Guide

1. Modpack
2. Other reading
3. Your first day
4. Tips

Welcome to Devouring Darkness.

This is the next derivative of the Zombieland series hardcore modpack. Now available as a standalone modpack.

1 Modpack

Gregtech 6 + Botania, no other tech trees
Minimal RF
Buildcraft for common earth moving (builder/quarry) only (no power or pipes)
IC2 for late game Quantum Armor
GT Weapons for that shotgun vs zombie satisfaction.
Many common utility mods (Openblocks, Extra utils, Random things)
Harvestcraft, HungerOverhaul and Cooking for Blockheads!
Spice of Life with a FIFTY food history, eat wisely.
- 2 x slower food growth and slow healing. Plants need sunlight.
Zombie Awareness configured for omniscient zombies. They know where you live.
Special Mobs with new creepers, zombies, and more!
Special AI causes monsters to actively grief! Beware.
Infernal Mobs generates boss mobs with random overpowered buffs!

2 Other reading

Gregtech is an overhaul mod. It is good to read some of these:

3 Your first day

You can't break blocks without tools. Find rocks and sticks on the ground ASAP. You need a flint knife, an axe, and a shovel.

Break grass. Use a crafting table to make a hay bale from 9 grass and set it out to dry.

Gather any nearby food. Kill animals, collect berries, but don't break Harvestcraft gardens.

For security you need search for a tall tree or a body of water where you can float in a boat overnight.

Ideally by nightfall you can break the dry hay bale up into dry grass and craft torches.

Wait out the night on a tree or offshore.

Good luck.

4 Tips

As a shipwrecked survivor in a distant land, you carry only a pocketful of apples when you awake.

4.1 General tips

Consider turning off InvTweaks autoreplace for tools, GT also replaces with the COLUMN of tools over the hotbar if they match the current type. These two features conflict and can have unpredictable results.
Finite water has been enabled. Gregtech turns this on by default, and river biomes have infinite water. The Cooking for Blockheads sink is unlimited and cheap (iron + wood) water in the early game. Later use a drain on a pipe in a river to collect as much as you like.
Deserts and large beaches (sandy areas) are amazing for starting ores! You really need the lead, copper and tin found in the sand.
GT recipes may require vanilla cobblestone. The other rock types can be made into vanilla slabs, and then stacked to make a cobblestone.
Common features from old packs are still present. You can't eat the same food nonstop. Plants need real sunlight. Domestic animals fight back.
Use NEI constantly. All the GT recipes are new and different! It's an overhaul mod, nothing is left untouched.

4.2 Food

Food types stack quickly. Use your knife to make slices of carrots, cucumbers, apples, and more. You can also make fruit salad with the knife and almost any two fruits or berries. Grapes and strawberries can be added to fruit salad too. Later with a juicer you can make juice from any berry and collect it in a bottle or jug.
Pam's Animal Traps can use the wheat you can't eat (yet) to obtain meats and leather.
Sugar cane grows rapidly and is valuable as an early fuel! Bamboo is also good.
Pineapple, apple, carrots, and cucumbers are all slicable into 4. You can eat about 10 before you can't eat anymore.
Hunger Overhaul has bonemeal disabled, BUT the fertilized dirt works and speeds up growth 3x. I don't intend to nerf this, but I may put the plant growth back to 4x vanilla (instead of 2x vanilla) if FD is in common use. Consider it a farm upgrade you purchase, spending mob stuff to make a speedy field.
Fertilized dirt is totally ok, since zombies now seek and destroy it just like normal farmland.
Salt for pam's recipes can be made from salt (blue stone). Hammer it to get crushed salt, craft it to make cubes, then mortar them to make salt. Given the size of the salt stone biomes, it's unlikey that salt would be rare.
You can use a flint knife to slice fruit and veggies for a different food. This flint knife can also be used as a Pam's Cutting Board.
Some fruit, nuts, grains, and veggies you find can be cooked in a furnace to make a new, better food item.
GregTech berries are good and count as fruit in all recipes.
Make sure you right click Pam's gardens, so you can take them home. Place them down and they can clone adjacent gardends. Every garden will spread to a total of 5 in a 7x7 space by type.
Pam's kitchen tools (cutting board, pots, etc) can be made with copper.
To plant seaweed, cranberries, and rice you click with the PLANT (not a seed) on a 1 deep water block over a solid block. I have confirmed all three work. Also, interestingly enough, mobs don't break them because they are looking for farmland. Glenn has confirmed you can plant these ON THE OCEAN, so you can make your shoreline into a valuable crop.
Don't break Pam's Gardens if you can help it. Always leave one, as I set the duplication rate to high. Right click to take it home to plant. If you don't leave some behind, new ones will not appear.
GT bushes are available and grow fast. Be careful overdosing, the sugar high won't kill you, but can take you to 1 HP if you eat too many.

4.3 Security

Pit traps are an effective early game defense
Tornadoes are enabled, however they do NOT damage farms, only players and the occasional herd of cows. Hide indoors.
Mobs are smart, and there are lots of them. Infernal is on, so some are virtually unkillable. Unlike prior servers, there is no mob clear.
We have successfully made a secure base utilizing a tower with a drowning moat design. The upper deck supports several crop fields, and the underground allows mining access. I recommend we duplicate this design for the spawn base on go-live. https://imgur.com/a/AwCLQ2N
Carpenters torches, doors, ladders are all griefable just like their vanilla counterparts. However note that carpenters ladders can be skinned with high durability things like obsidian and they take AGES for a zombie to break. Food for thought.
There are many GT blocks that say "monsters cannot spawn on this block". That is FALSE. Do not believe it. Other mods in the modpack override that logic. Light is your friend.
There are 3 ways to survive the night outside a base:
- Climb a jungle tree in a dense forest. Run across treetops.
- Dig under a pond (not river or ocean!) and wait for morning, then dig away faster than they can swim.
- Take a boat (and a backup boat) onto the ocean.
Bricks are creeper proof, but not TNT proof. This may help with early bases against vanilla creepers.
Drowning moats and strong defenses are a must. You can't survive in the open at night. Use the trick of digging into a pond (not the sea) and then dig out in the morning leaving the mobs behind in the water.

4.4 Tech

Early iron uses black sand from river biomes
Once you have bronze steam power for a bronze centrifuge, you can take the regular ashes and centrifuge them to get carbon dust!
Carbon dust unlocks steel and doubles the output of iron recipes. Suddenly steel is easier to make than bronze.

4.4.1 Tools

Smash Cobblestone to get stones of similar type. Using the stones of a particular type can give you better tools than using vanilla stone.
Use a hammer on cobble to make rocks of the stone type. This is great for tools. Given how easy it is to make new rocks, I don't think recycling pebbles is needed.
Shift-rightclick to remove seawater from a bucket.
Clay jugs can be made early to store 2 buckets of water or lava, but they cannot place blocks. A wooden bucket can take from a jug to place water, and an iron bucket can place lava.

4.4.2 Mining

Gather rocks and sticks off the ground. Early game tools are made from rock and flint. Mind which rocks you pickup, they can indicate ores in the area.
Ore is no longer in a 3x3 chunk grid, it's now random through the world. The only clue as to what ore is nearby is the stones you find on the surface. Always place a sign or map mark where you find unusual stones!
Ore veins are still large, but not necessarily tightly clustered. They tend to start with more small ores on the outside, and then get to full size ores in the middle.