Blightfall tips and tricks

Just a little list of advice for newcomers to the pack. Responders, feel free to add any tips you can think of that I missed!

• Unless your plan is to move straight to the swamp as soon as you hit the planet, I recommend starting in some other bio-dome than Alpha. ANY other bio-dome! Well, perhaps not Omega. If you're here for tips, you're probably not experienced enough with the pack to start in Omega...Anyway! With all due credit and respect to Talonos, I know what he was trying for with setting up Alpha, but he didn't succeed. Sure, its central location makes it closer to (almost) everything than most other domes are...but with how spread out everything is, it doesn't make much difference, and each bio-dome has things it is MUCH closer to than Alpha could hope to claim. Plus, every other dome (save Omega) is close enough to sources of pretty much everything you need early game that the difficulty difference from dome to dome is negligible at best. Even Omega: All it's really lacking is enough nearby, no-reputation-cost, early-game food sources; and a source of sugar. Plus, Omega has a nearby location with a free tool forge, so you can start making four-part tools really early on...

• In the early quests, where it says you probably shouldn't touch the silverood tree in your bio-dome since it seems to be keeping you safe from the Taint? This is bupkiss. There is only one block per tree that you need to leave alone, and that only because it contains a pure node. The actual tree itself does nothing, so if you want more room and/or aren't concerned with its aesthetic appeal, feel free to tear down as much of the tree as you like-Just watch out for the one log that has a large black circle on each side. That's the indication that there's a node contained within, so don't touch that log until you have the technology to move it unharmed.

• Don't bother with wheat until you've got animals you want to breed with it, or you're trying to make cookies. As far as concerns making any food for yourself besides cookies, wheat and barley are functionally identical in every way, save one: Barley takes a LOT less bonemeal to grow, which frees up lots of bonemeal for you to use on other things. Or means a lot more flour to make food with, one or the other.

• Wooden armor! Sure, it's terrible protection, and doesn't last long at all, but it's better than going out there naked, and is available much earlier than any other type of armor!

• Just because you've gotten wheat and barley from your tall grass and don't seem to be getting anything else, don't assume this means you should stop spawning and breaking tall grass: There's still one more type of seeds you can get, they're just kind of rare. Keep going until you get cotton seeds, and you'll have a renewable source of wool and string, both of which are surprisingly useful in this pack.

• Make a fishing rod! I haven't experimented with this enough to see if it'll catch Pam's Harvestcraft varieties of fish, but even if it doesn't, there are four types of fish it catches by default, each of which can be eaten a couple times before diminishing returns kicks in, and half of which can be cooked for another form of food-that's six new varieties of food, even without getting a drying rack or cooking tools and extra ingredients involved! Plus, once you have access to plastic, an undamaged fishing rod can be used to craft an MFR fisher, which will do the fishing for you, and I'm pretty sure it DOES catch Harvestcraft fish!

• If you started in dome Beta, try to make your way to Redwood City as early as you possibly can. There's a library on the south end of town that has a barrel containing some honey and honeycombs, but the real prize said barrel contains is five queen bees. Scrounge for enough leather to make three to five apiaries, and you can have them producing lots of honey and wax for you. Honey's great because all foods that require sugar can have honey act as a substitute sweetener, and for things that specifically require sugar (fermented spider eyes, for example), you can just craft the honey with a pot, and you get sugar! Wax is great because, in addition to making candles as an alternative to spending loads of wood making torches, you can craft a piece of wax with a piece of leather to make hardened leather. The armor set you can make from this has the same protection as a set of iron armor, for much, much cheaper! Well, you know, once you have a cow farm set up, at any rate...

• Emergency nutrient bars! Available from the supplier, these things are a life-saver early game. They only cost one reputation per bar (though you can only buy them four at a time); they restore more hunger than anything you can craft with just one or two ingredients, save bread; and they are completely immune to the effects of diminishing returns! Seriously, until you've done enough exploration and/or reputation grinding, then buying seed bags that you've got a good food variety, these things are amazing.

• Speaking of reputation grinding, there are a fair few repeatable quests, a couple even available really early on, that you can get a bit of reputation from every time you complete them. I recommend grinding these quests early on, and spending all that reputation on seed bags, and possibly sapling bags as well. I know, the game seems to try to convince you that it's unwise to request a whole lot from the Jaded, but Talonos himself-the very creator of the modpack-has gone on record stating that the intention of the reputation system was for you to treat it like a company store: Do other quests to earn reputation, then spend that reputation like currency to buy things from the supplier tab of your quest book. So, buy lots of seed bags! There's a whole lot of food variety you can get just buying those over and over, plus you can get the otherwise-unavailable apple sapling! An apple sapling grows a special type of tree that grows apples you don't need to cut the tree down to get, giving you a steady supply of the things-and apples, together with just a few other ingredients and a full set of Pam's Harvestcraft cooking tools, create a LOT of different food types!

• Sapling bags! While grinding reputation to buy seed bags for dietary variety, consider also buying the occasional sapling bag. Sure, most of the saplings you can get from them are just a new variety of wood, for aesthetic purposes...but there are a few you can get that are a lot more useful than that! You can get a slimy sapling, which will let you farm slime-a resource that's quite handy, and otherwise frustratingly rare. You can also get a rubber sapling to farm rubber, another resource that's very useful, but frustratingly rare, otherwise. Lastly, you can get all four varieties of Nether saplings, three of which grow on normal dirt in this pack, and the fourth of which comes with a free block of Netherrack to grow it on. Why is this helpful? Well, the Nether woods all have higher mining levels-and most have higher durability and mining speeds-when used as tool materials than normal wood does! Heck, the highest tier of them, bloodwood, can mine diamond-level blocks, and has higher durability than any non-metal material! Plus, darkwood trees produce a new variety of food, and bloodwood leaves occasionally drop redstone. Lastly, tool parts made from any Nether wood save bloodwood will actually reduce the amount of experience a tool needs to level up!

• Boats! Most scout locations are a surprisingly short distance from water if you look carefully enough at the map, plus traveling over water leaves you at no risk of Taint poisoning, or attacks from Taint beasts...but swimming everywhere is SO SLOW! You should build a boat as early as you can...and if you have a hard time keeping boats from crashing and breaking to bits, I recommend keeping several on you any time you want to explore.

• You can get a juicer, a mortar and pestle, and a mixing bowl, all without leaving the safety of your bio-dome, and within your very first game day, if you're quick and clever! I recommend doing so...They make your base ingredients stretch a long way in terms of dietary variety. ALL the Harvestcraft tools do, so I recommend getting the pot, saucepan, cutting board, and skillet as soon as you have the metal for them. The last tool, bakeware, only requires two blocks' worth of clay, so most bio-domes can get one with just a bit of exploration outside, if you look hard enough.

• Snow golems! Not entirely necessary in the tundra or taiga, but as long as you keep them covered from the rain/snow, and aren't located in the desert/savanna, they'll provide you with infinite snowballs. So what, you say? Well, most fruits can be combined with a juicer and a snowball to get a smoothie! This adds one more food type for each fruit you have available, save malloberries and potash apples.

• Cows! No, seriously: COWS! Get these as early as you can! Milk is extremely versatile in this pack, beef has quite a lot of versatility as well, and leather is really important, especially if you've gotten the bees to produce wax for you.

• Don't bother with pigs for a while, unless you get some to spawn inside your bio-dome. Sure, pork is a lot more versatile in this pack than any without Pam's Harvestcraft...but that is literally the only thing pigs are good for. They're the least useful animal, by far. That being said...do get them eventually, because that versatility for pork does add quite a lot of new foods.

• Most of the advice in the official wiki from the Technic folks (found here: http://blightfall.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Advice/Tips ) is very sound and good. Follow it. The one thing I would argue with-and this applies to ANY pack with Tinkers' Construct, not just Blightfall-is that they seem to imply you should make your hammer entirely out of one metal. I disagree. Making any tool, hammer or otherwise, out of a single material is a massive waste of potential! The only time you'll want to do this is if it's a shovel or hatchet, and the material you're using has both the best base stats and the best handle modifier you have available: Shovels and hatchets are literally just a head and a handle. But considering paper and thaumium are the only materials whose material traits stack, NOT mixing and matching to add a nice variety of material traits is quite unwise. Everything that isn't "thaumic" or "writeable" just takes the highest among present sources, and ignores all others. For example, if you have one part made of iron, and one made of obsidian, it will NOT add their reinforced levels together and give you four. Rather, it takes obsidian's three, as that's the highest, and ignores iron's additional level. Similarly, making a hammer entirely out of ardite will not give it a dozen levels of stonebound, it just takes three levels from one part, and ignores all the rest. So, for a hammer, it's much wiser to make the head out of the best material you can; the handle out of either whatever material has the highest handle modifier, or the material with the lowest experience requirement; and the binding and plate out of materials with abilities you like, such as paper or obsidian, making sure to make each out of something different. Of course, it's YOUR tool, so feel free to make it your way!

• Watch for anomalies on your mini-map! If there's an area where the coloration abruptly and sharply changes, odds are there's something nearby fighting off the Taint. This usually means that Talonos put something good nearby, and doesn't want the Taint to destroy it, so start exploring! Even if that's not what's happening, it usually means a randomly-generated pure or sinister node, which are typically worth at least tracking down and scanning so you can find them again later.

• Physical Taint does not spread over/through water, so islands make pretty decent locations for additional bases, once cleaned up. The swamp island with a scout location is especially good, because you can teleport there instantly! Just keep an eye out for pockets of purple creeping back in. While the surface of the island won't become re-Tainted, it can sneak back in through tunnels beneath the surface. Plus, any Tainted nodes under the island will continually attempt to re-Taint the land around it. These are both simple enough to deal with, though: Just park an ethereal bloom wherever the land keeps changing back to purple, and leave it there until you have the time and/or resources for a more permanent solution.

• Get into Botania as early as you can, and advance it as much as possible each time you unlock a new resource that was holding you back. Botania gives you access to a lot of new things, or easier access to things you previously had a hard time finding. Plus, a surprising amount of things can be turned into mana, so it'll give you an outlet for using up quite a lot of stuff you might have been hanging onto, due to a packrat-like mentality. Got stacks and stacks of extra saplings? Endoflames can burn those up for mana. Got tons of experience levels you were sitting on because you don't have/lack a use for an enchanting table? Rosa arcanas will take those off your hands. Got tons of rotten flesh because you found a zombie spawner and converted it into an experience grinder for you and/or your weapons? The gourmarylis will gladly gobble that crap right up. Same with any food you made too many of. Best of all, once you get far enough in Botania, you never need to go mining again! (I mean, you CAN still, if you find it enjoyable, but you don't have to...) A flower called the orechid will turn stone blocks (stone, not cobblestone or stone bricks!) placed nearby into randomly-selected ore blocks! Yes, this works for komatite and schist and the like, not just vanilla stone.

• Speaking of Botania, do NOT mix and match floral powder colors when making fertilizer! This pack includes a mod called "radical new botany," whose purpose is purely to overhaul the floral fertilizer system so modpack/custom map makers can enforce more control over the player's progress. It does this quite extensively, and quite effectively: The normal fertilizer that can spawn flowers of any color is no longer craftable, and in this pack, can only be obtained as an uncommon drop from certain specific tainted NPC's. The recipe to combine two mundane red dye, two mundane yellow dye, and bonemeal no longer crafts into anything. Finally, when you make floral fertilizer, it can only spawn flowers of a color that was used in crafting it. So, if you only use blue floral powder, all you'll ever get out is blue flowers. If you mix in some white powder, all you'll get is blue flowers or white flowers. The reason I said not to mix and match? Well, according to all my testing so far, it appears that it selects one of the possible colors at random, then spawns flowers as normal...save for forcing it to only spawn flowers of the chosen color. So if you apply fertilizer made with blue powder and white powder, you'll get three or four white flowers, OR three or four blue flowers, rather than three or four flowers of a random mix of blue and white. For this same reason, never use up so many of a given color of flower that you have less than two left! If you use them all up entirely, you'll have to go through a complicated Thaumcraft process to get them back, and if you only have one left, that's not enough to make floral fertilizer from. So keep two at all times! It might be wise to invest in a flower pouch to keep two emergency flowers of each type in, just in case you accidentally use up the last of what you're keeping in normal storage...

• Invest in a pick and/or hammer with silk touch as early as you can. Once you have one, start using it on all the salt ore you can find. It'll drop normal salt ore, not diorite salt ore, or quartzite salt ore, or whatever it happens to be. Why bother? Fed through a pulverizer, salt ore produces six salt...and the occasional free salis mundus! As the salis is usually only obtainable by smelting a balanced shard, every free bit you can get is awesome! Don't bother trying for free ones using infused stone, though, even though a silk touch tool can get you normal infused stone as an item...Pulverizer'll only give you one shard of the appropriate type per infused stone, which is a HUGE waste, with the salis not being worth near enough to make up for it!

• Speaking of balanced shards, want to know the least wasteful way to make them? Use two water shards as your base, and toss them in after adding four cut grass (or ferns or dead shrubs), one gunpowder, and four chiseled stone bricks (the kind that looks a bit like a target, and shows up in jungle temples). Chiseled stone bricks can be made by crafting normal stone bricks with a Tinkers' Construct chisel a few times, or by tossing them into a mana pool with an alchemy catalyst under it. Gunpowder will be an issue at first, but there are two ways to double it later, so eventually, it's not so bad. Alternately, you can purify a portion of one of the islands on the far edges of the map (eerie island, volcano island, the glacier, etc.) and build a normal mob grinding tower there. The lack of tainted animals being counted from the mainland ought to clear up enough space in the hostile mob cap to let the tower work as normal.

Well, that's everything I can think of at the moment, that hasn't already been said in that page I linked! When I think of more (not if, because I probably will), I'll be sure and add it here. Have fun!