20 Things to Do When Starting Valhelsia 3 Minecraft Modpack

Valhelsia 3 is a Minecraft modpack with over 200 mods in it. It can be overwhelming for anyone not used to modded minecraft and the subtle and obscure ways there are to learn about a modpack and the mods in it.

I hear over and over in the Valhelsia 3 Discord server people asking, what’s the point? and where do I start?

People rightly respond, “it’s Minecraft, do whatever you want”. Or “open up JEI and click on items to see how to make them”.

Though I also understand how overwhelming it all is.

I would really like to see modded minecraft become more accessible to more people, and I’ve been thinking a lot about writing how-tos, creating videos, and books can be written on the subject, Short of that, let’s take a really high level look at the big mods in Valhelsia 3 and how to get started with them.

First, before jumping in it’s worth mentioning that part of what’s great about a mod-pack is that the mods are not all isolated from each other. Some of the best parts of modded minecraft is mixing the features to create something not possible in a single mod. Some mod authors count on this even and build in interoperability. Even better, the creators of Valhelsia 3 go through great effort to add additional configuration to make mods work even better together. So don’t be afraid to mix and match. There are no rules.

With that, here’s a list of 20 (actually 21 25 26, and we'll keep adding to it) things to do to get yourself kickstarted with Valhelsia 3 and learning about the mods and different things you can do. This isn't a walkthrough or cookbook. More intended to help you see what's here and what to work toward. The most common answer to what to do in Valhelsia is probably, "Mekanism and Refined storage", both of which I love and honestly can't live without at least some of the stuff. But there's so much more. Enjoy!

0. Step zero. New to modded Minecraft?

This one doesn't really count, so I marked it zero. If you're not new to modded minecraft, move on to #1. If you are new, there are many differences in the interface that are really useful added by dozens of mods that are just designed to make Minecraft a little bit better:

• JEI, or Just Enough Items is one of the primary keys to learning about all the mods. It's the big list of items on the right when you open your inventory. Items are sorted by mod, so scrolling through there can give you an idea of what to try out. Click on an item to see how it's made. Right click on an item to see what you can make with it. Put @ in front of a search to filter by the mod.
• Akashic Tome - when you drop into a world, you'll get this book. It's basically all the books that are available in all the mods. Right click on it and it'll turn into one of the books. Left click on it in hand to reset it.
• Xaero's Map and Mini Map - hit 'm' to bring up the world map. Get familiar with setting waypoints, which can help you find your way around. A zero-effort way is to keep some death waypoints around. :)
• Scroll through all the keyboard controls (Esc, Options..., Controls) This can help you identify some important keyboard commands, and also you can remap them. There are lots of conflicts between the mods.
• Adjust the sounds - CTRL + i opens up all the sound settings (is the clanking anvil making you crazy? you can turn that off). CTRL + v opens the quick volume settings.
• View the Advancements Screen for ideas on getting started. More things will appear here as you discover items. Hit 'l' (lowercase "L") on the keyboard to view it.

And finally, now on to the list of things to do when starting Valhelsia 3. This isn't in any specific order, as there's no order to Valhelsia or Minecraft. Just some ideas so you know what's here.

1. Get a few important farms going

This goes with any minecraft game, but there are lots of new crop and food options thanks to the Farmer's Delight mod.

• Plant aubergine to create cooked aubergine (basic smoker or furnace stuff). You’ll get aubergine seeds and lots of other seeds by harvesting grass. Cooked aubergine is basically my go to.
• Plant rice to cook into rice bowls. You can find rice in some villages. Get a cooking pot and put it on a campfire or a stove.
• Plant Industrial Hemp, which will give you hemp fiber which can be used to make all the string you could ever wish for. You can find hemp seeds easily. There are two types of hemp in Valhelsia 3.
• Bonus harvesting tip: Auto harvest and plant by right-clicking with a hoe. Later, get a diamond hoe (which harvests a larger area) and see how quickly you can work a giant field.

Later you can automate these things, but for now, these will keep you fed. And when you need string, and otherwise get into Immersive Engineering, you won’t regret the industrial hemp farm.

2. Go adventuring

Valhelsia has a great set of mods that change the world by adding structures, biomes, and new mobs, not least of which is their own Valhelsia Structures mod. Use Xaero's mini map in the upper right corner to discover underground structures. Pay new attention to villages and other structures for looting. Thanks to the Artifacts mod, they’re now filled with some amazing new items that you can only get by finding them in the world, like bunny hoppers, night vision goggles, lucky scarves, and whoopie cushions.

Find yourself a structure and or a village to set up your base near.

There are so many mods in Valhelsia 3 that add to the adventuring experience, way too much to go into detail, but here's a partial list:

• Valhelsia Structures - the creators of this modpack also have a mod that creates some amazing structures to discover.
• Biomes o' Plenty - this is the default world gen mode, and brings many new biomes.
• Twilight Forest - This was added in April 2021 and is a whole new dimension.
• ATUM - New dimension added in May 2021
• Blue Skies - Two new dimensions in one, added in Aug 2021
• Mowzie's Mobs - Also added in April 2021 and brings some bosses (see #26)
• YUNG’s Better Caves
• YUNG’s Better Mineshafts
• YUNG's Better Strongholds
• Apotheosis - important note: this has been mostly disabled. It's just there for the spawner stuff, and even then most mobs are disabled for spawner configuration.
• The Conjurer - find a theater in the wild
• The Endergetic Expansion - New biomes in teh end
• Savage & Ravage - some new illager stuff. And baby creepers. Also, don't be afraid to kill the illager parties wandering around. You won't automatically start raids when you kill the banner guy. (You can start a raid by placing and burning it)
• Alex’s Mobs - dozens of new mobs. Many of which can be tamed. Some will kill you in a heartbeat.
• Artifacts - the bunny hoppers and night vision goggles I mentioned above
• Goblin Traders - have some amazing things to sell. Carry around gold and emeralds to take advantage. Then kill them. Because they're annoying.
• Tetra - find ancient structures.
• Waystones - if you find a waystone, break it and bring it to your base. always have a way home!

3. Get a portable storage solution

In Vanilla minecraft, one of the great end-game items is a shulker box. I'll never forget how game-changing it was to be able to pick up a box full of stuff and place it down again somewhere else.

In modded minecraft, there are many more options. And good thing, because a big modpack like Valhelsia has a lot of items. Go mining for 10 minutes and your inventory will be full of dozens of new ores, gems, and other items you’ll have no idea what to do with. If you’re a hoarder like pretty much every person who plays Minecraft, you’ll want to come up quickly with a good storage solution. Your choice in which mods to dig into will provide you with different solutions for this, like portable chests, backpacks, etc. that can extend your trips. There are many better portable storage options, but that’s probably the easiest.

A backpack is probably the easiest portable storage item to make. It requires some grinding to get enough zombie flesh, rabbit pelts, and leather, but it's pretty easy.

Put a backpack in your chestplate slot, and now you’ve got 27 more slots in your inventory.

Here are some other portable storage:

• A mekanism Cardboard Box can pick up a full chest and put it in your inventory. This is a bit tedious
• Immersive Engineering Storage Crate - you can find these in villages before you even get treated wood.
• Engineer's Decor labeled crate (requires treated wood from Immersive Engineering). It's basically the same as an IE storage crate materials-wise but twice the capacity.
• Mekanism personal storage chest works from your inventory, and you don't have to place it.
• Ender Pouch paired with Ender Storage chests - as soon as you have ender eyes and blaze powder, these are game-changing. Also works from your inventory.
• Refined storage portable grids - you can take a Refined Storage disk with you. It needs to be charged, and isn't connected to your refined storage network, but is as big as the disk you put in it.
• If you don't have far to go, shift right click on a chest (or many previousy immovable things like mobs), you can pick them up and move them!
• A flower pouch holds all the mystical flowers that you harvest as you run around, preventing them from filling up your inventory because you'll want them all even though you don't know why. They will go into the pouch automatically. Even if you don't get into botania, you can use them to make dye.
• Shulker box. Later game, but worth mentioning because you can put it in your backpack slot and access it with a hotkey.
• Tame a giant beetle (golden apple and a saddle). They are like a walking double chest, though not nearly as reliable. OK, this one isn't terribly useful.

Mekanism

The next three items are all related to Mekanism, which is the 800lb gorilla of mods in Valhelsia 3. (Actually, there are actual gorillas in Valhelsia 3. Add that as an adventuring todo.)

4. Create power with Mekanism

Surround a Heat Generator with lava. Use basic universal cables to get power out of it.

5. Accomplish basic ore doubling

With a single Mekanism machine (Enrichment Chamber), you can double ores like iron, gold, and many of the new ores like copper, tin, zinc, and uranium. Later you can triple and even quintuple your ores. Though by the time you can quadruple ores, mining them will be so easy you won't even need to. In a new game, ore doubling carries me a long time.

6. Make steel from Iron

Make steel with two steps in Mekanism's Metallurgic Infusers. You can set two up in a chain with a furnace to automate the entire process. There’s no instruction book in-game for Mekanism, but there are lots of videos and a wiki. Figure out how to make those and you’ll have some strong early game tools that are almost as good as diamond, and you can save your diamonds for more important things. You can also make steel in Immersive Engineering.

7. Immersive Engineering: Build a coke oven, blast furnace, and alloy kiln

These are the introductory things in Immersive Engineering. With the creosote from the coke oven you can make treated wood and with that you can make all sorts of things, not least of which is a Wooden Storage Crate, which is a portable storage chest that you can put stuff in and break it to take them with you. (Like a shulker box.) You can also make steel in the blast furnace. These will also introduce you to multi-block structures. You definitely need the Engineer's Manual for these.

If you do nothing else in Immersive Engineering than get steel, coal coke (doubles coal burn rates), and creosote (for the treated wood and portable storage crates), you won't be sorry. Though you won't be able to help digging deeper into the mod. Trust me, one day you'll run across something you need and it'll require treated wood.

That’s a mekanism fluid tank pulling creosote out of the coke oven. Don’t be afraid to mix mods! Again, Immersive Engineering has a very well written in-game manual that you can easily craft with a book and a lever. Look in JEI for “Engineer’s Manual”.

8. Get started on Tetra by building a Workbench

To do so, right-click a crafting table with a hammer. The in-game manual for Tetra is not quite as intuitive (it's a holosphere), but if you can get into Tetra, there’s a rich tool-building mechanic that can be much more satisfying than vanilla tools. Be warned that Tetra doesn't play super-nice with other tool features like the enchanting tables in vanilla and other mods.

Tetra has very mysterious structures around that you'll run into as you mine in cold mountainous biomes, and you'll need Tetra's hammers and other tools to interact with them.

9. Find a monster spawner and move it to your base.

This is one of those things that can change your life. Learning to leverage spawners for fun and profit will give you lots of different loot and ways to get XP when you really need it and don't feel like grinding.

In Valhelsia 3, you can break a spawner with a silk-touch pick axe and take it with you. You can also pick up a spawner in a cardboard box (or an entire chest full of stuff!), which you can easily craft with sawdust. Sawdust comes from a sawmill in Mekanism. Build a simple XP farm with that spawner by putting it in a room and killing the mobs. Later you can automate this in many different ways, like Eidolon.

10. Secure your base from creepers and zombie hoards with a mega torch.

A mega torch from the torchmaster mod is a special torch that provides normal light, but actually prevents mobs from spawning in a 32 block radius. They’re not cheap, but it’s nice as you start building a base to know you’re safe.

11. Dig entire veins of ore or entire trees, and do 3x3 mining

These are going to take a while, but are some things to work towards. And everybody wants these.

• The Create Mod Mechanical saw with a hand crank will take out an entire tree, and is sort of a baby-step into that mod, which allows you to build amazingly big and complex single-purpose machines that are fun to build and watch.
• The mekanism atomic disassembler is an amazingly useful tool. It’s just a bit of the way into the Mekanism mod and a good goal to get you through creating infused and atomic alloys, and refined obsidian, which are early-stage mekanism things. Warning: don't work on your base and machines with this tool. If you accidentally switch it into extended vein mining, it's incredibly destructive.
• You can also get 3x3 and higher pick axes, drills, and other tools that allow you to quickly build big neat tunnels. The excavation enchantment may be something you can get your hands on with a little luck. And you can progress toward drills later game in some mods like Immersive Engineering and Industrial Foregoing.
• Just know that there are also things like Excavators (Immersive Engineer), Digital Miners (Mekanism), and Mining Lasers (Industrial Foregoing), and more, which take literally all the work out of mining. Some people consider these a bit too overpowered and avoid them. But they can be fun to get, even if you choose to let them collect dust until a desperate moment.

12. Build some Storage Drawers

Storage drawers can organize and hold large quantities of single items. Keep the cobble from filling up all your chests. Later, you can connect this to an automated storage system, and you can upgrade them to hold literally tens of thousands of a single item.

13. Get started on Refined Storage

Refined storage is another game changer. Build a disk drive and a grid to access it. You won’t regret it as you start to automate and get huge amounds of items to deal with. I basically can’t live without it. Once you fill it up with all the stuff you find, it's like creative crafting.

14. Start on Botania

Botania is a massive tech mod disquised as a magic mod. It attempts to turn automation into something that's more interesting and beautiful than a bunch of single block machines. It can be very difficult to get your head around and the learning curve can keep you from getting going on it. Start by collecting mystical flowers in a Flower Pouch and then creating living wood and living stone with pure white daisies created in a Petal Apothecary. Use the Ars Botania book for guidance on progressing in the Botania mod.

Botania has some of the best armor and tools in the game and the rewards are pretty great.

Botania is part of the unlimited enchantment cycle. With botania mana enchanter and industrial foregoing's enchantment extractor and enchantment applicator, you can build very high enchantment levels on books and therefore armor, weapons, and tools. For this, you'll need lots of mana. As you progress, build yourself automated mana generators and lots of pools. 12 or more full mana pools is not too much for the mana enchanter.

15. Find an Eidolon laboratory under ground.

Clear it out and get yourself started on Eidolon. It’s a well documented mod that gives you access to much better enchanting than the enchanting table, allowing you to get the enchantments you’re looking for. And there’s so much more.

Eidolon is worth it if only for the Enchanting, but do check out the progression through the book. If you do nothing else, get a combination of a spawner to get soul shards, and you'll be enchanting amazing tools and armor without the vanilla grind on enchanting tables. In fact the vanilla way to get enchanting is made many times harder to get what you want because there are so many new enchantments.

16. Blood Magic: Make a Blood Altar

Start in on stealing and exploiting the souls of the mobs you kill. That is, get into the Blood Magic mod, which is an early-developed mod that holds great promise for new content.

17. Astral Sorcery: Find an Academy Shrine.

The smaller shrines are all over the place, white structures with a fountain. Dig under the pillars to get constellation charts. This is the start of the Astral Sorcery mod which is the gateway to some great tools and other powers and a ton of content. Put the constellations in your Astral Tome. To progress, you’ll need to find a bigger shrine in a mountainous or desert biome. These are more difficult to find. Dig under that to get to its important contents.

This mod has a massive progression and very deep gameplay. The Astral Tome has everything you need to know, though it's intentionally a bit vague so you have to figure things out. As you progress, you unlock more things in the book.

18. Try your hand at fishing

In vanilla minecraft, fishing is one of the ways to get powerful enchantments very early game. And that's amped up in Valhelsia 3. With the Aquaculture 2 mod, not only can you create new types of fishing rods, you can get special hooks and bait that will increase your chances of success. Most importantly, this is how you get Neptunian armor and tools, which are some of the most powerful in the game. Be sure to fish in at least a 5x5 water area to maximize production. There's also a mod called Real Fishing, which makes it so the fish you catch aren't yet dead. If you're fishing for food, this can be a bit annoying. If you position yourself properly, the fish can fall into a spot where they'll die and you can pick them up. Better yet, set up some hoppers to collect the stuff you drop while fishing.

19. Industrial Foregoing: Build automated XP and loot farms.

I mentioned this earlier. Take that spawner you grabbed with a cardboard box and pair it with an Industrial Foregoing Mob Crusher (the mob spawner picture from earlier is my xp and loot farm as well as other stuff (like pink slime and liquid meat). To get started in Industrial Foregoing, you will need to make latex using a fluid extractor. Search JEI for the Industrial Foregoing manual. By now, you’re going to need lots of XP for enchanting. Industrial Foregoing has so many useful machines. You won't regret the startup costs and learning curve.

20. Achieve Creative Flight

Elytra is great for getting around quickly, but being able to fly and hover around can make building big structures so much easier, and it's what draws people to creative mode. You can have the creative mode flight experience in Survival with a number of different options.

• Get yourself a Jet Pack and Free Runners, which are Mekanism tools that give you flight and feather falling. These require Hydrogen for fuel, which to get there you’ll learn about creating bio fuel and managing gasses.
• Botania has the flugel tiaria that provides creative flight, and
• astral sorcery has a ritual that provides creative flight within an area. These are later game.
• The Meka Suit in mekanism gives a much better creative flight experience than the jetpack, and is about as late-game as it gets.

21. Power with Powah!

As you build more machines to do your bidding and automation and your Refined Storage grid shuts down the first time, in that moment you'll vow to never have a power shortage again. Mekanism, which is probably your source of power consumption, has a vast array of power generation options, which head into mid and late game, and also get you the materials for the meka suit. But if you're not quite ready to invest the next four years of your life in Mekanism Univeristy, check out Powah!

With minimal grinding to get Dialectric Paste, you can pretty easily make a Starter Reactor that cranks out the power (1.5k FE/t to be exact) of more than 60 of these windmills on a typical clear day over level 70. I made this more for the fun of it rather than it's Power generation, which won't get you very far).

And that's just the starter Reactor. It does require that you keep it fueled with uranite, coal, redstone, and coolant. All things that are easily mined. The reactor in this picture below is the black box. The windmill and wires is Immersive Engineering.

22. Use Create Mod for Tree and Farm automation.

Do you need endless wood, wheat, or glass? The create mod has unique, mechanical, large, way of automating small tasks with big machines. It doesn't actually use typical FE power, but needs kinetic energy from more natural sources like heat, water, or windmills. There's a steep learning curve to Create, so it'll take some time on Youtube to get the gist. But it's worth it to learn for some basic machines to have at your disposal. With this tree farm, we went from what felt like constant chopping down spruce trees (to keep our mine colonies running, to having over 10,000 spruce planks in a matter of hours).

Create and Immersive Engineering make a great pair, and here's a tip: Create needs brass for machines, but has a rather complex way of creating it (you need to capture a Blaze to use in smelting.) Immersive Engineering can make brass in its Alloy Kiln.

23. Create a Mine Colony

The Mine Colonies mod is a huge game within a game, sort of like Sims and Civilization all rolled into Minecraft. This mod is not one to be taken lightly. Start by putting down a Mine Camp and / or a Supply ship, which are great ways to get started early game if you find one, even if you don't plan to start a Mine Colony. They're very easy to craft.

All these structures were built by NPC builders, and they employ dozens of other NPCs who do things like Forestry, Cooking, Farming. You may think they can automate a lot of the tedious things in the game, which they can, but they're slow and needy! You must keep them alive from starvation, mob attacks, and raids, and the builders are in constant need of supplies. There are many different build styles which use different types of wood and stone for building. Choose a style that you have ready access to the resources. As you can see, this one uses a lot of spruce.

Mine Colonies is a way to never be wondering what you're going to do (for better or worse) in Minecraft as you progress through all the buildings, occupations, and their levels.

24. Transportation

There are many ways to move around the world in Valhelsia 3, bringing remote bases, villages, and structures much closer to home:

• Waystones - find these around the world, break them, and put them in more useful locations. The waystones require levels to use, so after you die, they can be frustrating! The farther you travel, the more levels they consume. These will be the first way you teleport. You can also make your own with ender pearls.
• Teleporters - from Mekanism are pricey, but free to use
• Elevators allow you move up and down.
• Gateways from Astral Sorcery let you teleport around the world, like teleporters.

25. Building Tools

Several mods bring tools that make building easier. Without going into too much detail, these tools help with reach

• Astral Sorcery Formation Wand (for building shapes) and Conversion wand (for replacing blocks)
• Create Mod has the schematic cannon and table (save an entire structure from small to enormos and build it automatically), block zapper, world shaper, and symmetry wand.
• Botania's Worldshaper's sextant helps you craft perfect circles. Want to make that glass sphere? Now you can.
• And of course creative flight is always useful.

26. Visit other Dimensions and Go After Some Bosses

This isn't getting started stuff, but thanks to Twilight Forest and Mowzie's Mobs, there are a number of bosses to go after when you've taken care of the Dragon and a Wither or two. Botania has the Gaia (which requires a wither kill to get its nether star).

Now, thanks to Mowzie's mobs, you can hunt down a Naga, Barako the Sun Chief, a Frostmaw, and the Wroughtnought (which will one-shot you if you aren't prepared.) Twilight has the Naga (a different one), the Twilight Lich, the Minoshroom, the Hydra, the Knight Phantom, and the Ur-Ghast.

Check out this video explaining how to make all the dimension portals

Twilight Forest

Visiting Twilight Forest is easy enough though. Create a 2x2 infinite pool of water and surround it with natural stuff like flowers. Then throw in a diamond and jump in.

Atum

Atum is a desert dimension that's generally pretty unfriendly, though I won't spoil it more than that. To get there, set up a 5x5 square of sandstone, put a 5x5 square on top with 3x3 in the middle empty. Then two more sandstone blocks up on each corner like pillars. Fill it with water and throw in a Scarab (which needs some gold and a diamond). Atum, like Twilight has some progression to it, complete it by tackling some puzzles and bosses.

Blue Skies

Blue Skies has two dimensions in it with a huge amount of content, puzzles and bosses. This one is a bit of a puzzle to even get started and I don't want to spoil it. First step is to find a gatekeeper's house and talk to him. More soon...

More...

There are so many more mods and within them, countless things to do, but by now, you’re well on your way to learning about the different mods on your own, heck, even beating the dragon. You definitely want to get to the End. There’s some amazing new biomes in there.

What am I missing for a get started in Valhelsia 3 list? I'm starting a new one. Let me know in the comments.