Getting Started (FTB Revelation)

Introduction
FTB Revelation is a large, general-purpose Feed The Beast and CurseForge modpack created by the FTB Team. This guide is meant to help you get started with playing the modpack by introducing its various mods little by little as you progress through the game. The guide covers the 2.0.0 version of the modpack that was released on Wed 6 June 2018.

Disclaimers
Some notes before we get started:


 * This guide assumes a basic understanding of the mechanics of vanilla (i.e. non-modded version of) Minecraft, such as how to move, how to interact with blocks, how to craft, how to mine and how to attack. If you have not played vanilla at all, here's a guide for complete newcomers.
 * When you start playing FTB Revelation for the first time, you are advised to reconsider some things that you are used to doing in vanilla. For instance, if you do not mine and do not smelt  right away, you can get much more out of these resources a bit later on.
 * This guide aims in sustainability and zero waste, i.e. trying to get as much out from natural resources as possible and preferring renewable resources. As an example, use for fuel and leave  to the ground until you can craft yourself a Silk Touch tool to harvest it. It also assumes that you want to start gathering tool experience, so we are going to acquire the basic Tinkers' Construct toolset from the very start.
 * This guide is vegan, i.e. you do not need to interact with any animals to use this guide. As an example, to craft a, harvest or  and craft  instead of shearing sheep. However, unless you are playing on Peaceful difficulty, you will inevitably come across some monsters and will have to attack them to protect yourself. Since this guide aims in zero waste, it would be a shame to leave all that loot behind, wouldn't it? As such, stuff like Bones are fair game. You can ponder for yourself whether or not you consider it ethical to kill Spiders in broad daylight when they are not hostile.

These ideals are followed in order to create a guide that is accessible, optimized and of high quality. Of course, if you don't mind wasting some resources or time or abusing some animals, nothing can stop you from branching out to the dark side.

First impressions
When you first spawn, you start out with a bunch of items in your inventory right at the very beginning. Out of these items, probably the most relevant to you in the early stages of the game will be, a book about the Tinkers' Construct mod, and its Armory Addendum, another book covering Construct's Armory, the new armor crafting add-on for Tinkers' Construct. Feel free to check out the rest too if you want.

You can see yourself on a minimap at the upper right corner of your screen. That is the JourneyMap mod and, by default, you should be able to access it in fullscreen view by pressing J on your keyboard. Over there, you can also make changes to waypoints. For example, if you die, it creates a waypoint where you were found dead, and you might want to remove that waypoint at some point.

When you open your inventory, you will see all the blocks, items and elements listed as a grid. That is the Just Enough Items (JEI) mod. You can search for any block and its crafting recipe by writing its name on the input field and clicking on its icon. If there are any recipes that are not yet documented in this wiki, you can always check the available recipes with this method, so you will likely be using this functionality quite a bit.

Toolset
Even with all the possible mods imaginable, some quirks never change, so go gather 5 by punching a tree or two. You might notice that as you get rid of all the wood blocks of a tree, the leaves decay much quicker than in vanilla – that's the Quick Leaf Decay mod at work. The decaying leaves will probably drop some saplings; use them to replant the tree and save extras for yourself. is preferred because it is abundant, easy to farm and occasionally drops, but practically any Wood will do at this point. Just don't clog up all your inventory space with all those new fancy mod trees!

When you have 5, craft a basic Tinkers' Construct workshop: 8 s, a , a and a. Place the blocks on the ground and the s on the.

Tinkers' Construct tools have a number of benefits. They gather tool experience, meaning you will become better at using the tool over time. They also offer a lot of variability and customization options. So, let's make you some cool new tools, shall we? You will use the to craft patterns, use those patterns on the  to craft tool parts, and use those tool parts on the  to craft the actual tools. Use the Stencil Table to craft these patterns first:



Now use the to craft the first tool parts with the,  and. Repeat this process for each of the patterns:


 * 1) Place the pattern on the.
 * 2) Place the required amount of  on the.
 * 3) Pick up your new tool part.

Finally, use the to craft your first tool: select the  from the lefthand side menu, place your tool parts in the Tool Station and craft a.

Gather at least 10 more with your new  and craft some more:
 * with the same process: craft the parts on the, assemble the parts on the.
 * 4 more s
 * for more crafting options.
 * for storing all your patterns.
 * for storing all your tool parts.

By now, you probably figured out that you can craft the tool parts from something else other than, of course. Every material has one or more traits associated with it, and the traits can vary depending on what tool part you use the material for. Since you get one trait for each tool part, it is usually a good idea to use different suitable materials for each part, so you will get as much traits as you can for the tool. Then again, some traits also stack, so you might get better traits if you use the same material for several parts. Materials also affect the durability of the tool in different ways, and the material used for the head tool part determines the tool's mining level and speed, attack rating and what materials can be used to repair the tool.

That is a lot of variables to take into account, but basically at this point in the game, you want to craft your tool handles out of and tool heads out of. After a while, you can upgrade your tools to also use s, heads, s or  guards, for example.

Gather 10 with your new  and craft:
 * 2 x
 * 2 x
 * 2 x

Place your on the  along with a  and pick up your upgraded tool. Neat! Do the same with the and the. Next, using the and the s, craft two more Tinkers' Construct tools: the, and the.

If your tools run out of durability, they get broken but not removed from your inventory. Whenever you want to repair a tool, you can either:


 * put the tool on the along with the material that was used to craft the head of the tool. For example, if you have a  crafted from a  and a, you can use either stone or wood to repair it.
 * craft s on the out of the material that was used to craft the head of the tool, and use them on the go by putting them to a crafting grid along with the tool you want to repair.

That covers the basics of how to craft and repair tools in Tinkers' Construct. Maybe now you want to craft yourself a to protect yourself, or a  to pick up  or to shear  from sheep, for example. You might also want to consider replacing the s with s, or using other materials for your tools, such as, , or. You can check out all the material qualities in the in-game manual, and search for more information online in case something is explained vaguely.

Let there be light!
Craft a and smelt 1  to create. Put the in your crafting grid and you will get 8. They each smelt one item, so this is a way for you to make sure you get everything out of your s at this point in the early game.

Smelt a bit more, and you should now have enough to craft some. Alternatively, you can create Stone Rods out of and use them to craft, or use those s to craft some cute. Pushing F7 will show you any places where the light level may become so dark that monsters can spawn there.

Agriculture
Another thing you should do is gather and plant some seeds and plants. Try to find at least (drop from ),  (found near beaches),  (flowers growing near Grass),  (next to water sources) and  (deserts).


 * and are a great early-game food source ( & ). You can also use  to craft a substitute to s: s. Plant  and  on  (i.e.  tilled with the ).
 * is an efficient way to obtain, and that can be used to make . Plant on  as well.
 * can be crafted into which is, alongside, a useful renewable material in building tool parts in Tinkers' Construct. Plant the  next to a water source, and the  on.

When you till or  blocks, you might occasionally come across some s. If you place them on  or, they start tilling the soil for you into. They come in real handy early-game when you don't have s yet to carry around, but if this sort of symbiotic relationship with s is too much animal cruelty for you, you can always find a body of water and grow your plants at the beach instead.

When you have gathered the resources (or at least most of them – e.g. can be a bit tricky to find in some environments, but don't sweat it), you should find a place where you want to build your base. You likely want to live nearby a body of water, at least initially, so that you can craft a and start exploring the nearby shoreline efficiently. When you have harvested enough to acquire 12, refine them into 3  and craft yourself a cozy. Good night!

Workshop
Since you have gathered quite a bit of items by now, you might have already crafted some vanilla s. You will most certainly want to upgrade those to s by crafting s. These single-block crates have 13×9=117 item slots, which means more space for your junk than what four vanilla s offer. Furthermore, you can upgrade them later on to s and s. If you need to move crates or chests around, you can lift them with single-use s.

You should already have a, a , a , a , a , and a. Now craft an (we'll get to that in a minute), and you have your basic Tinkers' Construct blocks ready. You can of course put the workshop blocks where you want, but to get the most out of the modpack's functionalities, lay them out in front of you like so:

Interacting with the workshop is now much more convenient:


 * All the blocks (except the ) are accessible via tabs, and their physical layout more or less correlates with their tab position in the user interface.
 * The can access the contents of the.
 * Both the and the  can access the contents of the.

Currently, there are a total of 43 different and they are easy and cheap to craft, so at this point you might just as well craft the  for each possible tool part and store them all in your.

Patience, young padawan!
Now you have your tools ready, but there are some things you might want to consider before heading off to mine:


 * If a block drops something else than the block itself (e.g. drops,  drops ,  drops s), you might not want to mine it until you get a tool with Silky Touch that does not break harvested blocks. In FTB Revelation, acquiring a tool like this is a bit easier, so wait if you have some patience.
 * You can mine ores, but do not smelt any of them yet. This goes for, , , , etc. This is because you will soon be able to process your ores so that they will generate two ingots per one ore – or even more!

Pack up
The Forestry mod adds a number of backpacks to the game, and they are useful for extending your inventory space. As long as you have 4 (harvested from ), 2  (crafted from 8 ) and some, you can already craft yourself a  that stores all your different , , , , , ,  and so on. You might also be interested in:


 * the (requires 2 ) that stores natural resources like, , , ,  and so on,
 * the (requires 2 ) that stores building materials like, , , ,  and so on, and
 * the (requires 2 s) that stores ores and ingots like  and s,  and s,  and s,  and s,  and s and so on.

Suit up
Alright, let's craft you an armor next. Each armor piece consists of a Core, Plates and a Trim. At this point in the early game, arguably the best armor you can craft is made out of Cores,  Plates and  Trims, but if you haven't acquired enough of those materials just yet, feel free to use any materials you want. After all, you can gradually upgrade the armor to a better version if you wish.


 * Use the to craft a  for each Armor Core, a  for the Armor Plates, and a  for the Armor Trim.
 * Then, use the to craft each of the Armor Cores (e.g. from ), 4 Armor Plates (e.g. from ), and 4 Armor Trims (e.g. from ).
 * Finally, use the to craft each piece of armor from the Cores, Plates and Trims, and equip the armor once it is done.

Like with tools, you should be able to find all the information about the qualities of different armor materials qualities in the Armory Addendum in-game manual, or alternatively search for more information online.

Enough crafting, let's mine!
You now have a base, a bed, torches, tools, armor and plenty of inventory space for different items. As such, you are ready to delve into the depths of your first dungeons and finally get your loot game going.

Smeltery
As soon as you have found a few blocks of and some, you're ready for your next task. Tinkers' Construct features a neat multiblock structure called the Smeltery. With it, you can, for instance:


 * Get double ingots from ore blocks by smelting them
 * Create tool parts out of metals and other materials by casting them
 * Blend metals and other materials together by alloying them

Smeltery parts are built from s that are smelted from, which is a mixture of , and. You will need at least 18 of each to get enough for building the tiniest possible Smeltery, and you need another 5  to smelt some. However, the Smeltery is much more useful when it is even just a bit larger, so I advise you to get at least 80 s (so 40 of each, and ), and an additional 5   to be turned into. With these, the Smeltery can smelt 4 items at once, and it's easier to see what's actually boiling inside. You can also expand the Smeltery later even further if you wish. Go dig!

The Smeltery uses as its fuel source. As you know from Vanilla, to acquire, you will need a , and it requires three to craft one. Some people prefer to craft the solely for this purpose; I suggest you just use up 3, since crafting the grindstone requires 3 s, and those are even more rare to come by than Iron. So, craft a and go pick up some.

Once you have your materials ready – a, 80 s and 10 – it's time to build all the different parts for the Smeltery. Craft these:


 * 4 (4 s each = 16 s total)
 * 4 (4 s, 1  each = 16 s, 4  total)
 * 1 (8 s)
 * 1 (4 s, 5 Glass)
 * 2 s (6 s each = 12 s total)
 * 2 s (3 s each = 6 s total)
 * 1 (7 s)
 * 1 (7 s)

Lay out the blocks like so: (attach the s on the sides of the s)

If your building skills are decent enough, the should light up with fire particles validating all your hard work. It's alive!

You can now add to the  by right-clicking it with the. However, if you have more, you can also create your first with the Smeltery. This is done like so:


 * Right-click the with the . This will pour the Lava into the Smeltery.
 * Fill the empty with.
 * Right-click the again with the . This will pour the  on the . The Smeltery alloys (i.e. combines) the two to create liquid.
 * Right-click the that you have placed next to the  and on top of the . Liquid  will fill the  and start cooling off.
 * After hearing a faint hiss, right click the to collect your block of.
 * Repeat the process one more time until you have two blocks of in your inventory.

Now you can go to the and craft yourself an. Or, you can craft an and put that, your existing  and a  to the  to get a  that can mine anything an  could. Do you want a better pickaxe that requires for repairs, or a pickaxe that can be repaired with  but has slower mining speed? The choice is yours!

To smelt ores into ingots, you need to place an on the. To create casts, you can use, but is preferred due to its cheaper material costs. To get, put 3 s and 1 to the  to alloy them. Smelt 1 in a regular  to acquire 1, take the  in your hand and right-click the  to place it there, and then right-click the Faucet over the  to create the. You can create more casts out of the spare you have with this same method, or you can just smelt the rest of it into s with the  and resmelt them later if you ever need additional casts.

Now that you know how smelting, casting and alloying in the Smelter works, you can finally smelt some of that iron to receive double s for every you smelt. The same principle works for, and so on. Neat!

Power up
As you progress further, you can start building various machines to get even more out of your ores and to do much more fun stuff. There are a number of different mod options to choose from, but to get started, I suggest getting into Thermal Expansion 5 (and Thermal Foundation).

When you have acquired at least 14 s, 7 s, 4 s, 1, 1 and 6 , you can craft a  and a. Place the on the ground, pointy face up, and then place the  on top of it. Right-click the with a  to supply it with water to heat up.

The burns things like  to heat the water, which generates electricity in the form of Redstone Flux (RF for short). This RF is then used by the to crush your ores into two respective dusts, which you can then smelt in a furnace to get two ingots per ore. The also creates some byproducts, so you might get some  when crushing s,  when crushing s,  when crushing s, and so on.

When you start building more machines, you likely want to hook them all up efficiently to a single power source like the. Thermal Foundation provides s, but they are pretty expensive. Instead, I suggest you utilize Extra Utilities 2 to craft 1, hook it up on the and transfer the energy to different machines via s.

At some point, you may want to upgrade your power generation system to an easier setup than manually carrying water to the and inserting  to heat it. Mischief of Mice actually has a great YouTube tutorial on how to build a system that provides you with infinite amounts of renewable energy. Check it out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdZTBwWoVfA Thermal Expansion: Infinite Renewable Energy Early Game! Minecraft 1.10+]