Welcome to my humble rabbit hole. This begins a journey that I have been far too dedicated to, ending with a goal that I put far too much importance on achieving. Why not come with me? If nothing else, this guide will help make your journey far smoother than my own, as I've already made a large number of the mistakes you might, and can advise you on how to avoid them.

This guide will be coming out piecemeal, starting with world generation. I'll be capturing and assembling assets as I go for examples, and I WILL be cheating for convenience' sake. Just in case you see anything fishy and think the whole article is a scam, no. I've done all these things legit in the past, many of them several times.

To get things started with some general advice...

I did this all in hardcore mode, and my PC isn't particularly great. I allowed myself the indulgence of using the auto-backup feature that sevtech has in order to rollback deaths that I felt were undeserved in one way or another. My final successful run had two of these occurances, and I'll let you know when they happened as they come up. I HIGHLY rcommend you afford yourself the same leniency, especially if your machine is a potato just fresh enough to make sevtech run. These autosaves don't happen particularly frequently, and I find that when rolling back, you're likely to lose significant progress. It seems fair enough to me, but if you're dedicated to the true masochist route or are a proud crown bearer in noita, I won't stop you from doing the true hardcore experience. Just make sure you clear out your worldsaves, as they will fill your hard drive real quick.

I won't explain every step in detail. If I don't say explicitly how to get from point A to point B, I'm assuming you can figure it out yourself using JEI. This is a guide, not a walkthrough.

And now, without further delay...

I HIGHLY recommend you generate a world using the "realistic" setting, and somewhat noncommitally also recommend using the "Sevtech_V2" preset.

I'm not totally sure what this second one changes, but it's what I used. The seed you choose isn't going to change much unless you get phenominally lucky. That said... I did at one point happen to get such luck.

->The world seed k will spawn you next to a giant crater with some VERY valuable items in it and a dark oak hut nearby, sneakily hidden behind a few trees. If you want to skip two of the biggest early-game RNG barriers and have some extra convenience at no effort, use this seed and take a dive into the cobblestone caves at the bottom of the hole. HOWEVER, you should only do this AFTER creating your first crafting stump.

Dungeon chest loot will change depending on what age you open it in. This is incredibly important if you are attempting to use seed k (or to a lesser extent, seed h). If you try to gather your fancy loot before leaving stage tutorial, all you'll get is a pile of bones.

You woke up one morning on the beach. Started walking, it's your regular routine. You were on the search for... Something. What was it? Something pale blue, shining... the concept escapes your mind. What were you doing again? It's hard to remember anything... but you do remember a pattern of 9 squares inside a larger one. Maybe if you saw it again, it would help you remember.

Welcome to existence! How does the sun feel? The grass? If you're allergic to fancy green things (low or choppy fps after the initial chunk generation has calmed down) consider opening up your mod options and find "better foliage". Open up it's config and turn the "enable mod" setting to false.

Now existence is great and all, but you really are stuck to the dirt monke lifestyle in this early half-age. Until you make a crafting stump, your only real tool and weapon is the flint hatchet and your only real options for feeding yourself are wild berries and raw carrots. We wouldn't want to set a bad example for the talking heads, so lets get past the nuts and berries stage.

OBJECTIVES:
• Punch grass for plant fiber
• Punch leaves for sticks
• Punch gravel for gravel
• Punch rocks for flint flakes
• Punch tree (with tool) for wood
• Brain blast

Haha, Punch Many Things. But, there is some nuance here.

Don't focus too much on gathering plant fiber. The stuff is everywhere, you'll have more than you need after a few seconds of spinning around in tall grass with m1 held down. (And theres a trick to easily get as much of it as you want later.)

If you spawn in a forest, gathering sticks off the ground piles is way faster than attacking trees for them. Scoop up as many as you like.

The only reason we need gravel right now is to get flint. If you can't find gravel, don't worry. If you dig up enough dirt and grass blocks, you will eventually come across some flint. This is time-inefficient, but it's better than nothing. I recommend looking for water, as gravel is often found on the shore. However, if you come across a huge deposit of gravel, consider slapping together a few fiber torches and using the drop-on-torch trick to collect it all faster. The unlit ones work fine, and you can later toss them for inventory space 100% guilt-free if you need to. If you do find a gravel windfall, go ahead and use up your fiber mesh entirely. That 65 gravel will last you well into the next stage.

"Why can't I move items to my offhand?" you might be asking. It's because of a keybind conflict. Specifically, the one that controls fluid mode for one of the later tech mods. I've never had to use this keybind even during its relevnt age, so go ahead and rebind this to whatever you want.

You can usually find everything you need to finish out this stage by climbing the closest tree and looking around. Don't think too hard. Wander a bit if you need to. Be monke.

There's really no reason at all to delay getting your crafting stump. Cut down a tree with your new tool, and lets move on to something more interesting.

This feels right. Placing things on a grid, and bashing them into the right shape. You feel like it is more difficult than it normally is, but can't remember what it's supposed to be like. Straining to conjure up the reason why, all you can come up with is the mental image of a hot, grey box with holes in the front. You haven't seen anything like this around, but maybe you could find it somewhere?

Nice brain you've got there. Ready to use it? Hopefully you haven't moved too far from your flint knapping spot, because you'll need some more flakes.

Expect to be in this age for a while, especially if its your first time. There are a number of items you need to gather to advance, and you don't have many methods of bending luck in your favor. You'll be doing a lot of walking- so keep your eyes open and be ready to make a detour if you see something valuable.

Key Items:
• Nature's compass
• 8 Sugar cane
• 4 Bones
• 7 Clay
• 1 Ink sac
• 1 Shark tooth
• 1 Shadow gem
• Leather
• 4 Buffalo teeth
• a handful of Red cedar

Desireables:
• bone shears
• a handful of Dark Oak Wood
• some kind of vanilla sapling, preferaby birch
• an abundance of clay
• an abundance of wool
• brown mushrooms
• animal skins
• at least a dozen berry bushes
• bone blocks
• mulberry saplings
• at least 32 shoggoth flesh
• at least 14 monolith stone
• at least 1 iris (tall purple flower with tall leaves on either side)
• vines

Before we get started, allow me to introduce you to . will be your loyal and unwavering companion in not just your age 0.5 journey, but potentially your entire Sevtech adventure. will never leave you of 's own free will, will never break, and while 's damage output is modest, will never, ever fail you. Unless you throw by accident. As long as you don't do that, will faithfully follow you to the ends of earth and beyond. We love . Upon entering age 0.5, your first action should be to craft and place immediately on your hotbar. Yes, I'm being a bit silly. But genuinely, treat your well, and will be there when everything else fails.

The second thing you should do is work on crafting Nature's Compass. The materials are usually fairly easy to get, especially since most anything you kill has a chance of dropping bones. Take your newly crafted and go on a wild rampage, killing anything that you see. As soon as you get a bone, knap it down and get crafting. use the nature's compass and start searching for the darklands biomes, to see which one is closest.

Chances are, the darklands mountains search will turn up nothing. That's pretty normal. Ignore the sludge plains option as well, that biome is in an entirely different dimension and you'll probably never use it. Honestly, I'm not sure why it's even there.

Typically you will notice one of the darklands biomes within 1400 blocks. (Usually the forest.) You could make a beeline straight for it, but not all of them are created equal. If you see either the plains or highlands are equal distance or even a little further, I recommend going toward them instead, depending on your circumstances. In the highlands, it is easier to see and fight shadow enemies, which will drop the gems you need to progress. In the plains, it will be easier to find and herd livestock toward your base, and you will need cows to progress. The choice is yours, in the end. If you aren't a fan of the place the compass leads you, don't worry. You won't be stuck there forever, and age 1 brings a very powerful tool for relocating your base.

If you have the flint for it, making a pickaxe and workblade before we start moving might be a good idea too.

Time to move. Use your compass to decide on your destination and get walking. Keep your eyes peeled, your journey could prove to be particularly dangerous. Keep an eye out for steppe wolves. They will swarm at you on sight, and if you spot a few, there are usually more in the area ready to ambush you if you make them angry. Likewise, be careful when jumping in the water. Sharks and pirhanas will kill you very quickly, and they move very fast. A raft is absolutely necessary for crossing large bodies of water, letting you pick off swarming pirhanas with relative safety. Sharks will still break your raft with a single hit, but with a steady hand, you stand a good enough change at fighting them off. However... every danger is it's own opprtunity, and there are many valueables you can pick up along the way.

In a rough order of importance (aka, what you should prioritise keeping in your inventory), here's what you should look for.

Squid. You should kill squid on-sight. You should go out of your way to do so. Their ink sacs are THE key to opening tech progression, and if you haven't got one by the time you get to the darklands, you might be unable to progress much until a costly and slow RNG roller deems you worthy. Also, if you come across a village, having an abundance of ink and feathers might net you an early atlas, which is nice, but definitely not necessary.

Sharks. You should also kill sharks on-sight, but you can stop after you get a few teeth. Their meat and skins are nice, but not very valuable compared to other things on this list. Just always be aware of their existence when crossing water, and remember that 1-block water isn't deep enough for them to swim in. Pro tip: to most reliably hit the shark's wonky hitbox, aim for their front lower fins.

Natural Cobblestone/Mossy Cobblestone. This stuff appears naturally for only a few reasons. First, water and lava mixing. Second, dungeons. It is worth peeking into dungeons for their loot, which can include shadow gems. If you use seed k, you've already got more of these gems than you need and the danger is entirely optional... But probably still worth it. Scoop up some of the mossy cobblestone you find as well, it will be a surprise tool for later. Just be careful around spawners, any shadow enemy can kill you in less than a second at this point.

Dark Oak Wood. You won't need this right now, but if you pass by a dark forest or see a hut made of the stuff in the wild, you should absolutely take some wood or saplings with you. It can save you a massive headache and an unreasonable number of hours later.

Clay. You need at least 7 clay to get started, but you will need a lot of clay over the course of your Sevtech adventure. 2 stacks is a pretty good start, more is excellent. That said, it is plentiful enough that only the first stack is worth fretting over.

Bones and sugar cane. You need at least 8 Sugar cane and 4 bones to do all the necessary totemic rituals. Grab sugarcane when its convenient, and kill every pig you pass by. They will likely give you all the bones you need, and set you up with ample food and skins to get you through the next ages. Cows are also a good target, and you may as well kill any sheep you come across, until you have a set of bone or flint shears. Just be aware of how close you are to your destination. If there aren't any cows near it, then you'll regret having killed the last ones you've seen.

Some kind of vanilla tree. By vanilla, I of course mean "not from a mod". They are the only trees you can use in the process of curing hides. If this sapling is a birch sapling, then it will enable us to make a base anywhere we want to in the next age.

On that note, let me stop you for a moment to discuss cows. There are two general approaches you can take when it comes to this journey. You can do it all in one shot, or in a few parts. IF you have all the items in the list up to this point (excluding the dark oak), you may want to set up camp near the next group of cows you find, craft some cabinets (they are better than primitive chests), and settle in to breed buffalo and make leather. With leather comes the earliest backpack, meaning extra inventory space to carry more valuables with you when you continue. The buffalo teeth will also mean that you can get right business when you arrive in the darklands. I don't usually do this, preferring to do the journey all in one go, but it is a perfectly respectable option. Go ahead and read the next section "The Hideout" if you take this early stop, you'll find useful info there.

Bone Blocks. In this age, farmland can only be made by crafting a dirt and a bonemeal together, and your options for making bonemeal are all tedious and not very rewarding until you're nearly done. The best way to make farms of any considerable size is to grind bone blocks. You don't need that many, but if you haven't found any at all, you'll be stuck scrounging for extra bones and using the zaphkiel waltz repeatedly to squeeze food out of your 5 blocks of farmland.

Wool. It's the easiest way to get string, and having a stockpile is really nice.

Berries and Brown Mushrooms. Berries are probably the most reliable and least effort food available in the game, and having many of them growing will make your life much easier. The mushrooms will combo with the berries to make a POTENT meal combo that we will get to in the next age.

Iris. Remember when I mentioned a trick to easily get as much plant fiber as you want? Here it is. The iris has an interesting property, probably shared by some other plants, but I actually haven't checked them all. If you break an iris by hitting the top block, nothing much special happens. But if you break the bottom block, it will drop plant fiber with the same likelyhood as tall grass, as well as dropping itself. with a small stack of around 6-10 iris and the right arrangement of blocks on the floor, you can hold right click and spam left click as fast as you can to harvest large amounts of plant fiber by repeatedly breaking the same iris o9n the same block dosens of times. this requires no input like bonemeal, only needs a few blocks of space, and works very quickly. It's easy to underestimate just how useful it is to be able to manifest as much plant fiber as you need at any given time. By all means, experiment with other flowers and see if they do the same thing. I know that not all of them do, and was content to settle on the Iris as by flower of choice, since I think they are pretty, easy to spot while travelling, and common enough to collect between the described destinations in this guide.

Mulberry, Monolith stone, Shoggoth flesh, and vines. These are nice to have, but are by no means necessary. Only grab them if you have comfortable inventory space, are confident you won't be ambushed by random wolves and sharks, and are comfortable sticking in one spot long enough to collect them. They'll be useful later, and usually aren't that hard to find once you need them... But I've lost that bet a few times before.

An honorable mention: animal fat. By no means should you pass up anything else on this list for animal fat, but there's a good chance you'll end up with some in your pocket. Animal fat is the gambligant's preferred food; slightly dangerous to collect, and usually a pretty bad food item. If you're lucky though, RNG might bless you with a FULL hunger and saturation refill, with the saturation potion effect for a short time on top of it. Don't think too hard about how it must feel or taste.

You made it! welcome to your new home. I hope you're comfortable with the dark blue grass, grey sky, and wierd noises the neighbors make. Kick back, cut down a tree, and get to work.

If you've had good luck during your journey, then the only thing you actually need from this place is the wood from the dark trees and the abyssal zombie flesh. And you might not even need that flesh, if you got very lucky and knew what the future holds in store. If you're eager to get out of here, set up a slapdash campsite and focus on progressing through the age by collecting whatever key items you're missing. You'll have your escape soon enough. The strainer might be of use here if you need sugar cane, ink sacs, or teeth. Once you've set down roots, it's frustratingly unlikely that the waters near your home will have any useful critters in them.

Once you've got your bison tooth gear, go right on ahead and finish out the age by grinding out some porcelain. Take the oppurtunity to eat a variety of foods, those nutrition buffs will be super useful through your entire playthrough, and this is where you can really begin to commit to filling each food group. If you've made a horse mill, then flatbread will do just fine to fill out grains as a grinding snack. You only need 12 porcelain to move to the next age, but I recommend making 40. You'll need 32 porcelain for a fully functional melter-basin-table setup with two spigots, and the last 8 go toward a tank to use for melting iron. Technically you can get away with less, or substituting some with seared brick, but the process is very similar, and it isn't worth the hassle. Just make the 40 porcelain, and don't fire it all into bricks right away.

On the topic of shadow beasts...

Shadow beasts are guaranteed to drop at least one shadow gem when killed, and are, by a huge margin, your most valuable target. They are very capable of killing you in return, but aren't as scary as you might think. Their blinding smoke attack actually does very little damage to you, and if you get one by itself, you can easily keep it just at the edge of your vision while blinded and stab it to deaeth with your . Fighting it like this is pretty spooky, as you will be erased from existence with only a couple hits from the beast, but as long as you play extra safe, engage at full health, and triple check your surroundings to make sure nothing will ambush you, this is a fight you can win every single time. Keep in the back of your mind that not every attack you land will knock the enemy backward, land crits whenever possible, and don't let your greed win out over your caution.

...

OR, you can made a 4 block tall pillar and be safe from most threats. Ghouls and zombies cannot reach you this high, and skeletons cannot melee you. Trumpet skeletons might be able to knock you off, but they are likely to pull aggro from everyone else in the process, allowing you a relatively safe excape. Even shadow beasts can only reach you with their smoke, which you can mostly ignore unless you are at the very edge of death. The only real threat to you on top of a freshly built derp tower is spiders. If you see spiders approaching during this age, you generally want to disengage any fight you happen to be in, and fight them without any other interference. Their wonky hitboxes and speed make them a threat you don't want to mix with any others.

About wheels and carts...

You've probably noticed that the grear and millstone show in the advancement tree after the wheel and alongside the cart. You may be tempted to reinvent the wheel here and get some horse-drawn carriages to ease travel and transport of items, and I HIGHLY recommend that you DON'T. I've never been able to get the wagons to work, and wheels have no other use. Maybe I was doing something wrong, or had some kind of keybind conflict, but they aren't necessary, require the luck to find a horse, and you can get to the next age just fine without that branch being active. If you want to give it a shot, go for it. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Spotting legit rocks in the wild:

Have you ever REALLY looked at the rocks that you pick up off the ground? Have you ever listened to them? Tried to get a feel of what it's like to be them? Maybe you should. It's far too easy to take the simple stones you come across on the ground for granted. The reality is, many of these rocks are anything but mundane. If you've played sevtech much before, you'll know why. If not, you will soon. For now, you'll want to preserve some rocks, while others can be used without worry. Telling them apart is easy, and there are a number of ways to test them. If a rock pases any of the following tests, they will also pass all of the others, and you should leave it be. These rules apply for ALL ages, not just the early ones.

1: You can stand on it. Legit rocks can be stood on, with a noticable change in elevation. Mundane rocks will be "passed through".

2: It is underwater, with an air bubble around it. Which is also useful if you are trying to walk around on the bottom of an ocean for some reason. It won't protect you from the wildlife, though.

3: It talks with an accent. Legit rocks make dirt sounds when punched. You want to be very careful testing like this though, only very fast clicks with no tool should be used, as they aren't very sturdy at all. Mundane rocks will pop off the ground instantly. But honestly, there's no reason to test rocks like this. just try stepping on them.

Is the bear claw paxel worth making?

Usually. It's not like you'll ever use the claws for anything else. You might come across bears during your nomadic time, and you might not. You might kill 2 bears and get enough claws, or you might have to kill seven. You might want to prioritize other items like food or skins in your inventory. You might decide that sticking your nose into the blood feud between step wolf and brown bear isn't worth the danger. And all of these are valid. but, if you decide that you really want that paxel to clear up inventory space, there's something you should know. The bear claw paxel is a fickle beast. It is definitely the best excavation tool you will have accesss to for some time, being about on par with a bronze tool in terms of dig speed. But there are some blocks that it just doesn't like. It has trouble with nonstandard stone like limestone and marble, digging them very slowly and destroying any potential drops in the process. It struggles with some complex progression blocks, and seems to be allergic to some kinds of tree. You are going to want to keep standard flint and stone tools in your back pocket in case you have to deal with these, defeating the idea of the paxel being an all in one tool. But, it cannot be argued that it has more durability and speed than any other tool you have, and makes a decent weapon as well. If you decide to make a paxel, (and you shouldn't go out of your way to do so), then do yourself a favor and NEVER use it on ANYTHING valuable, or you might just end up losing it.

Miscellaneous tips:
• Once you set up a home base, use your Nature's compass to search for the biome you're already in. This should cause it to point to the spot you're currently standing.
• There aren't any ranged enemies in this age other than baykok. The advancements tree might try to tempt you with the promise on an early ranged weapon, but do not fall for it.
• You can make tiki torches by crafing a lit fiber torch with two sticks. They are worth it.
• If you stick to using vanilla wood types when possible, then stripping each log's bark before use will give you enough bark to last several ages.
• Make a horse chopping block as soon as possible, and set up woppers leading into and out of it. You will save so much time.
• If you don't need the horse press now, then you still will later. Just make it now.
• None of the 3 horse machines actually check the blocks immediately around them, meaning you can group them all up next to each other in a 2x2 area and they will operate just fine.
• If you have your horse machines near your livestock or farm, the cows tied to the machines will break their leads to get the wheat. Keep them separate.
• Oh yeah, cows are by far the best animals for horse machines.
• Keep the whole walking area of animals working horse machines within the same chunk. You can use f9 to see chunk borders easily.
• Your farmland doesn't need to be near water. Your crops will grow faster if wet, but the farmland won't change back to dirt if there are crops planted.
• Don't turn all your animal skins into raw hide. You can use those to make gear easily in the next age.
• Buffalo meat is ABSOLUTELY goated, and its massive amount of saturation will be very helpful in the next age.
• The buffalo dance will only turn 2 cows into buffalo at a time, but you can do it more than once to get more buffalo quickly. Just don't change ALL of your cows.
• Adult buffalo are so much bigger than young buffalo that when they grow to adulthood, it can cause them to suffocate when their heads get stuck into solid walls. Always surround your buffalo with walls or fences to avoid this.
• If you want to leave the darklands ASAP, make a garden trowel and a fisherman's strainer. Eventually it will catch vines, which you will want for the near future.
• It's worth repeating: if you can't hit the opposite shore with a thrown rock, THEN MAKE A RAFT.

As a final note before the mental rush of making a couple porcelain boxes knocks us comatose for several seconds while all the gnomes come out of hiding and swap out some of the stones for shinier stones, I'd like to present the humble grill with the "universal champion of usefulness" trophy. Put down a wopper going into it and a flame wopper under it, and that grill will passively cook dozens of stacks of anything a vanilla furnace can while never requiring any fuel, power, or supervision, regardless of what age you've reached, and without danger of setting nearby wood blocks on fire. ANY base you make should have a setup like this. Maybe even two, despite only one being needed to handle any demand you have for cooked items. The utility of the grill rivals that of the ender furnace, an expensive item unlocked in the space age after going to the end. It really is THAT good.

Nature's Compass

Okay that's all well and good but I've been sprint jumping around for hours and still haven't found a roofed forest. I've crossed several moisture and heat bands trying to find it, and all I get are these damned useless menril forests and autumn woods. I'm starting to suspect you're pulling a fast one on me here, with how these biomes seem to be out of place and sprawling wildly into regions they shouldn't be. Just tell me how to get the compass working so I can be done with this.

I did say that the generation was the sloppiest set of plaid stripes you've ever seen, right? I meant it. But yes, at this point you've more than earned the right to use the tool that was specifically intended for situations like this before it was nerfed. Find your installation folder for the modpack (most modloaders have a buttor for this, and if you did a manual install I HOPE you remember where you put it) and open the config folder. In it you will find a file called "naturescompass.cfg". Pop it open with your notepad equivalent of choice, find the beiome you want to get pointed to, and simply delete it from the list. I recommend leaving everything else as-is, especialy for the other mods. You'll have to reload the modpack, but once you're back in, you will find that the compass now allows that biome to be searched for. Safe travels.

Some general travelling advice:

• Keep your antique atlas on your hotbar, it's less annoying than your offhand.
• Bring plenty of food. slime speed requires a lot of food to mainain over long distances.
• You may notice that slime speed also lets you swim faster than usual. This Is No Excuse To Not Have A Raft on your hotbar in the case of large water crossings and sudden fish swarms. Use A Goddam Raft.
• You might come across ocean monuments during your travels. Grab some sea lanterns if its convenient. if not, we have other means of getting them later. You'll want at least 4 of them. squid-enderman totems are immensely helpful when raiding ocean monuments, but trying to clear out a monument at this age is a major pain in the ass. Possible, but not worth it.
• Storage crates are easy and cheap to make. Why aren't you carrying like 10 of them?
• If you spot an ore vein that you need while away from home, and your prospector reads it underground, you might as well dig down and grab a stack or two of the metal. You DID bring extra storage crates, right?
• Come up with a system for marking waypoints. Use different icons for different purposes, and don't just delete a waypoint to an ore vein because you cleared it out. recreate the waypoint as an empty mine. You may find it convenient to go back to these later for easy access to valuable stone variants.
• Did you find a place you want to call home? feel free to settle, but don't unpack everything right away unless you change your mind.