Tutorial:Getting Started (Regrowth)

This article is part of the Feed The Beast Wiki's Tutorials section.

The Regrowth pack is heavily customized, which makes starting gameplay confusing for some. Due to changes in basic recipes and mechanics wiki pages for items and mechanics may not be helpful for this pack. This guide aims to get you through the first few in game weeks and set up with basic resource production, hopefully without any dying.

Choosing A Base[edit]

When starting a new world, you will notice that there are only two biomes: wasteland and ocean. While it is viable to start with a base in any location, beginning your first base on a shoreline or a large island is preferable for several reasons:

Clay is plentiful in ocean biomes. Alternatively, you can collect your first clay by breaking dead grass with a low drop rate. However, since you will need over a stack of clay before long, looking underwater will save you a lot of time.

Collecting water for irrigation is possible in the wasteland but slow due to the lack of rain. Setting up a Railcraft Water Tank or an AgriCraft Wooden Water Tank in an ocean biome will increase the collection rate dramatically, boosting your resource production early.

It's dangerous out there at night! Setting up on an island will allow you to quickly and easily light up all spawnable areas, reducing the chances of your dying before you get a bed.

Oysters are the safest way to produce ender pearls in early game. You will need to collect 5 ender pearls in order to create Ender Seeds, so diving for an Oyster as soon as you can hold your breath long enough is advised.

Having access to both wasteland and ocean climate conditions is preferable for both Mariculture and Bee Breeding. More biomes will open up later and there is tech available to change conditions for both of these mods, but it will be a simpler start with access to the ocean biome.

You will want green dye very early. While Botania flowers can produce this with a little luck, eelgrass from ExtremeBiomesXL found along the shoreline is the easiest source.

Your early base will need lots of room. It's entirely possible to set up underground for safety, but you will need to excavate a lot of space if you go that route. Building a wall and setting up above ground will allow for easy expansion for farming space.

In The Beginning[edit]

In Regrowth, you will rely heavily on your Hardcore Questing Mode Quest Book and on NEI. When you spawn, the first thing you should do is open the provided Quest Book and check out the quest Let's Try Punching Things. Food will be scarce for the first few days, so the apples given by this one will be all that keeps you from starving. Goals you will accomplish by the end of this section:

Cotton Seeds for unlimited string and wool
A basic tree farm
Runic Altar for Magical Crops seeds

The First Day[edit]

Punch dead trees and slate to retrieve the planks and flint for the first quest. Look for charred logs when punching trees, each one will drop at least one charcoal. Break dead grass as you go, since you will need the bonemeal, clay, and seeds that drop from them. As soon as you have enough, turn in the quest. You may notice that along with 12 apples, you get +1 Mechanist Reputation as a reward. Your reputation in various categories will unlock more quests as you continue. Now it's time to complete your first Tinker's tools for the quest Such A Tool. For this you will need 12 Flint and 10 Stick. You do not need a crafting table for this, all of the following recipes can be completed in a 2x2 grid. The tools can be assembled by placing all of the pieces for each tool in your crafting grid in a shapeless recipe. Turn this quest in and then make your first weapon using whichever reward you chose.

Now that you have tools to make your work easier, continue collecting flint and wood until you have at least 48 planks. Dead Wood Planks are interchangeable with vanilla planks in most crafting recipes. Also continue collecting dead grass drops for Grass-ping At Straws. The most difficult part of this quest will be the Pasture Seed required as it has a very low drop rate. Finding shelter is more important than completing this quest on the first day, so do what you can but don't get stuck on it. When you have enough wood, start digging up cracked sand for shelter and to access cobblestone and dirt. At this point the sun will probably be starting to set. You should have plenty of materials for torches, so dig out a little room and set up your first crafting table. As soon as you have enough cobble for a furnace, use 3 clay to make a bucket and cook it using 2 sticks, then create an infinite water source, then hole up before dark and start creating your Tinker's work area for Patterned Response. A couple of these recipes are modified as follows:

Note: The Flint Hatchet must be fully repaired for this recipe.

Note: Dead Wood Log can be used to craft the Part Builder

The First Night[edit]

While waiting for the safety of day, finish Patterned Response and Earthly Possessions. You will want to start a small farm plot to begin AgriCraft. You must plant seeds on AgriCraft Crop Sticks. Depending on your RNG luck, you may or may not have all the grass drops you need to receive the quest reward for your carrot and potato seeds. If you were lucky enough to get pasture seeds the first day, great! Use some of that bonemeal you've collected to get food production started. Otherwise, set up at least 4 empty dirt blocks to use the Floral Fertilizer you've collected and try to get the two White Mystical Flowers you need to get started in Botania. If you were fast enough to be able to set up a safe room above ground before dark, try to lure endermen over and kill your first one to complete the Ender-ference quest.

The Second Day[edit]

Once the sun comes back up, seek out hostile mob drops. Bones and string are very important to grab. Spiders are docile during the day and will shed string occasionally due to Botania's shedding mechanic, but having plenty of spider eyes will become useful shortly. Rotten flesh can be placed on a Drying Rack for jerky, and it will be useful later for leather so it is worth collecting as well. Gunpowder will also be useful soon, so consider trying to kill a creeper or two if you can.

You'll want to spend most of this day collecting materials. If you weren't lucky enough to get a Pasture Seed yet, keep breaking grass and trying to find one. If you were lucky enough to end up close to a large body of water, try to find at least 4 eelgrass and any clay blocks close to the surface. Don't spend more than a few seconds underwater, it takes your breath away.

You will want a safe way to fight mobs during the long nights until you collect enough string to make a bed. If you didn't do it the first day, now is the time to set up a safe mob fighting area. A four block high 5x5 enclosed platform with a wall at the second level, windows at the third level, and a roof on the fourth works well for this at the marginal cost of one stack of blocks, but any design that keeps you safe is fine.

Onward[edit]

Once you have the Grass-ping At Straws quest turned in, your first priority is farming. You will find all of the necessary information for crossbreeding in the Quest Book chapter The Life of the World, but any seed's crossbreeding recipe can also be found in NEI. Cotton Seeds are the important goal here, as once you have them you can stop relying on spiders for string and wool, which means that you'll want to follow the breeding trees to get Dandelion Seeds and Barley Seeds. Start with crossing Wheat with Carrots and Belladonna with Potatoes. For more information on crossbreeding, see the Farming section of this tutorial. The key when crossbreeding is patience. While you wait, you can work on the other, less crucial quests to increase your reputation and unlock more useful quests. As soon as you have the required items, complete the Not Farmville 3 quest. Crafting a Seed Analyzer and a Garden Stuff Compost Bin as early as possible is a good idea. The AgriCraft seeds won't stack, and the best use for them right now is throwing them in the Compost Bin to start creating the Compost needed for Garden Soil. Continue to crossbreed, working towards cotton seeds, as you complete other quests.

In addition to whichever food you prefer, the crops you will want to plant more of are sugarcane and pumpkin. These are both very useful early. Each pumpkin should be crafted into 4 seeds and dumped into the compost bin, since you won't be able to mutate the dandelion seeds until you have compost. Eight items in the compost bin will break down to one compost. Now that you have sugarcane, you will be able to create a Lexica Botania with the modified recipe. Any color of Mystical Flower can be used to craft this.

Your next goal is real wood, because you will need it to progress in Botania. This is where that pasture seed you worked so hard to find comes in. Set up a 4x4 or larger dirt patch and use the pasture seed to create a patch of grass, then bone meal it for lots of grass to mutate using Witchery's Mutandis The modified mutandis recipe can be completed using items you already have. If you were unable to find eelgrass, which converts to cactus green in a crafting grid, use a Botania Pestle and Mortar on the petals of a green mystical flower. The resulting floral powder also works in this recipe. Turning in the Mutation quest will give you extra mutandis to use.

The ExtraBiomesXL items are included in the possible mutandis mutations, so you may need a few crafts of mutandis to get a sapling. Grab any Witchery mutations you see, as you'll be crafting more mutandis later to get these. If you're lucky enough to find a mushroom, grab that as well since that's an item that you can only get through mutandis or exploring. You only need to get one sapling through mutandis and then you can grow it to get more sapling drops from the leaves. The four saplings needed for the quest You Sap can be any sapling and they don't have to be the same type. The most valuable sapling types, though, are Oak, Birch and Spruce, since these are all needed for Witchery. You will be able to choose one of these types after turning in You Sap.

While waiting for the saplings in your brand new tree farm to grow, check on the Quest Book chapter What the World Enables. Now is a good time to complete Deep Breath so you can start farming pearls for that ender pearl drop chance. When collecting an oyster, break the sand block it's sitting on rather than the oyster itself.

At this point, if you've been keeping an eye on your farm, you should have a cotton plant. Set up a few of these plants since wool and string are in high demand. Continue moving through the quests in The Life of the World chapter, especially the flower seeds. These might seem fairly useless right now, but you will very shortly need massive amounts of Mystical Petals in order to start producing metals, and these seeds are needed to unlock Mystical Flower Seeds so you can grow these petals.

Flower Power is the next quest you will need to focus on. After you get your Pure Daisy set up, start producing livingrock and livingwood right away. The recipe for the Mana Spreader is another modified recipe, so you can create it now along with a Mana Pool. Any color petal will work in this recipe.

Start collecting mana from the producing flowers you receive when you complete Sunshine and Lollipops.These first producing flowers will decay within 3 days, but the amount you get as quest rewards will give you a decent amount of mana to get Botania started. Once you have enough collected, the first things you will need to create are two Mana Powder and one Mana Pearl. The mana pearl should be used to create the Runic Altar and the mana powder will allow you to create a permanent mana producing flower, the Endoflame. The runic altar is where you will be creating the Magical Crops seeds for the various metals.

Farming with AgriCraft[edit]

Agricraft gives us the ability to upgrade seeds for a better yield and growth rate. The crossbreeding mechanic also allows us to unlock seeds that we wouldn't otherwise have access to. A growth stat of 10 gives a very quickly growing plant. A gain stat of 10 gives a yield of 4 crops per harvest. A strength stat of 10 gives a 100% chance to successfully transplant clippings. When the config for weeds is turned on, the strength stat also determines the plant's resistance to weeds. This config is turned off by default in Regrowth.

When crossbreeding crops, you will need to place two parent plants adjacent to a block with crop sticks placed twice to create a crosscrops. The dirt each plant is growing on does matter, for example you will not get sugarcane seeds unless you provide a sand block for them to grow on. If in doubt look at NEI because it will show you the type of soil each seed needs to grow on.

Seed mutations will only happen if both parent crops are fully grown, and some higher tier mutations may need several attempts before you get the seed you're trying to breed. All Magical Crops essence seeds must be planted on tilled Garden Soil. Bone meal will not work with Magical Crops, you will need Magical Fertiliser to force growth on every Magical Crops essence seed.

The starting stats on crossbred seeds are affected by the stats of the parent seeds. It will halve the average of the parent stats, meaning the highest possible starting point for a new crossbred crop is 5/5/5 if both parents are fully upgraded. This rule only works for crossbreeding, not basic upgrading.

Upgrading the statistics on your seeds is fairly simple. Every time a plant spreads to a new crosscrops, it has a chance to increase its statistics. This chance is higher with multiple parent crops of the same type. Crops must be fully grown to be parent crops. Items that can facilitate the breeding process include the Clippers, which will give you a copy of the seed you use it on to be planted on another cropstick, and the Gardening Trowel, which will allow you to move any plant to a different cropstick.

Unlocking Metals[edit]

Botania and Magical Crops are thoroughly merged, with all higher tier seed recipes utilizing the Runic Altar. You will start this phase with the chapter What the World is Made Of. The quest (in)Fusion-HA! will reward you with a choice of Skeleton Soul Seeds or extra Weak Essence. If you do not choose the Skeleton Soul Seeds you will regret it. Plant these and spread and upgrade them as a priority, the more bone meal you have the faster you can get to the unlimited resources phase. After this, every other quest in this chapter will present a choice between more of the essence you just unlocked or extra Weak Essence. On all of these you will want to go with the Weak Essence, since we're going to need many stacks of Essence Dust before we're through unlocking Magical Crops.

The first couple of essences needed to start each of the seeds are available in the dungeon loot tables, but it's much easier to get them early game by turning in the repeatable quests. If you haven't mutated seeds to get Mystical Flower seeds, now is the time to do so. You also may want to create the Clayconia mentioned in the quest Clay For Days if you have not found plentiful clay in an ocean biome. You can create sand by crafting a water bucket with a Cracked Sand if sand is scarce. Reset time on the repeatable quests is 2 in-game days, and when you complete Cuprous Conduction it will unlock others for creating coal seeds, iron seeds, and tin seeds so you can work on these while waiting for the first one to unlock again. These do seem expensive this early in the game, but once you have the seeds for each one that resource is only limited by the time you put into expanding farming infrastructure.

To create each seed on the Runic Altar, right click or drop each component onto the altar. Bind a mana spreader next to a mana pool to the Runic Altar. Once there is a valid recipe on the altar and there is mana available for the spreader, it will start shooting mana in bursts to the altar. The recipe progress can be seen by looking at the altar while holding the Wand of the Forest. When the altar has enough mana to complete the recipe, it will show a lightning effect. When this happens, drop or right click one livingrock onto the altar and right click it with your Wand of the Forest to receive your seeds.