StaTech Industry Part 2

Bootstrapping

Here's the world:

As usual, I started doing some exploring first, and eventually found a village with not one but two meteors near it.

After a day of looting the village and wandering around some more, I found a shipwreck and got a few diamonds from that, among other things. Wandering around a bit more, I found a ravine with an explorer's camp at the bottom, and decided to go have a look. Not much of interest down in the camp, actually. Upon returning to the surface, I had too many items and had to leave some behind in a cache.

Now, on to the quests. I clicked through the "welcome" chapter, getting myself a plain old iron sword. Having gotten a golden axe previously (from the shipwreck, I think), I set about not punching trees, but chopping down the trees.

I'm going to be pointedly ignoring the various storage mods, I think - MI provides a good enough storage system with its pipes and its barrels, and a few chests early game would be sufficient. Everything else seems like more effort than it's worth, especially AE2.

A consideration I hadn't yet thought of was what my base was going to look like - I was probably going to do another underground base like I built in my vanilla MI playthroughs, so I'd better find a spot to build a staging camp of sorts. A shore near a ravine and a meteor would do. I cleared some space from the annoyingly tall prairie grass, and set down my chests (and I also fetched the nearby supply cache). Along the way, I mined some cobblestone, and equipped myself with stone tools. A bit of building later, and I had my staging camp.

I then went down into the nearby ravine to go mining. Luckily, there was an iron and nickel ore deposit at the bottom of the ravine. Unluckily, there wasn't a source of coal I could find. I did chance upon a goblin trader who offered a most wonderful trade of two iron ingots for one raw iron. I then upgraded to iron tools and armour and a shield.

Despite the lack of a coal source so far, I decided to continue on with the main quest and get some andesite alloy.

And taking a brief break from crafting, I went out and found a coal deposit, then returned and finished building my Create infrastructure - a double large waterwheel with a gearbox linking the two Create crafting machines I'll need to use.

Afterwards, I took a short jaunt and found a copper deposit. I've now got access to enough resources that I think I should have a good shot at getting to the steam quarry without further prospecting. In anticipation of the amount of smelting needed, I set up an array of fans to do that processing. Finally, I built the forge hammer.

At this point, I decided to go out and get leather for a backpack - this proved to be quite the challenge, but I eventually got enough. Along the way I also got some bamboo - scaffolding would be quite helpful, if only I could get string. Some more miscellaneous tasks, like making a crafting calculator and a math calculator, as well as a basic potato farm, rounds out this chapter.

p.s. Apparently the steam mining drill requires large steel plates! What gives?!