Getting Started (BuildCraft 4)

First Steps
As with any Minecraft world you are really going to want to find the usual resources and BuildCraft is no different.

Make sure you have a good collection of wood, cobblestone, glass, iron and redstone dust. You'll need these to create your first simple pipe system. Not to mention all the chests your going to need. Don't forget to bring a crafting table.

Find a nice flat area, or create one near your home to give yourself some space. If you really want create a basement for all your machines.

Craft a few chest's and place one somewhere in the middle. This will be where we will put a few items later.

Pipes
Now we craft some pipes. We'll need a wooden pipe in order to get our stuff from the chest we placed earlier.

This will craft you 8 wooden pipes. We'll need to attach one to the chest we created earlier. To so this click on the block adjacent to the chest and this will place your first wooden pipe and attach it to the chest.

Bear in mind you cannot connect any more wooden pipes together. you can put multiple pipes around the chest if you want, but you'll need cobblestone pipes or better to do anything after that.

Now we need some cobblestone pipes. These are crafted in a similar way to the wooden pipes, but we replace the wood with the cobblestone.

Now attach a few of these pipes to the wooden one to make a small network. Not too many though as anything that flows through them will be slowed down due to the pipes drag effect. This means cobblestone pipes aren't all that good at transporting things any great distance or you'll find your stuff gets stuck further down the line.

Now put another chest at the end of the pipe system. I know this doesn't seem all that productive, but this is just to demonstrate the basics of moving stuff around.

At this point nothing will happen. This is because in order to make your pipes work you need power. Minecraft Joules(MJ) to be precise.

Power
Now to make any use of the pipes we'll need to supply power. BuildCraft introduces Minecraft Joules(MJ) as our power. How do we create this power? Easy. We build an engine.

Our first engine is going to be a Redstone Engine and in order to make it you will need to have already crafted a piston. In fact as all the engines require a piston why don't you go ahead an make a few of them. 4 or 5 should be fine for now. Why not store them in the first chest you made.

Next we'll need some gears. As this is a simple engine we only need wooden gears.

now we can create our first Redstone Engine.

Once you've crafted the engine go ahead and place it next to the wooden pipe attached to your first chest.

The engine should point towards the wooden pipe if you have done this correctly. Now the final thing to do is turn the engine on. We do this using a Redstone Signal which you can supply by crafting Lever and placing it behind the engine. A quick flick of the Lever will then turn the engine on.

You'll notice that anything you have placed in the first chest will now start to flow through the pipes to the second chest, but they are doing so somewhat slowly. This is because the engine is cold as can be seen be the blue colour in the engines core.

As the engine warms up, from Blue to Green to Orange to Red, the engine will speed up and so will the flow of items through your pipes.

This is an effective transport system and allows you to move materials from one location to another, but as we are using Cobblestone Pipes this won't be very far.