Sometimes the vanilla Minecraft tools just don't cut it. Yeah, an axe is great, but having to chop down one tree block at a time gets repetitive. So much time is wasted mining through a cave square by square. What if there were tools that could do more?
Enter Tinkers' Construct. This mod, created by mDiyo and developed by bonusboni and KnightMiner, introduces a variety of tools capable of making your Minecraft life more efficient. Take down entire trees in one blow. Dig up huge patches of ground in seconds. Break down entire walls in caves. But where do you start?
Crafting
Tinkers' Construct is aware of how complicated it can be, and it seeks to mitigate that by providing you with a book - Materials and You. It outlines the beginning steps, which, much like Minecraft, starts with making crafting stations.
Tinkers' Construct starts you off with three unique crafting tables, which require blank patterns to make. With two sticks and two planks, you'll get three blank patterns to work with. Keep in mind that you can never have enough patterns. It's always better to have more than less.
Part Builder
You'll need two blank patterns and two planks to create this table. When using the table, you'll get a list of available parts you can make. Put down a blank pattern and the material you want to use, choose the part you want to build, and you'll have the part.
Tinker Station
You'll need three blank patterns and four blanks from any kind of wood to create a Tinker Station. This is where you'll put your tool parts together and create your very first tool. It may not be anything fancy, but it's a start.
Crafting Station
This acts mostly as a regular crafting table, but with one important difference - it will hold your items if you exit out of it. This is extremely convenient if you need to step away to grab something but don't want to lose the pattern you've made.
Storage
You're going to have a lot of extra materials. Sure, you can use a regular old chest, but what fun would that be? Tinkers' Construct offers three different types of storage
Part Chest
Extra parts left over? It happens. Use a Part Chest to keep easy track of them. No one wants to waste time going through a dozen different chests trying to find what they want.
Tinkers' Chest
This is something more akin to a regular chest, but you can use it to store items you want to keep specifically for your tinkering needs.
Cast Chest
This is a convenient place for keeping all the casts you make for your smelter. It creates a slot for each cast, and the casts stack, making for very convenient storage.
As an added bonus, if you put the tables and chests next to each other, you can easily switch between them and pull from the inventory without leaving the table you're at.
The Smeltery
A Smeltery is one of the most convenient things offered by Tinkers' Construct. It will melt any ore, giving you two ingots as opposed to the one you'd get from a furnace, and you can use different casts to get different shapes (weapon parts, ingots, nuggets, etc.), plates, or blocks. And it just takes a few simple blocks.
You'll need a total of 19 seared brick blocks. Create a 3x3 base with a one-block high 5x5 wall around it (but don't fill in the corners). When that's done, replace one of the bricks with a Smeltery Controller, another with a Seared Tank, and a third with a Seared Drain. Automate the entire process by sticking a lever on the drain and a hopper and chest underneath the table. And remember to put a roof on your smelter - if something falls into it, you'll end up with a layer of blood.
Smelter sizes can vary - you can make them wider or taller to get more smelting done more quickly.
New Materials
Tinkers' Construct introduces new wood and stone, as well as two new ores - cobalt and ardite. These materials can mix with other materials (from vanilla Minecraft or another mod) to create alloy metals.
The resulting metals can be used like any other to make weapons, tools, and armor. For the purposes of starting out, you won't want to get too wrapped up in the alloys, but they're something to keep in mind as you progress.
Basic Tool Creation
You have your smelter, you've made your parts, it's time to put a tool together! Start basic, and make a stone axe. You'll need an axe head, a tool binding, and a stone tool handle. Head on over to your Tinker Station, select the axe from the menu on the left, and put your pieces in. And there's your first axe! Name it if you want, and head off to start chopping down trees.
Note that this is only tier-one crafting. As you progress, you'll learn how to make a Tinkers' Anvil and better tools, learn about adding modifications to your tools, and mixing and matching metals to get the best possible tools. This is just the beginning of many great opportunities. And when you're feeling more confident, you can start adding on more compatible mods and experimenting with new kinds of metal and smeltery setups.