Monifactory Part 2 - Steamy Beginnings

Here's the world - an eerily abandoned city overgrown with jungle:

The first step in almost every modpack is to wander around and raid structures. Since Monifactory Expert mode forces you into peaceful to avoid mob farming, I'll consider the peaceful structure raiding just compensation. My main target is the oil drilling rigs - those generate with diamonds.

Er, perhaps I should get a stone pick first - it'll be helpful for picking up furnaces and breaking down iron doors.

Ooh, wood crafting has been Gregged!

Oh, I got a bucket! Buckets are perhaps the single most useful mobility item in Minecraft - you can climb and drop easily with a bucket of water. And buckets are always Gregged, so finding one is actually quite a large shortcut.

I also collected a few doors - this action might be familiar to GTNH players.

I'm done with this lost city - I got a fair amount of resources, but nothing exceptional. Let's find some more structures - but perhaps not another lost city.

Praise be, I've found a village! I can take a bed from it! (Once again, this might be familiar to GTNH players.)

I also found a bounty board - too bad I can't spend Monicoins in expert mode.

I ended up settling down and making some basic machines - my first large task, however, was a primitive blast furnace.

Processing the materials was taking forever, though, but then I remembered that I had some steel from my looting earlier. I upgraded all of my machines to high pressure - hooray for sequence-breaking. I then made the PBF and started producing steel.

Using some of the steel to make a Nether telepastry, I entered the Nether. Gosh, what a desolate place.

Some more work on the base later, I discovered that iron golems still dropped ingots! Iron farm, here I come! While I was looking into that, I started processing for the materials for three more PBFs, taking advantage of wallsharing.

While the iron farm worked on building up enough iron to make a batch of steel in my PBFs, I started working on LV. One prerequisite of this, though, is that my base needs to be under cover so the machines aren't exposed to rain - thankfully I have a fair supply of cobblestone and a stonecutter. Some building and crafting later, and I was ready to tackle LV. (I also added some shaders.)