Post by Vivian on Feb 10, 2023 23:30:14 GMT -5
NFC Guide
(As of NFC v3.5.0)
Introduction
The first and biggest change in NFC resides in the ore and material tier systems. This aspect will affect all other aspects about how you experience NFC. It's as foundational to NFC as the hunger system was to The Adventure Update. Back in Vanilla Beta 1.7.3, there were only 6 ores you could find, Coal, Iron, Gold, Diamond, Redstone, & Lapis. New Frontier Craft adds an additional 26, coming up to a total of 32 ores. At first, this quantity might seem ridiculous and overcomplicated. But in reality, the tier system isn't too difficult to understand. NFC has 6 Tiers, 0-5, each of which is capable of mining up to 1 Tier above itself.
There are several more aspects to NFC that this page doesn't cover, which you can read up on in the rest of the wiki here
Caves
Now, before you so much as start to think about starting off in NFC, there's one very important thing you need to keep in mind. Use the caves. Tool durability is at a much higher premium than in Vanilla during the early game, and many ores aren't available at certain layers. You'll waste a ridiculous amount of tools trying to strip-mine right off the bat. Use caves. They've been changed in NFC to generate near infinitely compared to how they do in Vanilla Beta 1.7.3.
Later in the game, we also highly recommend blast mining using TNT, as we've boosted its strength twofold over Vanilla and made ores impervious to being blown up.
If you'd like a chart on what y levels you can find different ores at, we highly recommend taking a look at this page.
Tier 0
Starting off then, your first two tools, wood and stone, both reside in Tier 0. The only advantage stone offers is a slight speed boost and slightly more durability. Neither are capable of digging up even a stack of material, and the damage they deal as weapons are the same, and pitiful. Tier 0 is the Internet Explorer of NFC, it's only purpose is to let you get something else.
Tier 1
If you want even slightly effective tools, you'll need metal. And for Tier 1, you have a selection of 6 different ones. Aluminum, Bismuth, Lead, Copper, Tin, and Zinc. The differences between them is negligible at this point in gameplay. Use whatever you find to start crafting some better tools. You'll find these ores scattered around near the surface.
Tier 2
Now, you as the player have two options now for moving to Tier 2. The first and most obvious is just to find the tier 2 ores, of which there are 5. Gold, Boron, Nickel, Platinum, and Silver. Gold, Boron, and Nickel have dismal durability but mine incredibly fast, while Platinum and Silver are as slow as Tier 1, but much higher durability. However, this is not the recommended way to get to Tier 2. If you happen to run into these ores, don't hesitate to use them, but there's a better way...
The Brick Oven - An Introduction to Alloys
| Ingredients | Recipe | 8 Fired Bricks* *Smelted Brick Blocks |  |
For the early game, bronze and brass will become your best friends. These are alloys that can be smelted together from Tier 1 resources. This makes them incredibly easy to get and plentiful throughout the world, as the Tier 1 resources are the most common ones in NFC.
| Texture | Product | Recipe | Required Time | Coal : Product Ratio |
 | Brass (6x) | 3 Copper 3 Zinc | 80 Seconds 1:20 1600 ticks | 1 Coal : 6 Brass |
 | Bronze (6x) | 5 Copper 1 Tin | 80 Seconds 1:20 1600 ticks | 1 Coal : 6 Bronze |
Brass will dig around 3 stacks of blocks, while Bronze will dig 2. However, Bronze mines faster than Brass. Whichever one you choose to use it up to your personal preference and what resources are available to you at the time.
Tier 3
There are only three ores that are useful for Tier 3, Silicon, Cobalt, and Iron. Silicon has very little durability, somewhere between Brass and Bronze, but mines as fast as Boron (which is very fast). Cobalt on the other hand mines as slow as brass, but with around 4 times the durability. Iron sits right between the two, with durability and speed between the two.
Chrome also exists in this Tier, but should never be crafted into tools. Always save it for...
Tier 4
Welcome to Tier 4. You've officially reached the mid to late game. Here, durabilities and speeds get large enough that the trends seen in earlier tools really start to flesh out. There are three main materials you'll be dealing with in this tier. Titanium, tungsten, and steel. Titanium is the fastest tool in the entire game by a mile. It shares the durability of cobalt, but outclasses it in speed by a factor of 3.5. If you wanna mine something quickly, use titanium. Now, if you want a tool that'll last, then tungsten is what you're looking for. Tungsten fortunately isn't as slow as cobalt, but it is only slightly faster than bronze. However, the strength of tungsten is in its durability of 1750.
Unlike in Tier 2. The ores do have their objective advantages compared to the alloy. However, the alloy still beats them hand down in its abundance. Steel is crafted out of 7 iron and 1 chrome in a Brick Oven. Finding veins of iron is incredibly hard in NFC, but it spawns in veins several stacks large. If you find one, you'll be set for a long time. Just keep your eyes open for chrome.
| Texture | Product | Recipe | Required Fuel | Coal : Product Ratio |
 | Steel | 3 Iron 1 Anthracite 4 Iron* | 320 Seconds 5:20 6400 ticks | 4 Coal : 8 Steel |
*Iron in Steel recipe can be exchanged for 1 of each...
- Chrome
- Nickel
- Titanium
- Tungsten
Magnet Tools
Silk Touch is a very useful enchantment in modern Minecraft. We personally felt it needed an equivalent in NFC as a resource, and we decided to use magnets for it! Magnet tools also share the more obvious function of being magnetic, with all blocks broken by the tools flying into the players inventory. Stat wise they're a little worse than steel, but their main function is their special abilities, not their raw stats.
Tier 4.5 doesn't technically exist. But it's a helpful construct to understand the position of gems in NFC. Ruby, emerald, sapphire, and onyx have durabilities twice that of steel with the speeds of boron, silicon, and diamond. They're like if you fused the advantages of titanium and tungsten together, although not quite matching those tools in their strengths. All gems share the same stats. Whichever one the player uses is up to their preference and whatever they manage to find (as they're very rare and only spawn in veins of 1). Swords crafted from these resources do twice the amount of damage as the rest from Tier 4, 15 points of damage. This is enough to one hit kill most passive and two hit most aggressive mobs in the game, including other players if they don't have on any armor.
Fun fact! You can skip all the way to Tier 4.5 right at the start of the game. Gems can spawn in the chests of underground dungeons, and if you manage to find one with enough gems in it, you can craft these gems together straight away and skip even wood tools.
Tier 5
Tier 5 is an aspirational and rare goal you can sometimes achieve while mining. It shouldn't be your primary goal, as the amount of time you'd dedicate to finding these resources specifically would be draining. However, if you do find it, welcome to the best tools in the entire game. There's of course diamond right at the top, like it is in Vanilla. It shares most of the stats with gem tools, but with over twice the durability. It's a fantastic tool, and if you get your hands on diamond you should feel extremely lucky. However, diamond isn't the best tool in the game. Far from it.
The best tool in the entirety of NFC is osmium. Osmium tools have a durability of over 10,000, and are almost identical otherwise to diamond and the gems, only being slightly slower in its mining speed. Osmium is rare, you'll almost never find it. But if you do, you've found one of the best resources in the entire game.
Both tools are the only way in NFC v3.5 to deal 20 HP of damage, one hit killing most mobs in the game. It's highly recommended for that purpose
Closing Remarks
There's a lot of information that this walkthrough doesn't touch on that our mod has, and it's highly recommended if you'd like to learn more you browse around the rest of our wiki. This is meant to act as an introduction and explanation on how NFC works. The Tier System is where NFC differs the most from Beta 1.7.3, and therefore was the primary focus of this draft. This will continue to be extended and will eventually be turned into a series on the NFC YouTube Channel.
