Getting Started (The Twilight Forest)

This is a community created article originally by Sirbab.

Getting started with Twilight Forest
This guide will demonstrate how to start yourself with the mod Twilight Forest, or TF for short.

The materials needed to do so are fairly minimal. You will need: To create the portal to the the Twilight Forest, you must create a 2 by 2 hole in the ground, 1 block deep. Fill it in with water by using a Bucket, or another cheaper method is to find a body of water, such as a lake, and filling in a "cast" for the portal. Make sure that the bordering blocks are made of dirt/grass for each flower you plan on using so that a 2x2x1 hole is filled with still/source water. Next step is to place the plant blocks around the portal (or use Bone Meal). This is where the dirt or grass border is necessary as flowers cannot be placed on other blocks. This can be avoided by using all mushrooms, which can be placed on other surfaces, such as stone.
 * Any combination of 12 plant blocks; these include items such as flowers or mushrooms (for example, 3 brown mushrooms, 4 red mushrooms, and 5 roses)
 * Alternatively, Bone Meal can be used to create plants around the portal.
 * 1 Diamond
 * 4 Water source blocks (can be natural or manually placed via a bucket)

Now you should have a pretty little pool; why isn't there a portal yet you ask? That's because the portal needs a catalyst to activate it. All you need to do is walk up to the pool, and drop a diamond into the pool. Shortly after it falls in, you should hear the crack of thunder and see lightning strike the pool— this will do minor damage to nearby players. This lightning strike does not cause fires. If successful, you will see portal blocks where the water was.



What's left is to hop in!

The Twilight Forest (TF) is perpetually in twilight, as its name implies, meaning that it will remain in constant dusk and sleep won't be possible, but default undead mobs will not spawn above ground. There are new passive mobs in the TF such as:
 * Wild Boars: Equivalent to pigs in the overworld.
 * Wild Deer: Equivalent to cows in the overworld. They drop Raw Venison instead of Raw Beef.
 * Tiny Birds: these little creatures make chirping noises, and can be found hopping around the forest, and in trees. They drop only feathers.
 * Forest Ravens: These look similar to Tiny Birds, and are basically the same except that they drop Raven's Feathers (which are used in the Magic Map recipe).

And many others! Furthermore, hostile entities do not spawn on the surface, which allows for more spawning room of passive entities.

Mining in the Twilight Forest is a generally easy task, as the height of the world is usually between 30 and 60, as opposed to the overworld which can be 60-90, which makes getting to diamonds less arduous. Torchberries are glowing plants found in caves, which emit light, you can harvest them to combine with sticks (which can be obtained from the Root Strands found underground) to Torches.

Another feature of the underground is that some of the roots you will find have a greenish texture which contain Liveroot which are used in the creation of Ironwood. These magically infused ingots produce pre-enchanted tools and armors when crafted such as an Unbreaking I shovel, Efficiency I pickaxe, or Featherfall I boots. The Gold Nuggets used in the creation of Ironwood, along with Wheat, can be obtained easily while underground by slaying Kobolds. All these features make for a fairly "friendly" mining experience, and certainly one that prolongs mining trips by providing you with the resources you need to keep mining.

There are still many fantastical features of the Forest, including fearsome Hollow Hills, filled with treasure and valuable ores but guarded by dozens of dangerous mobs, and the mystical grove where a certain magical animal can spawn.

Watch out for the massive Lich's keeps, as they are fairly powerful and filled with mobs, along with the other bosses that are found throughout the world.

One last tip: the magical map can track an area much larger than the default map and holds an additional feature of showing the prominent landmarks in each biome, such as the Lich Tower, various mazes, and large mangrove forests.