Beginner's Guide

Starting out in Better than Wolves can be challenging - indeed it is intended to be so! However, you are not without recourse. This guide will help you get your footing in understanding key Better than Wolves features, taking you step by step through the main parts of the Tech tree and explaining important points in detail.

Before we embark on this journey of learning, it pays to mention an important caveat of this guide: it will not attempt to explain vanilla Minecraft features, of which this guide assumes a strong working knowledge. It also assumes that if you are unfamiliar with a vanilla Minecraft feature presented in this guide, you know where to get the info you need, which will in almost all cases be the Minecraft Wiki. Furthermore, this guide cannot and will not explain esoteric or very advanced features - if you need help with something specific, you should make reference to the page of the item or block in question.

Preparation

Better Than Wolves is a total overhaul of Minecraft. It adds many advanced features like Wind Mills while tweaking standard gameplay to be harder and more rewarding. With the addition of Hardcore Spawn, maintaining one single homestead is no longer a feasible option. In the early game, it is better to concentrate on surviving, creating landmarks and expanding. Many renewable resources are no longer readily cultivated and may require traveling long distances to obtain. Some of the more unique features of the mod like the Light Block and Soulforged Steel require access to the Nether and the End, respectively. You should expect to complete a large portion of traditional main game content (albeit much harder now), before being able to experience all of the tech tiers of this mod.

Major Mechanics Changes

The first changes you will be affected by are:

1. Upon death you will re-spawn at a random location.
2. Animals do not re-spawn, and monsters kill animals.
3. Many low tier tools have been removed or weakened. See Hardcore Tools and Weapons.
4. It takes longer to break blocks when using basic or no equipment.
5. When broken without a proper tool (i.e., punched or exploded), most blocks drop a portion of their derivative parts:
   1. Dirt, gravel and sand drop their respective piles.
   2. Logs drop Bark, Saw Dust and one wooden plank.
6. The lower your health or food level, the slower you move and break blocks.
7. Wheat seeds can no longer be obtained by breaking tall grass or tilling grass blocks
8. Unlit caves are now completely dark no matter your brightness settings.
9. When in the dark, you move and break blocks slower.
10. Staying in complete darkness for too long will kill you.

For more information look at Changes From Vanilla

Pre-Mechanical Survival

Starting with nothing and surviving through the first night can be difficult. It may take a few attempts and failures before you find a strategy that works for you. Go ahead... try for a bit. Failing helps keep the game interesting and won't hold you back in the long run.

Assuming you're starting a new world, you will have no resources available other than what is procedurally generated. Some early game freebies such as villages and temples near the spawn are now abandoned, leaving little to no helpful resources. Your first day's goal should be to get enough wood to create tools and build/dig a shelter to survive a night. This will require tediously punching trees for one plank per log until you have enough planks to build a workbench and wooden tools. You won't want or be able to use wooden tools for very long though. Wooden pickaxes now only give one stone each before breaking. Wood tools are really only good as starter or fallback items. Transitioning to stone tools before the first nightfall is highly recommended.

Here's a list of steps you'll need to take on your first day nearly every time you start a new game:

1. Find a good starting location
   1. It's helpful to have nearby trees, dirt, and stone. Coal seams in the stone are a plus.
   2. Nearby animals are helpful for obtaining food later.
   3. A location near your spawn could be helpful because:
      1. You can find it with a compass later
      2. You can start punching trees as soon as possible
2. Start punching trees. You'll need to punch at least 13 tree blocks, which will give you 13 Wood Planks.
   1. It will take close to half of the first day to obtain these planks (punching is much slower in BTW), so get to it ASAP.
3. With your 13 Wood Planks, craft the following:
   1. A Crafting Table (4 Wood Planks)
   2. 6 Sticks (3 Wood Planks) Note that in BTW, a single Wood Plank will produce 2 Sticks.
   3. 2 Wood Pickaxes (3 Wood Planks and 2 Sticks each)
4. Each of your Wood Pickaxes can be used to mine one Stone block.
5. With your 2 mine Cobblestone blocks and remaining 2 Sticks, you can craft a Stone Axe. (This recipe is different than the vanilla recipe; it requires only 2 Cobblestone blocks.)
6. Now start chopping trees in earnest. You'll want to chop until you have only about 1/3 of your Axe's durability left.
7. Convert all of the wood blocks you've chopped into Planks. This requires placing the Axe into the crafting grid and will use up the Axe's durability.
8. Use 12 of your newly created Planks to craft a Stone Pickaxe.
9. Mine 6 Stone blocks with your new Pickaxe.
10. Craft a new Axe, a Stone Shovel, and a new Pickaxe.
    1. Every time you use your Pickaxe to mine, ensure you reserve 3 of the mine Cobblestones to craft a new Pickaxe.
11. By now it should be getting close to dark.
    1. Use your shovel to dig out a fast shelter.
    2. Use the dirt to make necessary walls.
    3. Make sure you don't completely enclose it or it will be pitch black, which will damage your health over time.
    4. If you have time and materials, build a crafting bench and a door for inside the shelter.
    5. If you have to fight off mobs, your Axe is your best bet.
12. Spend the night mining Stone inside your shelter (make sure you continue to reserve 3 Stone for a new Pickaxe) to craft a Furnace.
13. It's a good idea to craft a Chest for your sundries, in the (very likely) event that you die and are re-spawned far from home.

Some further tips for the first day:

• At this point, hunger may have set in. If you did a lot of jumping or killing things, it probably reduced your food meter considerably. Jumping can be avoided using dirt slabs (created from two dirt blocks side by side). Wait until you have an axe before killing nearby animals for food, as it is much more efficient and less hunger intensive than doing it bare-knuckle.
• Keeping an eye on the sun can keep nightfall from surprising you. Basic stuff, I know. The sun rises in the East and sets in the West (as in real life). The moon in Minecraft does the same. When nightfall hits, unless you have prepared a modest shelter already, make a terrible one quick! Dig a deep hole in the ground if you need to. As you probably won't have enough time before the first night to build an elegant log cabin, digging into a mountain is the fastest way to make a sturdy shelter. Planning its placement ahead of time may even allow you to re-use your starting workbench.
• When the first night has fallen and hostile mobs roam free, your only forms of protection are your shelter and your tools. Axes are the best tool for offense, but those will not be in large supply on the first night. Your main goals should be hostile mob avoidance and mining stone until daybreak. Get cozy in your shelter and mine enough stone for a furnace and tools. Try not to run out of stone or pickaxe usage when you make a furnace, as that may cause you to resort back to wooden tools, which waste precious wood. Mobs do not usually spawn in your close proximity, so the furnace is mostly useful for the second day/night.

On the second day, you should gather more wood and look for cute little animals to kill. Open the door or destroy the barricade and run the heck out of your base before looking back. Creepers love to surprise you right outside your house. If you have enough axes or axe usage, kill an animal or two. Gather more wood, but don't run out of axe usage completely before chopping it. At this point, you can go back to your day 1 base, or explore until dusk and build a new one wherever you end up. After surviving this far, you should definitely start using storage chests. Storage chests are good for when you die and eventually wander back to this place on some subsequent respawn or trek (may be a very long time from now). Try to store a few tools (or at least an axe) and anything with little use that is filling up inventory space (lilly pads, piles, rotten flesh, etc.). You've done good so far. Doing this many times over the course of deaths and respawns will create a network of available storage chests to find and hopefully avoid punching trees in the long run.

After the second day, pre-mechanical survival is pretty free-form. You'll want to use furnace and logs for light until you find coal to make torches. You will need to do some considerable mining before getting enough iron nuggets to make the two ingots required for a hoe.

Sustainable Food

Since animals do not re-spawn, Hunger become a major threat to the player.

1. Fishing: For Bait use spider eyes, rotten flesh, Creeper Oysters, and Bat Wings. Best Times to Fish are dawn, dusk, full moon, or rain. Fishing is less effective at night.
2. Chickens are a good source of indirectly renewable food. If you find pumpkins, their seeds are the easiest early game food/lure for chickens, and once you have a hoe, you can easily start a pumpkin farm. From there, find a chicken, trap it, feed it and wait for it to poop out an egg. Throw it at the wall, floor or whatever, and you'll get either a raw egg (cook to avoid food poisoning) or a baby chicken out of it. Obviously, keep doing that until you have a chicken farm, and you will then have a pretty good renewable food source.
3. Mushrooms: In addition, you can try looking for brown mushrooms and start a farm for those underground. Adding three per raw egg will give you a raw mushroom omelette to cook and boost the value of your food source. Farming mushrooms is considerably slower and requires more space than traditional farming. It does not, however, require water, dirt or light.
4. Cow Milk: Craft shears to cut tall grass which will allow you to herd cows and sheep. Cows can be milked as long as they have tall grass to eat. Milk plus Raw Eggs equals scrambled eggs.

Beginning To Mine

Once you have a stable base with a renewable food source and a bunch of torches or Jack o'Lanterns, you should try exploring caves and mineshafts underneath or near it. Your main aim is to light your way down as far as possible, hopefully finding gold, diamonds and redstone. Due to Hardcore Striated Stone, it is not fiesable to dig your own mine in the beginning. Instead look for existing deep cave systems or a bedrock trench at your first source for redstone and diamonds. Once you have these, you can move up the tech tree.

Alternate Technique: FC mentioned on the forums a good alternative to branch mining is to hit the 2nd layer of stone then dig a long hallway just above it. Listen for water or monsters which will indicate a 2nd layer cave system, then carefully make an opening into the cave system. This cave system will most likely be a deeper system than surface caves - and it is much safer than trying to go down a trench/ravine.

Hemp Processing

Ok, in your first real stage with this mod you will get your first look at Hemp, a Hand Crank, and a Mill Stone. Step number one is to put together an iron Hoe (since you can't craft wood or cobblestone one) and start tilling a large tract of grassland for hemp seeds. Once you have 10+ Seeds go ahead and plant them at a good handy location with a fence around to keep out the pesky wandering animals. Remember that the soil needs to be hydrated!

Now move on to making and preparing your Hand Crank and Mill Stone.

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Gear	Shafts and Wooden Plank

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Hand Crank	Shafts, Cobblestone and Gear

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Mill Stone	Stone and Gear

Since hemp has a VERY long growth time here are some objects you will need soon that you can go get while waiting for more hemp: Gratuitous amounts of wood, a steady food source while you build up, and finding wolves are VERY important activities that will help you progress not only through the early game but also help propel you through the midgame. On this list, however, food is by far the most important of the three, and also the hardest to sustain. The wolves will be put to good use later on. Put them in a corner and forget about them for now.

Now, back to your hemp Farm. Hemp has several growing stages, the first 3/4 of which occur in the first block with the final "ripe" stage being the appearance of a second block of hemp on top of the initial plant. Optimally, you should not cut the entire plant down, but instead harvest the top portion of the plant as it grows (somewhat similar to sugar cane), because the top of the plant regrows far faster than the whole. Once you get some hemp from the plants you can take it over and throw it in your mill. Place the hand crank on the ground next to the mill and hold down the right mouse button.... for a very long time. To make a windmill(your first mechanical power source) you will need 24 fabric, each fabric consisting of 9 hemp fibers. Each hemp makes 4 fibers, so you need a total of 216 hemp fibers or 54 hemp PLUS one Rope for every axle you'll use (Usually around 10), each rope using 6 fibers. At the slow rate of a hand crank it takes quite a while to get all the fiber you need. You can grind multiple millstones at the same time to double your grinding rate, although that will make you twice as tired. Be careful and keep an eye on your food bar while you crank.

Once you have 216 Hemp Fibers (3.5 stacks approximately), you can move on to the next stage!

Windmill

Goals for this stage are to build a Windmill, Axles, and Gearboxes, and bring power to your mill without standing there hand cranking it.

Before you go any further you can watch this video of Mechanical Power, especially the section from 5:50 to ~8:00 that explains how gearboxes and axles work (you may want to turn your sound down a lot before you hit play. You've been warned!)

[Tutorial]Better than Wolves 101 #2 Mechanical Energy & Hemp : How to start, how to use on YouTube

The recipes for the devices you need for this stage are:

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Fabric	Hemp Fiber

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Sail	Wooden Planks, Fabric

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Wind Mill	Sail

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Gear Box	Wooden Planks, Gear, Redstone Latch

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Axle	Wooden Planks, Rope

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Rope	Hemp Fiber

Keep in mind that gear boxes and axles will become the basis of all mechanical power systems you will construct in the future. You should make lots of them, especially when you start automating things.

Now, to build a functioning windmill you will need around 5 gearboxes to bring the power down to ground level and approx 20 axles. Another option would be to connect the millstone straight to the windmill (using 1 gearbox and 2 axles), although it is useful to bring the power to the ground/floor level if you want to build more mechanical contraptions there. You will probably want to build a structure to house the windmill as well. Windmills take up a huge amount of space; they are 13x1x13 (LxWxH). So any tower you build to house it must be at least 10 blocks high. The windmill is set up by placing an axle over the edge of your tower, turning it with a right click with empty hands so that it points out and away from the wall (unless it's already pointing in the right direction), and right clicking with the windmill in hand on the axle. The windmill should be placed. If you get an error message, you should make sure the 6 blocks above, below and to the sides of the windmill aren't taken. Remember - even torches and vines can stop you from placing the windmill. You will then run the axles back to your gearbox and down and away to your mill. NOTICE: Every axle can only transport power up to a length of 3 blocks. Placing more axles will just break them when the device is powered.

Leather Processing

Remember back when we said it would be very handy to get some cows and wolves together for later? This is later. Things you will need to start this stage are: a productive wheat farm (or just a decent supply of wheat), cows (at least 2, or else you won't be able to get more), a pack of wolves (two would be a minimum), at least 1 netherrack (probably want to grab glowstone and soul sand while you are there, and way more than 1 netherrack (up to 9), that's just the minimum) 7 iron, a bone, and a bucket of water. This stage is very short and simple once you get all the materials, the only new device is the Cauldron.

Now, put a block of Netherrack and ignite it. Above the flames (exactly 2 blocks above the Netherrack) there should be a Cauldron. It is very recommended to place 9 blocks of Netherrack (in a 3X3 formation, with the Cauldron above the center), because that will greatly increase the speed of the Cauldron.

You have successfully created a Cauldron. You can use it to heat many different food items at once, unlike the Furnace, and it is also capable of creating other things. Also, any items that are thrown into it will get inside. That means you can put it in the bottom of your traps, farms and toilet to effectively store items.

Now, farm some leather from your cows, feeding them wheat to breed, and thinning the herd as they mature. Simultaneously breed your wolves (feed them raw meat till they get hearts over their heads, while they aren't sitting) and once you have around 10 have them sit down in a little area and feed each one, beef or any other meat besides rotten flesh. Just sit around and wait. They will poop out dung, which you need to collect (be careful with that, you don't want to spill it). Once you have a few Leather pieces go over and put it in your mill at the base of the windmill from earlier. It gets processed into Scoured Leather, once you have that put it and the dung into the cauldron. Wait a few seconds and voila: Tanned Leather!

!Tanned Leather | align="center"| Scoured Leather,
Dung,
2 Jungle Bark or
3 Spruce Bark or
5 Oak Bark or
8 Birch Bark
8 Blood Bark |

Tanned leather is really your next step in building devices, much like hemp fiber, and will be used in a LOT of your upcoming stages, as such it is very important and you will probably want to maintain occasional hemp and leather processing as you go about the next few stages. Since you cannot yet fully automate anything.

Wood Processing

This stage has some very easy goals. You will first need to place your new tanned leather on a crafting table and grab some straps. Then construct a belt to use in making your first saw. Immediately after that you will be able to create a Hopper, and then the world of automation is busted wide open. Recipes used in this stage:

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Cut Tanned Leather	Tanned Leather Shears

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Strap	Cut Tanned Leather Shears

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Belt	Straps

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Saw	Iron Ingots, Gears, Belt and Wooden Planks

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Hopper	Wooden Sidings, Gears, Wooden Pressure Plate, Wooden Corner

First build the saw, then take it over next to your mill at the base of your windmill. Now run another axle out of one of your gearboxes and into your saw. To use the saw, place a block of wood in front of it, and it should be cut down into 2 pieces of wood called Panels. You can also cut a panel to get an even smaller one (1/4 of a wooden block) called Moulding. You can further cut the Moulding into Corners (1/8 of a wooden block). You can also cut corners into gears which is a very efficient way to make them. Continue until you have all of the blocks you need for the Hopper (2 panels, 2 gears, 1 corners). Hoppers are used to collect and sort things that pass over them. Using a combination of hoppers and water flows, and in some cases such as the nether, you will use pistons to automate all of your farm collection areas easily, and with more clever work you can automate just about anything in the game.

Hibachi + Bellows

After much thought and planning, the next section is going to be very short and really not accomplish very much because this is simply a needed step on the way to pottery. First step in this stage is to collect a lot of netherrack. 216 is again the magic number needed to make the 9 Hibachi that will be needed for our Kiln. Once you have 216 Netherrack you will need to place them in your mill and grind them down into Ground Netherrack. After that they will need to be dropped onto(hint hint, first semi automatic opportunity here) a hopper that has soul sand in the filter slot and Hellfire Dust will appear on top of the hopper in the place of the ground netherrack. It is important to note that you will need to run mechanical power to the side of the hopper you are using to filter the ground netherrack or your hopper will overload on the souls being filtered out(which are invisible) and explode, spawning a very bad friend. Hellfire dust is then placed in your Cauldron and 8 dust turns into 1 Concentrated Hellfire. Add an Element, some stone, and a redstone and you get a hibachi. You need 9 of those.

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Concentrated Hellfire	Hellfire Dust

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Element	Blaze Powder, Redstone Dust, Hemp Fiber
Element	Blaze Powder, Redstone Dust, String

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Hibachi	Concentrated Hellfire, Stone, Element, Redstone Dust

Hibachi are actually very easy to use. All you need to do is run redstone power to them, and they create fire. If you are like me and simply leave them burning all the time then the easiest way to do this is to place a redstone torch immediately below each hibachi. The next piece you will need to complete your preperation for building a kiln is your Bellows. This is very easy to make and I will simply show you the pattern and move on to the next stage.

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Bellows	Wooden Sidings, Tanned Leather, Gears and Belt

Ok, once you have at least one hibachi (though 9 is optimal) and a bellows in your inventory you are ready for the next stage.

Pottery

The pottery process is started with at least one but preferably several Turntables. When a turntable has mechanical power supplied to the bottom it rotates the block on top of it at varying speeds controlled by the indicator on the side of the turntable. Right clicking with empty hands will change to a slower rotate speed.

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Turntable	Sidings, Stone, Clock, and Gear

Your first step is to create 8 clay blocks. Then place the clay block on top of a turntable that is powered by an axle. It would be very handy to have a nearby lever that turned on and off the gearbox nearest to your turntable so as to stop the turning at the correct stage of the clays' shaping into Unfired Pottery. As a clay block turns on a turntable it goes through 4 stages that become the following items if placed in a kiln: Crucible, Planter, Vase, and Urn. For now you will need to stop the turntable at the first stage and collect the item once for a crucible, then go to the last stage for 7 urns.

Now we need to build a Kiln with the hibachi underneath and the bellows to stoke it. Your Hibachi are placed in a 3x3 square much like your netherrack under your cauldron but with 9 redstone torches under the hibachi. You will then take at minimum 4(but more makes it look better) brick blocks and place them as shown in the picture below. One block above the hibachi.

The kiln (on the right) with hibachis underneath it.

Your bellows must be placed against the center and one block above your hibachi facing the fire. Then you need to run mechanical power to the back of the bellows. Now power needs to be alternated to the bellows for it to expand then contract, the easiest way to do this is to use a turntable with redstone torch on the block above it. I'll leave the rest for you to figure out.

Now you have your kiln, to fire your unfired pottery from the turntables above you simply need to place the block in the center of your bricks and wait a few seconds. If nothing happens make sure you have your kiln only one space above your lit hibachi and that your bellows has alternating mechanical power to keep it expanding and contracting. Also check that your bellows is facing the right direction :P.

To move to the next stage you simply need to fire your 7 Urns and 1 Crucible.

Soulforged Steel and Anvil

Your first step in acquiring steel, along with the more advanced blocks that come with it, is placing a urn under a hopper with a soul sand filter, BE SURE THE HOPPER IS POWERED! Else you will get a bit of a surprise, along with a broken hopper, after placing 8 souls of the damned into the urn, place the urn into a crucible with some extract of carbon (coal dust), an iron ingot, and soul flux, like so

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Soulforged Steel	Soul Flux Coal Dust Soul Urn Iron Ingot

now you have your first soul forged steel ingot, now repeat 6 more times, then craft them into an anvil, like so:

Ok, now that you got an Anvil, you can now use the 4x4 crafting grid, for stuff like block dispensers and the like

Rendering

now you may be asking "why can't I make tools from steel?" the answer is quite simple, really, the shafts that you use normally are too weak to make steel tools out of, you need something tougher, such as a Haft, which is made like so:

Now you may be wondering what that orange stuff in there is, it's Glue, which is made from rendering leather. You may be asking "how do I turn leather into glue?" it's quite simple really, all you need is a cauldron and a fire. Now you may be asking why it doesn't work, well you know the bellows you made earlier? Now it's time to use them again, the fire needs to be hotter in order to render items down, and I'm pretty sure you know how to use those bellows... I hope.

Rest to be completed later -- slango20