GT: New Horizons - Beginner’s Guide
Introduction
This guide is meant to eventually cover just about every part of the GT: New Horizons modpack (or at least as far as I get with it; I intend to make as much progress as I can, which should be rather a lot). I’m playing a survival world in which I will go through all of the quests (in the order I personally prioritize) and I will detail my progress and the reasons I make certain decisions regarding progression.
To be entirely transparent, I’m not doing everything entirely legitimately. I have employed a couple of admin powers, exclusively for the sake of making this guide without having my progression halted by being forced to spend weeks searching for a good world or looking for the right ores.
The first cheat was simply flying around the world in creative mode before starting it, in order to be sure that the world is acceptable and to find a suitable starting location. In doing this, I also made note of a few key locations (villages and wisp spawners) which I later revisited in survival to remove the loot from the chests, as well as waypointing the locations of eldritch obelisks for the purpose of avoiding them (I’ll explain why they’re best avoided later).
The second cheat (and to clarify; this does not breach the rules of the FTB Reddit page because it is not an exploit based upon a bug) was to temporarily spawn in a late-game item known as the UV Prospecting Scanner in order to save me the time needed to find all of the ores I needed in the overworld, nether, and Twilight Forest. This item is craftable in the very late-game but cannot be obtained legitimately (or by any known bug) before an enormous amount of Gregtech progression, and it essentially just shows you where ore veins are found in the world. I only used it because I’ve done enough legitimate playthroughs that I’m tired of spending ages just looking for ore veins, and also (as I said earlier) to speed up the time of this playthrough. because otherwise it just gets way too tedious and this guide would grind to a halt if I happened to be unable to find one major ore vein. Note: there are now early-game options for prospecting tools. Those were added only after I had used the prospecting scanner to find ores.
Additionally, I’ll be playing predominantly in Peaceful mode for a while. This is simply because I don’t like fighting mobs that can kill the player in only one or two hits through anything weaker than heavily-enchanted Thaumium armour (and even then I’d much rather have thaumium fortress armour to feel properly safe from mobs in this pack). It’s another thing that makes the pack more tedious and would slow down this guide. Similarly, the keepInventory gamerule is true so that when I do die it is simply less tedious. When you die in this pack your items are stored in gravestones, but sometimes they can be challenging to recover (particularly if you die near an eldritch obelisk…).
With all that confessed, I’ll begin the actual guide. Despite playing in peaceful for the early-game, I’ll still cover defenses of course. Just note that the best defense before a significant amount of thaumaturgical progress is just avoiding mobs as best as you can.
Just so you know, a lot of the early parts of the guide will cover which quests are important to do when and will skip what should definitely be obvious. Later on there’ll be more technical detail, but the early game has very little need for that.
Part 1: Starting Out
The most important thing when beginning to play GTNH is the location. Well, actually it’s surviving long enough to choose a location, but really the location is pretty key.
Having explored my world a little beforehand, I came across this location. It is ideal for several reasons. There’s a lot of water nearby (including a few small lakes, which I prefer to drain than rivers for the sake of appearances), there’s quite a few oil wells nearby too (which will be vital later), the terrain is grassy and relatively flat, and there are plenty of trees nearby. It is close to a river, which is a good source of sand, gravel, and clay. There are also two meteors, one of which is surrounded by lava (which is my current lava source as I have yet to reach the Nether). All of these factors are important. Something else that’s convenient is the presence of a coal vein very close to where I built my starting base, but I wasn’t aware of that until after I chose this location.
Additionally, there are no eldritch obelisks anywhere nearby. In case you’re not familiar with Thaumcraft, those are the big floating purple things which spawn horrible deadly mobs that wither you to death before you even see them, and do the same thing again when you try to recover your grave. Avoid those like the plague.
More benefits of the location can be seen as I zoom out. There are three villages within only a few kilometers, one of which is easily reached by boat. There are several large mountains nearby, which can be good sources of stained clay (useful later). There’s a lot of oil around, and there’s a cherry blossom grove biome very nearby (which tend to contain quite a few silverwood trees). And to the south there is a very large mesa biome, which isn’t strictly necessary but I want to build there later (when I get past the LV age, most likely), and like the mountains it’s also a good source of stained clay, provided you don’t mind tearing down the terrain.
The First Things To Do
Now, once you have a good location, you need to actually get started (or if you’re not pre-exploring the world like me, you’ll need to survive first and then find an ideal place to live). You start out with a quest book but you don’t actually need it, as you can press the ` key (the grave key, usually it’s the one to the left of the 1 key) to open the quests. The first few are simple enough; collect dirt for shelter, then collect some wood and gravel and you get given a torch. You’ll find that this is very important, as you can’t really create torches yet. You can’t mine coal yet and charcoal requires a coke oven to create, so you have no real choice but to rely on the quests for your first few torches. And this is very important, since this modpack has hardcore darkness, and stumbling around blindly at night is not a good idea, especially since running blindly into a mob will almost certainly result in your death. The first quest tells you to collect dirt because that’s a good way to build an early shelter.
It’s important to think about food, but early quests mostly take care of it for a while. Even so, if you see any gardens from Harvestcraft, right click on them to pick them up. Placing them down on grass again later will allow them to spread over time, and you can break them with a left-click to obtain a few crops, which can be shapelessly crafted into seeds so you can grow more. It’s always worth saving one of each type of garden though, so they can spread gradually while you do other things. For anyone unfamiliar with Pam’s Harvestcraft, here’s what some of the gardens look like:
Note: water gardens, despite the name, can be placed on grass to spread.
Questing Through Tier 0
Generally in this guide, I’ll recommend that all quests be completed and that you don’t ignore side quests, but some of the quests in the Tier 0 tab can be ignored, particularly since priority is obtaining a bed and it’s not always obvious how to do that. Once you get to the “Tools” quest, it’s not exactly clear what to do next.
This is my Tier 0 tab. Every quest in green (except the bone meal one) is needed to reach the bed. The bone meal quest was just convenient. The quest in blue was for making an apple sapling, which is highly useful, and the only reason I have yet to claim the reward is because it is a choice of four other fruit saplings and I want to find three of them so I can pick the reward as the last fruit I can’t find.
Note that if you’re not playing peaceful like I am, a few more of these quests are useful. The quests “Your first long-range weapon”, “Shields UP”, and “Monster trap” will help you survive against mobs. The shield and spear quest also have followup quests for upgrades, but they’re inconvenient to do unless you’ve been farming cows and cotton.
If you make a shield or a weapon, they can be placed in the Battlegear slots (some Tinker’s Construct weapons don’t work for this; apparently this will be fixed in future pack versions). The Battlegear slots are accessed from your inventory, with the tab at the top which looks like two swords crossed over a shield. Slots on the left are for the left-click weapons, slots on the right are for right-click shields. The Battlegear slots can be used with the “draw weapons” key, found in the Gameplay section in the Controls menu (accessed through the Esc menu). I use the Button 4 on my mouse to draw weapons, but you can set it to whatever is convenient for you. Whatever button you set for “draw weapons” will, when pressed, swap your active hotbar between the conventional hotbar and the Battlegear hotbar (which has 3 weapon/shield pairs).
This might seem strange, but it’s usually better to keep your bed with you than to just go out on day-long expeditions. This is because you’re generally less likely to be annihilated by mobs if you’re careful to sleep through every night (although if there’s a blood moon your best bet is just to hide for a while). Later you can make a sleeping bag, but that takes tanned leather and it’s a bit of a process to create, so for now you’ll be stuck carrying your bed with you on your expeditions (and just so you know, even though you’ll be underground if you’re mining, it’s still better to sleep through the night so mobs don’t spawn on the surface; the mobs in GTNH are massively more deadly than in any other pack I can think of).
Farming
Fences are an absolute pain to make, especially if you don’t have any metal yet, but it’s important to start farming early. You’ll definitely need to farm: cows, sheep, cotton, and wheat (mainly for the animals). To wall off your crop farms or to keep your animals in, make cobblestone walls and wooden fence gates. That’s the cheapest way of doing it currently since cobblestone walls still use the vanilla recipe, although keep in mind that this might change in future modpack versions.
I’ll expand the Farming section of this guide later, once I’ve figured out exactly what crops are helpful for a good diet that’ll sustain you indefinitely. If you want to figure it out yourself, note that every food can be eaten 4 times out of 24 without losing saturation, so 6 unique food types are needed. It also helps if all of them fill the same amount of hunger, so that the lunch bag or lunch box will prioritize them equally.
Tier 0.5: Prospecting & Progressing
Once you’re not going to starve, you can sleep, and you have a pointy stick that can possibly help you to defend yourself from one lone zombie if it gets stuck behind a wall, you’ll want to make a coke oven so you can finally get some torches and start mining. The quests in the Tier 0.5 tab detail how to do this fairly clearly, although keep in mind that the quests for the clay bucket and for paper are prerequisites. Tinker’s Construct is also important to start so you can get some decent tools (these tools will level up, and you can replace tool parts as long as the tool is at full durability, so there’s no need to make replacement tools unless you somehow lose them). You’ll also want to do the quest for woven cotton, as that leads to the quest for lava gloves (yes, you need specific gloves to pick up buckets of lava without burning to death). If you’re wondering how to make a smeltery, that quest line is in the “Multiblock Goals” quest tab, but it’s simple sand, gravel, and clay just like the coke oven.
So anyway, once you’ve got a coke oven, you can make some charcoal for torches. Alternatively, if you’ve been lucky enough to find a coal vein in the side of a local mountain, you can probably mine some coal with a Tinker’s Construct flint pickaxe, but only if you’ve levelled up the mining level first by mining cobblestone. Coal coke makes the most torches at 5 torches per piece of coke.
Prospecting
Gregtech ores work differently than you may be used to. For the sake of people unfamiliar with Gregtech, I’ll explain how ores generate and how best to find them.
Gregtech ores spawn in enormous veins on a 3x3 chunk grid. Though there’s no guarantee that an ore vein can spawn in a valid spawning chunk, it is very likely. Valid chunks for the center of an ore vein to spawn can be found by checking the coordinates of the chunk (found in the F3 overlay). If both the X and Y coordinate are 1 more than a multiple of 3 (ignoring negatives; e.g. treat 4 the same as -4) then there is likely to be an ore vein centered on that chunk. Some example coordinates where you’d be likely to find an ore vein are: (4, 1), (7, -10), or (-16, 4). Note that these are the coordinates of the chunk, not the coordinates of the block you’re standing on. To see an overlay of the chunk grid easily, you can press F9 twice (and press it once again to turn off the overlay).
To actually check to see if there is an ore vein in a valid chunk, I have a preferred method that is as safe as possible while also minimizing the amount of blocks you have to mine.
First, find a block in the middle of a chunk which is a valid ore chunk (the waypointed block here is one which I know there is ore in already, but if you hadn’t cheated for the sake of speed like I did in this world, you’d be doing this blind).
Mine directly down, but in a 2x1 shaft wherein you’re standing on the border between both blocks, so that whichever one you break you won’t fall until you break both blocks at the same y-level. Dig this shaft until you find ore. In this case, I found an apatite vein (note that the ores look different than the default textures because I’m using a texture pack).
Then dig a spiral staircase upwards to the surface, centering one of the two blocks you dug down through. This allows for a vertical shaft of daylight to light up your staircase, meaning you don’t need to use torches (though you’ll need to sleep every night, which is one reason I earlier suggested carrying your bed with you until you get a sleeping bag).
Once you actually find an ore vein, this is a good method of mining. Torches are separated by 3 blocks diagonally, or 7 blocks in the cardinal directions. This isn’t the perfectly efficient torch placement method, but I like it because it makes it well-lit and it definitely prevents any mob spawns. Strip-mining is very effective because these ore veins contain hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of ore blocks.
Here’s an example of a limonite vein that I’ve excavated the entire top 3 layers of. Due to the way Gregtech ore veins generate, there’s not actually any brown limonite left in this vein, but there’s still some malachite and banded iron, as well as 3 more layers of yellow limonite down below.
Important ore veins in the early game are: limonite (iron), chalcopyrite (copper), cassiterite (tin), redstone, diamond (main ore is graphite), mineral sands (iron), and lapis lazuli. Magnetite veins are also quite common sources of iron, as well as being the only early source of gold (not that gold is useful for a while) but my favoured early iron sources are limonite and mineral sands, because they have fewer useful byproducts and there’s an important ore in the mineral sands vein that’s not found elsewhere.
As for ore-related quests, there’s a few. It starts with a quest that gives you an iron pickaxe head to upgrade your flint pickaxe, but don’t upgrade it yet. You need to find an iron vein first (either magnetite, limonite, or mineral sands), or you’ll be unable to repair your pickaxe. Speaking of repair, it’s worth taking your tool station with you whenever you mine, as well as a few repair materials for your pickaxe and shovel.