Permafrost Mod: Tips and Interesting spawn points

 I love difficult modpacks, and Permafrost certainly delivers with this concept.  The recent updates change the environment so that you spawn in a neverending "whiteout" situation with visibility limited to a great degree.  I recommend that you set up the world and have it spawn a chest at starting... not that you'll actually be able to recover that chest every single time (or even half the time) but it does give you a small edge.

TIPS: Do hunt down the glowing mushrooms in the caves.  They can be made into soup (thankfully because you'll be short on food in the early game) - two different kinds of mushrooms and a bowl is all you need.  And don't neglect the Botania branch of the quest book.  One of the early flowers you make (Bellethorne) is a perfect mob-killer.  Set up two of them near your home, feed them with a mana pool, and those horrible tiny zombies will drop dead before you do.

Trees WILL grow in the storm.  Plant them near your base, stick a candle next to them, and voila!  Tree after a bit.  This saves you from the pain of trying to grow them underground.

The first thing you should craft when you get iron is shears.  You will want to cut and plant cave roots since they are one of the few sources of food early on.  Also, check the trees along the river banks - mulberries are food!

Doors keep out SOME mobs - but not all.  Gates are safer.

Crops will grow if you put glass two blocks above them.

I turn on cheats so I can use the /locate command.  A lot of times it works very badly ("locate mineshaft" can produce some odd results in Permafrost.  /locate village works just fine.

I get lost easily in the whiteout conditions -- my solution is to tunnel somewhere and pop up, like Bugs Bunny taking a wrong turn.  Most of my wrong turns involve mobs landing on my head.

The caves are huge, and some are very lovely.  I adore the glowing crystal caves and the big mossy caves - if you can find one of these, it has a lot of resources.  Also be on the lookout for smoke in the mines; this leads to a campfire (and mobs) with some chests (and sometimes a Mimic) and a few useful things.

The Wandering Trader may come wandering by.  He's invisible and he won't trade with you but you can steal his llamas with a leash.

The more survivable areas are those close to a village and those close to a forest with mushrooms.  Sugar cane (for making paper, which you WILL need) is difficult to find, particularly with every mob within 60 blocks (or so it seems) hunting you.

This one's a favorite.  Some big disadvantages (resource poor) but you spawn near a big roadway.  Underneath it's not snowing and you don't get cold.  Great for building the Fortress of Survivability.  -1736735879090148283

Here's a world where you spawn reasonably close to a small village:  -8002173506394758459

Minecraft Bloody Bones Interesting Worlds

Spawn point close to village in a very food-rich environment
4142181077520164431

Spawns close to a hilly area with a nice sized village
7442683806483925322

Near big village but watch out for quicksand... and a monster spawn point near the well which may be a stone circle with very hostile witches or a spawn point for big angry ents.
-254666605561416678

In spruce forest.  Black obsidian tower and town near spawn point, but beware of things lurking under trees
-2468359728894326462

Mom Plays Minecraft: Rogue Like Dungeons - the Between Lands

General Notes (specific things about each dimension are in different posts.)

I think that this one has been my favorite modpack so far.  Although it's quest based, the idea really is aimed toward exploration and there are some interesting rewards for exploring.  T

Inventory Pets really shine in this modpack.  I found I was constantly using the Enderman (teleports when health is low), Anvil (repairs equipment over time, including armor), and Ocelot (see in the dark... like... dungeons.)  The speed run of the chicken was something else I used frequently.  Chest pets (and double chest pets) are wonderful storage for your travels though you do have to keep feeding them planks or they won't open for you.

I do recommend (particularly for the novice) setting the game play to allow cheats for two reasons.  Firstly, there's no mechanic for recovering your inventory after death and that's a pain and the gravestone pet doesn't always work (the command /gamerule keepInventory true seems to work, though).  Secondly, in order to get to one of the worlds to explore, you have to find a "druid circle" and they're not very common.  You can travel via glider or via airship (if you can get that to work) but it's easier to enter creative mode and fly until you find the circle, put down a marker, and teleport to that area after you set the game back on normal mode.

Starting in the R.A.D. world for the first time means doing all the first time stuff (beating up trees, making rock pickaxes, and so forth.)  Once you get basic tools, start looking for single trunk oak trees in areas where there are other types of trees (spruce forests, for instance.)  There are chests hidden in the tops of these oak trees that contain an inventory pet, gemstones (usually), nuggets, leaves, and lots and lots (lots!) of melon slices.

After you've found a few chests, you will want to find cows (leather) and sheep (wool) to kill.  Four wool plus four leather plus a chest is the basic recipe for a backpack and you're going to need a lot of those.

My advice would be to wait until you find a village to set up a permanent house.  Some of the villagers will trade useful things (Eye of Ender) and it's easier to hand over an emerald for something than to go kill a dozen or more mobs and hope the random number gods favor you.  There are traveling vendors as well.

Wolves are very common, and I suggest creating a pack to follow you down into dungeons.  It cuts down on aggravating deaths.

There are only a few basic ores in this mod... so you won't have to worry about making bronze or any of the alloys.  Your basic mine-able blocks are diamond, emerald, coal, redstone, and iron (other materials are rarely found.)  These are all fairly abundant; one of the best places to look for those ores are on the fourth level of what I call the "homely house" dungeons (yes, a reference to Elf-Lord Elrond's abode in THE HOBBIT.)  The fourth level will also have magma blocks (which you will need) and nether quartz -- no need to make a nether portal to get those.

Not all the vegetation is friendly.  Feather blossoms will loft you high into the air -- and then drop you.  Purple fade leaf flowers will teleport you to random places.  I've lost a number of horses when I ran over those flowers.  Cinder blooms will set you on fire.  There are thornvines... and plants in the jungle that will try to eat you, just to keep it interesting.


Next up:  the wizard option

Mom Plays Minecraft: Descent to the Core (2nd level gameplay)

I'm going to be honest, here - until you're familiar with all the recipes and mechanics and locations, be prepared to switch into 'peaceful' mode on occasions.  Ores and other resources are in mob-rich areas and often some distance away, and  the bows and arrows that the skeletons use have a considerable knock-back.  If it's your first time in the area, you can die many times just trying to get back to retrieve your gear - and then lose it all in the lava..  It will take more than a Minecraft month to complete the quests; with mobs, it could take darn near forever.

Remember, it's a game.  It's supposed to be fun - not to get you stressed out.

Descent to the Core is best played as a multiplayer game.  If you do it as a singleplayer game (as I do), consider learning to use the "Cheats" module.  They weren't disabled, and it makes gameplay a lot less frustrating when you lose your iron sword and you have to spend a day leveling a pickaxe so you can mine iron.

The /give command and you
The "give" command can give you a lot of useful things.  For example, typing

/give **** book
and
/give **** string  (where **** is your name)

...will give yourself a book and a string.  You can put the two together and get a new copy of the questbook for Descent to the Core.  This is useful, because there are about a thousand different ways to lose that darn questbook, and I've done it a good fifty times.

/give **** 1666 will give you soil to plant your seeds in.

You could theoretically give yourself all the things needed to complete quests, but that's not much fun.


Moving Around
Using the map teleport to get back to your death place is also useful (I generally leave two death points up... one near my "home"and another on one of the big planes.)

Keep a chest near your doorway "out" of your home and supply it with a pick and a sword and armor.  You'll need them to retrieve your gear when you die.

Harvest a lot of saplings.  I grow my trees outdoors (in Peaceful mode) rather than trying to set up a tree nursery.  That ended up being less frustrating.  The Sacred Oaks give you more saplings and wood than you can harvest in an hour.

Hoes and mattocks don't work.  You need fertile soil to grow crops - no preps, just stick the seeds in the ground.  Choose the soybean seed when it comes up, because you'll need milk.

Eight zombie flesh can be smelted into leather and turned into one backpack.


First Steps in Descent To The Core
Once you've survived your arrival and set up a small house, your priority should be to find the large planes with dirt, ore, and gravel resources.  You'll want to save out two stacks of marble and two of limestone because one quest will want them.  Mine any aluminum ore on the way... as your pick upgrades, you will be able to mine some other ores but it takes a lot of digging.

A lot of the items are in chests in dungeons.  You'll do a lot of fighting (or a lot of cheating)

Make lots of chests and if anything odd shows up, store it.  There's probably a quest that will ask for it.

If you lose your initial pickaxe, the command /give **** 5678 will give you a nice ferrous pickaxe that will mine ferrous ore.

Recipes that you may need

Seared Brick: Roast the grout that you got as a reward.
Sand: Two compressed gravel (nine gravel, spread on your crafting table)

Mom Plays Minecraft - Regrowth Modpack

Descent to the Core proved to be frustrating after awhile, so I tried several other "quest/adventure" modpacks that were offered in the Curse interface.

The Regrowth modpack is the one I've liked best so far, though the first time I started it I quit after a few minutes since the regular recipes I was used to didn't seem to work.  After reading some of the items on the Reddit Minecraft subreddit, I felt a little less lost and hit it again.

One thing that I really liked about the Regrowth modpack was the scenario setup - waking up in a bleak desert and trying to make a go of things.  You've got some type amnesia and don't quite remember how things work.  Your adventure book is a bit of help - and if you've ever wanted to learn some of the modpacks (thaumcraft, Mariculture) or explore these interesting mods, this is a good way to do it.

As a new Minecraft player, I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out things since I have experience with only a few modpacks.  The Internet was surprisingly little help.  While there was some information on the Wikis, a lot of it was in videos.  I find it annoying ot have to sit through 20 minutes of a video just to try and find out what fuel to feed the Hobbyist Steam Engine (more often than not, the video didn't actually have what I needed.)

So this blog is just a compilation of notes that I made as I went along.  I started out knowing only basic Minecraft and a bit of Tinker's mods.

In The Beginning:

I made the crafting table, sword, mattock, and shovel (and hid the shovel since the mattock does double-duty) and headed out to get thoroughly lost.  West is a good direction.  Lets you know how long you've got before something wants to add you to the dinner menu.

This is a really bleak landscape and it's easy to get lost.  I got lost lots.  I carried a stack of cracked sand with me (20 high) and when night came, I'd build myself a nice pillar and wait till morning.

THINGS TO LOOK FOR AS YOU EXPLORE:
Stonehenge circles - they're inhabited (often) by one hostile witch - BUT inside the circle is a lot of dirt (that you'll need.)  When digging around the altar, you'll find two monster spawners with witches (use your pickaxe to break them).  Underneath the rock altar is a treasure chest with goodies (some useful, some not) that you can take or leave.

Hobgoblin houses; These guys are neutral (sort of "isolated villagers") and trade - but as with villagers, they often offer trades you can't use - or don't have the currency for.  Help yourself to the cauldron, share the house as a temporary safe space, and if they have a chicken, collect feathers.

Beehives:  you won't be able to collect them until you have lots of cotton for a scoop.  (I'll talk about bees later)

Big Straw Men: These wicker men figures are made up of about 20 bales of hay, each one made up of nine sheaves of wheat.  That's food for quite awhile and seeds for planting.  Collect the flowers and dirt at their feet.  Under one foot is a monster spawner with zombies.

Ruined farmhouses - I didn't find this useful as a base - too limited.  They have a garden with alkaline soil and fence.  Collect the fence to use later.  Down in the basement is a lot of easy wood, the structure is the source of a lot of burned wood (for charcoal) and they very generously have two furnaces that you can help yourself to.

Dungeon - Big structure with flaming pots in front. Once you have metal armor, it's a great place to find treasures (the dispensers make good "hold this stuff that I will need to craft THIS thing" items) and it's a good place to find lots and lots and lots of bones and string.  And when you need that "congealed blood" because you're trying to make a rune that requires slimes or blood, this is the best place to get Rotten Flesh (which you throw in the smelter and turn into blood.)  Rotten Flesh thrown into mana pools also gives leather.  I find these dungeons more fun than the mines in Minecraft.

Finding A Place To Live Make a first base but plan on moving - AFTER you get sugarcane so you can make paper and start crafting maps (no sense in wandering around the landscape only to end up back at the same place.)  Your best final location is on the ocean with lava close and one of those big oil fountains somewhere nearby.   And try to pick someplace with beehives somewhere near.  I avoid islands (not enough resources.)

My strategy was to build a walkway out into the ocean itself and start my build from there.  I put a layer of cracked sand one block down so that all around my house the water is "waist deep."  This is useful if you decide to build a greenhouse room (you don't have to haul in all the water... you just have to set the dirt down.)  I keep it modular (build up, build out in sections that have walls) which seems to keep the mobs down.  I can then place rooms above the water - so when I put down my Petal Apothecary stone construct, I set it up next to a trap door.  When I need water for a flower construct, I just flip open the trap door and haul up a bucket of water.

One of the best advice that I got from another site was to build a composter early so you can mix up fertile soil for your crops.

BOATS: Make the speed boat as soon as you can.  Boats in this mod are extremely unreliable - they might carry you for a day or they might collapse within a minute of you sitting down in it.

Best source of food: fishing.  Use the standard 3 sticks, 2 strings and toss your line out.  Fish will strike within a 30 seconds or less (usually).  Fish in an area of shallow water (or make one in your fortress - hip deep ) because they don't always land in your inventory.  Fishing in shallow water makes it easy to retrieve the fish.

Collect charcoal and craft some of it into blocks.  When you start the process to get diamond seeds, you will need 48 blocks of charcoal and you won't believe how annoying it is to try and get 480 pieces of charcoal together all at once.  Start early.

Start breeding plants early.  Breed sugarcane and then breed mandrakes and dandelions.  It's a rather Byzantine process breeding common flowers to get mystical flowers but it's well worth it even though they don't always cross perfectly the first time.  There are some processes that require 48 petals of one type, and if you're trying to get them by tossing out Floral Fertilizer, you will spend a lot more time and effort on that than if you'd just bred the flowers in the first place.  Ssave at least one seed (but not more than three) of everything - the exception is Experience Seeds (you can make them with seeds from wheat if you have a mana pool...but in the earliest days you may not have one.)

FLOWERS TO GROW:
Breed three Snowbells (so when you have to do the Rune of Winter, you have snow available.)
Create the Endoflame.  Yes, I know you're supposed to get mana from other plants but they have an annoying way of dying after a few days.  The Endoflame sits there until you throw charcoal, coal, or wood at it (I use charcoal and coal) - when fired up, it produces a nice burst of mana.  A field of about 12 plants will give you enough mana to "cook" your runes in less than 3 minutes.
Beegonia - if you've got beehives you'll end up with too many drones.  You can turn an unnecessary drone into useful mana.

Mystical Flowers to grow
You'll need all of them, but the Green, the Black, the Brown, the Cyan are the ones that need more petals.

When you get mutagen, three plants to look for are the Glint Weed, the Sakura Cherry sapling and the Rowan Tree.  These appear as random chances; sometimes you get them on the first try, other times it takes many fertilizings to get one.  Glint Weed living torch (that multiplies when you put it on sand or dirt, so you always have a supply of ready-made torches.) Sakura Cherry is a tree that drops lots and lots of saplings and has a lot of easy to reach salmon-colored wood - it's easy to get a stack of 15 or more from a single tree.  You will also need Rowan saplings later on for potions, so keep on laying down mutagen.

Collect all the trees - I use them as road  and section markers.  You can see some of them from quite a distance - the Citrine Autumnal Tree, the Sakura Cherry and the woods are interesting and colorful

Build lighted trails and lighted waypoints.  The dungeon I was clearing was a day's ride from my base (by boat).  Marking the shoreline with Sakura cherry trees and glint weed (and the occasional flaming Netherrack) made it very easy to find in the dark.

SEEDS
One of the most important things to learn in the Regrowth Modpack is how to breed crops.  Most of them can be simply ignored once you've bred them because they'll be used on only a few occasions.  But there's a group of them that you'll want to breed up to "Perfect Ten" - seeds have three characteristics when you look at them under the analyzer.  Ten is as high as you can get any of them).
* cotton.  You need bags and wool and strings
* Essence Seeds - you won't believe how much of this you'll need.   A group of 9 of the "Perfect ten" seeds was adequate until I got to the advanced seed
* Wheat.  Three "Perfect Ten" seeds are all you will need to keep you fed.
* Coal seeds - bunches of it
* Diamond seeds
* Emerald seeds
* Redstone seeds
* Fire seeds (this makes buckets of lava!)
* Blaze seeds for Blaze rods.  Nine of them makes a wonderful light.

While it's not necessary to breed the metals up to a perfect 10, it's a good idea to at least breed them up to a 4 or better.

Basic plant breeding layout:
Put down dirt in a 3x3 (nine blocks) pattern.  For crossbreeding, use just 3 blocks (one row) in an A-X-B pattern (where A is one plant, X is a blank square with the double crop stick and B is your other plant.

Plant Layout for Raising Seed Levels (basically a 3x3 grid Plus sign with a blank middle):
0 A 0
A X A
0 A 0
...where A is the plant type you want to turn into perfect ten seeds, X is the cross crop sticks, and 0 is anything you want to put there (or put nothing there).  Once the plant at X is growing, dig it up, analyze the seeds, and replace the lowest "A" plant you have.  It takes a number of generations (8 or more) to get your perfect 10, but the effort's worth it.

RUNIC ALTAR:
Hey!  You can spawn cows, sheep, pigs, (but not horses) ocelots, and a lot of other stuff.  You can spawn eggs...but not chickens (however, throwing them at the ground produces the occasional chicken.)  Build a nice, tight, secure barn first because the very first night your lovely creatures are out, zombies will hunt them down and eat them.  If you use a cheat code (I did) to get a horse, use the one to spawn a tame zombie horse with saddle.  Zombies leave it alone.


A HANDFUL OF TIPS FOR THE EARLY PART OF REGROWTH MODPACK
After awhile, I used the minecraft command to keep my inventory when I died.  I'm playing for fun, not for constant hunting of the (sometimes hard to get) stuff that I just found.

ALWAYS make a wooden plate to put behind your door.  That way your doors will automatically close when you walk out or in and keeps monsters out of your house even if you're not paying attention.

SAND - Can be hard to find.  I had been playing for quite awhile before I discovered that if you put a bucket of water next to cracked sand on a crafting table, it turns into regular sand.

PASTURE SEEDS - I worried about getting those.  Turns out that if you make shears (once you have iron) you can cut grass with the shears, throw that grass in a mana pool, and voila!  All the pasture seeds you need.

DIVING QUESTS
...turned out to be difficult.  You'll need your good speedboat.  Look for oysters in a place with lots of shallows.  I had little luck finding gas until I got to the "make incense" quest, when potions/incense of Night Vision and of Gills (seeing in dim places and breathing underwater) made the whole thing much better.

Mom Plays Minecraft - Descent to the Core: Things To Know about Level 2

You've descended towards the core and just landed in the new zone.  Brace yourself - things will start happening fast!

You'll be in one of three places: a little cave, a big dark outdoors place, or an "island" (basically your transporter) in the middle of water.  Wherever you land, the first thing to do is get to safety!

If you're on the darkened plane, dig down several blocks and then dig out very fast.  Be prepared to beat off mobs (luckily, most of them show up on the minimap.)   Mobs will come after you, and if you're on level 80 or above, you get different types of explode-y creepers,

If you're on the island, extend the island using your leaves (you can only extend it one block....try for two blocks over the water and you end up in the water).  On harder modes, use the leaves to build a "fortress wall" because everything out there is coming for you right away.  Once you're safe, build a boat to go to the "mainland" (if you die while doing this, it's almost impossible to retrieve your stuff from the bottom of the pitch-black water environment.  Reset and try again.)

If you're in the cave, bring out a cube of dirt, plant one of your saplings on it, and relax.  You're in the clear for now.  Start digging outward and keep looking on your map for a patch of dark blue, indicating open space and water.  You'll want to head there to make your home.


FIRE!

Torches work differently in Descent to the Core than they do in Minecraft.  While they are your friend, they also set things on fire.  Keep them away from trees, vines, coal, netherrack, and small children passing by.

AIR!
Vines are a good source of oxygen (particularly if you have a limited number of saplings) but you'll need to keep them 5 blocks away from torches.

FOOD!
You can starve to death.  The two easiest foods to get are "rock soup" (probably hard on your teeth) and "Limes" from limestone.  Rock soups do not spoil, but they do use up wood and stone.  Limes are also your best and fastest growing crop.

GERTRUD
Don't get too fond of her.  She has a habit of walking into walls and dying if she's penned up, and running into attacking creepers and zombies if she isn't penned up.  I stick her behind stone walls, but that's not a guarantee.  The first quest under "Noah's Ark" gives you another sanity pet, Rhea... but you have to find and kill some spiders, and if Gertrud's dead by this point, it's going to be a challenge.

STUFF TO COLLECT

Keep any marble and limestone you find.  Eventually you'll need two stacks of the stuff. You'll also need two blocks of compressed gravel eventually.

Mine all the aluminum and copper that you see.   Copper can be used for armor and a lot of other things.  You won't be able to mine ferrous ore, iron, or anything else for a very long time.

You will need to find lots of dirt - and that's found in the open areas where all the monsters are.  If you're not in the open area, 9 rotten foods (most of your food goes rotten) will make one dirt.  Fastest way to get spoilable food is to create limes from limestone (it takes 4 days for food to go bad.)

Friendly NPCs
Believe it or not, they (like hay bales and other stuff like enchanting tables) are buried in the rock.

HACKS!

Cheat mode is enabled, but that takes the challenge out of it, I think. The one hack I do use after I get tired of dying is the map teleport (if you type M to get the map and click on one of the X's, you can either eliminate them or you can teleport there.  I save useful locations)

TIPS!

Keep a tree and a block of dirt on you at all times.

One thing I wasn't aware of when I was first playing is that your pickaxe (and other tools) upgrade as you use them... so repair (with one piece of flint) rather than replace.  Use 3 gravel to make one flint to repair pickaxe.  No need for repair table - type E and do it in your 4 box crafting slot (flint on top, broken pickaxe on bottom)

No matter how stupid the "blind" rewards seem, put them in an inventory somewhere.  They'll be something you need for a quest turn-in later on.

If you die and lose your pick (in the deep water, for example) you will have to make another flint pickaxe and level it.  It's not much fun.  Don't take your pickaxe on the water.

Boats are surprisingly fragile.  Running into the shoreline, baling out of the boat, zombies, and perhaps even harsh words will cause it to vanish.

Zombies have pickaxes AND TNT. They will come into your house and will let other mobs in.

There's a display in the middle left of your screen that tells you what "floor" you are on.  You start out around level 50, so you have to go up for copper and up even more for iron.

Watch your inventory display ("E") - you get experience for some crafting actions.  After you've accumulated a certain number of points, you will have the option  to unlock another inventory slot.

Build ledges and pathways as you go, along with "hides" to duck into for those times when you discover that you're being shot by a skeleton (or worse) and need to get out of their sight.  Watch out where you place the torches, though.

Mom Plays Minecraft - Descent To The Core Modpack (first level)

I'm a mom (and grandmother, for that matter) and I just started playing Minecraft because one of my granddaughters plays the game and I thought I could learn to interact with her online when I can't drive over to visit.  And having once mastered it (and learned some of the cheat codes and where to find them), I got fairly good at Vanilla Minecraft.  In fact, it got a bit boring.

Someone suggested I try a "modpack" and after a lot of hunting, I installed the Curse client (a different one than I use for my Warcraft gaming mods) and went off to look for a modpack.

"Journey to the Core" looked like a fun Minecraft mod.  So I installed it, tried it (on hard mode), and kept dying.  Then I tried it on 'normal' mode and kept dying in the second part.  I refused to try it on 'peaceful', so I put the modpack on 'easy' (this is a misnomer, folks) and forged ahead.  I tried looking at videos, but most of the dialogue was some young-ish guy making lame jokes and giving a travelogue of what he was seeing - after about an hour of watching, I came away with only two tips and a sense of frustration.  Most of the videos for Journey seemed to stop with the second level, and the one that reached the third level was a team of three people.

I'm playing in standalone mode and it doesn't look like I'm becoming triplets any time soon.   So I'm writing this, my own "tips for survival" for "Journey to the Core."  No lame jokes, no music, no voiceover.  Just ... notes (what a concept.)

Level 1:
This is a totally safe area (even on hard mode), so you can do what you like and not get eaten or killed. My first action is to hit the chest with my hand (breaking it apart so I can take it with me) and put on the backpack.  I do NOT start reading the quest manual at that point.  The manual will put lots of lovely quest rewards in your inventory - but you're starting out with a very short inventory and there's some things you might want later.  I put the jelly sandwiches and root beer (and the chest) in the backpack and then I usually catch Gertrud with the safari net and put her in as well - don't forget the leash and the fencepost.  This keeps her from wandering into your work area later.

Next, I punch the DEAD trees (not the live one.)  Don't stand under them because the leaves fall hard and will hurt you.  Collect leaves and wood and go into the cave and collect a mushroom or two and all the gravel on the top level (don't descend the ladder.) The last block of gravel (a "slope")will also give you a Carpenter's Wedge Slope.  Save these wedges - they burn nicely in furnaces and save your valuable wood for other things.  Once you've started the Journey to the Core, you won't be able to mine coal right away.   Collect the mushrooms because they can be made into a food, and then and go back to the tree.

Beat up on the leaves (don't bother using pickaxes or sword or shovel) - but don't stand under the tree.  Falling branches ("widowmakers") will hurt.  Use the leaf blocks from the dead tree to boost yourself up to harvest all the wood.  Around the tree in a "plus" pattern are six blocks of regular dirt.  Take them.

Caution: when you're harvesting the tree, it may get dark.  DO NOT PUT A TORCH ON THE TREE.  It will burn the tree up and the leaves (and you!)

Next, beat up on the grass and evaluate the seeds.  I only take two that will give "nourishing morsels."  If you can find a soybean seed, take that one.

Finally, sacrifice one of your blocks of wood and make a Wooden Shears.  Go to the vines without flowers and start harvesting them until your shears breaks.  In the next section you'll need oxygen, and these vines will provide it.  Get as many as you can.

Once they break (or you're tired of cutting vines), grab those discarded wood planks, collect all the torches in the area, and head into the cave.  DO NOT WEAR A TORCH ON YOUR HEAD.   That can set things on fire.  Grab wedges, all the mushrooms you find, and all the gravel.  You can beat things up using the torch - if it goes out, click on another item in your inventory and click on the torch again and the light will come back on.

By the time you reach the elevator, you'll hopefully have around 60 stacks of leaves, more than 11 torches, more than 10 Deadpine logs, more than 20 Oak logs, more than 5 saplings, at least one apple, and at least 20 wedges.  Before you start the elevator descent to the core (you can't come back up) make sure that your leaves AND your pick are where you can reach them.  I usually click with pick.

You will end up in one of 3 situations - a nice cavelet (best option), a space in the middle of the water (second best), or a darkened plane (dig downwards VERY very fast!)

Warcraft Garrison Pet Battles : Two Pet Strategy for Elekks and Others

Trying to find a good strategy for some of the Garrison pet battles can be frustrating, particularly when you're just starting out and you only have a few pets leveled to 25. If you're trying to work on two-pet strategies so that you can level your pets to complete the Awfully Big Adventure quest with the Elekk, you may find yourself yelling at the screen and pounding on the mouse as that frail little garrison visitor suddenly demolishes your whole team in three blows.

There've been some changes recently, and now most garrison pet battles award only a trivial amount of experience.  However, the tokens you win each day allow you to upgrade several pets, so it's a pretty reasonable tradeoff.

There are differences in individual pets' health, speed, and power-to-hit.  This and the "random number gods" make every pet battle different.  These two pet strategies allow you to field a third pet (I suggest something level 15 and above) to take care of those cases where two pets just aren't going to take down the garrison challenge.

Let's start with some terms:

All pets have two rows of 3 actions that you can pick from.  When web pages talk about pets, they will usually add the setup that they have for that particular battle -- in this case, arcane blast is the first thing you can choose and it's on the second row, as is life exchange.  Moonfire, the third action we want for this pet is on the top row.

So if I'm telling you to use this pet and this setup, I would say "Sprite Darter Hatchling (2,2,1)"  If I'm giving you a specific pet strategy, I will use the slot number instead. So, if I want your Sprite Darter Hatchling (2,2,1) to first do Moonfire, then Life Exchange, then Arcane blast, I would say "strategy: 3,2,1"

NOT ALL PETS ARE CREATED EQUAL.  If you look at your Sprite Darter, you may see that your health or speed is different.  That means your attack effectiveness will be different than mine.  You can either go hunt the specific pet type that you need or use some alternatives -- where I know alternatives, I'll list them.

Got it?  Okay, here, starting from the Quintessence of Light, are the pet strategies I use.  These are two pet strategies, so you can put whatever you like in the third slot.



 Quintessence of Light
* Sprite Darter Hatchling (2,2,1)
*Nether Faerie Dragon (2,2,1)
*ANY
*Strategy: 3,1,2,1,1,1 rinse, lather, repeat

Blingtron 4999b and friends 
* Singing Sunflower (1,2,1) (slow but reliable fight)
* Nether Faerie Dragon (2,2,1) moonfire, life exchange
*ANY
* Strategy: start with sunlight, keep up photosynthesis
ALTERNATE: Ruby Droplet(2,2,2) or Blossoming Ancient for first pet  OR Mechanical Frostboar(2,2,1)plus Ikky (1,1,1)  Black claw and flock them to death.

 Stitches JR.

 WARNING:  THIS FIGHT IS VERY RANDOM-NUMBER-GODS (RNG) DEPENDENT - If your pet does less than 500 damage to him, he will ignore that damage.
* Nether Faerie Dragon (2,2,1)
* Water strider/ mirror strider/etc strider (2,2,2)
* Any water with "pump"
* Strategy:  Nether Faerie Dragon (2), swap, Strider (2,3,3) bring out NFD, rinse, repeat
ALTERNATE: Nether Faerie Dragon(2,2,1), Mini Mindslayer,(2,1,2) Zao, calfling of Nunzao (2,2,2) STRATEGY: (3,2,) swap (3.2.1) swap (3)

Hanos-Fatos-Manos
* Mechanical Pandaren Dragon (1,1,2)
* Winter's Little Helper (2,1,2)
* any third with 800 health (swap in and out when Manos comes in)
Strategy:  (3,2,1,1,1(etc)) Winter's helper (2,1,3,1 etc) -- she really takes them down fast.

Squirt - one of the few garrison battles where you can level a pet!
*Scourged Whelpling (2,2,1)
*macabre marionette(2,2,2)
*any third with 800 health.  Swap when Puzzle (3rd pet) enters and immediately swap back to Marionette.
*Strategy:  Whelpling - spam 3,2,1,1,1 until whelpling dies.  Bring out Marionette, spam 3, 1,1,3. 

Rukus
* Lil' Bling
* Darkmoon Zeppelin
* any mechanical over 700 health

Draenor Horde Garrisons: Strangers in a strange land

Welcome to Draenor, fellow Hordie!   What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Well, friends, I'll tell you that it all boils down to one single, simple fact: Archmaage Khadgar NEVER asks for directions.

We see him blasting the Iron Horde into the air en masse, destroying bridges with a twitch of a finger, and even disintegrating a dam.  But as it turns out, the Omniscient One is secretly direction challenged and possibly time-challenged as well.

He does NOT manage to sail the boat to a nice warm place in Nagrand with sunny beaches where we can plan strategy over a nice microbrew.  Instead, Wrong Way Khadgar runs off to help the Frostwolves after they've hunkered down in the Great Icebox Of Durotar.  In lieu of cabana boys with frou-frou drinks, lush scenery, wooded dells, and uppity (but tasty) wildlife, Frostridge has rocks.  It also has glaciers, rocks, ice, rocks, and snow (and rocks) livened up by the occasional volcano.  And ogres.  And ugly hogs.  And demons.  And iceworms.  And rock ledges with a 200 foot drop. 

The Invaders from Argus (Dranei, who managed to crash land on Draenor before crash landing on Azeroth) ended up in lovely Shadowmoon Valley.  And yet with the rest of a lovely warm world on which to live, Our Hero's Father Durotan opts for settling down to live in the World's Biggest Refrigerator.

Apparently he gets epic hot flashes or something.



Welcome to Draenor.

GARRISON CHANGES:

Your garrison is visually more confusing than the Alliance garrison.  Gazlowe has a thing for Hides With Holes (as walls -- I think he gets them pre-ganwed on, wholesale) and your basic brick red and gray-ish tan scheme.  Your (white) position marker doesn't stand out well against the (white) snow and (gray) buildings.  Zoom in close to avoid changes.

If you're basing your gameplay strategy on what you did on the Alliance side, you're gonna be in a world of hurt.  That's what I did when I decided that my first resource building was going to be the Lumber Mill.

I ended up running across two zones (death run, really, and an 80 gold repair bill) just to find two doggone "small timber" trees to cut down for the lumber mill's approval, because there seems to be a rule that "Horde Doesn't Do Trees" -- except, perhaps for those flouncy Blood Elves, who seem to be closet tree-huggers when they're not sniffing illegal magic items.

And then I decided I'd build a barn and a leatherworking store -- only to discover that the animals you can get leather from live in Alliance areas (cue headdesk-ing.)  A few of them actually live in the Frozen North, but let me tell you, I feel guilty hunting wolves with Durotan and Thrall sitting around in my garrison.

Therefore, a better option is to build the Trading Post and simply trade for garrison resources.

As with Alliance side, build your tradeskill buildings first and then consider the recipes.  Remember that you can change out the buildings in your garrison if you want to pick up a different item.  For example, my priest (who has alchemy) traded in the alchemy building after getting all the recipes for an Enchanter's studio and enchants.

As with Alliance side, your better bet is handing over the raw materials to workers to process.  It takes my blacksmith character 24 hours, 20 true iron ores, and 10 Blackrock ores to produce one Truesteel Ingot.  Alternatively, I can turn over batches of Blackrock ore to my forge worker and get out 4-6 Truesteel ingots each day (and more possibly, depending on the worker.) The maximum item level equipment that these buildings produce is level 640 (and it takes around 2 weeks to make something, unless you get lucky), so you may want to change them for something else once you've gotten the gear you like.

Although you get a daily quest (with various rewards, mostly gold) from sticking with your own tradeskills and leveling the trade building to level 3, you may find that having an alternate building is more useful.  It is very expensive to make some items (and many things are "bind on pick up"), so I often include buildings that will produce armor for me.


SHAMANSTONES

One of the perks you do get is the blessing of the Shamanstones.  The main one is in Wol'Gar, but there's another one way out on the hind end ofnowhere (65,79 Frostfire Ridge).  They offer the "Spirit of the Wolf", "Blessing of the Wolf", and "Buffeting Galefury".  As best I can figure it out, the last one means a wind spirit comes in and dines on various things.  It promises some sort of levitation, but I haven't figured out who or what gets levitated.

My personal favorite is "Blessing of the Wolf," which calls a ghostly Frostwolf rushing to your aid when you get into combat (if you don't get into combat too often.)  So far, the frostwolf hasn't rushed in with a keg of brandy, but I have hopes...

So put some thought into your garrison early on if you're playing Horde.  While you can reverse the changes easily enough (gold and garrison resources are all that is needed), you can save yourself a bit of frustration by a little careful planning.

World of Warcraft - Bodyguards for your Body in Draenor

Felinos in his DPS Discipline spec -- and Defender Illona.  He needs a lot of defending.|

You And Your Bodyguard

I couldn't wait to upgrade my barracks and get a bodyguard for Draenor, because my main toon, Felinos, is a holy priest.  While he isn't that easy to kill, it does take him longer to kill things, and questing gets tedious.   I upgraded, grabbed Illona as my bodyguard but she seemed to die too easily, so I took on Delvar. 

...and regretted it about ten minutes later. 

It wasn't that he was bad at anything, but he talked constantly, bragged, and got drunk.  He seemed the hypercritical sort -- as though following a (male) priest in a robe (dress) around was beneath him.  Two bodyguards later, I figured out what I was doing wrong.

As with dungeons and raids, bodyguards have one of three roles:  DPS, Tank, or Healer-damage.  Illona was a tank, but I hadn't been treating her as a tank.  Delvar was pure DPS, which meant that a lot of the time the mobs decided a live Night Elf priest looked a lot tastier than a plate-wearing undead Dwarf.  Leorajh is a shammy who heals and does ranged DPS.  And once I got THAT sorted out, things began to make sense.

So consider your role before you pick a follower

Falcos, my druid tank, ended up with Leorajh as a follower.  He needs heals but he does NOT need someone for Competition Tanking (which was what happened when teaming up with Illona.  Felinos, my priest, ended up with Illona because he needs someone to charge in and entertain the mobs while he heals and does ranged damage.

My hunters did better with tanks and melee DPS, and my warlocks seemed to do much better with melee DPS and the Voidwalker as a tank.  I went with ranged DPS for my death knight.


ALLIANCE:
Delvar Ironfist: - melee (Blood) Death Knight
Defender Illona - tanking (Protection) Paladin

HORDE:
Vivianne: - Mage
Aeda Brightdawn: - Warlock

NEUTRAL:
Talonpriest Ishaal: Shadow Priest
Tormmok:  (Arms) Warrior tank
Leorajh: Ranged (Restoration) shaman DPS


You'll notice that you get reputation at 10 points per kill with your bodyguard.  It takes a LOT of kills to get to the next stage.  With the second level of honor, your bodyguard gets a new damage ability.  With the THIRD leve, the bodyguard gets an ability that is useful to you...

Delvar can set up a "death gate" portal to your garrison
Vivianne can open a portal to your garrison.
Illona can use "guiding light" to summon party members to your location
Aeda can set up a summoning stone so you can summon party members

Ishall can bring a raven (mailbox) to your location
Leorajh can set up a garrison mission table for you
Tormmok can repair your armor in the field.