Where to start?

[DT_Darkness]

When i first started playing i was all mixed up and confused; where do i start? what mod should i start with? How do i start with the mod?

[dwwojcik]

Thermal Expansion is the new IC2. I'd suggest starting by rush-building a pulverizer to double all your ores.

[Valkon]

I'd suggest starting by rush-building a pulverizer to double all your ores.

I usually prefer to use the Induction Smelter, once available. Doubles ores like the pulverizer, and occasionally will produce rich slag as a byproduct, which allows tripling of ores.

[phazeonphoenix]

You start out like regular Minecraft. Go punch a tree. Now realize that you can improve and automate almost every task you can do. You have a greater selection of weapons, armor, tools and food to choose from but largely they follow the same rules as vanilla Minecraft equipment. Start by a basic powered machine setup to get a number of Pulverizers, Electric Furnaces and Induction Smelters running on Steam Engines. If kept small and manually fed this setup can be picked up and moved if need be. Mine for materials. Pulverize your ore. Store some of the dust and cook the rest. Even though ValkonX is true when he said using the Induction Smelter will double possibly triple your ores, you will still need to pulverize some since certain metals have to be mixed as powder and cooked (like bronze or electrium). Save almost everything. Burn charcoal in your Steam Engines rather than coal at first.

Find shelter somewhere and start expanding and improving. The exact order of this isn't important. If you maintain a basic setup of machines to help you build the rest comes naturally. I suggest an AE Storage Network. It's easy to get a basic setup going and they are a key component of automation later on. Work towards being able to power a quarry. They remove the need to mine yet leave huge carved out hole in your world. Many of the better machines need items from other dimensions. Get into the End and the Nether. They are still both dangerous so be prepared. Tread lightly with Dimensional Doors you or someone you know have not placed. They can be lots of fun but dangerous. Placing them yourself creates a stable pocket dimension. You'd better have an Overworld Linking Book if you're going into a Mystcraft Age. Learn how and when to use the Dimensional Anchor or Chunk Loader blocks. Turn on the chunk grid overlay on Rei's minimap that helps immensely. Resist the urge to continually build in one large area. You'll experience client side lag and performance issues if you pack too many machines into a space. Spread out your builds. Use a Rift Signature to create teleport doors between your bases. Build larger complicated builds in other dimensions if possible. Stable pocket dimensions work well as do Mystcraft Ages.

[DT_Darkness]

thanks for the feed back but i started with minefactory reloaded was that a good or bad choice?

[Flextt]

Minefactory is a great mod, but at least ore processing should be done with Thermal Expansion (at this point only called TE - better GUI, better BuildCraft (BC) integration). Some Minefactory Reloaded (MFR) blocks like the Block Smasher provide very little feedback, making it hard for beginners.

In either case, your first step should be doubling your ore output by TE's pulverizers and a subsequent Powered Furnace or use the MFR Block Smasher and put the output in a TE Powered Furnace. You will need to mine 50% less ore to achieve the same. And boy, you will need a lot of them^^

TE's Steam Engines work very well with TE's Aqueous Accumulator. Water only needs to touch the Accumulator on two faces and it will continously and without energy output water into a BC Waterproof Pipe or an TE Liquiduct.

The biggest issue in Tekkit is your power source. Very early on, a few steam engines will provide enough power for your ore processing. Over time, these bastards will chew through your coal however. Hence...

Early to mid-game: TE Steam Engines. A really cool idea would be making an MFR Harvester with a tree farm, hooking it up to a TE Powered Furnace and output the coal from the wood into your engines, making it semi-perpetual, albeit at low output.

Mid- to late-game: Read up on TE's Magmatic Engines (I recommend getting the mod ExtraUtilities for its Ender-thermal Pump and abstain from using Buildcraft's Pump, because it sucks) or get into MFR's BioFuel Reactor and Generators.

Late-game: Build a massive BioFuel Reactor and Generators rig or get into Atomic Science's (AS) Fusion Reactor and Turbines.

The amount of power you can generate AND effectively distribute will vastly dictate your tech tier. The rest will come naturally, if you read up on each mod's capabilities. Best thing to do is using this subforum's search function, because a lot of difficult stuff was already covered here. Furthermore, bookmark http://wiki.technicpack.net/Main_Page. Almost every mod and block is covered there with a quick how-to-use. Also, I often go into my creative world and simply test stuff there until it works on my own^^

[phazeonphoenix]

To add to what Flextt said, use the Wiki as a research and reference book. There's more off site information about most of the mods in Tekkit and the Wiki has many helpful links. Often the MinecraftForums thread created for the mod is the place to go for the information straight from the mod author. There can be additional or more up to date information there. Google and Youtube searches for a specific mod will turn up even more information. There's a lot out there.

[Digdug83]

I think our forums are now the authority on Atomic Science heh.

[Flextt]

I think our forums are now the authority on Atomic Science heh.

Yeah, I think we've got it figured out pretty much, but vanilla AS players will probably brand us as cheaters.. so there goes our authority