Gregtech New Horizons S2 02: Full Steam Ahead

Another important early vein to hit up is Redstone. Mine the redstone ore with a GT hammer (not soft mallet, a proper hammer) to get crushed redstone ore, craft that with the same hammer to get impure redstone dust, and throw a stack of that in a vanilla cauldron to wash it into redstone dust. With this you can use those modifiers you're building up to speed up your tools, and yes, that is worthwhile. You're going to be doing a lot of mining before you are able to craft your first mining machines. I wouldn't recommend making mortars out of anything but Flint. Iron ones only have twice the durability of Flint ones, so you're spending two iron ingots per stack of mortar-ing to save four flint and five stone. Not worth. The other materials either are even worse than iron and super not worth, or a very complex/costly materials to make and still don't process enough to justify it. Wrought Iron can make a case, since early on you're likely going to be smelting up a ton of that stuff to keep burning your creosote oil and they process a stack and a half per mortar, and later on Damascus Steel, purely because you can buy that relatively cheaply from the questbook when you're in MV. I have added a section to the spreadsheet listing...I'm not going to say "optimal", but at least good and relatively easy food you can cycle early game. Because yes, food is a major concern, especially when you're sprinting everywhere. Something which I maybe should have pointed out earlier, in hindsight: You know all those ladders you stole from a village earlier, and maybe some gotten from the questbook as well? If you find a lava source deep down that might be the best spot to place the ladders in order to avoid having to do the (perpetually) low on food lava death dance. Either that or prepare by building an actual mine shaft you can walk/jump up. IIRC the TiC smeltery does consume more lava in GTNH than it does vanilla (I'll just give you some time to recover from the shock of this startling revelatio-okay that's enough), so expect to go back to it a few times. Especially if you don't grab a large batch to begin with. If possible you want to use your alu gravel sparingly, and collect more whenever you find any. Later on you can extract Titanium from it, albeit very little, but if you collect enough you might be able to get some pre-Moon Titanium. Which you can do some very good things with, even if it's only one or two ingots. For the record the wide guard only contributes it's material quality to a broadsword, not durability or anything like that, so unless it's something like an obsidian wide guard looted from a villager you might as well go with wood and save yourself half a bronze ingot. "That's literally nothing in GTNH", you say? I mean you're not wrong, but if you can spare yourself some material, might as well. "Inefficient to be efficient" is definitely a thing in GTNH, but being frugal can still pay off at times. Flint -> Bronze is a mining speed upgrade from 4 to 6.5. The reason it feels slow is because you haven't put any redstone on your pickaxe yet: A flint pickaxe with one level of redstone (8) is faster than a bronze pickaxe without any redstone (6.5). Don't underestimate how powerful it is. There are other storage solutions available before AE2 - EnderIO Inventory Panel, Project Red item pipes, Logistics Pipes, as well as some more esoteric solutions - but the best solution by far is to simply keep your stuff organized. Note that Drawer Controllers are nerfed in GTNH, so drawer walls/cubes basically don't work. Organize those chests. Though don't completely write off Logistics Pipes as a poor man's solution to keeping your own inventories sorted. There's some very fun stuff you can do with Logistics Pipes and a touch of magic much later on, before you go to the Moon. For GT tools iron is better than bronze. For TiC tools brozne is better than iron. Keep that in mind so you can save on resources and craft tools that'll last longer. You'll be going through enough of them before all is said and done, no reason not to save yourself some effort. There is an electric treetap which has much better durability (as in electrical charge rather than actual durability), but the manual ones indeed are...not great. Chopping down rubber trees like that also isn't great, but this early you don't really have much in the way of other options. Later, yes, but not quite yet. Don't feel bad finding all of these "useless" veins when you're looking for early game copper/iron/tin, by the way. Salt veins are early sources of Chlorine and Lithium for tech, as well as obviously Salt for cooking (edible salt exists, but that takes a bucket of water per). Coal veins are greatly useful for coal to cook into coal coke, which speeds up steel production later, as well as some lignite you can use as extra fuel or for some extra torches. And if Limonite wasn't useful for Iron it would be for Oxygen and Hydrogen, which are useful (and not necessarily trivial gases to get) in early-mid LV. Similarly if the pure iron in a copper vein doesn't interest you for the iron it might interest you for easy Wrought Iron. Tons of stuff has uses, if not sooner than later, and some stuff even has uses you wouldn't expect it to have at first glance, so keep on prospecting. The optimal placement of steam machines, because they need a space to output steam, is machine -> empty space -> machine -> repeat. The two machines vent steam into the empty space, hoppers underneath them can pump into a chest beneath the steam output (you thankfully don't burn your hand interacting with the chest), steam can be fed in trough the back, and items to be processed hoppered in from the top. Note that of all steam machines the Steam Alloy Smelter tends to consume the most steam (and see a ton of use), so placing it directly next to your steam boiler (they auto-output, be in into a pipe or steam machine) isn't a horrible idea. That said steam pipes can act as a poor man's steam tank before you've got a railcraft tank set up for that purpose, so that can be an argument to (temporarily) place them further down a line as well. In case you needed more arguments in favor of Pam's animal traps: Explosive animals. Yes, even animals in GTNH are made of pure nitroglycerin for some reason. You can avoid this explosion if you kill animals with a specific weapon, the rationale for which is completely nonsensical and doesn't hold up to even the slightest consideration of scrutiny, so unfortunately I never committed the exact tool to memory. It's in the questbook somewhere. One thing you can do to make prospecting easier at this stage is to craft an Ore Finder Wand. It's basically a dowsing rod that you can tune to specific blocks, and if they're within a certain range it'll make noise. You can also use this to find stuff like Marble or Lootgames, if you want to find more of that for building/lootgaming purposes. One downside to the ore finder wand is that it has a rough time finding diamonds in the overworld, because diamond veins are low down enough that they often escape the limited range of the wand. Once you're in LV proper you'll be able to craft proper prospecting kits and forgo this whole dowsing rod nonsense altogether, though.

Your attitude about things is by far the most enjoyable part of your channel

I like how you point out the definitely not existing bed there, after people commented in the first episode that you missed it

Tinkers has a bad rep of being too op, but I think it's implemented well in gtnh. Getting your first hammer after spending hours with a shitty pickaxe feels amazing and really contributes to how rewarding the pack feels

Ep2 already, this series will be absolutely crazy!

Seeing the first episode was like seeing snow for the first time in years. Might be an exaggeration, but Im thankful to you for making this series. I hope everything goes well and you manage to reach your goals before burning out. Thanks for making me smile, Three.

I have massive respect for people who share their experience of them just having fun, as he once said that he isn't competing in the Youtube game which makes it even more admirable

I always have the hardest time pushing past this early part of a pack, cause there are so few quality of life items available. But, at the same time it is also one of the most fun parts of the pack cause you have all of the space to do anything and take any path, and I love that potential!

it is so crazy how much your editing and youtuber skills in general have improved since the last season of gtnh, still feels like it was yesterday

Literally just found your channel yesterday, so excited for this series!

your videos radiate pure life energy, gives me a happy feeling every day

Fairly new subscriber here (ATM7) I discovered you by accident and am SO glad I did. Your commitment to "finishing" a pack by reaching a clearly stated goal is refreshing and I hope you carry that forward. I can't speak for others, but the most maddening thing for me in watching YouTube content is abrupt ends with no explanation. Thank you for the content and commitment. (Not to mention the build style ideas.)

I love that you started a new season. Your videos are the reason I started GTNH :D. Great to see that you're now getting a lot more views, you really deserve it for all the effort and dedication!

As someone who found your channel during the Inferno Playtrough i am excited to see how far you can go with this pack! Appreciate the videos!

The amount of effort put into this is insane, especially the part explaining the chunks, keep it up!!

Really enjoyed this epsiode. Love the building with Threefold. I am on my third attempt at GTNH, and I think your suggestions here and in the How to stay motivated about thinking through the base will really help. Thank you for the great content!

I really love the mini-series "building with threefold" I hope we get more little explanations and tips in the future, really helpful and interesting. Awesome episode! Threefold is the best!

I love your outro music. It's just calming and happy :) So nice a break from that techno spasm stuff you normally get in a series :)

I absolutely love the "new" style. Although very little has actually changed for me it makes all the difference. I am referring to the fact that you explain stuff a bit more and other little things like that.

I found this channel through the "how to stay motivated" video, but I think I might be in for the long haul now :) Your voice is so relaxing and watching you navigate packs is fascinating!