Settling In

Once you've addressed your immediate needs for food and water, it's time to consider how to make good use of the resources readily available on the surface. The most useful resources early on are wood, cobblestone, string, iron, and slime. You must also be mindful of your food stockpile. When winter comes, crops will die and the fruit on trees will no longer grow. Even stockpiled food will inevitably rot away.

Depending on how much ore you have, you will at minimum want to craft a shield. You can stretch your metal ores farther by crafting ore into chunks, crafting the chunks into blocks, and pulverizing them with an iron hammer into progressively smaller chunks until you have blocks of metal dust. This can be quite time-consuming, however. Quite early on, you should have the materials necessary to craft a divining rod, which can be used to probe for ores. Higher tiers of the rod have a higher max range. [You can change the range of a higher tier rod with a ProjectE keybinding.]

Four types of armor are available to you early on: leather, chainmail, jelled slime, and iron. Two pieces of string crafted together make a good substitute material for leather armor, while chainmail can be crafted with copper ingots. Unfortunately, most armor weighs you down, making it necessary to store it on an armor stand while indoors. [A simple shift-right-click will allow you to swap your armor to and from the armor stand.]

Aside from armor, string is useful in crafting meshes, which can be used in bait for traps, or placed inside of a sieve to sift dust. Traps are a good alternative source of animal drops and fish, while sieves can be used to get small amounts of redstone or various magical materials. Dust can be obtained by smashing sand with a hammer. Cobblestone and gravel can be smashed as well.

Slime is... an unusual substance. There are multiple ways of crafting it. Once you have two pieces of slime and a source of fuel, it is possible to grow large amounts of slime. The growing agent, vital catalyst, has rather useful properties. Rubbing it into seeds and saplings causes them to split in two. Combining it with slime and certain mob drops can create the very essence of life, spawn eggs. The catalyst can be processed yet further into alchemic ash and beyond, although inferno bales are best left to automation.