Small progress update on GTNH! Here's the world backup so far, and here's how my current base, "The Hole", looks like now:
I played for about four hours today and achieved the following:
Paper and Tinker's Tools!
Instead of mindlessly breaking and remaking wooden tools, I decided to focus on getting myself some reusable and upgradeable Tinker's Construct tools.
To achieve this, I needed some blank patterns; in GTNH, this requires paper. Paper requires eight wood pulp around a bucket of water, wood pulp is produced by using a mortar on wood logs, and buckets have to first be crafted out of clay dust (one of which is produced by four small piles of clay dust, by mortaring clay balls) and then fired in a furnace. After baby's first crafting chain, I was the proud owner of some tool tables!
I then set about making a flint pickaxe, rapier, hatchet, shovel, and mattock (an axe + shovel + hoe combo). Here they are on the floor outside The Hole:
So, to avoid this rigamarole of paper, Pam's helpfully provides a paperbark tree (which was once disabled in GTNH!) that allows paper to be farmed from its bark on right click:
Underground Farms
The outside of The Hole is not so conducive to farming; unfortunately I had chosen a very rough and hilly spot to set up my tier 0 base and did NOT want to spend hours terraforming it all down flat to just move on after steam. So: I decided to dig down below my base and make some classic 9x9s:
As you can see I have one set up for wheat and barley (eventual flour, animal breeding/traps, and something else which I forgot) and one for Natura cotton (for string, woven cotton, and wool!). I did a small oopsie and planted Pam's cotton in the first farm, which is annoying because for some reason breaking it doesn't give you back your seeds :/
Coke Oven!!!
Most excitingly, I managed to set up my first piece of infrastructure: a coke oven! (you might also notice my new pumpkin, sugarcane, and tree farms)
This nifty little multiblock turns logs into charcoal and coal into coal coke. This means I can finally stop using wood for fuel in my furnaces :)
That's it for today. Excited to keep going! The next task I have is to go get me some iron so I can make some GregTech tools. See you tomorrow!