplayer (probably the same for a Cryo Curtain). This may be, but it will only take a few minutes and could be done in a period of low activity. Just leaving the key block in place is of course also an option.

Greetings, Tekkiteers!
 
When I started using the Buildcraft Quarry, I ran into many small problems and annoyances that were not covered by any wiki or guide. So now that I have largely mastered that art, allow me to share my insights in a concise and (hopefully) compact manner.
 
1. Why Quarry?
Mining is tedious. Really tedious. It may be exciting to hunt for The Shiny at the start, but after doing it over and over again, it eventually loses its luster. Especially when you need to ramp up your production in mid-to-late game to feed that ravenous machinery. There will come a point where even for the most medieval of us, a robot that does the manual work will be a welcome relief.
Buildcraft has you covered. The BC Quarry is a machine for strip mining, that means it will remove (almost) anything in its path, block for block, layer for layer, until it reaches bedrock or an obstable that it cannot mine.
 
2. Make One!
You will be ready to make a quarry once you acquired 11 diamonds, 8 gold ingots, 28 iron ingots, 28 cobblestone, 1 redstone dust and 30 sticks of wood. Most of that goes into crafting BC gears, and the rest into a diamond pickaxe. All of this will be consumed in the making. As always, I rely on your ability to use NEI or the wiki for the actual recipe.
 
3. Power It!
The quarry runs on Minecraft Joules (MJ). In Tekkit, use any kind of Redstone Flux (RF) production and connect the quarry via Thermal Expansion conduits, which will automatically convert to MJ. It is highly recommended to use at least one energy cell as a power buffer, and using at least Hardened conduits and cells. The quarry uses lots of power, so Leadstone-level gear is too weak. Using Redstone-level is recommended. A small, early Yellorium reactor will power a quarry easier and quicker than any other setup, but you are of course free to design your own.
 
4. Place It!
As a quarry will strip-mine, you may want to place it out of sight from your home/base, to avoid looking (or falling) into a square pit later. On the other hand, you might want to use it to excavate a space for your future underground base, and cover the pit with a filler later.
Note that when placed and powered, the quarry will start building a 5 block high frame in front of it, inside and below which its mining arm will then operate. All blocks obstructing this space or the frame itself will be destroyed (not mined!), so take this into consideration. Especially make sure to not place your power source or any related machinery inside the frame area.
 
4.1 But Where?
If you dislike disfiguring the Overworld with large rectangular pits, you could opt to disfigure a random Mystcraft Age instead. Choose one you don't like, but that is safe enough for you to do maintenance in if needed. Or quarry the Nether right away - instructions on the special requirements for this included >further down in the thread.
Or just place it in the Overworld, but far away from your base. No matter where you decide to set it up, keep in mind that the Quarry does its own chunkloading. So as long as you put the power feed and output processing within one of the loaded chunks, you should be fine. But better check chunk boundaries to be sure.
 
4.1 Landmarks
If just plonked down, the quarry will default to a 9x9 space right in front of it. You can modify this area with Landmarks, which are just Redstone Torches re-crafted with Lapis Lazuli. Landmarks are glitchy, so don't be surprised when they malfunction. It will often suffice to just repeat what you were doing, or moving everything by one block, to make them cooperate.
Place three Landmarks defining a rectangle, all on the same height level, to claim the area you want to quarry out. You are marking the lower corners of the frame this way, so keep the block destruction in mind. Once all three necessary corners are marked, right-click the middle Landmark (I think any of them works, but middle works best). Red lines should connect them and visibly frame the rectangle you defined. If not, check if you actually made a rectangle or maybe went off by one block. Try breaking and placing all Landmakrs again. Also don't right-click before all are set. Keep in mind that the frame will extend to five blocks above the Landmarks. The maximum space possible is 64x64 blocks for the frame, i.e. 62x62 blocks enclosed.
 
4.1.1 Landmark placement beams
It may become tedious to correctly place Landmarks for larger pits. You can get some placement help if you apply a Redstone signal (Lever or Redstone Torch will do) to an inactive Landmark. Blue "ghost beams" will emerge in all directions and extend 64 blocks, which is conveniently identical to the maximum frame dimensions. So for max-sized Quarry, place one Landmark, activate the blue beams, place the other two exactly at the ends of the beams, return to the first Landmark, turn the blue beam off (remove Lever) and activate the read beam (right-click Landmark). Then place the machine against that Landmark from the outside of the rectangle. Note that it needs to face the Landmark directly, otherwise it will ignore your rectangle and default back to its 9x9 scheme.
 
4.2 Call it Bob if you like
If the quarry accepted your framing and is powered, it will form a yellow-and-black pre-frame, and a little robot cube will laser the actual (orange, non-mineable) frame onto it. The Quarry will also announce how many chunks it will keep loaded. Or none of this happens, and it will tell you that your frame is out of boundaries or too small. This sometimes occurs even when you did it right. Try breaking and re-placing the Landmarks, or maybe reduce the size by one block. Sometimes the pre-frame will not show although everything is correct. This is just a visual glitch.
Oh, and the Landmarks will drop when the quarry accepts them, so you can run and recover them now.
 
4.3 Maintenance Shaft
The quarry will proceed into an ever-deepening rectangular pit. Do yourself a favour and dig at least a 1x1 ladder shaft next to it, ideally starting directly under the frame. You will likely find yourself down in the hole at some point, and having a ladder to get back up is vastly preferable to the alternatives. Unless you can already fly.
 
 
5. Loot!
Don't power the quarry before you placed a chest on top or next to it. If powered sufficiently, the quarry will mine quickly and spout lots of blocks out of its top side. With the 9x9 default size, quarrying from sea level to bedrock will roughly fill one diamond chest. Most of which will of course be cobblestone, followed by dirt, sand and gravel. I recommend Reinforced Strongboxes for their portability, so you can easily swap them out if they are full. Later in game, you can hook your output to whatever automated sorting pipe and factory you are building.
 
5.1 Fillers Ahead
A great mass of rubbish, mostly cobblestone and dirt, will choke up your storage if not dealt with. An elegant way to handle it is compression. Use the Compressed Cobblestone (and -Dirt, -Sand, -Gravel) recipe from Extra Utilities to stow it all away. Pipe the stuff out of your buffer chest with itemducts and route it into Cyclic Assemblers, which will dump the compressed stuff into long-term storage. Note that there are two compression levels for sand and gravel, while there are four for dirt and eight (!) for cobblestone. Makes for interesting decoration, if nothing else.
Of course, you could just opt to void-pipe the mass items, or stack them in Deep Storage Units. Especially a Cobblestone DSU may be useful once you decide to visit the Deep Dark dimension.
 
 
6.Oil
This is annoying. Oil is quite abundant in Tekkit right now, and most quarry sites will hit one or more deposits at some point. The quarry cannot mine oil, and will ignore all blocks covered with it, which somewhat defeats the purpose here. There is no elegant solution that I know of, so this is what I do.
 
6.1 Suck It
First, stop the quarry when you see that it hit oil. This will usually require cutting the power - I usually place a lever on the energy cell to do that quickly. The quarry seems oblivious to redstone signals.
Then get yourself a Buildcraft Pump if you don't have one already (mostly iron needed). Also craft yourself a handful of Portable Tanks, ideally Reinforced ones. Grab those, along with a small energy cell, some conduits and fluiducts, and get down to the oil. The deposits are usually orb-shaped with a single topmost block. Dig that top oil block free, unless it already is visible, then place the pump directly above it. Wire it up and attach fluiducts with portable tanks to one side, then start pumping. The pump will extend its nozzle directly downward, remove the oil blocks and fill the tanks. Continue until the oil is gone, then remove your stuff, climb back up and power the quarry up again. Once you get a little practice, these little excursions are quite simple and quickly done. And they get you oil, which could be useful for power generation.
 
6.2 Stuff It
If you really don't want that and just need the oil to be gone, grab a stack or two of sand (or gravel) and simply fill the deposit in. The sand will displace the oil and leave only air when mined again. Be smart - let the quarry do the removing.
 
6.3 Kill It With Fire!
I never tried this, but supposedly placing lava above oil will make the oil respond like water. This means it turns into solids (cobblestone or obsidian) and can be mined by the quarry. Unfortunately, lava obstructs the quarry just like oil does (see 8), so you would need to place/remove the lava often for this to work. I don't see this working faster than pumping or sand-filling.
 
6.4 Invoke Higher Powers
I heard that at least one server community was so annoyed with the overabundance of oil that they had an admin remove it from chunk generation. It can still be generated with Oil Fabricators to fuel those rockets. Also, it might be enough to just disable Galacticraft oil, because that is what you will find underground. Regular old Buildcraft oil usually only forms in and around desert and ocean biomes, you can identify it by the surface geysers.
 
 
7. Water
The quarry mines fine through any amount of water, so it can basically stay. However, if an oil deposit is uncovered below a water source, it will mix in funny ways and make the methods from 6.1 and 6.2 very difficult. So I actually recommend removing water when it is uncovered, unless you know there is no oil, or don't care if all the blocks below any potential oil will remain unmined (note that this often affects the most worthwhile ones, like diamonds).
 
 
8. Lava
Lava stops the quarry from mining anything beneath it. This will often completely block off diamonds from your reach, so you want to solve this.
 
8.1 Water After All
It is recommended to flood your quarry. Yes, I said above that you should remove water, and I stand by that. But once the quarry is down between height level 20-30, it will be past any oil that might have been there, and nearing lava levels. That is the time when I recommend flooding your quarry with water. If there is a flow covering the mining level, any uncovered lava will turn into obsidian immediately, which can be mined fine by the quarry (you did sacrifice a diamond pickaxe when you built it, remember?). Works also for lava blocks in the side wall, so you can even drill through an entire lava lake. Note that this will put quite a lot of obsidian into your buffer chest, which might choose to overflow at this point.
 
9. Bonus Tip: Water Curtain
With all this, you should be ready to make a big, clean hole in the ground. But there is one more thing that might help. Flooding a pit of this size (9x9, and even more so if you go larger) is tedious both when placing and removing those water blocks. But due to the way water works in Minecraft, you can actually get away with placing just a single source block. Just place the water in one corner of the pit, right on top of the edge. Let it flow for a second or two, then put it back in your bucket and quickly place it one block further along the edge. Repeat for a few blocks until it has "wandered" for a bit. Then look into the pit. You will notice that you are creating a "curtain" of water that still encompasses all the area where your one block has been. Do this for one complete edge of the pit and leave the water block in place when reaching the end. That one block will keep the whole curtain up, until you remove it.
 

 
 
10. Enjoy!
Where to go from here? I recommend not going 64x64 in a hurry, as you will want some hands-on practice before you scale up. I like making 60x10 pits, so flooding is easy by just going along one of the long sides. After that, just do another 60x10 right next to the existing pit ("Stripe Quarrying", if you will). But at this point, you should be equipped to make your own decisions.
I hope this helps the newbies, and maybe even some more seasoned players. Read on >here if you are also interested about the additional pitfalls and windfalls when quarrying in the Nether.

You can farm Emeralds with a Quarry, but you need to manually locate an Extreme Hills Biome and set it up there, because Emeralds are only generated under those. Village trading works as well, of course, but I suggest using a Trading Station to make it less tedious. Gathering the guys in one spot also makes sense, so don't forget that you can
catch them by shift-right-clicking with a Reusable Safari Net and resuce zombified villagers with a De-Zombification Syringe (takes a moment until they turn back).  
Shiny Metal can be reliably generated:
quarry the Nether for Nether Redstone Ore put it into a Redstone Furnace (NOT in a Pulverizer) alternatively you can just silk-touch regular Redstone Ore, the point is getting the ore itself and not the dusts when you pulverize this ore, you will eventually get some Cinnabar put Ferrous Ore in the Induction Smelter with Cinnabar to get one guaranteed Shiny Ingot from each ore It's a little work, but you can lift your limitations with that chain. That and EE3 should basically auto-generate MPS parts for you, once you advanced far enough.
 
If you need some pointers about the Quarry, I wrote down what I learned >here.

I'm not even sure if using Energy Shields as "armour plating" will draw any power. The accepted standard is going with a battery-less suit and keeping a TE Energy Cell (ideally Resonant) somewhere in inventory, which will last you a long time. The Advanced Solar Generator is known to glitch, and fire-kill you instantly when it does. Generally, in-suit power generation is not recommended whatsoever. Just set up a Yellorium Reactor somewhere and have it charge a spare cell, so you can just swap it for your drained cell when you hop by your base.

If you followed bochen's news thread, you would have seen this a few days back. Seems like MPS might return. Of course only on 1.7, and thus not in current Tekkit.
 
And iirc, MPS logic says that flight is controlled mostly by the jetpack upgrade, and rocket boots only buff your flight a bit. The boots themselves are for step-up, high jump, running and reducing fall damage. That is all from memory, so it may be inaccurate. I've stopped using MPS many months ago.

I shall recap and update my thoughts here briefly, as there is a chance that IskanDar at least has a look at this. So rise from the grave, dusty thread, and shamble onwards!
 
Tinker's Construct + Iguana's Tweaks:
I have seen The Light after using it with Iguana's Tweaks once (ironically, in IskanDar's own Crash Landing). Ever since, I am an avid TiC user and have pretty much mastered it. Definitely nice to have, with Iguana's Tweaks, as you also have the option to "Flux" tools and effectively have them run on RF.
 
Natura:
One biome mod should be included, and I would prefer Natura to be that mod. BoP is nice, but too heavy. Giant Redwoods for teh win.
 
Mekanism:
Having used this extensively, I am quite convinced that no self-respecting tech pack can go without it. Nerf stuff if you must, but I actually think that this is not even necessary.
 
Ender IO:
The king and queen of conduits - for those alone, it needs to be in any tech pack. Seriously, this is two classes above and beyond any other mod that has conduits. Also has multi-block power storage with useful monitoring tools, and Dimensional Transceivers, which are the love child of a Tesseract and Chuck Norris. You will refuse to ever use Tesseracts again once you had DTs. Also has an MPS equivalent built in, because why not?
 
Chisel 2:
The king is dead, long live the king. I recently tried out Chisel 2, and it's about twice as awesome as the original. Mostly because of the new custom block variants, but also because it works practically without bugs here, although I wrangled it a damn lot.
 
Pam's Harvestcraft:
I am rather fond of this little garden and kitchen mod. It adds as much variety as BoP would, but not on biome-level. Instead, you get dozens of fruit trees and around one hundred different field crops. Also, menus worthy of a classy restaurant to craft from all this. It may not be tech, but come on, you need a few purposes to use all that tech on.
Needs a small fixing mod to become compatible with MFR machines, but works like a charm when that is applied.
 
Thaumcraft:
Yes, it's magic and not tech. But of all magic mods, Thaumcraft seems to be the one with the most "scientific" mindset - also has an underlying "mad scientist wizard" theme and tie-in mods that integrate closer with tech stuff. Also, I invoke Mystcraft being included in 1.6.4-based Tekkit as precedent.

Nothing is under active development there. The notes are from mods that want you to update, but you usually cannot do that within 1.6.4.
 
I believe that the Powersuit has upgrades that allow for more controlled flight, but not sure how the Rocket Boots play into it. MPS has been dead for so long that most people have moved to other personal gear solutions.

Update: It seems like you can also calcinate fully repaired pieces of gold armor for minium dust. This comes in handy when you generate those with an MFR Grinder or a Peaceful Table. Keep in mind that you can simply repair-craft two identical items to get one with higher durability, which will eventually get you fully repaired ones without using an Anvil. Credit goes to SirLappy for that find.
 
Also added in-line.

It has been mentioned elsewhere, but here is a quick way to get infinite Obsidian to fuel that alchemy pump:
 
dig a 9x1 trench place two MFR Block Breakers along the side at the 3rd and 4th block, so that their faces are part of the trench wall provide a power source to the Block Breakers make sure the Block Breakers have an inventory to drop their items into place 1 block/bucket of lava at the "short" end of the trench, i.e. the one closer to the Block Breakers place 1 block/bucket of Gelid Cryotheum at the far end of the trench This should result in Obsidian and Cobblestone forming right in front of the Block Breakers, being broken and re-forming infinitely, as long as you power the machines. Tested in 1.2.9c.
And here is what it looks like. I made a nice cover so I won't fall into the trench, which does not interfere with operations as long as you place it above the trench.
 

 
My test setup has three breakers, just in case. But the blocks always just form in front of those two.

I dropped a comment about my lava-to-diamond processing chain elsewhere, and somebody got curious. So allow me to elaborate on it a little.
 
1. Prelude
First, what happened so far in the Equivalent Exchange universe. EE2 was part of the old Tekkit, and can still be used in Tekkit Classic. It was a very big, very powerful and very server-taxing mod because of its extreme empowerment and endgame options. You were basically generating blocks, any kind of blocks, in any amount desired at some point. A whole chunk of diamond blocks? That was kid's stuff when you had Dark Matter, or even Red Matter. Also, massively overpowered endgame armor and equipment above and beyond what even power armor can do.
 
EE2 is gone, closed source, abandoned, most likely never to return. So a friendly coder set out to remake it from scratch in friendly open-sourced EE3, and that has been lingering in pre-alpha stages for so long now that people were wondering why Tekkit was still dragging it around. But no matter how glacial the development pace, something usable is here now. It is quirky, very limited yet, and resembles a humble little alchemy mod more than the old galaxy-size EE2, but there is power here.
 
2. What is EMC?
Blocks have value. Not just usage value, but EMC value. The rarer and harder to get, the higher. EMC stands for Energy Matter Currency, and simple blocks like dirt have EMC=1, with diamonds at EMC=8192. In Tekkit, press shift while hovering over a block to see the EMC value displayed through Waila. Not all blocks have it, although in a theoretically ideal modpack, all should have a value (cut the Tekkit people some slack, that is tons work).
 
3. What to do with it?
EE3 has not terribly many blocks of its own. You will want a Calcinator, an Aludel and a Glass Bell, all quite simple and cheap to produce.
 
3a. Calcinate!
You can place any block with EMC value in the top slot and add any vanilla fuel in the bottom one. It is basically a furnace, with different results. As this is alchemy, you will get magickal dusts for your efforts.
very low EMC value = ash (worthless) low EMC value = Verdant Dust (green) medium EMC value = Azure Dust (blue) high EMC value = Minium Dust (red) For now, we just want the Minium Dust. It seems that anything over 8000 EMC will yield it. Yes, that means you will have to sacrifice some diamonds or emeralds here. Do this only if you have some to spare, otherwise advance some more in the game until you have some to spare. The absolute minimum to get started is 8 Minium Dust, so 8 diamonds or emeralds have to be burned.
 
Update: It seems like you can also calcinate fully repaired pieces of gold armor for minium dust. This comes in handy when you generate those with an MFR Grinder or a Peaceful Table. Keep in mind that you can simply repair-craft two identical items to get one with higher durability, which will eventually get you fully repaired ones without using an Anvil. Credit goes to SirLappy for that find.
 
3b. Get Stoned
Craft yourself an Inert Stone from 1 gold ingot, 4 iron ingots and 4 smooth stone (I rely on your ability to look up recipes in NEI by pressing R). Now you need the Aludel. Place the Glass Bell on top of the device, otherwise it is not complete. If you open it then, there are three slots. The lower one is again for vanilla fuels, the middle one will take your dusts, and the top one your "target item". Place the Inert Stone there, add 8 Minium Dusts below it and fuel the whole thing. You will be rewarded with a Minium Stone.
 
4. Alchemy!
Contrary to popular belief, the EE wiki is not dead. You can see a barebones EE3 recipe list here, which should give you a first idea of your newly gained powers. Not all recipes work right now, but a few crucial ones do.
 
5. An Example: Lava To Diamonds
This process chain harnesses the power of several mods besides EE3, namely Thermal Expansion and Extra Utilities. You should only start it when you have enough diamonds to make a handful of Minium Stones. You need at least three Minium Stones for automation, but you could just opt to jiggle it all manually with a single Stone and no Cyclic Assemblers. In that case, do yourself a favour and use at least a Machinist's Workbench.
Use an Ender-Thermic pump in the Nether and connect a Tesseract for (nearly) infinite lava. This is a tested process, look up the details with the usual guides. Build yourself a battery of Igneous Extruders. They need no power, just lava and a water supply, and generate obsidian. Why obsidian? Because it has EMC=64, which is not huge, but high enough to make this viable. Don't forget to change the Extruders to obsidian in the interface, as they default to stone. I am running eight Extruders, but more will make things go faster (no idea how many one pump can sustain, but more than eight for sure). Set up a Cyclic Assembler. Feed it the obsidian from your new generator. Write the Obsidian-to-Iron-Ingot recipe to a schematic and place at least one Minium Stone in the Assembler's inventory, as the stone is an ingredient (In case you did not follow that link, 2x2 Obsidian with a Minium Stone added to the crafting grid). It will not be consumed, but degrade over time, so you need to refill Minium Stones at some point. I prefer to set up another Cyclic Assembler at this point to craft the resulting Iron Ingots to iron blocks. Why? Transmuting works with blocks, too, and will take fewer charges from the Minium Stones in the next steps. Next Cyclic Assembler. The concept is the same like in the first Assembler. Write a schematic for Iron-To-Gold (8 iron blocks and a Minium Stone yield one gold block), feed the iron blocks in and place at least one Minium Stone. Final Cyclic Assembler: Same procedure, just with eight gold blocks. Which will yield one diamond block. The process will yield many more diamonds than are consumed in the making of the Minium Stones. As long as you have lava, it will slowly fill your treasury with diamond blocks. Feel free to pipe in excess iron and gold from your quarries at the respective points. Of course, all of these transmutations can be reversed to get back gold, iron, or even obsidian. Just keep in mind that the Stones degrade.
 
Enough for now. Feel free to chime in with your own insights and ideas.

This is quite definitely referring to a Smeltery, a multiblock from Tinker's Construct. You can throw all kinds of strange things in there - mobs or players get you blood, which even has a use. Endermen just don't bleed like the rest of us, it seems.
 
You can of course go pedestrian and just smelt Ender Pearls in that thing. Too bad you can't test it in Tekkit, because Tinker's Construct is not in the pack. It's popular, and included in many packs. Just not in Tekkit.
 
The easy way to get Resonant Ender in Tekkit is >EE3-chaining for Ender Pearls and smelting them down in a Magma Crucible.

It's a bit fiddly, but you can put your reply outside the quote. Click behind the quote box, or cut and paste the entire quote to where you want it. Should keep its formattings.
This also works when editing your post.

No, you are still on the current one.
However, this version is still based on Minecraft 1.6.4, which is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Bugs won't be fixed any more, as mod makers have largely abandoned it. The modded Minecraft world has moved on to 1.7.10 (some still lingering on 1.7.2, but this is already frowned upon), and any pack that still considers itself current amd active has to create a 1.7.10-based version. Tekkit has been a bit neglected for some time, so it is late to the 1.7.10 party. But the Technic team recently gave IskanDar, of Crash Landing fame, the task to create this new version. Its name has been given as Tekkit 2 somewhere, but as far as I know, this has neither been confirmed nor denied as being the actual release name. As IskanDar's first work for Technic will be the new Hexxit, we still have to wait a bit longer for new Tekkit.
 
It would be a bit confusing if it really became Tekkit 2. If my memory serves, there have been at least four main versions of Tekkit so far, possibly more. You can still play 1.2.5-based Tekkit Classic, but that is truly ancient now (and has not even been the first one). There also is Tekkit Lite, a somewhat intermediate build based on (I think) Minecraft 1.5, but the main version has been the one with the Galacticraft theme for a long time now.

The inventory controls are reassigned in... inventory. Click the little "three-dot" icon in the top right corner.
 
Don't memorize that, though. In Minecraft 1.7, Mojang did a major overhaul of key bindings, putting them all in one central menu.
 
I should also have mentioned that there is another useful NEI key. While R shows you how to obtain an item, U will show you what it is used for. In regular NEI mode, which is active when you are not OP or switched to recipe mode, you can also simply click the left and right mouse buttons for these. In (default) cheat mode, clicking will give you a stack (left click) or a single item (right click) of whatever you are clicking at.
 
P.S.: It appears somebody pinned my thread. Guess I'll have to redo it when Tekkit 2 comes around.

Well, thanks for describing the problem concisely. The crash log is all you usually need, while the launcher log is not meant to be shared for diagnosis (except in rare cases where you may be asked for it).
 
That being said, you need to take your issue to the tracker, and not piggyback on other people's posts. The "me too" function is meant for specific gameplay issues, not crash issues which may have vastly different reasons even when looking the same.
 
I can say from this log already that you are having a world corruption issue caused by DimensionalDoors. Remove dimensional data created by DDoors from your save (make a backup and only work on a copy) and it should work again. If you require further help with that, please go and open that tracker issue.

Greetings, Tekkiteers!
 
I am growing a little tired of repeating the same few points over and over again when somebody new asks for directions. So I'll compile the most useful information here and only link to it from now. Yes, I'm a lazy person.  :-p
 
 
1. Welcome to Tekkit!
 
Dear new player, welcome anew to Minecraft. You probably played default Minecraft before, which we call "vanilla" here, and the core concepts are of course still there even when piling 110 mods on top. But there are so many new things, so many changes, that you should consider it basically a new game. Different. Advanced. Harder. More rewarding. Taking much longer to explore, too. Most mods expand on the concepts of the core game, some introduce whole new concepts, like an energy system to power machines, and pipes to transport items and fluids. It can be a bit overwhelming when you are confronted with all that complexity, so I'll describe the first recommended steps here, up to the point where you should be able to strike out on your own, with your own ideas and agenda.
However, don't expect to be spoonfed. I will name the machines and items, but you will have to look up stuff for yourself.
 
2. But how to look up stuff?
 
There is the wiki. But it usually lags behind the state of affairs and is mostly useful to get an idea of a particular mod you're investigating, not for looking up every little recipe. The actual, everyday lookup tool is called Not Enough Items (NEI). This is the opulent overlay you probably noticed when you opened your inventory. NEI is as much an encyclopedia as it is a cheating tool (if you have admin/operator rights or are in singleplayer). Mostly, it is a complete list of all blocks and items in game, and you can actually give yourself those items by clicking on them (left click gives a stack, right click just one). But don't kill your fun by cheating. We just use it to look up stuff, which can be done by browsing, but also by using the search box to filter the list. Hover over an item and press R to be shown the crafting recipe of any item that has one. You may notice that your inventory will be sorted everytime you do this. Unfortunately, the default sort key is also R, so you may want to reassign that one.
I try to always write the names of ingame blocks with a capital letter, so you know that this is a name you can look up.
 
 
3. Ok, what to do first?
 
Much the same you do in vanilla Minecraft. Punch wood, make a Wooden Pickaxe, get cobblestone, make a Stone Pickaxe, dig a shelter. Find coal, build a Furnace, make torches. Get some more wood. Dig down for resources, either with a ladder shaft or a stair shaft. And so on. The beginning of the game is just like vanilla.
But you will notice quickly that there is more. Copper and Tin ores will turn up when you dig, so will Silver and Lead ore a little further down. At first, just gather everything you can and stuff it into chests. If you don't find much coal, chop down some trees and make charcoal. You will need a bit of the following to get seriously started:
Copper Ore Tin Ore Lead Ore Iron Ore Silver Ore Gold Ore Redstone Sand/Glass Coal/Charcoal (either is fine) 2 pieces of Flint Half a stack of each is recommended, although you can get away with a little less in case of Silver and Gold.
 
 
4. I get to make machines now, right?
 
Yes, you do. But machines are no use without power. The first mod you seriously use will be Thermal Expansion. This is a core mod, as it provides the primary power system Redstone Flux (RF), most basic machines and also transport pipes. You will build a Bucket, a Steam Dynamo, a Leadstone Energy Cell, a few Leadstone Energy Conduits, a Pulverizer and a Strongbox. Look up the recipes in NEI, and try to smelt only as much ingots as you need, not more.
Make sure you have some well-lighted free space in your shelter. Make a 2x2 water pool somewhere in reach. Set down the Pulverizer a few blocks away from it and put a Steam Dynamo right next to that. For the very first run, the Dynamo will power the machine directly, but we will add a proper battery shortly. Take the bucket, fill it with water and right-click with it on the Dynamo. Do this four times. It needs both water and fuel to run, and you just filled its internal water tank. Now put some coal or charcoal in. The Dynamo will light up and start producing steam, and then power. If you set it right, the power will slowly fill the Pulverizer's energy bar, which can be checked in the machine's interface.
Now that you got a working Pulverizer, stick some ores in. It will create dusts, which can be smelted into ingots. Why the hassle? Because this will effectively double your ore yield, and also get you bonus dusts occasionally. For example, pulverizing a stack of Copper Ore will get you a little Gold for free, and Tin Ore a little Iron. You definitely want that.
You need to replenish the water in the Dynamo after a while, and also the fuel. Don't go crazy pulverizing yet, just make what you require for the next few steps. A few more Iron, Copper, Tin and Gold Ingots, mostly.
 
 
5. Can I store energy, too?
 
Certainly. We want a battery to store and buffer that power. You will notice in the recipe that the Leadstone Energy Cell needs a Redstone Conductance Coil to make, which is different from the Transmission Coil that went into the Dynamo, and the Reception Coil that went into the Pulverizer. But once you understood these three types, you mastered all the coils and machine categories.
Redstone Reception Coil = requires Gold Ingots, goes into machines that use power Redstone Transmission Coil = requires Silver Ingots, goes into machines that produce power Redstone Conductance Coil = requires Electrum Ingots, goes into Energy Cells Electrum? Yes, you already have it. Just take Silver and Gold dusts and mix them on a crafting grid. Congratulations, you created your first compound metal! Smelt the dusts to make the actual Ingots.
Craft the Leadstone Energy Cell now. This is a good time to craft yourself a Crescent Hammer, which will be your best friend for now. It is just a wrench with a funny name, and you can right-click with it to turn machines, toggle through all kinds of modes on different items, and also sneak-right-click (sneak is shift-key by default) to cleanly break the machines, conduits, or just about anything in Thermal Expansion. Use it to break either the Dynamo or the Pulverizer when they are not running, and place the Cell in between. You should also make some Leadstone Energy Conduits (a fancy name for power cables), which will enable you to power machines over some distance. Try running the cable from the Cell, and attach the Pulverizer to the cable. It could look like this:

 
Now have a look if the Cell is set up right. All Thermal Expansion machines have simple colour-coded interfaces that can be toggled through all states for each side independently. The six sides you see in the config are the six sides of the machine cube, so any side can be set to any function. Bottom right is the backside. An Energy Cell can be set to input (blue), output (orange) or ignore (pale yellow) for each side independently. You can actually see this on the outside of the block if you look closely, but you need to use the interface to change settings. Make sure that the side facing the Dynamo is set to blue, and the other one to orange. With the Dynamo on the left and the machine on the right, it may look like this:

You don't need to set all sides to ignore that you're not using, it's just something I do.
 
Try placing a Strongbox next to the Pulverizer, and look at the Pulverizer's interface. It also has six configurable sides, but a little more colours (not coloured corners here, but squares). That is because you can later choose to route the default dusts and the bonus dusts different ways. Blue is input again, orange is all-output, yellow and red are (optional) separate outputs. For now, just set the side adjacent to the Strongbox to orange, which will cause all products to be dropped into the Strongbox. In case your Strongbox is on the right side of the machine, it looks like so:

 
In case you want to move your stuff, keep in mind that the power already stored inside machines will be lost, but Energy Cells will retain their charge if you sneak-wrench them properly. So will Strongboxes. Yes, you can pick them up while full, carry them around and place them down again as much as you like.
For completeness sake: There is also a block called Grindstone available from the Applied Energistics mod. This is basically a low-tech Pulverizer that needs no power, but you will have to build a crank, stick it in and manually operate it. Yep, sitting on that grindstone like a monkey while you turn and turn... not really the Tekkit way, but it will work in a pinch.
 
 
6. Bucketing that water is tedious...
 
Then make an Aqueous Accumulator, and some Opaque Fluiducts. The ducts are also available in a transparent version later, but you can't craft them yet. Place the Accumulator down in the water pool. For the best results, enlarge the pool to 3x3 and place the machine just in the middle. Then connect the Accumulator's top side to the Dynamo with Fluiducts. The Accumulator is an automated water pump, it requires no energy, and will provide water forever, as long as it is immersed in water source blocks. No more bucketing!
In case you're short on sand to smelt into glass, place some Cobblestone in the Pulverizer and be amazed.
 
 
7. Can I make a machine for smelting, too?
 
Definitely! Until now, you had to keep using the vanilla Furnace to turn dusts into ingots, but it is now time to make a Redstone Furnace. You will need eight pieces of Clay for it, so look around in shallow water around your shelter. You need the Clay to make the two Bricks for the recipe. If you are short on metals, go and mine some more.
Connect the Redstone Furnace to the Energy Conduits as well, and smelt everything in there now. Except ores, of course, as you will only get the double output when going through the Pulverizer. It is possible to set the machines back-to-back, so Pulverizer output will drop in the Furnace to get smelted immediately.
With this setup, you will be able to fill your chests with processed resources. Try to stash a bit of everything, but what you will be needing next is Ferrous Metal, to proceed to the next tech level.
 
 
8. Tech Level?
 
Thermal Expansion has several tiers, or levels, of efficiency. The Leadstone stuff you made so far is the lowest grade. The Dynamo and Cell will store and output just enough RF for two machines. You could add another Dynamo, but the Cell will not be able to take the power from two of them at the same time, and cannot pass it on, either. So it's time for Invar.
Ferrous Ore is a rare and precious ore found down on Redstone level. But Pulverized Ferrous also gets produced occasionally as a byproduct when pulverizing Iron Ore. Once you got about ten of those dusts, use them to make your second compound metal: Invar Blend. If you accidentally smelted the Ferrous to ingots already, don't panic. You can turn any ingot back into dust with the Pulverizer.
Two iron dusts and one ferrous make three Invar Blend, which is required for just about everything on the second tech level (you need to smelt the blend to get the actual ingots). Use your first Invar Ingots to re-craft your Leadstone Energy Cell to a Hardened Energey Cell. Do the same for the Conduits. You can also upgrade your Strongbox to a larger version. And the best thing is, all of this can be done with filled items. You won't lose any energy from the Cell, or contents from the Strongbox. Just re-craft them with Invar, and enjoy the upgrades.
A Hardened Energy Cell can take power from up to five Dynamos at once, so go ahead and make some more. In case you are wondering what the other three kinds of Dynamos do, they also produce power, just from different fuels. Compression Dynamos are for liquid fuels (oil, fuel, biofuel), Magmatic are for lava (and are the only kind that runs without water), while Reactant are a weird and rarely used variant that uses other agents than water. Stick with Steam for the start.
You can use Conduits to attach all Dynamos at once to the same input side of your Cell, or put them on different sides, just as you like. Remember that you have to configure the Cell sides, and that each Dynamo requires both water and fuel to run. You may want to make another Pulverizer and Furnace to increase your processing capacity, but you also have the means to expand your factory now.
 
 
9. More machines?
 
More machines. A Sawmill can be nice to have, as it will increase the plank yield from wood blocks, and also produce Sawdust, which can be crafted into pellets and smelted into more charcoal afterwards. But the machine you really want is an Induction Smelter.
This one is an advanced Furnace with advanced recipes. By the way, you can check the full recipe list of a machine by left-clicking on the progress arrow in its interface. That way, you will learn that the Induction Smelter can produce Tinker's Alloy (a.k.a Bronze) from Copper and Tin, and more importantly, Hardened Glass from Pulverized Lead and Pulverized Obsidian. Which is the next tech level. Once you are able to produce Obsidian, you will be able to make Hardened Glass, and proceed to the next level. The Induction Smelter can also double the ore yield by smelting them with sand, but it will not grant bonus materials like the Pulverizer method does. What it does is create Slag and Rich Slag, which is an advanced thing that I won't cover here.
 
 
10. Obsidian... that means I need diamonds, right?
 
This is the standard way. Craft a Diamond Pickaxe, tediously mine Obsidian, then mine some more Obsidian. Fortunately, you can also build yourself an Obsidian Generator and bypass some of the grinding.
There are two ways to do this, the efficient/elegant one and the standard one. The elegant one involves Block Breakers, at least one bucket of Gelid Cryotheum and that you know what you're doing. As a beginner, go for the standard way now. Build an Igneous Extruder and set it to Obsidian (it can also produce Cobblestone and smooth stone). It requires no energy, but you will have to supply water and lava to it. Right now, you will need to fetch the lava in buckets still, but you can make this easier with the cheap and useful Portable Tanks. They hold 8 buckets of whatever liquid you put in there, can be placed and wrenched just like Strongboxes and will simplify your lava gathering a lot - just empty your lava buckets into them until full. Upgrade them to Hardened level with Invar to double their capacity from eight to 16 buckets each. Go ahead and fetch 14 buckets of lava with your new toys.
Once you got that, either bucket the lava into the Extruder, or simply plonk the Portable Tank on top of the machine, make sure that the top side is configured blue (input), and right-click the Tank with a wrench. This will set it output mode, and it will drain its contents nicely if a compatible liquid inventory, like the Extruder, is attached. Don't worry about modes too much - Portable Tanks will always be in input mode when you place them down again, unless you place them directly on top of another Portable Tank (in which case they effectively become a single, larger tank if the same liquid is inside both, or either one is empty; until you wrench them again).
Your 14 buckets of lava, along with 14 buckets of water (from the Accumulator if you're lazy) should get you the 14 pieces of Obsidian you need.
 
 
11. Why 14?
 
Because we're going to the Nether next, and 14 pieces of Obsidian make a 4x5 Nether Portal. If you have no style and leave the corners open, you could go with just 10. In case you forgot, a Nether Portal is an Obsidian frame enclosing a 2x3 vertical empty space that is ignited with Flint And Steel once completed. While newer Minecraft versions allow for other sizes, we are still on 1.6.4 and you need to craft this exact size.
Why we are doing this now? There is one very crucial machine we want to have soon, which is the Magma Crucible. You need Nether Bricks to craft it, and there is no easy way in the Overworld to obtain those. But don't panic. You don't have to look for a Nether Fortress. Just make your way to the red place, and get exactly eight pieces of Netherrack. That's right, just Netherrack. Then turn around and go home. Don't touch the Nether Ores yet, shiny as they might look. The Zombie Pigmen would make short work of you at this stage.
Netherrack smelts to Nether Bricks, four of which combine to placeable Nether Bricks, the very thing we need for that machine.
 
 
12. And what is that Crucible for?
 
Melting stuff and turning it into liquids. You can put stone or Obsidian in there and turn it into Lava, but it is more commonly used to turn Redstone into Destabilized Redstone, which is crucial for the next tech level. It can also make Gelid Cryotheum, a very useful substance that can be used to make an Obsidian Generator and to turn the Lava lakes in the Nether into Obsidian.
You want to know how? This is the point where you maybe want to look into a >specialized guide. The elegant Obsidian generator is described in the >alchemy guide, some way down (I first wrote about the complicated one, then somebody suggested the simple one, which is way better).
You should be getting a feel for things now. There is more to the machine stuff, and I will describe the useful and friendly Minefactory Reloaded in a separate post later.
 
 
13. Arm yourself
 
As soon as you have Iron to spare, make yourself some Iron Armor. You could also make it from Invar, but that one has the same defense, just higher durability, which is not worth wasting the precious compound for. An iron sword should also be an early priority, or maybe an Iron Spear or Halberd for the greater reach they give. But more importantly, as soon as you can obtain a fully-repaired bow (either by crafting or by looting/repair-crafting), do not shoot with it. Take it home and craft it into a Crossbow. The increased missile speed, punch and accuracy is more than worth the iron that goes into making the bolts. If you're short on feathers but do have gunpowder, make a Blunderbuss, which is a medieval shotgun that shoots gravel. Yes, you can actually make yourself a boomstick and go shotgun on them Creepers. This is thanks to the formidable Balkon's Weapon Mod, which should make fights that much more rewarding. Poke around in NEI for more stuff, and note that you can simply enter a mod's name to see its assorted items. There also is a Musket, a Boomerang and even a Javelin for throwing, and a Katana if you're feeling particularly samurai.
If you're looking for easy travel and a way to avoid fights, or even win them more easily, maybe a >Jetpack is what you need.
 
 
14. Advanced Mining: Turtle Power
 
In case you find mining tedious, there is a minion at your disposal that can do it for you. The Turtle is a programmable little sidekick, available in quite a lot of flavours, like mining. I never used it myself, but people tell me that it just takes coal to run and will bring back a healthy amount of resources from its adventures.
 
 
15. Advanced Mining: The Quarry
 
What you know as mining is usually just shaft mining, or opportunity mining while spelunking. If you can do it, strip mining will get you much more resources. Strip mining is the process of removing a mountain or chunk of landscape, piece by piece, until it is gone completely. I am pointing it out here in case you are successful and already found yourself some diamonds, because eleven diamonds are the entry fee to quarry land. If you're curious, I wrote down what I know about it in a >separate guide. It will be hard to power the Quarry with just Dynamos, though, so the next thing I'll cover is how to produce some serious power.
 
 
16. Power Struggles
 
If you experimented a little with all your new options, you have likely noticed that you can use lots of power with all those machines. Building more Steam Dynamos is only a temporary solution, because it becomes hard to feed them all with coal. You have several alternatives to solve the power generation problem:
 
switch to Compression Dynamos running on Fuel (or unprocessed Oil, but only in a pinch)
> you will need a Refinery to process Fuel (4 Diamonds), a Pump to gather Oil and some liquid storage, ideally Drums; you also need to keep finding Oil switch to BioGenerators running on Biofuel
> you will need an autofarm to generate biomass and a BioReactor to ferment it stick with Steam Dynamos, but build yourself a Charcoal generator
> you will need an autofarm to mass-produce wood go nuclear and build an early Yellorium reactor
> you will need a few stacks of Iron Ingots, Coal/Charcoal, Yellorium Ingots, a little Redstone and 1 Diamond Believe it or not, but 4. is by far the easiest option. The mod is called BigReactors, and it will introduce you to Multi-Block Structures while also providing KiRF of power (that is kilo-RF).
 
 
17. The Nuclear Option
 
I suggest you familiarize yourself with the principles of Yellorium Reactors on the wiki, so I don't have to paraphrase them here. We will build something slightly bigger than in the example pictures, namely a 4x4x4 cube without coolants that will serve you well until the time when you create your own, larger design. Here is your shopping list for the materials:
128 Iron Ingots 112 Graphite Bars 34 Yellorium Ingots + 32 (better some more) to run the finished reactor on 9 Redstone Dusts 1 Diamond 1 Wooden Chest 1 Piston (optional) 26 Glass if you want transparent sides to see the inside of the reactor Graphite? Just smelt coal or charcoal to make it. As both will work, charcoal is recommended because it is renewable and cannot be pulverized for coal dust later. Yellorium is created by smelting pulverized Yellorite Ore. Don't smelt the ores directly, because that will turn them into Uranium (and forfeit the doubling). This is not a bug, but a feature to support Atomic Science, the other nuclear mod in Tekkit. It is vastly more >advanced and complicated, so stay away from that stuff for now.
 
It would be a good idea now to make a Machinist's Workbench for crafting. That one has an inventory of its own and can memorize a recipe even after you removed the ingredients (the items on the grid are only placeholders). Ingredients have to be inside that inventory for crafting, otherwise they will have a red underlay on the grid. Once you get used to it, you will find it useful for just about any kind of crafting.

 
Now craft the following blocks:
52 Reactor Casing for building, 28 more as ingredients to craft the other blocks 8 Yellorium Fuel Rods 4 Reactor Control Rods 1 Reactor Controller 1 Reactor Power Tap 1 Reactor Access Port (optional) 13 Reactor Glass (re-craft 13 of the Casing blocks with the glass)
 
As usual, the recipes are in NEI. You will have three Casing blocks more than you need, because they can only be crafted in groups of four. Now assemble the Reactor!
If you opted for windows to look inside, keep in mind that only the side faces may contain Reactor Glass, not the frame and edges. Same rule applies to Power Tap, Access Port and Controller, so leave some room for them, too. Here is a picture of how the result should look like, one with glass and one without:

 
If you did everything right, the textures will change when the last block is placed. Congratulations, you built yourself a Multi-Block Reactor!
Climb on top first and set all Control Rods (separately) to 70%, then put 32 Yellorium Ingots into the Access Port. In case you missed it, Yellorium is not only a crafting component for the reactor, but also the actual fuel it consumes. Every Fuel Rod block inside will increase fuel capacity by four Ingots, so our 8-rod has a capacity of 8x4=32 Ingots.
Once you fueled it, the rods will be visibly filled with (liquified) Yellorium, although you can only see it if you used Reactor Glass. Now open the Controller interface and switch it on.
The Control Rods moderate the reaction, i.e. reduce core temperature and power output. The more extended they are, the less power is produced - think of them as nuclear handbrakes. You can leave them all out at 0%, which will result in a very hot reactor producing lots of power. There is much to know about reactor efficiency, temperature, fertility and more, but the setup I gave you strikes a good balance for your first operation at 70%. It will stay around the optimal temperature (which is ~900°C) and produce 960 RF/t, equalling 12 Dynamos. It will use just 0.02 mB/t of Yellorium, which means it will run over 40 minutes before the first Yellorium Ingot is completely burned and a Cyanite Ingot will be thrown out as waste. That's right, it can run a full real-life day on about 35 Yellorium Ingots, outputting 960 RF/t the whole time! Just keep a stack of Yellorium Ingots in the input slot, so it can replenish. Efficiency and power output will drop when the rods are not fully stacked with Yellorium.

 
If you don't actually need that much power, you can dial it back by extending the Control Rods further to 80% or 90%. Setting a Rod to 100% will disable it. It is recommended to have all Rods at the same height, otherwise the parameter readings will be funky (because they will oscillate between values for each Rod, which makes them largely useless). You can knock them all to 0% and see how high the temperatures and power output can go. Right now, there is no meltdown feature even when excessive heat is generated, so feel free to crank it up.
Remember that your Energy Conduits need to connect to the Power Tap. Leadstone ones are too weak entirely, so use at least Hardened ones. Observe, however, that Hardened Conduits and Cells max out at 400 RF/t, so your 960 RF/t won't pass through those. This is not tragic, because the Reactor comes with a free internal power storage of 10 million RF, which will fill with whatever the Conduits cannot take. Just keep in mind to shut down the Reactor once the internal storage is full, otherwise it will burn its fuel for nothing. You could also dial the reactor down with the Control Rods to get it below 400 RF/t, or simply go ahead with that third tech level now. Redstone Energy Conduits are the top tier, carrying up to 10000 RF/t. You will need Electrum and Hardened Glass for them, and fill the empty ones with Destabilized Redstone in a Fluid Transposer before they can be used. While you're at it, a Redstone Energy Cell makes sense now as well.
 
You can add a Reactor Rednet Port to the setup to get some advanced control options, and a Reactor Computer Port to even access it with ComputerCraft. But this is both optional and won't add much value to our little starter project.
Of course you can build reactors much, much bigger (up to 32x32x48 frame size). You can use coolants to moderate temperatures and influence efficiency, be creative with column setups and tinker around with just about anything. Have fun doing that!

 
Now that you have lots of power, it is time to build yourself an autofarm, and never worry about food or wood supplies again.
 
 
18. An autofarm?

You like swinging your hoe around all day and tending to every armful of grain personally? If you do, why are you playing Tekkit? :-p
No, the way of progress is turning that tedious farm into an efficient and, more importantly, self-sufficient factory. You can grow almost anything with a Minefactory Reloaded (MFR) farming chain, so let's build one to get you started!

You want the following machines for a simple, but complete farming chain that will produce tons of whatever biomass you tell it to grow:
1 Planter 1 Harvester 1 Fertilizer 4 Sewers (1 recipe yields 4 of them) 1 Composter 1 Sludge Boiler 1 Breeder (optional, but useful) While you could start with as little as Planter and Harvester, the rest is not really expensive and will add great benefits. The hardest thing will actually be running all the necessary wiring, so make sure you have some stacks of Energy Conduits, Fluiducts and Itemducts to spare, and maybe an Energy Cell or two to act as buffers. You will also want Strongboxes as drop-chests for the productive machines. But first, you want Plastic Sheets.


19. Plastic Sheets?

This is the land of progress, remember? MFR adds a new type of tree that you maybe noticed already, the Rubber Tree. It can be found in swamps, but occasionally also in other biomes, they're not too rare.
You're asking yourself how rubber helps you with getting plastic? While there is a huge difference between the two materials in real life, MFR conveniently lumped them together into a single resource. Go chop a few of those trees, which will yield Rubber Wood, Rubber Tree Saplings and... Raw Rubber. If you have built a Sawmill, you can process the Rubber Wood there to turn it into Jungle Wood Planks, which will yield more raw rubber as a byproduct, instead of the usual Sawdust.
Smelt the Raw Rubber into Rubber Bars, then simply smelt those again and marvel at the alchemy when it turns into Raw Plastic. This can be directly converted to Plastic Sheets on any 2x2 crafting grid, but keep some Raw Plastic around and don't convert it all (6 Raw Plastic should be enough for starters).
We need those Sheets because all MFR machines take two of them to make, no exceptions. Most of those machines will also require Machine Frames and Redstone Reception Coils, the same ones that go into Thermal Expansion machines - so stock up on those, too. Look into the recipes to see what else you need, but there won't be anything that we didn't already use, and nothing too expensive.
 
 
20. But what exactly is an autofarm?

An autofarm is the loosely-used term for the totality of the MFR farming machines working together, forming something larger than the sum of its blocks. Unlike the Yellorium Reactor, it is NOT a single Multiblock Structure, and the layout is pretty much up to your own choices and ideas. It must follow some rules, though. You are free to choose the location, but try to build it outside under the unobstructed sky and not too far away from your laboratory.

Begin with the Planter. It is recommended to make a 2-3 block high maintenance room below the actual farm, so you can access the Planter from below and resolve any issues that might arise, without digging. The topmost layer needs to be Dirt or Grass blocks (either is fine), and the Planter needs to be placed one layer below the soil. I think you could even cover it up, but the standard placement will leave the space directly above it free, which allows you to place a bucket of water there. Why the water? The machine doesn't need it, but if you decide to grow crops (grain, potatoes, carrots), the soil needs moistening, which will be assured this way.


The Planter needs power, so lay down some Conduits. It is recommended to also leave room for an Itemduct pipe to automate seed/sapling supply later, so you might already want to prepare that now.
Setting up the Planter is simple. It has an inventory, from which it will consume any compatible seeds or saplings and plant them in the soil layer above. The coloured grid on the left allows you to control which kind of plant should grow in each quadrant, in case you need to grow several things. That's right, you don't need to set up one Planter for each kind, but can handle it all with a single one. However, the default range is only a 3x3 grid, so each quadrant is just one block in size, with the middle one unusable because of the water. The good news is that the quadrants will scale up with overall machine range.



21. Machine Range?

MFR offers machine range upgrades, maybe you already noticed the slot for that in the bottom right corner of the machine interface. The Planter will always till a square area centered on the actual machine, but the default range is just 1 block around the machine in each direction.


Upgrades are available from Lapis (+1 block) all the way up to Emerald (+11 blocks). This always specifies radius, not diameter, so an Emerald-upgraded Planter will till a 25x25 area (1 center block and 1+11 in all directions). Upgrades are the things we kept the Raw Plastic for, so make yourself two of them now, one for the Planter and one for the Harvester. Use Iron or Tin (+2, +3), not much larger, because the logistics become a challenge in larger setups. Tin is the maximum range that still falls within the moisture range of the central water block - so if you go bigger, you will have to worry about additional moisture for crops (trees don't need it). You can switch upgrades later even in a running machine.


So, now that your Planter tills a larger area, put down the Harvester on the (center) edge of that area and apply the same kind of upgrade to it that the Planter got, so their areas match. This will be vastly simpler if you first craft yourself a Precision Sledgehammer. This is a wrench, with a very useful feature. If you hold it in hand, you will see the actual ranges of machines as an overlay, so check your setup with this tool.


The Harvester has a hole on the back, so make sure that this one faces outward, and the shear/chopping side points to the tilled field. Connect power and an Itemduct to it. All harvested grains, wood, saplings, seeds and other byproducts will shoot out of here, sometimes at high speeds, so placing a buffer chest and running the pipe from that is a good idea. You also need to place a Fluiduct outlet, because the Harvester will output Sludge as a byproduct when harvesting. You can just pump it into Tanks or Drums for the start, but later you will need the Sludge Boiler to process it.
You may want to create a loopback pipe for seeds and saplings to be fed back into the Planter, so you don't have to refill it manually. One or more MFR Item Routers can sort the Harvester output for you, but Itemducts with Pneumatic Servos installed in the pipe heads can do this just as well.
At this point, you should drop your first seeds into the Planter. For starters, I suggest you feed it oak saplings, a few (grain) seeds and maybe rubber saplings (use the quadrant grid to balance how much of each is grown). The wood will be useful for your plank and stick needs, and also give you access to lots of Charcoal. Oaks drop Apples for eating, too (another of those convenient Minecraft anomalies). Note how the Planter does its own tilling. You will never need to swing that hoe again.



22. And what are the other machines for?

As you will be producing Sludge shortly, set up the Sludge Boiler. When this machine is working, anybody standing within a few blocks will suffer from Hunger and Poison debuffs, so give it some more pipe and build it some way off.


The Sludge will be consumed to randomly generate Dirt, Clay, Sand, Gravel, Netherrack, Soul Sand and Mycelium. Concerning Netherrack, this is actually an alternative to the early Nether Portal way back in point 11, but it will take a while until enough Netherrack will be created (and it also took more than a bit of progress until we got here). Overall, this machine is quite useful especially for the Sand and Clay, that is why I included it here. You could of course just void-pipe the Sludge into oblivion.

As for the Fertilizer (the machine), you will love this one.


It uses Industrial Fertilizer (the brown stuff) to instantly grow things on your farm, which will greatly accelerate operations.


You can craft Industrial Fertilizer, but the usual way to obtain it is from a Composter, which takes power and a supply of Sewage to produce it. Sewage? Yes, liquid manure, the product of toilets. This may be a factory, but it still is a farm as well.


In the absence of toilets, you guessed it, Sewage is produced by the Sewer. This one, at least, does not require any power, and you just need to pipe the stuff with Fluiducts towards the Composter. Sewers are another kind of MFR machine that work with range upgrades. But how do they work in general? Well, an animal, any animal, has to stand on top of it when it does its occasional check. The bigger the animal, the more Sewage is produced. So you want to set up a pen of cows, pigs or sheep (or all of them) and place your four Sewers as part of the ground layer.


This may seem a lot of effort to just gather some manure, but the increased effectiveness is really worth it. The range of a Sewer is limited to the single block on top without any upgrades, so install some. Keep in mind, however, that placing the Sewers close enough to each other that their (increased) ranges overlap can cause glitches.
While you already have a pen, you might as well place a Breeder as part of the pen wall. This one will automate mob breeding as long as it's powered and has the required food in its inventory (wheat for cows and sheep, carrots for pigs, seeds for chicken, raw fish for cats, any meat for dogs, golden apples/carrots for horses). More animals means more Sewage, means more Fertilizer, so you probably want a full pen.


23. That's a boatload of machines

And there is more. You will notice that much of this stuff can be done manually, so you simply complete the chain by eliminating the manual steps one by one. The last application of the farming chain is meat production. While you could just slaughter some animals with a weapon and rely on the Breeder to bring the head count back up, MFR offers machines to automate also that, among other things. I will just mention the important ones briefly here:
Deep Storage Unit: Will store just one stack of items, but maximum stack height is two billion (!) Rancher: Will automatically shear sheep and milk cows Chronotyper: Allows sorting your animals by type (baby/adult) Slaughterhouse: Will kill your animals and produce liquid (!) meat, and some Pink Slime Meat Packer: Turns the liquid meat into Raw Meat Ingots, your friendly industrial steak (heat before eating) Mob Counter: Counts mobs - no, really, it can be used to fine-control your Breeder Grinder: Kills mobs as if you killed them yourself, outputting the loot The last one needs special mention. The Grinder can be used instead of a Slaughterhouse if you prefer your cows to yield beef, not liquid meat. Its main purpose, however, is killing hostile mobs.
Another useful feature the Grinder shares with Sewers (when animal breeding, ranching or killing occurs): It will generate Mob Essence.


24. Mob Essence?

Yes. Liquid experience! It is generated indirectly when Sewers soak up dropped experience orbs, and directly by Grinders. The third way to obtain it is to craft an XP Extractor and applying it on yourself (have an empty bucket ready somewhere in inventory), which will suck out levels you already obtained (!) and literally put them into buckets. This also means that if you apply the Extractor often, you cannot lose much experience any more when dying. It will be safe in liquid storage.
What can be done with Mob Essence? Well, the same things Minecraft does with experience in general, i.e. running Enchanting and Anvil operations. MFR has an Auto-Enchanter and Auto-Anvil, which will run off stored Mob Essence, and some power. That's right, no more tedious level-gathering to grind those enchantment books! With these tools, even obtaining Silk Touch is a matter of farming and patience.


25. Is the farm complete?

In a basic form. You can still experiment with Mushrooms and Netherwart (hint: works with a Planter, but requires manual placement of the necessary soils). You can scale everything up and try to build an especially elegant setup. Try to make it zero-maintenance, which will likely involve a stack of DSUs and maybe an early ME network. There is so much to tinker with that it will keep you occupied for a while, if you like it to.





26. Are we finally done now?

Not at all. But this guide has reached its end. I could write a whole book about Tekkit progression, and it would not be a thin one. But as nobody is paying me for it, and I'm also mostly re-telling information shared by others, let's leave it at this starter guide. You should have an idea about operations now, and the next progression steps will come rather naturally. Your long-term goals will be obtaining and mastering a Modular Powersuit, making a spaceship and flying to the Moon and Mars, creating a sophisticated storage network with Applied Energistics, and much more. You will upsize your Reactor, maybe add some impressive Turbines. A Laser Drill will eventually flood your storage with limitless ores.
Set your own goals, make your own achievements, find out about the little awesome things you can do. And of course the big awesome things, too.

And most importantly: Have fun doing it.

Here is an idea that is part building challenge and part fun activity with friends: Build a racetrack
 
The idea is to make a "winding road" a few blocks wide, in the style of a race circuit - the track itself being made from MFR Road Blocks, which will accelerate any entity moving across them (Ice will work, too). The track should have (grass?) side lanes, so skill would be required to stay on the track and not slide off to the side lanes and lose the speed boost. Also needs installations to prevent shortcutting, and maybe some redstone magic to time players (or maybe Computercraft?).
 
It will become particularly interesting when players are allowed to use speed boosts such as provided by potions or a Powersuit, which will make staying on the track a real challenge at higher speeds - note that the speed effect increases as suit weight decreases, so this is also a challenge in suit design. Before you lay down the track, make a test strip with MFR Road Blocks to see how fast you can go on them, so you have an idea about minimum track length and what diameter the curves should have.
 
The main fun will be the actual racing, of course. But I imagine that the thing will also tickle a builder's creativity in no small way. I never got around to build it, but I had the idea ever since I made a road system and discovered the break-neck speed that you can achieve.

And to show you how well the tracker works for your issues, refer to this ticket. It contains the description and two possible solutions for your problem, links and all.
Also, try not to vomit logs into forum posts (or tickets) next time. That's what Pastebin is for.

Neowulf, Teevo is right about one thing: Staff is exceptionally rude around here. I kindly recommend that you and the other mods exercise some lenience towards new members. The rules are not even obvious to find, and it's a fact of life that somebody looking for support will not spend much time looking for something so well hidden. The tracker also has lots of weaknesses. That is why I always give new posters one hint about the problems they post (if at all possible), while pointing them towards the correct ways.
 
I have done enough user support to understand how cynical and jaded you can get over the hordes of entitled idiots, and I don't mean to defend either their wrong sense of entitlement or their idiocy. But you won't ever break them out of it with confrontation. I believe that you just need to be "stubbornly kind" to them, and most people will eventually be happy to comply with the rules you set up.
 
That being said, Tekkit has a damn lot of work piling up right now because of the long phase of neglect following the last stable release. Fixing issues is among that, and maybe it would also be a good idea to clarify a bunch of things. Like which packs are featured and eligible for support, and which are not. Users will of course assume that all packs using the Tekkit brand (yes, to users that is a "brand" now) are featured. I'm not saying you should prohibit private packs from using the brand, but there is no easy-to-find statement about what packs are even featured, and what the difference is. It's not even possible for a casual user to discern the differences between the three featured Tekkit packs. 
 
@Teevo
No apologies required.

1. Don't spill logs into posts, that's what Pastebin is for.
2. Make sure you know which Tekkit you require help for. There is no "legacy" version, but there are Tekkit Classic and Tekkit Lite, both of which are completely different modpacks from the current Tekkit (Main), and might be considered legacy because of their age.
3. Once you know what you are using, head over to the tracker and post your issue in the correct section. Bear in mind that you are only eligible for support if you are using a featured modpack as-is. If you modified it, you are using a custom modpack.

Greetings, Tekkiteers!
 
I am growing a little tired of repeating the same few points over and over again when somebody new asks for directions. So I'll compile the most useful information here and only link to it from now. Yes, I'm a lazy person.  :-p
 
 
1. Welcome to Tekkit!
 
Dear new player, welcome anew to Minecraft. You probably played default Minecraft before, which we call "vanilla" here, and the core concepts are of course still there even when piling 110 mods on top. But there are so many new things, so many changes, that you should consider it basically a new game. Different. Advanced. Harder. More rewarding. Taking much longer to explore, too. Most mods expand on the concepts of the core game, some introduce whole new concepts, like an energy system to power machines, and pipes to transport items and fluids. It can be a bit overwhelming when you are confronted with all that complexity, so I'll describe the first recommended steps here, up to the point where you should be able to strike out on your own, with your own ideas and agenda.
However, don't expect to be spoonfed. I will name the machines and items, but you will have to look up stuff for yourself.
 
2. But how to look up stuff?
 
There is the wiki. But it usually lags behind the state of affairs and is mostly useful to get an idea of a particular mod you're investigating, not for looking up every little recipe. The actual, everyday lookup tool is called Not Enough Items (NEI). This is the opulent overlay you probably noticed when you opened your inventory. NEI is as much an encyclopedia as it is a cheating tool (if you have admin/operator rights or are in singleplayer). Mostly, it is a complete list of all blocks and items in game, and you can actually give yourself those items by clicking on them (left click gives a stack, right click just one). But don't kill your fun by cheating. We just use it to look up stuff, which can be done by browsing, but also by using the search box to filter the list. Hover over an item and press R to be shown the crafting recipe of any item that has one. You may notice that your inventory will be sorted everytime you do this. Unfortunately, the default sort key is also R, so you may want to reassign that one.
I try to always write the names of ingame blocks with a capital letter, so you know that this is a name you can look up.
 
 
3. Ok, what to do first?
 
Much the same you do in vanilla Minecraft. Punch wood, make a Wooden Pickaxe, get cobblestone, make a Stone Pickaxe, dig a shelter. Find coal, build a Furnace, make torches. Get some more wood. Dig down for resources, either with a ladder shaft or a stair shaft. And so on. The beginning of the game is just like vanilla.
But you will notice quickly that there is more. Copper and Tin ores will turn up when you dig, so will Silver and Lead ore a little further down. At first, just gather everything you can and stuff it into chests. If you don't find much coal, chop down some trees and make charcoal. You will need a bit of the following to get seriously started:
Copper Ore Tin Ore Lead Ore Iron Ore Silver Ore Gold Ore Redstone Sand/Glass Coal/Charcoal (either is fine) 2 pieces of Flint Half a stack of each is recommended, although you can get away with a little less in case of Silver and Gold.
 
 
4. I get to make machines now, right?
 
Yes, you do. But machines are no use without power. The first mod you seriously use will be Thermal Expansion. This is a core mod, as it provides the primary power system Redstone Flux (RF), most basic machines and also transport pipes. You will build a Bucket, a Steam Dynamo, a Leadstone Energy Cell, a few Leadstone Energy Conduits, a Pulverizer and a Strongbox. Look up the recipes in NEI, and try to smelt only as much ingots as you need, not more.
Make sure you have some well-lighted free space in your shelter. Make a 2x2 water pool somewhere in reach. Set down the Pulverizer a few blocks away from it and put a Steam Dynamo right next to that. For the very first run, the Dynamo will power the machine directly, but we will add a proper battery shortly. Take the bucket, fill it with water and right-click with it on the Dynamo. Do this four times. It needs both water and fuel to run, and you just filled its internal water tank. Now put some coal or charcoal in. The Dynamo will light up and start producing steam, and then power. If you set it right, the power will slowly fill the Pulverizer's energy bar, which can be checked in the machine's interface.
Now that you got a working Pulverizer, stick some ores in. It will create dusts, which can be smelted into ingots. Why the hassle? Because this will effectively double your ore yield, and also get you bonus dusts occasionally. For example, pulverizing a stack of Copper Ore will get you a little Gold for free, and Tin Ore a little Iron. You definitely want that.
You need to replenish the water in the Dynamo after a while, and also the fuel. Don't go crazy pulverizing yet, just make what you require for the next few steps. A few more Iron, Copper, Tin and Gold Ingots, mostly.
 
 
5. Can I store energy, too?
 
Certainly. We want a battery to store and buffer that power. You will notice in the recipe that the Leadstone Energy Cell needs a Redstone Conductance Coil to make, which is different from the Transmission Coil that went into the Dynamo, and the Reception Coil that went into the Pulverizer. But once you understood these three types, you mastered all the coils and machine categories.
Redstone Reception Coil = requires Gold Ingots, goes into machines that use power Redstone Transmission Coil = requires Silver Ingots, goes into machines that produce power Redstone Conductance Coil = requires Electrum Ingots, goes into Energy Cells Electrum? Yes, you already have it. Just take Silver and Gold dusts and mix them on a crafting grid. Congratulations, you created your first compound metal! Smelt the dusts to make the actual Ingots.
Craft the Leadstone Energy Cell now. This is a good time to craft yourself a Crescent Hammer, which will be your best friend for now. It is just a wrench with a funny name, and you can right-click with it to turn machines, toggle through all kinds of modes on different items, and also sneak-right-click (sneak is shift-key by default) to cleanly break the machines, conduits, or just about anything in Thermal Expansion. Use it to break either the Dynamo or the Pulverizer when they are not running, and place the Cell in between. You should also make some Leadstone Energy Conduits (a fancy name for power cables), which will enable you to power machines over some distance. Try running the cable from the Cell, and attach the Pulverizer to the cable. It could look like this:

 
Now have a look if the Cell is set up right. All Thermal Expansion machines have simple colour-coded interfaces that can be toggled through all states for each side independently. The six sides you see in the config are the six sides of the machine cube, so any side can be set to any function. Bottom right is the backside. An Energy Cell can be set to input (blue), output (orange) or ignore (pale yellow) for each side independently. You can actually see this on the outside of the block if you look closely, but you need to use the interface to change settings. Make sure that the side facing the Dynamo is set to blue, and the other one to orange. With the Dynamo on the left and the machine on the right, it may look like this:

You don't need to set all sides to ignore that you're not using, it's just something I do.
 
Try placing a Strongbox next to the Pulverizer, and look at the Pulverizer's interface. It also has six configurable sides, but a little more colours (not coloured corners here, but squares). That is because you can later choose to route the default dusts and the bonus dusts different ways. Blue is input again, orange is all-output, yellow and red are (optional) separate outputs. For now, just set the side adjacent to the Strongbox to orange, which will cause all products to be dropped into the Strongbox. In case your Strongbox is on the right side of the machine, it looks like so:

 
In case you want to move your stuff, keep in mind that the power already stored inside machines will be lost, but Energy Cells will retain their charge if you sneak-wrench them properly. So will Strongboxes. Yes, you can pick them up while full, carry them around and place them down again as much as you like.
For completeness sake: There is also a block called Grindstone available from the Applied Energistics mod. This is basically a low-tech Pulverizer that needs no power, but you will have to build a crank, stick it in and manually operate it. Yep, sitting on that grindstone like a monkey while you turn and turn... not really the Tekkit way, but it will work in a pinch.
 
 
6. Bucketing that water is tedious...
 
Then make an Aqueous Accumulator, and some Opaque Fluiducts. The ducts are also available in a transparent version later, but you can't craft them yet. Place the Accumulator down in the water pool. For the best results, enlarge the pool to 3x3 and place the machine just in the middle. Then connect the Accumulator's top side to the Dynamo with Fluiducts. The Accumulator is an automated water pump, it requires no energy, and will provide water forever, as long as it is immersed in water source blocks. No more bucketing!
In case you're short on sand to smelt into glass, place some Cobblestone in the Pulverizer and be amazed.
 
 
7. Can I make a machine for smelting, too?
 
Definitely! Until now, you had to keep using the vanilla Furnace to turn dusts into ingots, but it is now time to make a Redstone Furnace. You will need eight pieces of Clay for it, so look around in shallow water around your shelter. You need the Clay to make the two Bricks for the recipe. If you are short on metals, go and mine some more.
Connect the Redstone Furnace to the Energy Conduits as well, and smelt everything in there now. Except ores, of course, as you will only get the double output when going through the Pulverizer. It is possible to set the machines back-to-back, so Pulverizer output will drop in the Furnace to get smelted immediately.
With this setup, you will be able to fill your chests with processed resources. Try to stash a bit of everything, but what you will be needing next is Ferrous Metal, to proceed to the next tech level.
 
 
8. Tech Level?
 
Thermal Expansion has several tiers, or levels, of efficiency. The Leadstone stuff you made so far is the lowest grade. The Dynamo and Cell will store and output just enough RF for two machines. You could add another Dynamo, but the Cell will not be able to take the power from two of them at the same time, and cannot pass it on, either. So it's time for Invar.
Ferrous Ore is a rare and precious ore found down on Redstone level. But Pulverized Ferrous also gets produced occasionally as a byproduct when pulverizing Iron Ore. Once you got about ten of those dusts, use them to make your second compound metal: Invar Blend. If you accidentally smelted the Ferrous to ingots already, don't panic. You can turn any ingot back into dust with the Pulverizer.
Two iron dusts and one ferrous make three Invar Blend, which is required for just about everything on the second tech level (you need to smelt the blend to get the actual ingots). Use your first Invar Ingots to re-craft your Leadstone Energy Cell to a Hardened Energey Cell. Do the same for the Conduits. You can also upgrade your Strongbox to a larger version. And the best thing is, all of this can be done with filled items. You won't lose any energy from the Cell, or contents from the Strongbox. Just re-craft them with Invar, and enjoy the upgrades.
A Hardened Energy Cell can take power from up to five Dynamos at once, so go ahead and make some more. In case you are wondering what the other three kinds of Dynamos do, they also produce power, just from different fuels. Compression Dynamos are for liquid fuels (oil, fuel, biofuel), Magmatic are for lava (and are the only kind that runs without water), while Reactant are a weird and rarely used variant that uses other agents than water. Stick with Steam for the start.
You can use Conduits to attach all Dynamos at once to the same input side of your Cell, or put them on different sides, just as you like. Remember that you have to configure the Cell sides, and that each Dynamo requires both water and fuel to run. You may want to make another Pulverizer and Furnace to increase your processing capacity, but you also have the means to expand your factory now.
 
 
9. More machines?
 
More machines. A Sawmill can be nice to have, as it will increase the plank yield from wood blocks, and also produce Sawdust, which can be crafted into pellets and smelted into more charcoal afterwards. But the machine you really want is an Induction Smelter.
This one is an advanced Furnace with advanced recipes. By the way, you can check the full recipe list of a machine by left-clicking on the progress arrow in its interface. That way, you will learn that the Induction Smelter can produce Tinker's Alloy (a.k.a Bronze) from Copper and Tin, and more importantly, Hardened Glass from Pulverized Lead and Pulverized Obsidian. Which is the next tech level. Once you are able to produce Obsidian, you will be able to make Hardened Glass, and proceed to the next level. The Induction Smelter can also double the ore yield by smelting them with sand, but it will not grant bonus materials like the Pulverizer method does. What it does is create Slag and Rich Slag, which is an advanced thing that I won't cover here.
 
 
10. Obsidian... that means I need diamonds, right?
 
This is the standard way. Craft a Diamond Pickaxe, tediously mine Obsidian, then mine some more Obsidian. Fortunately, you can also build yourself an Obsidian Generator and bypass some of the grinding.
There are two ways to do this, the efficient/elegant one and the standard one. The elegant one involves Block Breakers, at least one bucket of Gelid Cryotheum and that you know what you're doing. As a beginner, go for the standard way now. Build an Igneous Extruder and set it to Obsidian (it can also produce Cobblestone and smooth stone). It requires no energy, but you will have to supply water and lava to it. Right now, you will need to fetch the lava in buckets still, but you can make this easier with the cheap and useful Portable Tanks. They hold 8 buckets of whatever liquid you put in there, can be placed and wrenched just like Strongboxes and will simplify your lava gathering a lot - just empty your lava buckets into them until full. Upgrade them to Hardened level with Invar to double their capacity from eight to 16 buckets each. Go ahead and fetch 14 buckets of lava with your new toys.
Once you got that, either bucket the lava into the Extruder, or simply plonk the Portable Tank on top of the machine, make sure that the top side is configured blue (input), and right-click the Tank with a wrench. This will set it output mode, and it will drain its contents nicely if a compatible liquid inventory, like the Extruder, is attached. Don't worry about modes too much - Portable Tanks will always be in input mode when you place them down again, unless you place them directly on top of another Portable Tank (in which case they effectively become a single, larger tank if the same liquid is inside both, or either one is empty; until you wrench them again).
Your 14 buckets of lava, along with 14 buckets of water (from the Accumulator if you're lazy) should get you the 14 pieces of Obsidian you need.
 
 
11. Why 14?
 
Because we're going to the Nether next, and 14 pieces of Obsidian make a 4x5 Nether Portal. If you have no style and leave the corners open, you could go with just 10. In case you forgot, a Nether Portal is an Obsidian frame enclosing a 2x3 vertical empty space that is ignited with Flint And Steel once completed. While newer Minecraft versions allow for other sizes, we are still on 1.6.4 and you need to craft this exact size.
Why we are doing this now? There is one very crucial machine we want to have soon, which is the Magma Crucible. You need Nether Bricks to craft it, and there is no easy way in the Overworld to obtain those. But don't panic. You don't have to look for a Nether Fortress. Just make your way to the red place, and get exactly eight pieces of Netherrack. That's right, just Netherrack. Then turn around and go home. Don't touch the Nether Ores yet, shiny as they might look. The Zombie Pigmen would make short work of you at this stage.
Netherrack smelts to Nether Bricks, four of which combine to placeable Nether Bricks, the very thing we need for that machine.
 
 
12. And what is that Crucible for?
 
Melting stuff and turning it into liquids. You can put stone or Obsidian in there and turn it into Lava, but it is more commonly used to turn Redstone into Destabilized Redstone, which is crucial for the next tech level. It can also make Gelid Cryotheum, a very useful substance that can be used to make an Obsidian Generator and to turn the Lava lakes in the Nether into Obsidian.
You want to know how? This is the point where you maybe want to look into a >specialized guide. The elegant Obsidian generator is described in the >alchemy guide, some way down (I first wrote about the complicated one, then somebody suggested the simple one, which is way better).
You should be getting a feel for things now. There is more to the machine stuff, and I will describe the useful and friendly Minefactory Reloaded in a separate post later.
 
 
13. Arm yourself
 
As soon as you have Iron to spare, make yourself some Iron Armor. You could also make it from Invar, but that one has the same defense, just higher durability, which is not worth wasting the precious compound for. An iron sword should also be an early priority, or maybe an Iron Spear or Halberd for the greater reach they give. But more importantly, as soon as you can obtain a fully-repaired bow (either by crafting or by looting/repair-crafting), do not shoot with it. Take it home and craft it into a Crossbow. The increased missile speed, punch and accuracy is more than worth the iron that goes into making the bolts. If you're short on feathers but do have gunpowder, make a Blunderbuss, which is a medieval shotgun that shoots gravel. Yes, you can actually make yourself a boomstick and go shotgun on them Creepers. This is thanks to the formidable Balkon's Weapon Mod, which should make fights that much more rewarding. Poke around in NEI for more stuff, and note that you can simply enter a mod's name to see its assorted items. There also is a Musket, a Boomerang and even a Javelin for throwing, and a Katana if you're feeling particularly samurai.
If you're looking for easy travel and a way to avoid fights, or even win them more easily, maybe a >Jetpack is what you need.
 
 
14. Advanced Mining: Turtle Power
 
In case you find mining tedious, there is a minion at your disposal that can do it for you. The Turtle is a programmable little sidekick, available in quite a lot of flavours, like mining. I never used it myself, but people tell me that it just takes coal to run and will bring back a healthy amount of resources from its adventures.
 
 
15. Advanced Mining: The Quarry
 
What you know as mining is usually just shaft mining, or opportunity mining while spelunking. If you can do it, strip mining will get you much more resources. Strip mining is the process of removing a mountain or chunk of landscape, piece by piece, until it is gone completely. I am pointing it out here in case you are successful and already found yourself some diamonds, because eleven diamonds are the entry fee to quarry land. If you're curious, I wrote down what I know about it in a >separate guide. It will be hard to power the Quarry with just Dynamos, though, so the next thing I'll cover is how to produce some serious power.
 
 
16. Power Struggles
 
If you experimented a little with all your new options, you have likely noticed that you can use lots of power with all those machines. Building more Steam Dynamos is only a temporary solution, because it becomes hard to feed them all with coal. You have several alternatives to solve the power generation problem:
 
switch to Compression Dynamos running on Fuel (or unprocessed Oil, but only in a pinch)
> you will need a Refinery to process Fuel (4 Diamonds), a Pump to gather Oil and some liquid storage, ideally Drums; you also need to keep finding Oil switch to BioGenerators running on Biofuel
> you will need an autofarm to generate biomass and a BioReactor to ferment it stick with Steam Dynamos, but build yourself a Charcoal generator
> you will need an autofarm to mass-produce wood go nuclear and build an early Yellorium reactor
> you will need a few stacks of Iron Ingots, Coal/Charcoal, Yellorium Ingots, a little Redstone and 1 Diamond Believe it or not, but 4. is by far the easiest option. The mod is called BigReactors, and it will introduce you to Multi-Block Structures while also providing KiRF of power (that is kilo-RF).
 
 
17. The Nuclear Option
 
I suggest you familiarize yourself with the principles of Yellorium Reactors on the wiki, so I don't have to paraphrase them here. We will build something slightly bigger than in the example pictures, namely a 4x4x4 cube without coolants that will serve you well until the time when you create your own, larger design. Here is your shopping list for the materials:
128 Iron Ingots 112 Graphite Bars 34 Yellorium Ingots + 32 (better some more) to run the finished reactor on 9 Redstone Dusts 1 Diamond 1 Wooden Chest 1 Piston (optional) 26 Glass if you want transparent sides to see the inside of the reactor Graphite? Just smelt coal or charcoal to make it. As both will work, charcoal is recommended because it is renewable and cannot be pulverized for coal dust later. Yellorium is created by smelting pulverized Yellorite Ore. Don't smelt the ores directly, because that will turn them into Uranium (and forfeit the doubling). This is not a bug, but a feature to support Atomic Science, the other nuclear mod in Tekkit. It is vastly more >advanced and complicated, so stay away from that stuff for now.
 
It would be a good idea now to make a Machinist's Workbench for crafting. That one has an inventory of its own and can memorize a recipe even after you removed the ingredients (the items on the grid are only placeholders). Ingredients have to be inside that inventory for crafting, otherwise they will have a red underlay on the grid. Once you get used to it, you will find it useful for just about any kind of crafting.

 
Now craft the following blocks:
52 Reactor Casing for building, 28 more as ingredients to craft the other blocks 8 Yellorium Fuel Rods 4 Reactor Control Rods 1 Reactor Controller 1 Reactor Power Tap 1 Reactor Access Port (optional) 13 Reactor Glass (re-craft 13 of the Casing blocks with the glass)
 
As usual, the recipes are in NEI. You will have three Casing blocks more than you need, because they can only be crafted in groups of four. Now assemble the Reactor!
If you opted for windows to look inside, keep in mind that only the side faces may contain Reactor Glass, not the frame and edges. Same rule applies to Power Tap, Access Port and Controller, so leave some room for them, too. Here is a picture of how the result should look like, one with glass and one without:

 
If you did everything right, the textures will change when the last block is placed. Congratulations, you built yourself a Multi-Block Reactor!
Climb on top first and set all Control Rods (separately) to 70%, then put 32 Yellorium Ingots into the Access Port. In case you missed it, Yellorium is not only a crafting component for the reactor, but also the actual fuel it consumes. Every Fuel Rod block inside will increase fuel capacity by four Ingots, so our 8-rod has a capacity of 8x4=32 Ingots.
Once you fueled it, the rods will be visibly filled with (liquified) Yellorium, although you can only see it if you used Reactor Glass. Now open the Controller interface and switch it on.
The Control Rods moderate the reaction, i.e. reduce core temperature and power output. The more extended they are, the less power is produced - think of them as nuclear handbrakes. You can leave them all out at 0%, which will result in a very hot reactor producing lots of power. There is much to know about reactor efficiency, temperature, fertility and more, but the setup I gave you strikes a good balance for your first operation at 70%. It will stay around the optimal temperature (which is ~900°C) and produce 960 RF/t, equalling 12 Dynamos. It will use just 0.02 mB/t of Yellorium, which means it will run over 40 minutes before the first Yellorium Ingot is completely burned and a Cyanite Ingot will be thrown out as waste. That's right, it can run a full real-life day on about 35 Yellorium Ingots, outputting 960 RF/t the whole time! Just keep a stack of Yellorium Ingots in the input slot, so it can replenish. Efficiency and power output will drop when the rods are not fully stacked with Yellorium.

 
If you don't actually need that much power, you can dial it back by extending the Control Rods further to 80% or 90%. Setting a Rod to 100% will disable it. It is recommended to have all Rods at the same height, otherwise the parameter readings will be funky (because they will oscillate between values for each Rod, which makes them largely useless). You can knock them all to 0% and see how high the temperatures and power output can go. Right now, there is no meltdown feature even when excessive heat is generated, so feel free to crank it up.
Remember that your Energy Conduits need to connect to the Power Tap. Leadstone ones are too weak entirely, so use at least Hardened ones. Observe, however, that Hardened Conduits and Cells max out at 400 RF/t, so your 960 RF/t won't pass through those. This is not tragic, because the Reactor comes with a free internal power storage of 10 million RF, which will fill with whatever the Conduits cannot take. Just keep in mind to shut down the Reactor once the internal storage is full, otherwise it will burn its fuel for nothing. You could also dial the reactor down with the Control Rods to get it below 400 RF/t, or simply go ahead with that third tech level now. Redstone Energy Conduits are the top tier, carrying up to 10000 RF/t. You will need Electrum and Hardened Glass for them, and fill the empty ones with Destabilized Redstone in a Fluid Transposer before they can be used. While you're at it, a Redstone Energy Cell makes sense now as well.
 
You can add a Reactor Rednet Port to the setup to get some advanced control options, and a Reactor Computer Port to even access it with ComputerCraft. But this is both optional and won't add much value to our little starter project.
Of course you can build reactors much, much bigger (up to 32x32x48 frame size). You can use coolants to moderate temperatures and influence efficiency, be creative with column setups and tinker around with just about anything. Have fun doing that!

 
Now that you have lots of power, it is time to build yourself an autofarm, and never worry about food or wood supplies again.
 
 
18. An autofarm?

You like swinging your hoe around all day and tending to every armful of grain personally? If you do, why are you playing Tekkit? :-p
No, the way of progress is turning that tedious farm into an efficient and, more importantly, self-sufficient factory. You can grow almost anything with a Minefactory Reloaded (MFR) farming chain, so let's build one to get you started!

You want the following machines for a simple, but complete farming chain that will produce tons of whatever biomass you tell it to grow:
1 Planter 1 Harvester 1 Fertilizer 4 Sewers (1 recipe yields 4 of them) 1 Composter 1 Sludge Boiler 1 Breeder (optional, but useful) While you could start with as little as Planter and Harvester, the rest is not really expensive and will add great benefits. The hardest thing will actually be running all the necessary wiring, so make sure you have some stacks of Energy Conduits, Fluiducts and Itemducts to spare, and maybe an Energy Cell or two to act as buffers. You will also want Strongboxes as drop-chests for the productive machines. But first, you want Plastic Sheets.


19. Plastic Sheets?

This is the land of progress, remember? MFR adds a new type of tree that you maybe noticed already, the Rubber Tree. It can be found in swamps, but occasionally also in other biomes, they're not too rare.
You're asking yourself how rubber helps you with getting plastic? While there is a huge difference between the two materials in real life, MFR conveniently lumped them together into a single resource. Go chop a few of those trees, which will yield Rubber Wood, Rubber Tree Saplings and... Raw Rubber. If you have built a Sawmill, you can process the Rubber Wood there to turn it into Jungle Wood Planks, which will yield more raw rubber as a byproduct, instead of the usual Sawdust.
Smelt the Raw Rubber into Rubber Bars, then simply smelt those again and marvel at the alchemy when it turns into Raw Plastic. This can be directly converted to Plastic Sheets on any 2x2 crafting grid, but keep some Raw Plastic around and don't convert it all (6 Raw Plastic should be enough for starters).
We need those Sheets because all MFR machines take two of them to make, no exceptions. Most of those machines will also require Machine Frames and Redstone Reception Coils, the same ones that go into Thermal Expansion machines - so stock up on those, too. Look into the recipes to see what else you need, but there won't be anything that we didn't already use, and nothing too expensive.
 
 
20. But what exactly is an autofarm?

An autofarm is the loosely-used term for the totality of the MFR farming machines working together, forming something larger than the sum of its blocks. Unlike the Yellorium Reactor, it is NOT a single Multiblock Structure, and the layout is pretty much up to your own choices and ideas. It must follow some rules, though. You are free to choose the location, but try to build it outside under the unobstructed sky and not too far away from your laboratory.

Begin with the Planter. It is recommended to make a 2-3 block high maintenance room below the actual farm, so you can access the Planter from below and resolve any issues that might arise, without digging. The topmost layer needs to be Dirt or Grass blocks (either is fine), and the Planter needs to be placed one layer below the soil. I think you could even cover it up, but the standard placement will leave the space directly above it free, which allows you to place a bucket of water there. Why the water? The machine doesn't need it, but if you decide to grow crops (grain, potatoes, carrots), the soil needs moistening, which will be assured this way.


The Planter needs power, so lay down some Conduits. It is recommended to also leave room for an Itemduct pipe to automate seed/sapling supply later, so you might already want to prepare that now.
Setting up the Planter is simple. It has an inventory, from which it will consume any compatible seeds or saplings and plant them in the soil layer above. The coloured grid on the left allows you to control which kind of plant should grow in each quadrant, in case you need to grow several things. That's right, you don't need to set up one Planter for each kind, but can handle it all with a single one. However, the default range is only a 3x3 grid, so each quadrant is just one block in size, with the middle one unusable because of the water. The good news is that the quadrants will scale up with overall machine range.



21. Machine Range?

MFR offers machine range upgrades, maybe you already noticed the slot for that in the bottom right corner of the machine interface. The Planter will always till a square area centered on the actual machine, but the default range is just 1 block around the machine in each direction.


Upgrades are available from Lapis (+1 block) all the way up to Emerald (+11 blocks). This always specifies radius, not diameter, so an Emerald-upgraded Planter will till a 25x25 area (1 center block and 1+11 in all directions). Upgrades are the things we kept the Raw Plastic for, so make yourself two of them now, one for the Planter and one for the Harvester. Use Iron or Tin (+2, +3), not much larger, because the logistics become a challenge in larger setups. Tin is the maximum range that still falls within the moisture range of the central water block - so if you go bigger, you will have to worry about additional moisture for crops (trees don't need it). You can switch upgrades later even in a running machine.


So, now that your Planter tills a larger area, put down the Harvester on the (center) edge of that area and apply the same kind of upgrade to it that the Planter got, so their areas match. This will be vastly simpler if you first craft yourself a Precision Sledgehammer. This is a wrench, with a very useful feature. If you hold it in hand, you will see the actual ranges of machines as an overlay, so check your setup with this tool.


The Harvester has a hole on the back, so make sure that this one faces outward, and the shear/chopping side points to the tilled field. Connect power and an Itemduct to it. All harvested grains, wood, saplings, seeds and other byproducts will shoot out of here, sometimes at high speeds, so placing a buffer chest and running the pipe from that is a good idea. You also need to place a Fluiduct outlet, because the Harvester will output Sludge as a byproduct when harvesting. You can just pump it into Tanks or Drums for the start, but later you will need the Sludge Boiler to process it.
You may want to create a loopback pipe for seeds and saplings to be fed back into the Planter, so you don't have to refill it manually. One or more MFR Item Routers can sort the Harvester output for you, but Itemducts with Pneumatic Servos installed in the pipe heads can do this just as well.
At this point, you should drop your first seeds into the Planter. For starters, I suggest you feed it oak saplings, a few (grain) seeds and maybe rubber saplings (use the quadrant grid to balance how much of each is grown). The wood will be useful for your plank and stick needs, and also give you access to lots of Charcoal. Oaks drop Apples for eating, too (another of those convenient Minecraft anomalies). Note how the Planter does its own tilling. You will never need to swing that hoe again.



22. And what are the other machines for?

As you will be producing Sludge shortly, set up the Sludge Boiler. When this machine is working, anybody standing within a few blocks will suffer from Hunger and Poison debuffs, so give it some more pipe and build it some way off.


The Sludge will be consumed to randomly generate Dirt, Clay, Sand, Gravel, Netherrack, Soul Sand and Mycelium. Concerning Netherrack, this is actually an alternative to the early Nether Portal way back in point 11, but it will take a while until enough Netherrack will be created (and it also took more than a bit of progress until we got here). Overall, this machine is quite useful especially for the Sand and Clay, that is why I included it here. You could of course just void-pipe the Sludge into oblivion.

As for the Fertilizer (the machine), you will love this one.


It uses Industrial Fertilizer (the brown stuff) to instantly grow things on your farm, which will greatly accelerate operations.


You can craft Industrial Fertilizer, but the usual way to obtain it is from a Composter, which takes power and a supply of Sewage to produce it. Sewage? Yes, liquid manure, the product of toilets. This may be a factory, but it still is a farm as well.


In the absence of toilets, you guessed it, Sewage is produced by the Sewer. This one, at least, does not require any power, and you just need to pipe the stuff with Fluiducts towards the Composter. Sewers are another kind of MFR machine that work with range upgrades. But how do they work in general? Well, an animal, any animal, has to stand on top of it when it does its occasional check. The bigger the animal, the more Sewage is produced. So you want to set up a pen of cows, pigs or sheep (or all of them) and place your four Sewers as part of the ground layer.


This may seem a lot of effort to just gather some manure, but the increased effectiveness is really worth it. The range of a Sewer is limited to the single block on top without any upgrades, so install some. Keep in mind, however, that placing the Sewers close enough to each other that their (increased) ranges overlap can cause glitches.
While you already have a pen, you might as well place a Breeder as part of the pen wall. This one will automate mob breeding as long as it's powered and has the required food in its inventory (wheat for cows and sheep, carrots for pigs, seeds for chicken, raw fish for cats, any meat for dogs, golden apples/carrots for horses). More animals means more Sewage, means more Fertilizer, so you probably want a full pen.


23. That's a boatload of machines

And there is more. You will notice that much of this stuff can be done manually, so you simply complete the chain by eliminating the manual steps one by one. The last application of the farming chain is meat production. While you could just slaughter some animals with a weapon and rely on the Breeder to bring the head count back up, MFR offers machines to automate also that, among other things. I will just mention the important ones briefly here:
Deep Storage Unit: Will store just one stack of items, but maximum stack height is two billion (!) Rancher: Will automatically shear sheep and milk cows Chronotyper: Allows sorting your animals by type (baby/adult) Slaughterhouse: Will kill your animals and produce liquid (!) meat, and some Pink Slime Meat Packer: Turns the liquid meat into Raw Meat Ingots, your friendly industrial steak (heat before eating) Mob Counter: Counts mobs - no, really, it can be used to fine-control your Breeder Grinder: Kills mobs as if you killed them yourself, outputting the loot The last one needs special mention. The Grinder can be used instead of a Slaughterhouse if you prefer your cows to yield beef, not liquid meat. Its main purpose, however, is killing hostile mobs.
Another useful feature the Grinder shares with Sewers (when animal breeding, ranching or killing occurs): It will generate Mob Essence.


24. Mob Essence?

Yes. Liquid experience! It is generated indirectly when Sewers soak up dropped experience orbs, and directly by Grinders. The third way to obtain it is to craft an XP Extractor and applying it on yourself (have an empty bucket ready somewhere in inventory), which will suck out levels you already obtained (!) and literally put them into buckets. This also means that if you apply the Extractor often, you cannot lose much experience any more when dying. It will be safe in liquid storage.
What can be done with Mob Essence? Well, the same things Minecraft does with experience in general, i.e. running Enchanting and Anvil operations. MFR has an Auto-Enchanter and Auto-Anvil, which will run off stored Mob Essence, and some power. That's right, no more tedious level-gathering to grind those enchantment books! With these tools, even obtaining Silk Touch is a matter of farming and patience.


25. Is the farm complete?

In a basic form. You can still experiment with Mushrooms and Netherwart (hint: works with a Planter, but requires manual placement of the necessary soils). You can scale everything up and try to build an especially elegant setup. Try to make it zero-maintenance, which will likely involve a stack of DSUs and maybe an early ME network. There is so much to tinker with that it will keep you occupied for a while, if you like it to.





26. Are we finally done now?

Not at all. But this guide has reached its end. I could write a whole book about Tekkit progression, and it would not be a thin one. But as nobody is paying me for it, and I'm also mostly re-telling information shared by others, let's leave it at this starter guide. You should have an idea about operations now, and the next progression steps will come rather naturally. Your long-term goals will be obtaining and mastering a Modular Powersuit, making a spaceship and flying to the Moon and Mars, creating a sophisticated storage network with Applied Energistics, and much more. You will upsize your Reactor, maybe add some impressive Turbines. A Laser Drill will eventually flood your storage with limitless ores.
Set your own goals, make your own achievements, find out about the little awesome things you can do. And of course the big awesome things, too.

And most importantly: Have fun doing it.