I wanted to write a few things about my current experiments, since I began trying a bunch of packs.
I’ve started Technological Journey, which is a Gregicality pack, but still on the former GregTech Community Edition for 1.12. The up to date versions only distributed on Discord. The more I delve into this, the more everything depends on Discord, this includes Factorio mods too. Anyway, not much to report for TJ, it feels like a less polished version of Omnifactory. The start of the game is very similar since it has the standard overworld and the game directly hands you a resource scanner and a diamond hammer. There’s decent quest support, but more sparse, so you move directly to create GT tools. In this case the differences are likely coming when machinery comes into play. Playing with monsters active the major hurdle here was running around until I could find three sheep to make a bed. Standard Minecraft recipes here. The bed being always the most important item in the game… leading instead to the following.
But the absurd, for me immensely satisfying, is the experience with TerraFirma Rescue. This is a 1.7.10 pack based on GregTech 6… and TerraFirma Craft, which has a “special” reputation.
This is either a chinese modpack or has a largely chinese playerbase, at least looking at github, but thankfully outside some spelling errors it has a pretty good questbook. Problem is… One quest is titled “Everything You Know is Wrong” and this is the kind of pack where your previous knowledge of Minecraft works AGAINST you.
It means everything follows different rules. It also means I spawned into the world, and it was night before I was even done reading just a few of the introductory quests. I’ve died about 10 times before I was able to get a very vague idea of what I was doing. But as in Factorio, the process of studying and learning what the games want out of you, is the fun.
Some intuitions are terribly wrong. I spawned in a small canyon, one of the quests gives a bit of “lore” saying you were on some sort of spaceship that crashed on a alien world, and your goal is return to Earth. So, given the canyon I thought this was a handcrafted location, that the canyon was made by the crashed ship, and that maybe I could find the wreck there and retrieve some useful resources. But I didn’t find any ship, and as I exited that canyon I found a barren world, with just an occasional isolated tree. Like a dead planet. And so I started walking, and walking, and then it’s night, it’s pitch black, and there are monsters everywhere. So what you do? You at least try to dig some dirt to build a wall and wait for the next day…
And do you think this works? Nope. TFC dirt is not Minecraft dirt. It’s affected by gravity. If you place a block of dirt on top of another, it… slides off to the side. So creating a shelter is not easy at all. But who cares, I didn’t start with much, and so I can respawn over and over without worrying. But I respawn in the middle of nothing, and no matter the direction it keeps ending in horrible deaths…
Do you think you can punch trees? Nope, punching trees does nothing. The game wants you to walk around and pick up stones and sticks. These spawn on the ground. Problem is, I could find plenty of stones, but no sticks. And since I couldn’t punch trees there was no way to get sticks even from the occasional tree that I found. Wandering around I was able to find sometime a rare stick, or two, but the game requires you to have at least five to accomplish something, and I was always dead long before getting there. Every time I died I respawned back to the original location in the middle of nothing. Eventually… I figured out that punching the tree branches does work, and it drops sticks with some frequency. Knowing this means I could finally have my starting point: stones and sticks, yay!
What do you do with stone and sticks? Once you have five stones you can right click and “knap” them. You get a custom UI where you can draw a “shape”. JEI through the quest item goal tells you the shape you have to draw, but you’re going to memorize these things. So, 5 stones, knapped, can create a stone axe head. Adding a stick to it creates the first tool, a proper axe. With the axe you can finally gather some wood… But nope, you can’t create planks from wood. Nor a crafting table.
You can instead, join two sticks to create a “firestarter”, then throw three other sticks on top of a block on the ground, aim the firestarter at those sticks, and if you’re lucky you get a bonfire! The bonfire, to stay lit, needs wood logs as fuel. But you can start cooking stuff with it. Like meat from animals, but even vegetables. I cooked a carrot and a tomato, I’m not sure if there’s a difference. But this also has nutrients to keep care of, protein, fruit, vegetables… You can’t just eat the same thing (and if you eat too much sugar you get diabetes and die). And there’s also thirst, so need of a non-salty pool of water to drink, or a fast death.
You can place sticks on a active bonfire to create torches. Yay! That means that I could drop torches around an area to create a perimeter and maybe survive the night. Progress! But of course there are also caveats: torches last 48 hours, then they wear off. Thankfully you don’t have to replace them, but you can go around with a lit touch to re-light all of them one by one! For another 48 hours. If you aim at them a handy tooltip tells you how many in-game hours are left before they run out.
What’s next? There are easy to spot yellow flowers, they indicate that if you dig below (just dirt, so you don’t need tools), you find plenty of clay. You “knap” the clay to create various clay molds. For example I made a jug that when filled with water could become useful as a portable source to drink… But it doesn’t work. You have to cook it to turn it from clay to ceramic. Would the bonfire work? Nope.
You actually have to dig a hole, place one or more clay molds at the bottom, add eight pieces of straw (by cutting grass with a knife… A bit of disappointment here, in GT6 you can’t get straw from grass directly, you have to leave the grass obtained under the sun for some time to dry) to fill half the hole, fill the other half with logs, and then use the firestarter on top of the logs. At that point it’s set on fire and takes a while to run out. When it does you look inside and your ceramic tools are ready!
All of this without even a pickaxe. No digging outside of dirt. No coal, only logs used as fuel for fires. You want to dig? You need some sort of metal. So you walk around, find special stones on the ground that have metal properties. Then make a ceramic vessel with the process already described. You fill the vessel with the metal pebbles you gathered. Then make again the pit with the straw and everything, after you placed on the bottom the ceramic vessel containing the stone metals. When the fire runs out you have a vessel that contains some metal fluid! Hopefully you have already used clay, and cooked it, to make “molds” (if you didn’t, the liquid metal loses heat a re-solidifies, so you have to cook it a second time with the other tools ready), because now that you have the vessel with the liquid metal you can pour it on the mold… and get a pickaxe head! Yay, same process to create a saw! And with the saw you can now turn logs into planks.
And this is just a beginning.
