Once you spawn in you will find you have fair bit of gear to start, this is so you can head straight out into the world and find a place to call home.

To cover your starting kit:

Engineering Diary - This book explains Buildcraft Additions and tells you about the quests to unlock the items and blocks that you can create in it.
Stone Tools - These will serve you well on your journey, letting you set out right away, but do not count on them last long once you find a place to settle.
Torches - You don't get many, but this should help you set up a well lit home or explore the entrance to a cave. Just enough to find and secure a home, not much more.
Trail Mix - The biggest problem for any would be traveller is not having food, this makes sure you have enough food to see you through a few days.
Adventure Backpack - This backpack does quite a bit, it can carry liquids, items, has a built in crafting table, and can be placed on the ground as a block or worn on your back to save inventory place. This backpack does not use up the chest slot like many other mods do, but it once on your back you will need to press a hotkey to access it. By default it is 'B', however due to conflicts you will need to tidy up some bindings. The backpacks final, and for many people, most useful trick is once placed on the ground there will be a bed button. This will deploy a sleeping bag to sleep through the night and set your spawn until you pick up the backpack again. This means everyone should have a bed early on in a servers life cycle, so night will be completely optional.
Grappling Hook - Right-click to throw up to a ledge to deploy a rope to climb up. Perfect to navigate any rough terrain you run into while trying to find a home.
Rope - These can let you climb down from high places safely. Not as reusable as the grappling hook, so should be used less eagerly.
Cotton Seeds - Cotton will let you craft string, which can lead to wool or woven cloth which can be used to make leather armour.
Soybean Seeds - Soybeans are the most flexible crop in Pam's HarvestCraft, creating these will make it easier to craft a variety of higher quality meals.
Cooking for Blockheads book - This first edition will let you see the various recipes for food in the mod. Later editions will filter the recipes based on what you have, and ultimately let you craft from the book.


Upon spawning into the new world you want to head out to find home. On your way you will want to collect saplings of various types and harvest as many Pam's HarvestCraft gardens and fruits as you can along the way to make it easier to defeat hunger in the long term. As once Spice of Life kicks in things will get tougher. So the more crops you can have when you arrive the better.


A few good places to settle include flat biomes with easy access to dirt, such as plains or savanna, in a small cave system, outside a jungle or forest, near a village, or even inside a walled village. You do however want to avoid settling in deserts, jungles, forests, or anywhere else that would make farming a challenge, as this could be a lethal mistake later on.

After you find a home you will want to go through the motions of mining, building, and securing a base. Luckily you will arrive to your new home with a your backpack, meaning you already have 39 slots worth of storage, a crafting table, and a bed. You also have the means to store some liquids you find if need be.


Once you have something to call home, there are some things you want to handle right away:


Your first priority is food. You want to make sure you have enough food to survive, this means you want to plant as many different crops as you can, turning those crops from Pam's HarvestCraft gardens to seeds then planting them. You can right click them to harvest them once they are fully grown. You will also want to farm vanilla crops which work as they did in vanilla.

Next you need to craft some of the Pam's Tools. These include the following: Cutting Board, Pot, Skillet, Saucepan, Bakeware, Mortar and Pestle, Mixing Bowl, and a Juicer. You also want a Presser to help process your Soybeans into more forms of food. This will let you access the variety of foods you will need.

Collecting more types of seed, animal, and fruit trees will continue to expand your options, you can also create traps and bait them to collect some meat and fish to help with cooking.

You will also want to see if you can find some Pam's HarvestCraft bees. These are fairly simple compared forestry bees, requiring you to only collect queens, and place them in Pam's HarvestCraft Apiaries, coming back to collect the resulting honey, grubs, and empty combs. The combs created need to be sent through a presser to get wax and honey. Wax can be used to craft better armour from leather and candles, among other things, and honey is a cooking ingredient.

As you gather resources you will also want to craft a Cooking for Blockheads kitchen, which can hold your Pam's tools and assist in crafting. The kitchen is made from an cooking oven, sink, cooking table, fridge, and two tool racks.

Some of your other early crafting projects should include:

- Basic Duster to start doubling ores and getting the dusts you will need for crafting.
- Steve's Workshop to help with crafting.
- Compartments to help with sorting and organizing your items.
- Witches' Cauldron and the book Witches' Brews, this will open up Witchery to you, which will be quite helpful for multiple tasks.
- Clockwork Engines will provide a good source of early game energy for any machines you need in the early stages.

With this you will be able to expand as you desire down other paths of the pack without too much worry.