What's the best way to start the Crash Landing modpack?

With the new Hardcore Questing Mode (HQM), numerous modpacks have surfaced, including Crash landing.

I've seen both popular and less popular YouTubers start "Let's Plays" on Crash Landing, probably because of the similarities it shows to Agrarian Skies (a hugely popular modpack).

Crash Landing is a situation where your ship has crash landed on a dust covered planet and you have to battle both dehydration and overheating to survive (among other things).

Most people, at the start of a Crash Landing play-through, go outside and build a wall, or dig a moat, to cover their crashed ship. The problem with this method is that working outside rapidly increases your core temperature and dehydration rate.

I was wondering if a smarter move would be to start your base underneath your ship, thus avoiding the dangers of outside.

Obviously the dust would fall down, but if you build your base under the solid blocks of your ship, it's likely that the dust wouldn't reach you.

Also, since you're technically inside, your heat increases at a very slow rate and you dehydration is also slower. At night you might cool off, but then you can build a furnace or torch to keep you warm (which are both easy to acquire).

Am I missing something important or is the best survival method by and large just a matter of personal preference?

I haven't checked any of the source code so I don't know which factors affect the rate at which your character overheats but, logically, building an underground base in the desert seems like a more logical thing to do than just building a wall open to the desert sun.

Graphical answers with formulas and facts will be highly appreciated.

On EnviroMine numbers

From what I can tell, both from play experience and from reading through the EnviroMine configs, shade isn't configured to provide any base relief from the heat. (EnviroMine supports it, but isn't configured that way.) However, the extra heat penalty from wearing metallic armor only occurs when in the sun -- not that you'll be acquiring metallic armor during the first few days. So no, as much as it makes sense thematically, it doesn't seem to help to make a covered/underground base.

The camelpack should be worn at all times, except maybe while exploring the city where extra defense is particularly useful. In addition to efficient hydration, it actually has a 0.95 heat multiplier during the day, and a 1.05 heat multiplier at night. Similarly, each piece of diamond armor has 0.9 / 1.1 heat multipliers, though diamonds are very hard to come by early game. Almost every other armor with defensive value heats you up during the day -- though notably, armored jetpacks do not. Also, I believe invar armor is still incorrectly configured to not heat you up, though steel has been fixed to be quite hot, with a 1.2x multiplier and a +3 increment per piece. You can find all this info in the CrashLanding\minecraft\config\enviromine directory and subdirectories. In particular, see the "MyCustom.cfg" for most of the environmental block data, like furnaces and fire.

I've never had any problems with getting too cold at night, even when hanging out in an artificial snowy area I've built. I suspect that you can't get hypothermia in this pack unless you really try to.

I think I've only ever hit "heat stroke" levels when I accidentally let my camelpack get empty. The constant sipping from your camelpack keeps your temperature below critical levels in almost any situation -- you just go through the water a lot faster when in a hot environment.

The biggest problem with heat is not actually lava and pyrotheum, since you spend so little time standing close to those, but instead the machines you make. Furnaces, generators, most MFR machines, and even torches put out a lot of heat. (Sadly, they put out the heat even when they're off -- and even the ultra low energy survivalist generator puts out a ton of heat.) However, this only affects you if you're within a 5-block radius. Early on, designate one part of your ship as the hot area (I use the cockpit) and stick your furnace, generator, crucible, etc in there. Don't stand around there unless you're actively interacting with the machines.

Once you have 4 glowstone dust and a flint, make a glowstone block and a flint saw and cut the glowstone block down into 32 glowstone nooks -- these are brighter than torches and put out no heat. (EDIT: As pointed out by airtonix below, glowstone nooks have been disabled in the final version of Crash Landing. I believe the most resource-efficient heat-free light source is now large glowstone bricks, which take 4 glowstone blocks and 1 stone bricks to make 8 glowstone brick blocks. These can be harvested with a pickaxe without shattering.)

And finally, once you've secured more of an area around your base, move all the heat-generating machines off to a corner of your base that you don't hang around in.

And I'm not sure if you were looking for more than just enviromine numbers, but in the spirit of the title question:

On general early game survival tips

Rush the first few quests. For instance, as soon as you get your one block of dirt, you can craft it into a dirty water bottle, turn that in for a clean water bottle and a new block of dirt, and then turn in the clean bottle for a cold water bottle. If you get too hot from working near the pyrotheum (perhaps by doing the day-1 cobble gen strategy), you can drink a cold water bottle to help you cool back down.

Regardless of whether you're going to set up a pyrotheum-based day-1 cobble gen, dig a trench around the 6 striped yellow blocks at the entrance to your ship. 3 deep and 2 wide will be enough to safely hold everything but spiders. (It needs to be 3 deep so giant skeletons can't shoot you from inside.) Harvest some of the dark glass from inside the ship (easily done by hand) and build a ceiling directly over the striped platform, to keep spiders off your head. Fill 2 of the 3 columns of the doorway with dark glass as well. Finally, if you have enough wood to spare, build trapdoors and use them to make a bridge over the pit. When night falls, open up the trap doors, and occasionally poke your head outside to lure zombies and skeletons into the pit trap. (They try to walk across the trap doors and fall in.) Just be wary of spiders, some of them will be small enough to fit through your door. In the morning, give things a moment to burn up -- but the pit will be full of creepers, and if any of them explode, all the drops are destroyed. Head to your cockpit, break through the glass, and walk north far enough for the creepers to despawn, then walk back and pick up all the mob drops. The bones in particular are really useful during the first few days, providing both bonemeal and soup stock. (As a rule of thumb, if you open up the large-view map, set the zoom level to 0.5x, and walk until the ship disappears off the south end of the map, you've walked far enough.)

On the first day, in addition to harvesting some wood, try to gather enough dust to be able to spend most of the first night sifting. (I like to clean up the front of the ship so I can see clearly when I need to bust out in the morning.) The things you want most from the sifter early on are iron dust and more bonemeal. Your early iron should go to: shears, survivalist generator, and cutting board. (And possibly a bucket for setting up the cobblegen, but I recommend using a clay bucket for that, rather than waiting until you have 3 iron to spare. Clay can be found by the water leak outside your ship.)

Shears get you leaf blocks which can be transposed for water just as well as saplings, but are much easier to get in abundance. Also, shears have been given a chance to drop bonus saplings/apples, and juicing leaf blocks in the transposer has a chance to give saplings, so you don't have to worry much about running out of saplings the way you might expect.

The survivalist generator allows you to power the transposer without being reliant on the batteries (flux capacitors) found in the ship's strongboxes. Not only is it crucial to get that power source set up before the batteries run out, but any juice leftover in the batteries can be used to charge up jetpacks. This is the only way to charge a jetpack before you've completed midgame and can build an energetic infuser. (Edit: It's been pointed out that Tuberous Flux Capacitors are available as an another early-game option for charging your jetpack. You just need to kill enough zombies to get a potato, plant it and grow some more, and then you can create as many potato batteries as you want.) For powering the survivalist generator, use a piece of charcoal -- or better yet, a charcoal block. A single charcoal will burn for about 24 minutes, while a charcoal block will burn for almost 4.5 hours.

The cutting board is one of the cooking implements for Pam's HarvestCraft. There's a quest you probably won't be able to access until day 2 that requires the cutting board (and a few other implements, which only require stone and wood) and rewards you with a pot. Completing the quests in that corner of the quest book guides you through how to make some basic soups, and gives you a rice seed, that you can use to start up your initial farm. Soups are a good early way to keep your diet varied enough to avoid diminishing returns.

Early on, any time you harvest a crop, you should left-click it (ie, punch it). This gets you extra seeds as compared to harvesting by right-click. This lets you expand your farm faster, complete the 10 rice seeds quest faster, and have leftover seeds for seed soup. (I don't know why it's configured that way, seems silly to me.)

Once you have some glass (get sand from hammering cobble twice), build a tank for your fluid transposer to output into. This way you can both store more fluid, and also bottle up the fluid by simply right-clicking it on the tank, rather than having to put them through the transposer flipping modes back and forth and waiting. The copper flavor of Thermal Expansion's portable tank is the earliest one you can build -- 1 copper and 4 glass, it holds 8 bottles worth. Later you may want to upgrade to OpenBlocks tanks and eventually a drum. (Note that filling containers from an OpenBlocks tank causes the item to disappear from your inventory until you try to move it around -- just a visual bug, but it can be confusing.)

Once you have a proper cobblegen (lava, not pyrotheum based), build a transfer node and attach it to the generated block of cobble. Use the extra transfer pipes to pipe it a safe distance away from the lava and into a chest or JABBA barrel. The transfer node acts as a ridiculously fast cobble generator when used in this way.

The needlegun is awesome. Accurate, long-range, hinders endermen teleportation, and you can refill the ammo canisters using arrows and gunpowder -- but you can't build new ammo canisters until you've got rubber trees, so be careful not to lose any. (They pop out in front of you whenever the gun empties; I've had them fall into monster filled trenches once or twice.)

Whether you made the pyrotheum stonegen or not, block off the pyrotheum just before the first night falls. This is most easily done by climbing atop the ruined engine from behind and dropping dust. Otherwise, all night long you'll have creepers wandering into the pyrotheum, which causes super explosions that will damage you even through the walls of your ship. Longer-term, your options for dealing with the pyrotheum are: 1) Use a clay bucket to pick it up, which will transform it into regular lava. This is apparently intentional, though it feels like a glitch to me. As with moving actual lava, the clay bucket will be destroyed when you pour the lava out. 2) Use an iron bucket to move it somewhere safe, and place your Ex Nihilo crucibles over it. It will melt items in the crucible at 0.7mb/t -- fully 3.5x faster than lava. This is the route I strongly recommend.

If you chose the easy route, you get a free sync shell constructor and a leadstone energy cell to power it. Place the sync shell constructor inside your base -- make sure that the door is oriented somewhere that's not blocked off -- and right click it. (This will damage you slightly.) Place the leadstone energy cell such that it can power the shell constructor. Only once the clone is fully built (takes a few minutes) will you be safe from permadeath. If you die, all your items will be placed in an OpenBlocks gravestone, and you'll respawn at the shell constructor. Immediately re-log to fix an EnviroMine glitch, and then start a new clone being built. DO NOT TRY TO RUSH YOUR CORPSE. Your items are safe, but you are vulnerable, until the new clone is completed. When your energy cell isn't busy building you a clone, you can use it to power the fluid transposer, which makes the survivalist generator less urgent to build.

Once you have some quartz dust, build a grind stone and a wooden crank. This allows you to make certains alloys pre-smeltery, like electrum and invar, by grinding down the component ingots, combining the dusts, and re-smelting the blended dust. It can also be used to convert cobblestone straight into sand in a slightly less annoying way than hammering it twice.

You can cook rotten flesh into leather. I recommend building a second camelpack, and always keeping a spare full one in your inventory. You can also build an OpenBlocks glider for quick low-tech travel over long distances.

The city is crazy dangerous. Don't go there without a sync shell clone back at your base -- unless, perhaps, you're rushing it early and don't mind possibly losing your world.

EDIT: I believe that the final version of the CrashLanding pack changed the new-world start time from mid-morning to early-afternoon. This will make it nigh-impossible to do everything you'd like to do on the first day. I'd recommend just getting one or two trees harvested, dig the trench outside your ship, and gather a bit more dust for the night's sifting. The rest of your "day 1 tasks" will have to wait for day 2. On the plus side, you'll hopefully have a few mob drops that much earlier.

On Day 1 cobblestone

As mentioned elsewhere, it's possible to get cobblestone in the first few minutes of starting the map, by digging trenches to bring the two "engine leaks" (water and pyrotheum) together. The pyrotheum will convert several flowing water blocks into stone and a moment later light the tops on fire. If you want to do this, I strongly recommend watching one of the videos I link at the bottom of this post, but here's a text description: exit your ship, turn left, and immediately dig down two; turn left again, and dig one block forward, underneath your ship. Turn left and dig until the water flows into the tunnel, then back up, placing enough dust blocks back on the bottom of your tunnel to bring the water as far as it can. Turn the other way, towards the pyrotheum, and start digging a path forward-3-up-1 until you reach the pyrotheum, then back up and lower the path as necessary to get the two fluids to meet. Meanwhile, use Tinker's Construct to make a bone pickaxe from your starting bonemeal. (Two bonemeal and one pattern for the head, 1 stick and one pattern for the tool binding, and 1 stick for the tool rod. Sticks don't actually have to be converted into tool rods, so you can skip that pattern for now, saving a little bit of wood.)

This path is a bit riskier, and requires you to move really quickly. If you spend too much time on that, you won't get enough wood, saplings, and dust on day 1. So that raises the question: how much cobblestone should you actually gather? Here's everything I think you want cobblestone for, in approximate order of importance:

• 6 for a slab furnace
• 4 for making lava, unless you are going to convert your pyrotheum into lava
• 5 for a transfer node (3 for pipes, 2 for the node itself)

So 15 is the bare minimum to set up the rapid cobblegen transfer node the next day.
(Edit: After trying a few more starts this way, I think getting a transfer node on the first night might require an unreasonable amount of luck sifting redstone dust -- the node requires either 13 redstone dust, or 4 dust and an ender pearl. So depending on your luck sifting, you may decide it's better to leave the transfer node for the second night, and prioritize some of the below tools for the first night.)

• 4 for a watering can, before you run out of bonemeal
• 3 for a juicer
• 3 for a mortar and pestle
• 13 for a survivalist generator
• 2 for a stone hammer

So 40 is the highest you might reasonably want to target, giving all of the above.

• 4+ for glass for tanks
• 5 for a grind stone
• 9*n to make moss balls for your TiCo tools

I think getting this much (58+) is really only viable if you're playing multiplayer, and probably not a good time investment even then. You're better off focusing that time on gathering wood and dust, since once you've set up the transfer node, it is trivial to get all the cobblestone you need.

Note that you'll get some Ex Nihilo stones from sifting dust, which can be crafted 4-to-1 into cobble; so even if you're a bit short of your target when night falls, you may still manage to sift enough stone to craft your desired items during the night -- as long as you gathered enough dust! (Leftover stones can be placed in a crucible to make seared stone, at a horrid 2mb each -- but that's the only way to get seared stone prior to raiding the city.)

And on the topic of moss balls, there are at least 3 different ways to get them:

1. Use 1 iron to build a chisel, then chisel smooth stone into mossy stone bricks. This is pretty cheaty.
2. Fill an Ex Nihilo barrel with water, and place cobblestone around it. The cobblestone will slowly turn into mossy cobblestone, using 100mb of water each. This is the way I recommend, but is slowest.
3. Place cobblestone in a fluid transposer. This will take 250mb of water each, as well as some power, but is faster than the Ex Nihilo method.

On diversifying your plants

Besides quest rewards, there are three main ways to get new crops, and all of them require dirt. So get composting those extra saplings as soon as you can!

1. Sift dirt in the sieve. This can get you a number of seeds at a low drop rate. One of them is grass seeds.
2. Place several blocks of dirt on the ground, and use grass seeds on one of them. Let the grass spread (use the watering can to speed it up). Right-click a mattock on the grass, and the block will be converted back to dirt with a small chance of dropping a crop seed. Be careful not to convert your last grass block, or you'll need more grass seeds. (Note: This only works if the grass isn't too close to flowing water, otherwise it converts the block into farmland.)
3. Once you have a large enough patch of grass, bonemeal the grass. Punch out the tallgrass and fruit saplings that appear, and plant them in appropriate places.

Each of these methods provide different kinds of seeds, so you'll want to use all three.

Note that once you have fruit from a fruit tree, you can graft it onto the appropriate vanilla sapling in the crafting grid to make more fruit saplings. This even works with vanilla apples and oak saplings. Remove the dirt block from the fruit sapling after it grows, as it doesn't need it anymore.

If you're careful, you can crook or shear the unnecessary leaves from the orange tree quest reward to get jungle saplings. These are necessary for the various tropical fruit trees (like more orange trees), and tall jungle trees are a great source of water and wood, though too much of a pain to shear by hand. They also make a great launching platform for your glider, as an alternative to an ugly cobble tower.

Ex Nihilo

Finally, if you're not familiar with Ex Nihilo's mechanics from Agrarian Skies or the like, here's a brief rundown of it:

• Use crooks on leaves to get a higher drop rate of saplings and also some silkworms. In this pack, I only do this on the first day before I have shears.
• Use the sieve to get resources from dust, sand, gravel, dirt, and a few other blocks.
• Use wooden barrels to compost plant matter into dirt. Saplings and leaf blocks are both great for this -- 8 will turn into one dirt.
• Use wooden barrels to make clay. (Though, there are 4 clay blocks by the ship's water leak, so you shouldn't need to do this during the early game.) Fill the wooden barrel with water, then place a dust block in it.
• Use wooden barrels to make witch water, and then soul sand, by placing the barrel near mycelium and filling it with water, then placing a sand in the witch water. Mycelium can be obtained by sifting sand for ancient spores. This is fairly resource intensive, but if you chose hard route, this is pretty much necessary to get the nether quartz you need to make sync cores. (Put the soul sand in the sieve to get nether quartz.)
• Use stone barrels filled with lava to make obsidian (water flowing over the top), end stone (place glowstone into a full barrel), and netherrack (place redstone into a full barrel).
• Use a crucible to make lava. One of the quests walks you through this, but you may want to do this before you actually unlock the quest. 4 cobblestone in a crucible, placed over a heat source (even a torch), will slowly melt into 1 bucket of lava.
• Broken ore, crushed ore, and pulverized ore from Ex Nihilo should be crafted into the respective blocks.
• Use hammers to break resources into other types of resources. For instance, cobblestone can be hammered into gravel, gravel can be hammered into sand, and sand can be hammered into dust. (Not that there isn't plenty of dust on this planet!) You can also hammer the various "ore gravel" and "ore sand" blocks for a chance at bonus resources -- you'll always get at least 4 chunks of the next stage, and possibly more.

Credit where credit's due

Much of this information, I originally gleaned from the following sources:

• Beginner's Guide to Crash Landing
• Cobblegen in five minutes (and the next few videos in the series)
• http://www.reddit.com/r/feedthebeast/comments/2eq0ri/

Here is How i Do My Beginings For Crash Landing.....

-=Days 1-5=-

Day 1=

Collect Wood and Crook most Trees Because of Saplings and Silk Worms.

Tip: Use Silkworms in the First Days of Survival Because Of Diminishing Effects Do Play a Crutial Problem so you get 30 Free Bites before diminishing Starts!

Tip: Go to y=45 And Place Water down Their with a Clay bucket or Iron Bucket.. when you right-Click Bottles you get Dirty Water.

Tip: Dont Get Rid of Pyrotheim.. keep it away but it is useful Mid-Game For Crucibles..

Torch .1 Speed Fire .2 Speed Lava .2 speed Pyrotheim (Flowing) .5 Speed Pyrotheim (Source) .7 Speed!

Your Begining Power Should be a Survivalist Generator! they are The cheapest and Effective Power Until Ender Gen Or Big Reactor! Normally i Fill my Survivalist Generators With Oak Slabs which is Effective Power.

Use Slabs While Cooking it Save Alot Of Wood doing this Way.

These are My Tips!