Getting Started (GregTech 6)

General Notes
GregTech ores generate in many forms, however the three that are the most useful are Small, Sand, and Gravel. Small Ores have a lower Mining Level than their regular versions, and when broken will drop either Crushed Ore or Dirty Dust (or a Gem if possible). Sand and Gravel Ores are mined with a Shovel rather than a pickaxe, however much more importantly, will obey gravity and fall if unsupported. This can be exploited alongside the trick of 'place a torch to make an entire stack of falling sand drop as items' to mine Sand and Gravel Ores without the tool mining levels that would normally be required. Because of this property of Sand Ores, Desert biomes can make for good starting locations, as with luck an ore vein can be found at the surface and easily gathered.

NEI is your best friend throughout GregTech. However, it can often show more recipes than are actually necessary or useful, as GregTech contains many, many 'recycling' recipes (which simply convert materials into different forms, or break apart machinery into the metals used to make it). One of the more important recipe category in NEI is "Combination smelting". You can browse this category when you search for an alloy ingot recipe (for instance bronze). There's also a GT Book of Alloys in-game, but it's much more inconvenient because there's no search functionnality in it, compared to NEI.

The extended debug display can be opened by holding H and pressing F3. This display allows viewing the Melting and Boiling Points of all items that can be thrown into a Smelting Crucible, along with exactly what materials they melt down into. Cycling through chunk display with F9 can also be very convenient. The red lines are chunk corners, so mining straight down on these lines allow you to check the content of 4 chunks at once. In GT6 a vein spawns in every 3 chunks so by arranging a digging matrix by using these red lines, you can easily map the locations of differents veins around your base. Additionally since there's only one vein in 3 chunk you can stop digging as soon as you've reach a vein: there won't be another one under it (although there still might be sparse small ores).

IndustrialCraft 2 Industrial TNT is crafted out of Flint and TNT. Industrial TNT can be crafted with String to make Dynamite items. When thrown, Dynamite will break a 3x3x3 cube centered on the impact point. This makes it extremely efficient for early-game mining of higher-level materials or excavating an underground area, provided you enough Gunpowder.

Skeletons have a small chance (1/16 by default) to fire a random GregTech Arrow in stead of a conventional arrow. This includes arrows tipped with radioactive materials, which cause Radiation Poisoning on hit. As such, a Wooden Bucket of Milk is often a good item to carry around.

One of the most valuable resources in the early game is dungeon loot. Metal armor found in chests can be melted down and used for tools, once a Smelting Crucible has been crafted. It can easily be worthwhile to only use Leather armor, and damaged metal armor looted from monsters, just to get the extra metal to get off the ground. Beware that only pristine stuff can be smelted in a crucible: used tools, armor, or weapons cannot.

The Stone Age
When you start a new map with GT6 you'll have to establish you base. But in doing so, take note of these pointers :

- GT ores spawns in veins, sometimes bigs ones, that can be seen quite clearly if you have some space, and few trees. As such a desert is often the best place to start a base. Bonus point if there's a lignite/coal vein there to help you start on fuel.

- Villages are also a valuable starting point because of their chests, which can contain precious materials you sometimes won't be able to craft yourself for a long time (this is also true for other random loot places like dungeons and mineshafts). The additional agriculture is also a plus, and trading with the villagers can help sometimes.

- Spruce and dark wood forests are best suited for GT axes (lots of vertical wood, even for big trees) and since you're going to need charcoal on a regular basis, having such resources at hand is valuable

Since you start in the Stone age, you'll have to act like a cave person: flint tools will be you primary focus. In GT6 flint has a fire aspect, which is very convenient because it allows you to light targets on fire, which kills them more easily and often cook meat when you kill animals. Flint tools may not have a lot of durability, but can be found in abundance (also not that villages have gravel paths). In addition to its killing potential, flint is also the primary component for a mortar, and crafting mortars will be a routine for you until you start to build your first machines, and it won't happen soon.

Certus quartz is also a viable alternative for tools because it has the same Tier level as Iron, allowing you to mine ores that you would not have been able to mine with a stone/flint pickaxe in the first place, even though mining beyond your means can be improductive if you're not able to effectively use what you've gathered.

Cobblestone pickaxes, even though their durability is horrible (barely over ten cobblestones), are really fast at mining stone, so when you do branch mining or chunk mining (see general notes above), keep in mind that you'll go very fast with a lot of stone pickaxes, and they are basically free.

You should also focus on your farming skills, since you'll be able to automate a lot of the food processing on that topic later on, and because farming is one of the only few renewable resource, you should take full advantage of it.

Under GregTech 6, the only metals that can be smelted in a vanilla Furnace are Copper, Tin, Bronze, Lead, Zinc, and Bismuth. Of those materials, only Bronze can be used to make tools. (Lead can be used, but it requires Steel Rods as handles.) All other metals must be melted, often alloyed, and subsequently cast, in a Smelting Crucible (heated by a Burning Box) and Molds.

Crafting your first crucible and learning the arts of smelting is of the utmost importance in playing GregTech 6.

Smelting
Smelting in a crucible is very basic, so basic there's not even a GUI for that.

A crucible is a block that you place on top of a burning box, and in which you'll throw your ingredients. Lighting your burning box will make it produce heat upwards, onto the crucible, which will heat up as well, until it reaches a temperature high enough to melt its ingredients, or itself. You better get used to that because a lot of contraptions in the beginning of GregTech are GUI-less, so nothing is handed out to you: you have to do the work by yourself, and only later will you be able to automate more and more parts of your work process.

To begin, and to avoid going back and forth collecting materials, go on a mining operation to collect at least 80 Clay balls, some amount of Stone, Wood, Flint, and Coal, enough Copper and Tin to make at least 25 Copper ingots and 7 Tin ingots, and 8 ingots worth of either Lead, Bronze, or Bismuth.

Copper and Tin cannot be directly combined to make Bronze. To combine them, smelt Copper and Tin Crushed Ores or Dusts into Ingots, then use Flint and Stone to craft a Mortar, and use the Mortar to craft the Ingots into Dusts. Then, craft 3 Copper Dusts and 1 Tin Dust in a square to obtain 4 Bronze Dusts.

Combine Stone and Sticks to make Hammers. (More than one will likely be needed, as Stone Hammers have very low durability.) Craft a Hammer with two Bronze Ingots to make a Double Ingot, then use the Hammer again with the Double Ingot to make a Bronze Plate. Two plates and a Stick combine to make a File. Craft another Bronze Ingot with the File to make a Bronze Rod. Combine a Plate, a Rod, a Stick, a Hammer, and a File to make a Chisel. Finally, craft six Bronze Ingots (in a Y-shape) with a Hammer to make a Wrench. These are the mandatory initial tools to craft your first GregTech contraption: the Crucible.

Note: Additional tool, not mandatory but highly recommended: Bronze Pincers. Items cast in a Mold will be extremely hot, cool slowly, and cause severe damage to a player who attempts to remove them. Right-clicking with a set of Pincers allows a player to extract the hot items as soon as they solidify. You can also use Lead or Bismuth but remember that a tool durability follow its materials, so a Bronze tool will be way more durable that a Lead one. But that said, you'll need a lot of Bronze in your GregTech career.

Smelt 12 of the Clay balls into Bricks, combine the remaining Clay into Blocks, and smelt them into Hardened Clay. 7 Hardened Clay, a Hammer, and a Chisel combine to make a Ceramic Crucible. One Double Copper Plate (2 ingots + Hammer -> Double Ingot, + Hammer -> Plate; 2 Plates + Hammer -> Double Plate), 3 Brick Blocks, 4 Lead, Bronze, or Bismuth Plates, and a Wrench make a Burning Box. (Which of the three Burning Boxes crafted doesn't matter much yet; they serve the same purpose but work at different speeds.) Finally, 5 Hardened Clay, a Chisel, and a Hammer craft into a Mold. (More than one Mold is usually good to have.)

Note: Molds and Crucibles can be made out of Stone. However, these are more or less useless, as effectively the only material that they can melt is Stone, which cannot be cast.

The standard basic Smelting Crucible is made of Ceramic, because it has a quite high melting point, allowing you to melt a lot of different metals and alloys. Be wary though that because it's very light, it heat up and cool down very quickly. It's very easy to go overboard with a crucible and safety measures, although efficient, won't be able to save you everytime. Standard molds are also made from Ceramic because of the same temperature reason, and because Clay is easy to find, especially if you're near a river, a beach or a swamp.

Place the Crucible somewhere that does not have anything near it that can catch fire. Place the Burning Box directly below it, and make sure it has an air block in front of it. Place one or more Molds adjacent to the Crucible. Note that these Molds have no pattern in them; the shape of item created by a Mold is determined by what shape is Chiseled into it (molds are GUI-less too). Molds have 25 spaces within them, which must be knocked out in specific patterns to yield specific items; if an invalid pattern is given, the Mold will in stead produce a number of Nuggets. The page on Molds has a full list of all valid patterns. To chisel a pattern into a Mold, right-click on its inner area with a Chisel. The chiseled piece will be knocked out of the Mold.

Note: Despite NEI only showing pure metals being thrown into a Crucible, any shape of metal can be thrown in. Chunks, Dirty Dusts, Crushed Ores, undamaged metal tools and armor, anything except Ore Blocks. However, throwing in items other than pure metals will usually also partially fill the Crucible with Stone, which must be removed before the material in the crucible can be useful. Material that has been thrown into a Crucible can be removed as Scrap by right-clicking while the Crucible is cold. (Right-clicking to remove material from a heated Crucible will result in the player taking very significant damage, most of the time lethal.)

The Crucible is heated by the Burning Box under it. The material used to make the Box determines the rates at which it burns fuel and heats the Crucible, and its efficiency in doing so. However, to use the Burning Box, it must be lit. Flint & Tinder is the GregTech equivalent of a Flint and Steel, but can be crafted using Flint and either an Iron nugget, Steel nugget, a gem of Quartz, Nether Quartz, Certus Quartz, or Chipped Jasper. Right-click the Burning Box with some conventional Furnace fuel to insert it (note that once fuel has been inserted, it cannot be removed while the Box is lit). Once the Box contains Fuel, right-click it with the Flint & Tinder to try to light it. (This will likely take multiple tries because Flint & Tinder does not have a 100% success rate, more like 30%).

While active, the Burning Box will also periodically produce Ashes or Dark Ashes; right-click the Box to remove them. Once lit, the Burning Box will continue to burn fuel until it runs out, or its front side is blocked by an opaque block. This allows for an emergency shut-down, by placing a block of Dirt in front of an active Box.

Now some safety warnings:

- An active Burning Box will cause nearby flammable objects to catch fire.

- Touching a heated Crucible, or a Mold containing hot cast metal, will result in the player taking heavy damage

- If an item or material inside a Crucible reaches its Boiling Point, or if an item falls in that has no listed boiling point, it will vaporize, dealing heavy damage to all players and mobs near the Crucible. This can include Molds, or the Crucible itself. Note that as material vaporizes, the Mass inside the Crucible decreases, causing it to heat faster. If a Crucible vaporizes, it will also vaporize all material inside it, and set several random nearby blocks on fire.

- Be extremely cautious around the "opaque block in front of the burning box" mechanic because a burning box will only shut down after it has burned the current fuel. So in your first tries, prefer using Lignite, or even stack of saplings, to ensure that when you drop an opaque block in front of the burning box, it will stop quickly because it will have burn it current fuel quickly (lignite and saplings are very inefficient fuel, compares to Coal and Charcoal. For instance, if you put a block of Coal in a Burning Box, light it, and immediately put a Dirt block in front of it, it won't shut down before burning the whole block, which make get your Crucible way past its melting point, vaporising its content and itself into nothingness, wasting everything.

- Removing a burning box using a wrench will stop it immediately, and will allow you to retrieve ashes and unburnt fuel, but you'll lose the currently burning fuel.

Once the Burning Box below the Crucible is lit, it will start to heat the Crucible. The rate at which a Crucible heats depends upon the mass of the Crucible, and the mass of the metal inside it. Once the metal inside the Crucible melts, it can be poured into adjacent Molds by right-clicking the Mold. Note:  The metal that will be poured into the mold is the one that has the highest melting point. For example if your crucible is at 1360K and contains 3 units of Bronze and 1 of Copper, the bronze will be poured first and only after the 3 bronze units have been poured will the copper be poured as well. This is an interesting mechanic when you're not following the recipes exactly.

Some notes on Materials
When in need, Chalcopyrite smelts as Copper, Cassiterite as Tin and Galena as Lead, and can all be smelted in a regular Furnace.

The notable (approximate) temperatures for early metalworking are: Bronze (melt 1300K), Iron (melt 1800k, transform to Wrought Iron 2000k), Steel (2050k), Titanium (1984k), Gold (1500K), Stone (vaporizes at 2000K), and Ceramic (Crucible vaporizes at 2500K). By knowing these melting and boiling points, Crucible temperature can be roughly observed in the time before a Thermometer is available by looking at the color of the liquified metal in the Crucible. For instance if you mix Copper and Tin, you'll first see the liquid Tin (past 500K) and at some point later you'll see the Bronze. After you've poured the Bronze out of the Crucile, if there isn't any Bronze left, but there's still Copper, you'll see it liquefied (Bronze is a desturated orange while copper is a bright orange-red color). If there isn't Bronze anymore, but there is Tin left, you'll see it liquified (Tin is bright gray).

Note though that if you've mixed different materials in the crucible, and if these materials does not all mix (like if you've thrownan iron pickaxe, its wood won't melt with its iron not matter the temperature), you'll never see the colored liquid state, only the dark gray solid state. That's why you've have to respect recipes as much as possible until you can craft a thermometer.

Iron Smelting is a bit of a special issue to handle. The primary initial source of Iron is Magnetite (later on you'll encounter Yellow and Brown limonite which are much more efficient to get iron from). Magnetite can be melted, but will not melt into Iron. In order to convert Magnetite into Iron, Dark Ashes must be thrown into the molten Magnetite. And as Dark Ashes can be most reliably obtained by running a Burning Box, you'll need to burn a fair bit of Coal or Lignite to get Dark Ashes for Iron. Luckily you'll have a lot of Bronze tools to craft in the beginning. Pyrite and actual legitimate iron ore are even better, but they're harder to find. Hematite is easy to find but is a pain, because you have to smelt it with dark ash AND calcite (gotten from smelt marble).

Steel requires temperatures of around 2050K with a ratio of one part Carbon for 50 parts of Wrought Iron (note: don't consider melting whole ingots, but tiny dusts, because the Crucible can only have up to 16 units). You can extract Carbon from Graphite Ore by washing it in a Cauldron; small Graphite Ore is found below z-level 20. Alternatively and far more easily, find Steel tools in dungeon treasure Chests and throw these into the crucible.

Disposable stone hammers help you crush ores in crushed dusts (especially copper and tin that are found regularly in caves), you'll get more material from an ore that way, especially if you wash them afterwards in a Cauldron.

Before the Forge Age your current work process should more or less be :

- Mining Ore (like Copper) - Crushing Ore to Crushed Dusts

The next step will be way more rewarding.

The Forge Age
Before diving in the wonderful world of machines and automation characterizing the Forge Age, you'll need some very convenient tools and contraptions.

- An Iron Bucket. Made of 3 iron plates, 2 of them curved by hammering a plate on a rolling cylinder, it's your only way to carry Lava. Why would you want Lava ? Because Lava poured in a Crucible allows you to make Obisidan tools. Although their durability is not that great, since Lava can be found quite easily (especially if you open an early Nether Portal) and since Obsidian is a Tier 3, Fire Aspect material, Obisidan tools are the next Tier after Flint: plentiful, efficient, and easy to make: Because Lava is hot, pouring a bucket of it in a Crucible will heat it immediatly to Lava level (around 1000K) and you'll be able to pour the lava right away in tools shaped molds. That's the beauty of it: you don't even have to heat the Crucible with a Burning Box. For this very reason it's a good idea to find an underground lava lake beneath you base and keep a Crucible + tools molds there. Be careful when pouring because obsidian tools need to cool a bit before they can be safely picked up, or use pincers/hazmat suit when available. Tools retrieved from molds are "raw" and need to be sharpened to be of any use so finish them with a file, or better, a Sharpener.

- A thermometer. It's really easy to overheat the crucible without it. You'll need two units of Red Alloy. 4 Copper + 1 Redstone = 1 Red Alloy unit. Be careful because it burns off most of its mass once it hits its melting point so overheating is very easy. You'll also need some glass, and Tin alloy which is made from Tin and Wrought Iron (Iron heated up to 2000K). The thermometer sticks on the front of the crucible. You'll need wire cutters, a rolling cylinder and a hammer to turn red alloy plates into red alloy wire. It's a time effort to craft your first themometer, but it's really worth it: you'll make tremendous progress in understanding the smelting process and managing your Crucible safely with a thermometer.

- A Cauldron is made of 7 hard-earned iron plates (or wrought iron plates so you can use them there if needed). The Cauldron is, with the Sifter and the Hammer, the next step in your ore mining process: throw in crushed ore and impure dust to clean them and get extracts. It's especially worth cleaning crushed ore because otherwise, it'll bring a bunch of stone with it into the cauldron. You want to try to smelt washed, pure dusts.

- A sifter costs 8 units of Steel, but it's your only way to manually process Sand and Gravel Ores, which are in huge veins so it's well worth it to craft it as soon as possible. Right click Ore onto the top stop to place it there, then hold down right-click to sift the Ore, then, after it has passed through the Sifter, right click the bottom result to pull out the purified Ore and extracts. Crushed, purified gem ores can be sifted to get gems (this includes lapis). Gravel can be sifted to get flint, quartzite and trace clay. Dirt can be sifted to get pumpkin, wheat and melon seeds. You can wash the Purified Dusts in your Cauldron to retrieve even more byproducts.

- A Sharpener costs as much as a Sifter so only consider making one if you've found some steel or a bunch of Graphite Ores, but the investment will pay off big time because sharpening your raw tools is almost a daily occupation in GregTech since you'll mine a lot and harvest tons and tons of wood for Charcoal. Place your Sharpener on the ground, feed it Sandstone with a right-click in the middle of the Sharpener, and keep right-clicking your raw tools on it. After a few tries your tool head will be sharpened, preventing you from using a file to do so, which costs time and resources.

- A mixer is quite cheap and can go a long way if you're into Bread for food: Harvest your wheat (hint: use a Sense, it'll farm in 3x3 pattern), grind it into flour with mortars, put the flour in the mixer with a right click, and pour water with a bucket: right clicking with an empty hand will get you bread paste, that you'll be able to craft in Bread or even Baguette, to be cooked in a regular furnace. You'll need 1 water unit for 3 flour so place your mixer near a well to spare you water trips. Or you can kill a lot of animals, that works too.

So, at the end of the Forge Age, your current work process is now :

- Mine Ores/Collect Sand&Gravel Ores - Crush Ores with a hammer, or Sift Sand&Gravel ores with your Sifter - Wash results in Cauldron to get by-products - Crush Purified Crushed Ores (again) with a Hammer - Wash the results again in Cauldron to get even more by-products

Better, isn't it ? But a lot of labor work. Why don't we start letting machines do the hard work for us ?

The Steam Age
Now that you're more familiar with the Burning Box heating principle we're going to mess with scary, scary steam power. Steam, at this point of the game, is the only way to power your first machines.

As an explanation, let's make ourselves a Hazmat Suit, which is a lot of work to do but help you understand how Steam is created, how it powers machines, and why it's awesome.

Go to the desert and find a sand Bauxite/Ilmenite vein. Dig up all the Ilmenite, and put it through the Sifter. Ilmenite smelts down to 1/4 its volume in titanium. You can dig up the Bauxite too because its by-product is Aluminium and you'll need a lot of it later so better start now but it's not mandatory at this point.

Once you've got the required amount of Titanium, Craft a Titanium Burning Box, a Titanium Boiler, a Titanium Steam Engine, and a Bronze squeezer.

Put the Boiler on top of the Burning Box, like the Crucible, and put Water inside by right-clicking water into the front side of the boiler.

Be careful that if it boils dry, it'll explode (TOBECONFIRMED). Put the boiler on top of the burning box, then run pipes out of its top to the back of the Steam Engine. Put the Squeeze in front of the Engine.

Like with the Crucible the Burning Box will heat up the Boiler, the Water will slowly reach its boiling point. The barometer will rise slowly through the left white section and will reach the Green Zone at some point: that's when you'll start to have Steam. The Steam will flow through the pipe and will go inside the Steam Engine. The Steam Engine with use this Steam to make its internal piston go back and forth, which will generate Kinetic energy, measured in GregTech as KU/t.

So, to sum up: You used heat (measured in HU/t) to power a Boiler (which converts HU/t to Steam/t) to power an Engine (which converts Steam/t to KU/t).

The Kinetic energy is then consumed by your brand new Squeezer that will happily turn it in internal energy (measured in GU) to Squeeze your Sticky Resin in liquid Latex. This is, by the way, your first encounter with Liquids, but we will look into that in detail later.

To turn your Latex into usable, solid Rubber, you'll need a pain in the butt Coagulator, made of Stainless Steel. You'll need Iron, Nickel, Chromium (found in dungeon treasure chests or extracted from ruby ore) and Manganese (dungeon treasure chests or extract from grossular/spessartine/pyrolusite/tantalite). Ratio is 5 Iron, 2 Nickel, 1 Chromium, 1 Manganese. You'll need 12 ingots to build the coagulator so you'll have to make 2 batches of 9 Stainless Steel Ingots each just in case. First combine Iron and Nickel to make Invar, otherwise the Nickel will get permanently bound with the Chromium to make Kanthal, preventing you from completing the recipe.

Place the Coagulator under the Squeezer: it'll suck up the Latex from it, and slowly turn it into rubber. Yeah, a Coagulator does not use any energy, just time.

Use your newly acquired rubber, orange dye, wool, glass and iron bars to build a Hazmat Suit and Rubber Shoes. It'll protect you from all crucible accidents and it'll allow you to pick up hot finished metal from molds without pincers. Note that you have to wear the whole set (Head, Chest, Legs AND the Rubber Shoes) for it to work as heat retardant. If only one piece is missing, you lose the effect completely, so be careful when using your Rubber Shoes everywhere. Note also that the Hazmat Suit does not lose durability from using it to get stuff from molds, or even handling radioactive elements. It loses durability just like any other armour pieces.

Now you should feel more confident in getting you items parts from Molds so a word on this topic: You should craft almost all Molds as soon as possible. You'll start to make more and more machines which will need more and more machines parts like Gears, Rods, Bolts, Plates, and so on. You'll be able to craft theses with Ingots and Tools, but you'll lose a significant quantity of material in the process: For instance, crafting a Plate (1 unit) means hammering two Ingots (1 unit each) together and hammering the double Ingot to get the Plate. So you paid 2 units and 2 hammer crafting usage for 1 unit. If you've had a Plate mold you could have directly poured the material in a Plate, costing you only the unit you've put in your Crucible.

So think about what you want to make, and prepare your materials in advance. You can also make batches of Plates, Rods, Gears, in advance to avoid having to craft them afterwards. Only exception are Screws, which will need a Lathe to make.

Now your biggest concern will be what to make next. As always with GregTech the answer is simple: More machines to help us make even more machines !

Notes on Steam
Pipes: make sure they have fluid capacity no greater than the capacity of the engine, around 200mB/t. Bigger is not better; steam in Gregtech 6 is an incompressible fluid; instead of pressure, increased steam power is expressed by increased flow rate. Small pipes won't burst under high flow in; instead, they restrict flow, keeping your engine from overloading. TOBECONFIRMED