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.

The most important ores early on are Coal, Magnetite, Quartzite, Bauxite, Copper, and Tin.

Flint and Certus Quartz can be used as basic tool materials. Flint Tools are more durable than vanilla Stone tools (however they are slightly slower), and a Flint Sword will ignite monsters on hit. Certus Quartz has the same properties as Iron, making it a useful material while Iron is unavailable.

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).

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.

IndustrialCraft 2 (IC2) 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, if you have the Gunpowder.

Skeletons have a small chance (1/16 by default) to fire a random GregTech Arrow instead 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.

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.

Once a Crucible (discussed below) is available, the next two major items to craft are a Thermometer (to monitor the Crucible) and a Cauldron (to clean Dusts for byproducts).

The end of this guide explains making an IC2 Hazmat Suit. This is an especially useful suit to have, as it protects the user from all 'environmental hazards', which include being burned by Crucibles, Molds, and vaporizing materials.

Smelting
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.

The standard basic Smelting Crucible is Ceramic. To begin, collect at least 80 Clay balls, some amount of Stone, Wood, Flint, and Coal, enough Copper and Tin to make at least 4 Ingots Copper and 7 ingots Bronze (3 Copper + 1 Tin = 4 Bronze), and 8 Ingots worth of either Lead, Bronze, or Bismuth. (The wording of this line may look odd, but there's several different jobs to do with these resources.)

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 the Dusts together to obtain Bronze Dust.

Combine Stone and Sticks to make Hammers. (More than one will likely be needed, as Stone Hammers have low durability.) Craft a Hammer with two Bronze Ingots to make a Double Ingot, then again 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 initial tools necessary.

Bronze Pincers are a highly recommended but not mandatory tool. 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.

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.

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 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 (while having a Hammer also in inventory or hotbar). 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 significant damage.)

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. However, to use it, it must be lit. The Firestarter is the GregTech equivalent of a Flint and Steel, but crafted using Flint and either an Iron or Steel Nugget, or 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 Firestarter to try to light it. (This will likely take multiple tries; the Firestarter does not always work.) 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. This allows for an emergency shut-down, by placing a block of Dirt in front of an active Box.

Safety warning: an active Burning Box will cause nearby flammable objects to catch fire.

Once the Burning Box below the Crucible is lit, it will start to heat the Crucible. The rate at which a Crucible heats is dependent 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 side of the Crucible facing the Mold. Note: This will only work if the Crucible contains only one type of molten material.

Safety warning: Touching a heated Crucible, or a Mold containing hot cast metal, will result in the player taking heavy damage. Additionally, 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.

The notable (approximate) temperatures for early metalworking are: Bronze (melt 1300K), Iron (melt 1800k, transform to Wrought Iron 1900k), 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.

Iron Smelting is a bit of a special issue to handle. Magnetite Ore, the primary initial source of Iron, 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, expect to waste (or be forced to creatively find a use for) a fair bit of Coal trying to get Dark Ashes for Iron.

*Manual essentials: bucket, cauldron, thermometer, sifter.

You want a thermometer before anything else, if possible; it's real easy to overheat the crucible without it. You'll need two units of red alloy (four copper+one redstone each; it burns off most of its mass once it hits its melting point) and some glass, but the two steel plates are the difficult part. Steel requires temperatures of around 2050K with a ratio of one unit carbon dust to 50 units wrought iron. 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 those into the crucible. 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.

A sifter costs another ~8 steel, but it does most of the work processing sand and gravel ores, so it's well worth it; an efficient macerator or crusher for normal stone ore is a long way off. Right click ore into the top to place it, then hold down right-click to sift, then right click the bottom 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.

Bucket and cauldron require 10 iron plates, a wrench, a hammer and a rolling cylinder. It's easier to find iron things in dungeon treasure chests, then melt those down. Alternatively, combine magnetite and dark ash in a 7:3 ratio; when it hits ~1800K, it'll smelt down to 3 iron. Limonite also requires dark ash, but it yields better ratios. Pyrite and actual legitimate iron ore are even better, but they're harder to find. Banded iron is a pain in the behind, because you have to smelt it with dark ash AND calcite (from marble).

Use the bucket to put water in the cauldron, then throw in crushed ore and impure dust to clean it and get extracts. Don't mess with copper; you'll sometimes get radioactive cobalt-60. It's especially worth cleaning crushed ore; otherwise, it'll bring a bunch of stone with it into the cauldron.

--> Obsidian tools are awesome: use them all the time. Unlike Gregtech 5, you can hold a bucket of lava without burning yourself. Right-click the top of a cauldron with a lava bucket to pour it into the cauldron, heating it to around 1050K. You can pour the lava out just like any molten metal to produce obsidian tools. You'll need to use the tool molds; one mold for axe head, one for sword blade, etc. It's totally worth it, though; you don't even need to light the burning box or wait to smelt out obsidian, and obsidian tools are level 3 with adequate durability. You can get by with stone molds and cauldrons for lava, so consider a separate set of equipment for making obsidian tools. Sharp tool heads will require finishing with a file.

*Getting rubber, IC2 machines, the hazmat suit.

Now we're messing with scary, scary steam power. Be careful. Go to the desert and find a sand bauxite vein. Dig it all up, especially the ilmenite, and put it through that sifter. Bauxite yields trace titanium, especially when you crush the purified crushed ore with hammers and clean the impure dust in the cauldron. Ilmenite smelts down to 1/4 its volume in titanium. Craft a titanium burning box, a titanium boiler, a titanium engine, and a bronze squeezer. Don't forget to right-click water into the front of the boiler; if it boils dry, it'll explode. Put the boiler on top of the burning box, then run pipes out of its top to the back of the engine. The front of the engine goes to the squeezer. As for 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.

You'll also need a pain in the butt coagulator, made of stainless steel. You'll need iron, nickel, chromium (dungeon treasure chests or extract 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; make 2 batches of 9 ingots each just in case. Combine the iron and nickel first to make invar; otherwise, the nickel will get permanently bound with the chromium to make kanthal.

Place the coagulator under the squeezer, put rubber resin in the squeezer, put coal in the burning box, check again to make sure there's water in the boiler, light the burning box, and make rubber in the coagulator. Watch the boiler carefully and refill it with water.

Use rubber with copper wire, tin wire, redstone, tin item casings, iron plates and wooden treetaps to build an IC2 generator and an IC2 extractor as quickly as possible; this rig is a pain in the butt and you don't wanna use it for rubber longer than you have to.

Use rubber, orange dye, wool, glass and iron bars to build a hazmat suit. It'll protect you from all crucible accidents and it'll allow you to pick up hot finished metal from molds without pincers.