Getting Started (Magic Farm 2)


 * This guide was originally created by DrowElf. Formatting and minor edits have been performed by SatanicSanta.

Introduction
This guide is aimed to help get you quickly to Alumite level tools and Feast tier food (highest tier of HarvestCraft (HC) food) simultaneously. I assume that you have played modded MC before and are at least familiar with Tinkers' Construct (TiCo) and NEI. Magic Farm 2 (MF or MF2) is designed to be sadistically hard, so even with this guide, be prepared to die. With Infernal Mobs and Deadly World, there is a whole new level of danger everywhere. I suggest that you do not use the Biomes O' Plenty world option, as it will be significantly easier with fewer biomes and you will need access to vanilla biomes for many mods. Finally I should note that this guide is for version 2.1.2, and previous versions will be easier as you will have access to Natura berry bushes.

Food
First things first; food. Hunger is central to MF (due to Hunger Overhaul) until the end of this guide, at which point it should not be a problem again. It is important to know that any empty hunger bar no longer means damage, it means death. Hunger Overhaul completely revamps hunger, especially when combined with HarvestCraft. The better the food is, the more of a bonus you will get in the form of the Well Fed effect. The Well Fed effect causes a slight boost to health regen and prevents hunger consumption. You can only get the effect from Light Meal tier food or better. The length of the effect depend on the tier of the food

The effect time stacks, so if you eat multiple, you will get the total time (example: 2 light meals = 1 minute 20 seconds).

Plants
In most biomes (all that have plants) you should see lots of new plants on the ground. Breaking these will give you a few different kinds of food courtesy of Harvestcraft.



From left to right by row: Stawberry, Blackberry, Blueberry, Candleberry, Grape

Cranberry, Raspberry, Cotton, Sunflower, White Mushroom

Bamboo Shoot, Kiwi, Cactus Fruit, Rhubarb, Rutabaga

Seaweed, Spiceleaf

Naturally, the cotton is inedible, but you should collect it anyways to make cotton.

Berries
The berries will be fairly important as you will want to farm them as they provide good nourishment early game and will be a necessary part of making the feast tier food, Delighted Meal. I suggest you either go with blackberries or raspberries, as candleberries are fairly useless other than allowing you to make a colored torch replacement, and blueberry smoothies (which will be good later if you are near a snow biome) are not as beneficial as blackberry or raspberry smoothies. Either way, make your choice of which type to farm, and try not to eat that type to help boost farm speed later. At the very least, just keep one of that berry type. Running and jumping are ill advised, as you will need to conserve your energy, so only do them when you really need to.

Tools
As per usual, you will want wood, but you should get 32 pieces as in order to get any tools, you will need to use Tinkers' Construct and that is a good number for getting all the required things to make tools. I suggest that you also chop down a MineFactory Reloaded Rubber Tree, so that you can use the rubber to make torches as you will not be able to get coal for a bit or even stone for a furnace. Standard tools have been disabled (apart from the wooden shovel, which you should get), so for your first day, you will have nothing. TiCo has been heavily modified with Iguana Tweaks for Tinkers' Construct, making it required to go through each material tier to make it to the next one. The first tier you will make is flint, so if you see any gravel, grab it. You will also need it to make the smeltery so keep that in mind.

All TiCo tools now have experience and leveling. Each time you gain a level you will gain a free modifier space and random modifier. In order to mine the next tier of metal (starting with copper as flint can't be leveled up) you either need to mine enough to boost it, or attach a mob head of sufficient tier (skeleton and zombie for copper, creeper for iron, enderman for bronze, and wither for alumite). Until you level up a tool at least once, you cannot add any modifiers.

The tiers for hardness from lowest to highest: flint/bone < copper < iron < bronze < alumite < ardite < cobalt < manyullan. Bronze can mine everything in the overworld, so technically the only reason for progressing more is just getting better tools, which is why I call alumite tier the end of early game, allowing you to progress into TE3, and from there all the other mods.

You can repair tools by placing the tool and the material used to craft it in a crafting grid (shapeless).

Housing
Standard early game housing rules apply, so cave or hole in a hill. I suggest you live in a forest biome, magical forest biome, or cherry blossom grove biome as these all count as forest biomes and most of the HarvestCraft seeds grow best in forest and plains biomes. As I mentioned before, I like being near the border of a snow biome as snowballs are part of the smoothie recipe, and they make excellent early game food. As you look for your house, look for sheep as you will need ten wool but the standard three is fine initially. The other seven are for a sleeping bag, which will allow you to sleep anywhere without resetting your spawn, which is a godsend.

At this point, you should have at least a temporary home, and at least 32 gravel. You will need a small amount of flint, so you can either waste time breaking the gravel until you get a 1:1 ratio (waste of energy and food) or put it into the shapeless recipe which converts 4 gravel into 1 flint. Go ahead and setup for TiCo and make your first tools all if which will have flint heads and wood handles. You cannot make a sword with flint, so your first weapon will be a flint knife. You should notice that the new tools have new tool tip information (from Iguana Tweaks).

More food
Now that you can mine stone, make yourself a HC Juicer. This is absolutely the most useful item early game as you can make fruit juice which doubles the hunger saturation of the fruit. All the berries can be juiced except candleberries, and so can all the other fruits. If you are close to a snow biome, go stock up on snowballs and make smoothies instead of juice as they are much better than juice.

You want to get food from all possible avenues. If you have string or found wild cotton, make a fishing rod. Make some TiCo Drying Racks to turn zombie flesh into monster jerky which no longer poisons you. Squid are an excellent source of food throughout early game as they drop HC Calamari and Mariculture Raw Squid. MC squid can be doubled in number and hunger saturation by crafting it with a wooden bowl,so if you live near water, you can survive of of squid for a long time as squid are constantly respawning.

Material gathering
Now that you have a semi reliable food supply, you should explore above ground a bit. You should look for more plants to break for food, 2 stacks clay, sand, and gravel for a Smeltery, and lava to fuel it. if you find lava, mark it using your map mod as you will want to come back later after making clay buckets which will need to be smelted in order to be used. Next up, getting copper for your first metal tools.

Caving in Magic Farm is a whole new beast, and your first time you are practically guaranteed to die. You will find spawners of all kinds even things that you would not expect. Fire spawners, lit TNT spawners, thrown potion spawners, and all kinds of mob nasties. If you see a chest by itself, it is guaranteed to be a trap. It either has a TNT spawner or is a trapped chest that will set off TNT when opened. I suggest approaching the chest quickly then quickly running away. If it doesn't blow up it is a trapped chest so dig around it until you find the TNT, break it, then open the chest. There are silverfish clusters randomly spread out in stone, so if a stone block takes particularly long to break, it is probably a silverfish block. Until you get iron, the silverfish can be a big problem. I expect you to have at least 16 Copper Ore, 6 Aluminum Ore, and at least 1 Clay Bucket of lava before you go to the next section.

Metal Tools
To make casts for metal tool parts you will need to use stone tool parts. Metal tool parts means 2 fairly important things; you can now make a sword, but more importantly you can make a mattock, which means you can start farming. Start your berry farm (either black or raspberry) and start breaking grass and look for very specific HC seeds: tomato, lettuce, and soybean. Because the goal is Delighted meal, you will need potatoes and you should get wheat although you can do without it. If you are lucky enough to have a village that you raided for potatoes, you can live off of them which is fairly easy as they yield much more than anything else in the entire pack. It is very important that you right click food to harvest, as you do not need to break crops to harvest them thanks to Hunger Overhaul. I suggest you do not create bonemeal until you have bronze tools, as you will be able to make a Thermal Expansion Pulverizer or at the very least an Applied Energistics Quartz Grind Stone to double the output of each bone. From here on out, I expect you to be constantly tending to your farm and expanding each crop's farm to the standard 9 by 9. Hopefully by the time you get to making food you will have a half stack of everything except soybean, which you should have a full stack.

Back to tools, Iguana Tweaks allows you to swap out parts of tools if the tool is fully repaired, so repair your pick and just swap out the head. It is important to note that this can be done with weapons but you should not do this as the damage does not increase (this is a known bug). Now that you have a copper sword, set up a kill hole (1 block hole that allows you to peak out of your base but not allow mobs in) so that you can kill mobs to level up your sword and hopefully get a zombie head or skeleton skull so that you do not need to grind your pickaxe to be able to mine iron. Either way go get yourself a stack of iron ore once you can.

Iron armor yourself, as you probably know by now, you need it. Make a Tool Forge using the following recipe:

I suggest that you make an iron cleaver to help get heads. To level up your new iron pickaxe, you will need a creeper head, and now that you have armor, if you are a good fighter, you can go out hunting at night. If you see a mob covered in particle effects, run. It is an Infernal Mob from the mod of the same name, which are very deadly. They have special abilities and more health, but in exchange for their difficulty, they drop many rare things, most importantly to you, enchanted diamond armor. I suggest trying to kill them from your kill hole, but do be careful as some of them can teleport (if they have the Ninja or Ender title).

Technology
This is optional, but I suggest you go make an Extra Utilities Drum, which requires 17 iron but is very worth it. It is a portable tank that store 256 buckets of a liquid in a single block in exchange for not being able to see the amount of liquid inside the tank, but this is why you use WAILA. You can create it using the following recipe:

Anyhow, go take the drum to your lava source, and fill it up with lava. This will be handy not only for the smeltery but also later when you want to make obsidian. You could even use it to power Magmatic Dynamos.

Go get yourself some Tin to start the Bronze age. If you want to boost the bronze pick without grinding, you will need an Enderman head, which are by far the hardest head to get, so good luck. Once it is leveled up, you can mine everything in the overworld, including obsidian. This means that as soon as it is leveled up, get yourself some obsidian and make yourself some Alumite.

No more starving
Now you can get started with Thermal Expansion, and from there, spread out to other mods, but before you do, I have one last thing to help you with: permanently ending your food problem. If you don't have snowballs, go and get at least a stack.

Get yourself some redstone and make yourself a HarvestCraft Presser. You can create the Presser using the following recipe:

You make Soy Milk and silken Tofu by placing the soybeans in the presser and both come out. To make firm tofu, which is the universal meat substitute (you can use it in place of any kind of meat in all HC recipes), just place the silken tofu in the presser. Bread is the next step in the process and there are 3 different ways of making it, including the traditional way of 3 wheat, but as I said before, you don't need a wheat farm. If you do have one you can go the Agriculture mod route, which I don't like as it cannot be automated and you can over cook things. I won't go into it, as it takes longer and I prefer the HarvestCraft route as you can substitute the wheat for potatoes and a lot of other things, but for this guides sake, potatoes are easiest. Anyhow, make a Mortar and Pestle with the following recipe:

Put it in a crafting grid with either wheat or potatoes to make Flour. Next up make Dough, which requires Salt, a water bucket, flour and a Mixing Bowl. The salt can be mined up (chances are you have seen it in caves and the Agriculture type in rivers) but you can also make it using a water bucket and a pot. Anyhow cook up the dough in furnace to make bread, then cook it up again to make toast. Make a Skillet using the following recipe:

Then put it in the crafting grid with the toast and firm tofu to make a hamburger. Now using the soy milk from earlier, some salt and the pot again, make cheese. put the hamburger and the cheese in the crafting grid to make a cheeseburger. Put the cheeseburger, lettuce, and tomato in the crafting grid to make a deluxe cheeseburger. Get your berries, your juicer and those snowballs and craft them together to make a smoothie. Make yourself bakeware, then put it in the grid with a potato and salt to make fries. Finally, put the smoothie, the fries and the smoothie in the grid and make yourself the Delighted Meal, one of the best foods in the game, and one of the 3 craftable feast tier foods.

And there you go. You are now at a point where you are free to explore and do as you want. And probably die a lot. Good luck!