Getting Started (Age of Engineering)

Introduction
This guide will teach you the basics necessary for getting through the 15 ages in Age of Engineering. The goal is not to explain every little thing you can do in each age, but rather just the basics necessary for getting through.

The assumption here is that the player has a basic knowledge of Vanilla Minecraft, but is unfamiliar with the mods. This modpack is excellent at forcing players to go deep into many of the mods, so it is likely a good pack for someone new to modded Minecraft. As such, it seems imperative that a very basic guide for it should exist.

The guide is initially written by Chezziks (IGN: Chezzik), but I encourage others to add to it.

Other Online Guides

 * The |This "Age of Engineering Walkthrough" by Vyraal1 has many tips that will be quite useful to those who want to automate more. It also contains links to several Twitch streamers with video guides.

Some general things about this modpack
Here's a few things that I don't know where to place them in the guide, but they are available right from the beginning:


 * /sethome and /home : Many people are familiar with these commands on bukkit-type servers, and they are often considered cheating when playing a modpack in SMP. AoE, however, includes FTBUtils, and has these commands enabled, even for single player. Therefore, I think that it is fine to use them.  If you like the challenge of not using them, that's fine, just decide your policy from the beginning.


 * Better Builder Wands is is this pack, and will make building structures much easier. The Stone Wand is the simplest, and the recipe is extremely simple, so you can use it right from the start.  Also, a Stone Sickle can be used right from the beginning to cut many leaves at once, if you are looking for saplings:


 * Speaking of saplings, be on the look for Rubber trees from the very beginning. Save up a bunch of saplings, because you will want to start a farm of them by the time you get into age 1.  In my experience, rubber tree leaves broken with sickles will not drop saplings (technically only the one leaf that the sickle touches can drop a sapling).  So, hand-punch the leaves.  Yes, it is slow.


 * If you aren't familiar with Storage Drawers, this is a time to learn them. They are simple to make, so it is worth making a few.  After you have placed one, you can right click with any item to place it in the drawer.  The drawer will only hold one type of item, but it can hold a lot of them.  Left clicking the drawer will remove one, and shift-left clicking removes a stack.


 * Unfortunately, a Drawer Controller is not available at this point. Once one is available, drawers become a lot more powerful, as you can empty everything from your inventory into the matching drawers by using the drawer controller.


 * When you have open a chest, and want to move all of one type of thing into the chest, control-shift click it. There are other useful shortcuts also, and you can see them by clicking the ... in the top right of your interface, and then clicking the '?' in the top right of the next screen.


 * Press 'E' to go to your inventory, then take a look at all of the buttons on the top left corner. One lets you form teams.  Do that immediately, even if you are playing single player.  Once a team is formed, you can use another one of the buttons there to set chunks to always be loaded (useful when you have machines to run), and those chunks are also protected from explosions!  Also, there's a button up there to read the AoE guide, which is marginally helpful.


 * Press 'J' to open JourneyMap. There's a button for waypoints, and you should learn how to use them. You will be given a waypoint for your corpse every time you die, and it is useful to know how to delete those, and how to add new waypoints for things you find.


 * Speaking of things that you find, keep your eye out for pumpkins, villages and floating slime islands. Pumpkin seeds are necessary for advancement, as are emeralds (from villagers), and slime blocks from the slime islands.

Task 0.0: Build a Smeltery
If you are looking around in JEI recipes at all, you'll notice that vanilla furnaces cannot smelt ore, and cannot even turn wood into charcoal. That means to get started, we are going to have built a Smeltery from Tinkers' Construct.

Pretty much the most standard setup is a 3x3x2 block of air enclosed on the bottom and all 4 sides by Seared Bricks, a couple Seared Faucets and Smeltery Drains, a Casting Basin, a Casting Table, a Smeltery Controller and a Seared Tank. This modpack requires a lot of use of the smeltery, so I'd actually recommend starting with a 4x4x2 or 5x5x2 version. Going up to 3 high is possible also, but I don't do that unless it's already 5x5x2 or bigger.

The main work here is gathering the crafting materials. I suggest finding a river, and hiking along it until you can find necessary amounts of all these ingredients.

Crafting materials:

In addition to this, it is highly recommended that you also pick up an additional 28 sand, gravel, and clay, as you will need to make another 56 Seared Bricks for task 0.3.

Recipes for Smeltery Components:
Make 29/40/53:

Make 2:

Make 2:

Make 1:



To build the Smeltery, first place 9 Seared Bricks in a 3x3 grid on the ground, and then (optionally) place a block on each edge that can be used for as a foundation for building the walls. The four walls will each be made with 6 Seared Bricks, although four of those Seared Bricks should be replaced with our 2 drains, controller, and tank.

If all is built correctly, the controller will light up with fire particles, to show you that it is a valid configuration.

On each of your drains, place a faucet on the outside face. Below one faucet, place a casting table. This will be used for casting tool parts. Place a casting basin below the other drain. It will be used to get full blocks of metal out of the Smeltery at once.

Next, build a couple Clay Buckets, and fill them with lava. These will only work once, but will be sufficient for now. With a lava bucket in hand, right click on the Smeltery tank to add that lava as fuel.

Now, right click on the controller to open the interface. From there, shift click on stacks of ore to add them to the furnace. If you want to add liquids (lava or water, for example), you'll need to hold the bucket in one hand and then right click on one of the drains.

In most modpacks, placing one ore in the Tinkers' Construct Smeltery will result in 2 ingots worth of liquid metal, but not in Age of Engineering. We will need to build an IC2 macerator (Age 1) before we can take advantage of ore doubling.

To test it out and prepare for the next task, add 12 copper ore, 2 tin ore, and 4 clay. All of these will melt. The 2 tin ore will combine with 6 of our copper to make 8 units of bronze. Try left clicking on the different liquids, and notice how the liquid you click on will always go to the bottom.

Now, add 9 iron ore. Once it melts, the gui will show "1 block of iron". Click on it to make it the lowest, and then right click on the faucet that is above the basin, and you will see one block of iron be poured. Right click on the cooled block to add it to your inventory. If you accidentally used less than 9 iron, then the block will not fully form. At that point, the basin would become unusable for anything else until you either finish that recipe or break the basin (thus losing the metal that had already been poured).

Task 0.1: Building Tinkers' construct tool station and first metal tools
Wood and stone tools can still be made in a crafting grid, but all other variants need to be crafted using the Tinkers' constructs crafting system. First make about 20 Blank Patterns, and then make one each of the following: Part Builder, Tool Station, Stencil Table, and optionally a Pattern Chest and Crafting Station. Place all 5 together in a line (like along a wall as seen in the picture below) if you want to be able to access the guis of all 5 after clicking on just one.

One of the first items we will want is a bronze pickaxe. It should be able to break anything up to diamond, and if we use a copper binding, it will generate more experience for us than normal!

First, got to the stencil table, and set what is remaining of your blank patterns inside. This seems to be the best place to keep them, as it is where we will most frequently need them. Find "tool rod", "binding" and "pickaxe head", and make one of each.

Now, go to the part builder, and place the tool rod pattern in the left slot, and planks in the top slot. Pick up the wooden toolrod from the right side of the gui. Our first part is made!

Next, do the same with the binding and the pickaxe head, but this time, use cobblestone instead of planks. We will be using this for a cast for the actual parts, which will be made from metal. Now that we are done with these 3 patterns, you can place them all in the pattern chest, so save them for later.

Next, go to the smeltery, and place the stone binding in the casting table. From the controller, click on "Liquid Clay", so it is at the bottom, then go back to the faucet above the table, and right click it. This makes a disposable cast, and note that it consumes our stone binding. Now from the controller, pick copper, and use the faucet again, and this makes our copper part! Now place the stone pickaxe head in the table, make a clay cast, and then fill the cast with bronze.

Now, go back to our part builder, choose "Pickaxe", place the 3 pieces in there, pick a name for it (if you choose), and then pick up the final product. We have our first metal tool!

From the part builder, we can see other options for weapons and tools. My recommendation is to use the bronze pickaxe to get some bauxite ore (you couldn't mine this before, still not able to mine it, I use a Black quartz pickaxe), and then with it you can make aluminum bronze in the smeltery. With aluminum-bronze, you can now make casts that don't disintegrate upon using. At this point, craft a few more bronze items. I would suggest a shovel, short sword and then either an axe or a Mattock (axe that also can shovel dirt). To repair broken items, place them in the tool builder again, and then place one bronze in any slot.

Task 0.2: Portal to Mining Dimension
This task is purely optional, but is rather quick, and I suggest doing it. Make the Mining Multitool from Aroma1997's Dimensional World, and then use it to craft 10 Portal Frames. Place the frames in the same way you would make a vanilla portal, and then activate it with the multitool. This portal doesn't make eerie sounds (like the nether portal does), so feel free to keep it in or near your base.

It goes to a dimension where it is always sunny, and you can mine to your heart's content. Also, since the top layer is flat, it is easy to find pumpkins, which will be needed for age 3. If you are on a server that doesn't have a mining dimension, keep an eye out for pumpkins in the overworld.

Task 0.3: Coke Oven
Before beginning this task, you will need to have 56 Seared Bricks. Hopefully you have them leftover from making the smeltery. If not, then go make them now.

For this task, it is highly recommended that you automate it. To do so, you will need 10 aluminum (from bauxite ore) to build a couple Vanilla Hoppers, and also a Fluid Tank from Ender IO. I recommend making a second (or even third) fluid tank also, not just so that you will need fewer trips to get your lava, but also because they will be useful to have around later.

Make a Bucket or two from iron ingots, then go to a place where you can find lava, and fill up your tank (or tanks). You can break the tank with a pickaxe, and it will retain its liquid.

Back at your base, remove your basin from your smeltery setup. We will use it temporarily to make Lavawood. Setup your basin somewhere where you have a hopper feeding into it, and another hopper feeding out. Place your Fluid Tank with lava so that it is also connected to the basin, then go into the UI for the fluid tank, and click on settings. In here you will find a 3d model of the tank that you can rotate and interact with. Right click on the side that connects to the basin, and set it to push fluid into the basin.



Next, place 56 planks into the hopper that feeds into the basin. It should take about 4 and a half minutes for this operation to work. If you haven't done it yet, go to your inventory UI, and click the button in the top left to make a team. After you have made a team, you can claim territory for your team. Claim all of your base (including the chunk you are now in), and that chunk will stay loaded as long as the server is running. Now, you can go off and go mining, and your lavawood will continue to be made while you are gone.

After you have your 56 lavawood, use them together with the 56 Seared Brick to make 28 Coke Bricks. You will need 27 of them to build your Coke Oven (Immersive Engineering), but you have to make an even number. Find a place for your coke oven, and build a 3x3x3 block with the coke bricks.

Next, craft for yourself an Engineer's Hammer. This tool is extremely useful in allowing you to change the orientation of blocks such as chests without breaking the blocks. But for now, we have just one purpose for it: to create the Coke Oven. Choose the face that you want to be your UI to the coke oven, and use the engineer's hammer on the center square. Presto!

The coke oven can be used to turn logs into charcoal, but its main benefit is turning coal into coal coke. Coal coke can be used as fuel anywhere that coal can be, and it provides 3200 heat (as opposed to 1200 from coal), so it's better in nearly every way. Open your coke oven UI (you can actually right click on it from any face), and put a whole stack of coal in now. It is slow, so it is something to just let run in the background while you are doing other chores. If you feel like you want to save yourself trouble later, go ahead and make a second coke oven. I wouldn't make more than 2, but I think a second one is probably easy to justify.

It is worth noting that a block of coal coke burns 10 times as long as a single coal coke (instead of the 9 you would expect). So, sometimes it is worth making your coal coke into blocks before using it.

After your coke oven has made 2 coal coke (or 4 charcoal), you will have 1000mb of Creosote Oil. Take a bucket and put it in the top right of the UI, and it will fill up with creosote oil. Remove it, as we will be using it for the next task. In general, I keep my stack of buckets in my coke oven, rather than try to remember which chest or drawer contains them.



Take one of your fluid tanks, and put on one of the walls of your coke oven, and set it to suck fluids from the coke oven. If you need creosote oil (rare but occasionally you will), just leave it like this to suck up the first 16 blocks-worth.

Also, this seems like the best time to make a Trash_Can_(Fluid). When you aren't harvesting creosote oil, place it right below your fluid tank (as in the picture at the top), and have the fluid tank push into the trash can.

Task 0.4: Forge Hammer
Now we are ready to make the final item for age 0: The Forge Hammer!

Honestly, this is fairly straightforward. You will need 5 iron ingots, and 2 Treated Sticks. The sticks come from Treated Wood, which is made with a bucket of Creosote oil and planks. Once you have crafted the forge hammer, you will get an achievement, and you will be awarded a trophy block, that you can place in a trophy room!

If you are playing with a partner, notice that there is a recipe that takes one Forge Hammer and creates one Forge Hammer. This seems useless, but give the Forge Hammer to your partner, let them use that recipe, and then they will also move to Age 1!

Whether or not you have a playing partner, it may be worth making a second forge hammer if you have the iron to do so. You will need to use it to make plates until you get the Metal Former, and in my experience, it will wear out before you get that far. So, just make 2 now while you have the recipe up.

Task 1.0: Macerator and Generator
First off, you should build a rubber tree farm, if you haven't done it yet. You should be making treetaps, and using them on the nodes to get Resin. Wait for the nodes to grow back, and then harvest them again. Here's the recipe for a Treetap:

Resin can be thrown in a standard furnace to make Rubber, which will be needed any time you want to insulate cable from IC2.

I mentioned ore doubling earlier. Right now, when you place one copper ore (for example) in the smeltery, you get out one copper ingot. Once you have the macerator built, and can power it, you will be able to make two copper ingots from every ore. So this is our first priority. Here are the recipes for the Macerator and generator:

Make a few Insulated Tin Cables. I always place the generator on a wall, and then have a tin cable come down out of the bottom face, turn a corner, and then run along the ground. When I build the first machine of a new type (eg. macerator), I place it right in front of the tin cable. This way, I can place hoppers both above and below. If I build a second machine of the same type, I usually just throw it on top of the cable, and don't worry about hoppers.

Important Note: Never break IC2 machines using your pickaxe! If you need to remove an IC2 machine, you will need to use a wrench to do it without breaking the machine. If you make a mistake as far as placement, jump ahead to task 1.4 and build a wrench. Right clicking a machine with a wrench will remove it without destroying it.

Place a hopper above (or to the side) of your macerator, and another below that leads into a chest. It is pretty important to make sure your macerator is always running when you have ore to process, because it is easy for it to fall behind. Listen for it to stop. When it does, go and add more coal (or coal coke) to your generator, and restock the top hopper if it is low.

From the lower hopper, you will receive dust. You can now either throw that dust into a furnace to turn it into ingots, or if you have a large smeltery, you can add it there. Once in the smeltery, you can empty it into a basin (one block at a time). It may be worth building a second and third basin if you do this a lot. There is a way to remove a single ingot at at time also. You can take an ingot of any type, place it on your casting table, and then pour aluminum brass (or gold) around it, to make an ingot cast. Now, any time you need out a single ingot, you place that cast on the casting table, and pour!

Optional sub-task: Make a Batbox or CESU. You'll notice that your generator burns fuel faster than the macerator uses it. As a result, any time your generator decreases below 4000 stored EU (eg 3997), it will immediately begin burning the next fuel you had in there. The internal storage will fill very abruptly, and then you will waste the remainder of that fuel. To counteract that, you can make a BatBox, and then place it between the generator and the macerator. Now, add one coal coke block, and that will fill the Batbox to 32000 EU. Once you get below 8000 EU, add another coal coke block. Efficiency!

Another use for the batbox is if you want to transmit EU over long distances. Tin cable (either insulated or non-insulated) can carry EU packets 39 blocks before they lose EU, but on the 40th block, each packet will lose 1 EU. If you use something "better" than tin, be aware that the losses are more extreme. For example, you lose one EU per packet every 4th block if you are using gold cables.

Packets that leave a battery block (such as the BatBox or CESU) will be the largest packet possible (32 EU in the case of LV power, which is what we are using). The same goes for packets emitted from any transformer. But, packets from generators can be much smaller. If you have a single solar panel, for example, that emits 1 EU packets, and then it travels over a gold cable for 4 blocks before hitting a Batbox or transformer, then that packet will be reduced to 0 EU by the time it gets to the Batbox! This has caused many frustrations for many players, so it is best to be aware of it now!

Personally, I don't bother with the Batbox. I'm ok wasting coal until I get the ability to build a CESU, which is basically a Batbox that holds 300,000 EU instead of 30,000.

Task 1.1: Compressor
This machine isn't very exciting, but it is necessary to make it to our next step. Here's the recipe:

Extend your insulated tin cable, and place this next to the cable. You can build hoppers for it if you like, but we are going to be doing something far more fancy later, so I don't think it's worth it.

Task 1.2: Metal Former
This machine will take the place of making wires and making plates. It will take more time than using your forge hammer and cutter, but it will give 1 plate for every ingot (far better than 2), and it can make wires directly from ingots!

As you can tell from the recipes, you will need 2 dense gold plates and 2 dense iron plates. These are made out of 9 standard plates each. You will use your compressor to form them.

Task 1.3: Extractor
It's nice to finally have a machine to make that doesn't use a ton of resources:

Once the extractor is built, you can get three rubber from every resin! It is also useful for making sulfur dust from gunpowder, which we will need in our next step.

Task 1.4: CESU, LV transformer, and wrench
Strictly speaking, this step is optional, but you'd be crazy to skip it. Recipes:

Create room between your generator and your IC2 machines to place the CESU and transformer. The CESU outputs MV packets, and these will cause tin cables to evaporate, and make LV machines (like the ones we have built) to blow up. So be very careful. It may be worth experimenting with them in a single player world with cheats before doing anything in real life!

The CESU has 5 input sides and one output side. The transformer has one high-voltage side and 5 low voltage sides. We need the output from the CESU to face the high voltage side from the transformer. This means there are 25 ways to do it incorrectly compared to just one way to do it correctly!

The safest way to do this is to place two machines with a one-block space in between. Then use your wrench to left-click the face of the CESU that faces the transformer, and the face of the transformer that faces the CESU. Now use a copper cable (not tin!) to connect them. Use tin cables to connect your generator(s) to the CESU and to connect the transformer to your IC2 power-sucking machines.

If you are brave, you can place the CESU and the transformer together with no cable between. If your transformer is west of the CESU, face west when you place it, and then face east when you place the CESU. If you get it wrong, you can fix it with the wrench again, but this time, left-shift-click the face opposite of the one that you want facing the other machine. The generator can connect directly to the CESU. This is the setup in my photo.

Another note about transformers: By default, transformers will downgrade the voltage, which is almost always what you want. If you give the transformer a redstone signal, then the low-voltage sides become the inputs, and the high-voltage side becomes the output. This is really only useful if you want to send power over long distances, as using larger packets will mitigate the loss of power.

Task 1.5: Electric Heater and IC2 blast furnace
Recipes:

In addition, make 4 Transfer Pipes, and then consume 2 of them to make two Transfer Nodes. Also make one Item Filter.

Doing all of this efficiently is quite tricky, but you will need to give LV power through cables to your heater and your compressor. Your heater has one large orange heat conducting pad, which will need to attach *directly* to the large orange heat conducting pad on your blast furnace. Then your blast furnace will need to be one square away diagonally from your compressor, and you will need to leave empty the two voxels that directly touch both the compressor and your blast furnace! Is it possible? Yes it is. Look at my screenshot if you are struggling with how to do it.

Next, place your transfer nodes directly onto your compressor and blast furnace, and then use the transfer pipes to connect them. One pipe should go from the blast furnace to the compressor, the other should go back the other way.

Now, make about 4 Universal Fluid Cells. When placed in the compressor empty, they will be filled with compress air. Then they will go to the blast furnace, be emptied, and sent back.

Before you insert the fluid cells we need to consider how to keep the main outputs of the blast furnace (Steel Ingots and Slag) from going into our compressor. Take the filter you made, place it in your action bar, and then right click with it in your hand. Now, drag one empty universal fluid cell into the UI for the filter. This sets up a white list for empty fluid cells (but the fluid cell is not consumed). Exit that UI with , and then right click on the transfer node from the Blast Furnace with the filter to insert that filter into the node.

Next, let's consider hoppers. We could have hoppers exiting the blast furnace, to gather our slag and steel, but it is so slow that it's not really worth it. It's worth having a hopper handy, though. If you remove a fuel cell from the blast furnace before it's fully empty, then it will be very hard to get it back into the queue, as the compressor and blast furnace will just continue using the few that it has left. In cases where this happens, I just throw a hopper over the blast furnace, and place all my partially filled cells there.

Lastly, you'll notice the UI for the electric furnace has a place for Coils. You will need at least one for it to function at all. The more coils you add, the more heat it will produce, but the more EU you will consume. The blast furnace can use up to 20 hU/t, so you can get it through this stage fastest if you have two coils in the heater. But, once the furnace is hot, it will only use 1 hU/t, so really there is no reason to use more than one coil.

Making steel is slow. Use the downtime to do mining, enlarge your base, or explore the nether.

Task 1.6: Solar Arrays (optional, but highly recommended)
Standard solar panels generate 1 EU/t, and as such are not worth the hassle. Once I can build a full Low Voltage Solar Array (which generates 8 EU/t), though, I do it. Also, why stop at one if you can make 2? The electric heater takes 10 EU/t, and is running all the time. It will take a lot of mining to get enough iron, redstone, and copper to make one, so I usually do that first, and get it set up and then just supplement with coal coke blocks in my generator occasionally while I gather enough resources to build a second solar array. Once I have 2 solar arrays going, I very rarely need to add more coal coke.

If you have lots of excess copper, then the IC2 circuits can suffice. If you spend just a bit of osmium, though, you can make the Mekanism Basic Control Circuit s and use them instead. You'll need to make a Metallurgic Infuser. You don't have RF to power it, though. To make one control circuit, you need to put one redstone in the left-most slot, one osmium ingot in the second slot, and approximately 2 redstone in the right-most slot (with the lighting symbol). The right-most slot will convert redstone to Rf.

Coal dust can be made by placing coal directly in the macerator, but you will be much better off if you place 9 coal in a crafting grid first to make a coal block, then macerate it. It will save both time and EU!

Once you are done building your solar arrays, place them in a place they will receive sunlight, and connect them to your CESU!

Task 1.7: Nether (optional, but highly recommended)
Throw water and lava directly into your smeltery to make liquid obsidian, then use your basins to harvest it. Once you have 10, make a portal to the nether. Next, make a flint and steel (same recipe as vanilla flint and iron, but with steel instead of iron), then use it to activate the portal. This portal does make noises, so I keep it far from my base.

Before you go, make a bunch more obsidian in your smeltery, and then go to your stencil table, and create a recipe for a sharpening kit. Use aluminum brass to make a cast, and then make the final kit out of obsidian. Next, put your bronze pickaxe into the tool maker, and add the sharpening kit and a diamond in any of the other entries. When you take the tool out, it will now be able to mine ardite and cobalt, of which we will find plenty of in the nether!

Now that you are ready, head to the nether. If you don't have great armor, immediately dig down into the ground, and do your mining where no pigmen can see you. I recommend going down to about Y level 12 or up to the ceiling, where you can find Benitoite, which is something that you will need later. The most important thing to get now is Ardite, which we will need in the next step, but you should also harvest all Nether Quartz you see, as eventually we will need many stacks of it. If you find a nether fortress, get some blaze rods, as it will allow you to make a new blast furnace, so you can make steel much faster. I wouldn't say it is necessary, though. You can easily wait until age 5 to worry about fighting blazes.

Task 1.8: Tool Forge (optional, but highly recommended)
As soon as you have 36 steel, it is time to make a Tool Forge. Place it where your you had your tool station, as it will completely replace it.

On Reddit, someone discovered how to make a |fast hammer that never breaks. It takes advantage of Tinkers' construct, and has subsequently been nerfed, but AoE doesn't have the newest (nerfed) version yet. Use ardite for the tough tool rod and the hammer head, then make one plate from obsidian and one from bronze. Use a diamond upgrade on it, and if you have enough string and Emerald and want silky touch, then also add a Silky Jewel. By the way, I have found emerald in the overworld, just by mining. It appears by far the most in extreme hills and extreme hills+ biomes, in y levels between 15 and 20. If you mine there, you may even get more emeralds than diamonds!

Once you get the hammer, it will be faster than what you had before, but not nearly as fast as it can be. You will need to wear it down a lot before it gets to that speed. As the OP said in that reddit discussion, just go mining again in the nether to wear it down. Once it is low enough durability, it will be insanely fast.

Task 1.9: Blast Furnace from Immersive Engineering (optional)
If your steel production is too slow, and you have blaze powder and enough slag, then make yourself a Crude Blast Furnace from Immersive Engineering.

Task 1.10: Calculator
This task ends the age, and it is actually quite straightforward to do. Simply make one Calculator_(item). It can be done as soon as you have steel, but it doesn't really buy you a lot, so I usually do the other optional tasks above first.

If you wish, you can also make an Info Calculator. It is extremely cheap, and will give you more information about everything that can be done with the Calculator mod.

Age 2: The Calculation Age
I usually rush through this age and the next one pretty fast. We will be learning the basics of how Rf power is generated, how to store and transmit it, and how to use it.

You will need to become familiar with how your calculator works. Basically, right click with the calculator equipped (and far enough from any blocks that you don't active them instead), then input two ingredients. If they can be added together, then the output is given.

Task 2.1: Power Cube and hand cranked generator
Make each of the following three items:

Place the power cube and the generator on the ground together, and place the crank handle on the generator. Place your calculator in the UI for the Power Cube, and use the handle to charge it.

Alternatively, you can build a Survivalist Generator, and then use it for your power. Here's that recipe:

You will need a lot of Reinforced Stone (made by adding together cobblestone and planks), so I would just make a stack or two right now to test your new toy!

This is a bit off-topic, but this is a good time to make some Bog Earth, and then place several of them near a water block. They will be needed in a few steps (as Peat) for our Basic Greenhouse, and they take time to grow, so get it started now.

Task 2.1: Atomic Reconstructor
This is a tool that we will be using a lot. It doesn't take a lot of power, so a hand crank could work for it, but I built a survivalist generator, and placed it beside it.

To get the black quartz, you will need to macerate your black quartz ore, and then smelt it.

The Advanced Machine casing will require carbon plates and advanced alloys, both of which are made with the compressor. They are fairly annoying to make, but we will need a lot of them going forward.

Once you have it made, set it on the ground, and place the survivalist generator beside it. Leave a gap of 2 blocks to the side of it (where you see the laser). Let it charge a bit. Place a redstone button either on the atomic reconstructor, or on a neighboring cube.

Now, take some redstone, throw it on the ground in front of the laser, and push the button. If it works, you'll get Restonia!

Task 2.2: Scientific calculator
This recipe is straightforward enough, once you figure out that a gold ingot + redstone in the calculator gives Enriched Gold, which then can be smelted into ingots:

Task 2.3: Waterwheel or other renewable fuel source for Rf


Make a Kinetic Dynamo and three Water Wheels. Place the dynamo, then place the 3 water wheels onto the face of the dynamo with nested squares, and build structure around them to hold the water in. Now, add 3 blocks of water, and get them going.

As you can see in the image above, the dynamo needs to be at least 3 blocks above the ground. The blocks that hold in water at the top can essentially be a 5x5 frame, with 2 extra blocks hanging down from the far right edge to keep the water from expanding out. 3 blocks of water are added above the wheels, and they are allowed to flow over the top and down the right side.

The hole that I have dug in the second image is 1x3 and 2 blocks deep. If you get it in the right place, then the water will go nicely into that hole.

Task 2.4: HV Capacitor
We will soon be doing operations that take 2 million Rf at once, so it is imperative that we build something that can hold a lot of power. You will need to first build 4 LV Capacitors, then use them to make 2 MV Capacitors, then combine them to make one HV Capacitor. It can hold 4 million Rf, so it is at least a good start.

Build yourself a number of LV Wire Coils, LV Wire Connectors, and LV Wire Relays. If you wish, make the MV variants now also. You won't need to worry about blowing things up (as you do with IC2 MV equipment), but the MV variants will transfer power a lot faster, which will be useful once you get your Empowerer.

For now, place an LV wire connector on your kinetic dynamo (on the face that is opposite of the large squares), and another on your HV Capacitor. Now, with the wire coil in your hand, right click on one connector, than the other. This will connect them!

If everything worked correctly power will be translated to the capacitor. Use your engineer's hammer if you want to add input our output sides to the capacitor. When you see blue connectors on a face, that is an input. Orange connectors are an output.

Place one of your wire relays on a wall. These should always go on walls or the ground, never on machines. By contrast, the wire connectors should always be used on machines, never walls or floors. You can never have more than one wire connected to a wire connector, but a relay is unlimited in the number of connections you can have.

Make another output face on your capacitor (right click twice with the engineer's hammer), add a connector, and then add a wire from there to your relay.

Now, you can place as many machines on the ground under your relay that you want, and then send power to each of them from the relay.

Task 2.5: Prunae Seeds
Did you get the Pumpkin seeds, like I advised before? Use them to make Broccoli seeds, and then use those for Prunae Seeds:

Task 2.6: Basic Greenhouse
If you have Peat from your Bog Earth, and have Canola Seeds, Industrial Hemp Seeds, and Prunae seeds, you can now make a Basic Greenhouse from Calculator:

You will need to give it a ton of logs, planks, glass, and stairs, even more than what the help section says.

Once you have placed the greenhouse, shift right click on it to see what else it needs before you can tell it to build itself. In addition to giving it the resources above, you will need to give it Rf power, and it will need a 5x6x7 space to build within (5 tall, 7 wide, 6 deep). I recommend placing the power source below the control block for the green house (it can be a LV terminal), so that you can save the block in front of the controller for a chest. Place a chest there, and it will automatically push its output (coal dust) into the chest.

Task 2.7: Empowerer
We need the Enriched Coal from the Greenhouse to make Enriched Coal for this step, so make sure your Greenhouse is going.

First, make 5 Display Stands. They will require 6 nether quartz each, so all together you will need 30 nether quartz.

Now, begin making your Double Battery:

Use one of your 5 display stands and your double battery to make the empowerer:

You will need to drop the empowerer and pick it back up to get the achievement, so do this.

Place your empowerer in the center of a 7x7 square on the ground. On the edges of the square (exactly 3 blocks away from the empowerer), set your remaining 4 display stands. Each of the display stands will need power, so set a terminal on the side of them (I choose to put them each on the sides that face the empowrer), and then wire them up.

To use the empowerer, you will take 5 items, and place them on the necessary locations, and then just watch as it does its magic. To retrieve the completed item, use an empty hand to shift-right click the empowerer.

In age 5, you will unlock the ability to make EnderIO conduits. Using conduits, you can provide power from the same side that you attach conduits for inserting and extracting items. It's really nice to run conduits underneath to all 5 parts, and then filter them to insert just the items you need, so that you can automate empowering stuff.

Task 3.0: Sturdy Casing
This is actually the only thing we need to make for this age!

Look up Sturdy Casing in JEI. You'll see that it just takes a Bronze Gear, and a few other very simple to make bronze items. Go ahead and place them all on the empowerer, and you are done with the age! Once again, drop it and pick it up.

Age 4: The farming Age
Age 3 was fast, but we will make up for it here. You may as well make 3 or 4 more of those sturdy castings, as we will use them all.

In addition to all the things you have been mining so far, you will also need blue slime blocks (find a slime island in the sky, and mine the blocks around the lake), and soul sand (from the nether).

Task 4.1: Thermal Centrifuge
Please notice that the advanced circuits take Empowered Restonia Crystals and Empowered Palis Crystals, both of which are made with the empowerer. For now, you only need 2 restonia and 4 palis, but eventually you will need many more (of the restonia, especially). You can choose to do the small versions, which use 200,000 Rf, but if you do the large versions (4-8M Rf), then you can save a lot on resources.

The ingredients necessary to make Empowered Restonia:


 * Restonia Crystal or Restonia Crystal Block (full block is recommended)
 * Rose Red (plant a rose bush, and use Fertilizer on it to get lots
 * Ardite Ingot
 * Resonating Crystal
 * Red Garnet

The ingredients necessary to make Empowered Palis:


 * Lapis Lazuli or Lapis Lazuli Block (full block is recommended)
 * Prismarine_Shard_(Botania) (made from reconstructing Nether Quartz
 * Cobalt Ingot
 * Blue Slime Crystal - from Congealed Blue Slime from slime islands
 * Raw Fish

Crafting recipes:

Task 4.3: Algorithm Separator
For this task, you will need to make 6 power cubes, but that's not the hard part. The worst part is the Empowered Diamatine Crystal.

To make the Empowered Diamatine Crystal, you will need to use 2M Rf in the empowerer, and provide the following ingredients:


 * Benitoite (mined from lowest or highest areas of the nether)
 * Fertilizer (made from sand and Apatite)
 * Lithium Powder (made in the Thermal Centrifuge)
 * Ash (from putting peat in a furnace)

There is a larger version that will save on resources, but you the Rf cost is pretty high (20M). Eventually, you will want to only use the block version, but for now, it will take a very long time to finish if you choose to do an entire block!

Task 4.5: Squeezer
Throw extra seeds that you have (regular seeds or canola seeds) into the squeezer.

You will need a lot of seeds to make 1000mb of seed oil, so if you are stuck, jump ahead and make the garden cloche from age 5. You won't be able to automate it entirely (because of the need for water), but it will work pretty well without automation.

Task 4.6: Machine Chassis
This will complete the age:

Take a bucket of seed oil, and put it into the UI for the carpenter. Make a recipe by dragging the items for the recipe to the crafting grid in the top left. Then place the resources for the farmer to use in the large area in the lower part of the UI, and watch it work.

Drop the item and pick it up to trigger age 5.

Next Page
To continue this guide, see Getting Started (Age of Engineering): Part 2.