Here you will find a post full of ideas to help you prepare for the upcoming update, 1.7, as well as various ways to go about doing so! For your convenience, a TL;DR is located beneath this opening paragraph, followed by the primary body of the thread. I hope that even experienced members will see something here that they may not have necessarily thought of (even if they knew it already, just a reminder) that will help everyone! DISCLAIMER: This is all speculatory. You’ll probably need these items based on past updates and spoilers given by @majicDave about 1.7.
TL;DR (Very Short Version of Thread)
Stock up on everything. The main things that you will want a lot of are probably going to be:
- Metals (especially iron, steel, and probably titanium. I’ll throw in Carbon Fiber as well, despite the fact that it’s not actually a metal)
- Food
- Coffee
- Time Crystals
- Server Credit
- General Exploration Tools (i.e. pickaxes, lanterns (preferably steel), jetpack, boat)
Now that that’s been covered, lets get into the good stuff.
Time Crystals
First and foremost, time crystals. The best way to get a head start on any update is to have a bunch of extra time crystals that you won’t mind spending. These can help you to get a head start on any world, whether old or new1.
Time Crystals are valuable for a great multitude of reasons. The best of these, I would say, is rushing time. However, Time Crystals can also be used for teleportation, crafting items at the portal (such as Portal Chests and gem pickaxes), and warping in new blockheads.
Acquiring Time Crystals
There are various excellent ways to acquire time crystals. Many of these methods (if not all) have threads, which can be found below. Here I briefly list a few quick hints/tips/ways to get Time Crystals.
- Videos. Watching video ads earns you 20 Time Crystals per video view, and you can do this generally at least 5 times a day (more, in many cases). This allows you to earn at least 100 Time Crystals a day, which means that if the update comes out in a month (and it will probably take longer than that), you could have over 3,000 extra time crystals sitting around at least!
- Mining. My personal favorite way to get Time Crystals is to mine for them. This must be done in a vanilla world. You can earn 3 time crystals per block that you find (time crystal blocks are located in caves) if you use a regular pickaxe on them, but you will earn 18 per block if you use a diamond pickaxe instead.
No matter what, please refrain from pirating Time Crystals. If you have pirated time crystals, please properly dispose of them.
Additional Sources that May Be Helpful
Maximum Crafting Time Before Your Little BH Needs Rest by @Skeeve - how much time is a time crystal worth?
How To Get Lots of Time Crystals by @Lizzie1
A Quick Guide to Time Crystals2 by @Bren
How to Get 10,000 TC - an illustrated guide3 by @Ronnie
Guide To Hacked/Pirated Time Crystals by @Smeeglefied
Steel (and Iron, and…)
Metals are always a safe investment to make. The most likely metals that you will need are the currently most valuable of the metals: first is steel. Steel is the strongest of the common metals and is actually not that rare or hard to craft, especially when you have a good factory-style setup going and a productive mine. Both of these will be explained in this thread at various points below.
Steel will be useful in making many things that exist already in the game and will help to make you rich, and also will likely be useful to make items that are coming soon . (The two things I would most recommend making with your steel and also stocking up on would be steel pickaxes and steel lanterns.)
How much steel is enough? I would recommend storing up at least half of a chest of steel ingots, as this should be enough to get an excellent start on whatever comes. This is plain steel ingots: you’ll want to make more to be able to make products with your steel to also be ready for the update.
Iron is required to make steel, but it is also useful for a whole lot of other things. First off, crowbars. Just kidding, there are more useful things. Iron can make swords (no steel alternative, and much cheaper than titanium), pickaxes (would not recommend because steel is faster and lasts much longer, and for only 5 coal), machetes (the highest tier of machetes are crafted from iron: not even a titanium variant exists that is better). In addition, I would recommend stocking at least half as much iron as you have steel, but better yet you should have as much if not more iron. Remember that if you have more iron than steel and you run out of steel, you’ll be able to easily make more if you’re prepared with an iron overage.
Bronze, tin, and copper are metals that are much less useful by the time you get to late game, but who knows what is coming in this update! You’ll want to be prepared for everything, so I’d recommend storing up a few stacks of each, especially copper and tin (if you have plenty of each and need bronze, that will be no problem!). Copper is useful for wires, which may or may not have additional uses with 1.7 (or whatever upcoming update there may be as future readers view this thread). Tin is useful for tinfoil (cooking fish, plus tinfoil hats (auto-farming!) and buckets, which can be used to make coffee, clay for your lanterns, and more. I love buckets. I made over 400 recently
I would also recommend stocking up on other metals (gold, platinum, and titanium). Titanium, being the most valuable/rare metal, is used for some of the best tools4 (swords and pickaxes), the best armor (equal to carbon fiber), and of course, jetpacks. Gold is best used to make gold spades (more shortly on that), and the occasional gold bow. I recommend you keep a few stacks of gold on hand as well. Platinum probably won’t have a whole lot of uses, so I would say that it’s safe to store your platinum as coins instead of ingots. If you want to be especially prepared, you can keep some platinum ingots somewhere, but it’s not too much work to turn coins into ingots if you desperately need those, and coins are likely to be more helpful to you.
In addition, I would try to get around 100 carbon fiber sheets ready in case you’ll need those.
Acquiring
Steel can be crafted at a furnace (regular) for 2 coal and 1 iron ingot. However, it’s better to craft it at an electric furnace because you can save 1 coal per steel ingot: the recipe there is 1 coal and 1 iron ingot per 1 steel ingot.
Iron can be crafted two ways: the regular way, which costs 3 iron ore at a furnace (any) or via pig iron. This way triples your iron output, because instead of costing 3 iron ore for one iron ingot, you can get 1 iron ingot per iron ore and 1/5 of a limestone block. This method involves crushing the limestone at a press (any) into Crushed Limestone, and then crafting Pig Iron at an electric furnace and making that into an iron ingot, also at an electric furnace.
Bronze, copper, and tin are simple and have one way to be crafted: they are crafted at any furnace. Copper and tin are crafted from three of their respective ores, and bronze is crafted from two copper ingots and one tin ingot, to make three bronze ingots.
Gold, platinum, and titanium are all more rare ores. These are all crafted similarly (3 of their respective ores at a furnace (electric furnace required except for gold)), but there are many handy tricks to produce more ores per block you find.
Collecting the ores is where the real tricks can come in:
Gem Pickaxes and Gold Tools
Gem pickaxes are well known and most often used for multiplying output of Time Crystal ore. However, they are also very helpful when mining up metals (especially those rare ones such as titanium, platinum, and even gold). The ascending tiers of gem pickaxes produce greater amounts of the resource you mine than the tier before it:
- regular pickaxe: 3 of mined ore
- gold pickaxe (and spade): 3 of mined ore, plus chance for bonus 10 gold ore (may happen multiple times), plus chance for bonus random ores possibly including the ore being mined
- amethyst pickaxe: 6 of mined ore (2x)
- sapphire pickaxe: 9 of mined ore (3x)
- emerald pickaxe: 12 of mined ore (4x)
- ruby pickaxe: 15 of mined ore (5x)
- diamond pickaxe: 18 of mined ore (6x)
I would not recommend making any pickaxe lower than an emerald pickaxe, except for mining time crystals very early-game. I would advise going with ruby or diamond pickaxes for mining ores in most conditions.
Thing is, gold pickaxes produce their drops randomly on any hit of the block. Since spades aren’t “the right tool for the job”, spades take a lot more hits to break a block than pickaxes do. Gold spades still produce the same drops as gold pickaxes do on the same blocks (i.e., both will drop random ores when used on stone). This means that you can use a gold spade on a block of titanium ore to get more hits in, which leads to a higher chance of getting (more) +10’s of titanium ore. If you leave the last hit for a gem pickaxe, then you can get the bonus 10’s of the ore from the gold tool, and then also get the multiplied number of the final product. I can typically get no more than 3 groups of +10 of the ore I mine, meaning that I max out at 48 titanium ore per block of titanium ore that I find. This is an incredible increase in the amount of titanium ingots you will be able to make - from 1 ingot to 16!
I would recommend using this method on gold (so you can make more gold tools) and titanium. Platinum only if you really want, because I tend to find that I don’t really need a whole lot more platinum. That could just be because I try to stay away from trade portals, though. I will generally only use a gem pickaxe or gold spades on iron ore (typically the former). I may use a gem pickaxe on copper or tin, and I typically will use it on coal - more steel! - but generally I will use a regular pickaxe on copper/tin ores because they are common enough and don’t have so many uses.
Magnets
Magnets can be used if you don’t want to use a gem pickaxe on iron ore. Many people are unaware of the fact, but you can use a magnet on iron ore to retrieve 5 iron ores from a block of iron ore, almost doubling your output! This is especially helpful if you craft it into pig iron first.
You may find that magnets are somewhat expensive to make, but assuming you have a bit of gold to spare that’s no problem! Simply craft a few gold pickaxes / spades (pickaxes will be easier) and use them to mine up black sand. You’ll notice a few magnets, among other items, popping into your inventory.
Spelunking VS Strip Mining
Depending on what you’re looking for and how much space/time you have, you can use either method. Neither is inherently better than the other. Strip mining tends to use more pickaxes, less lights, and produce more metals per space you look in (you won’t have to go as far from home during trips).
Spelunking, which I prefer, uses more lights - and on the topic, I recommend using oil lanterns typically because they don’t cost steel, they cost the almost-renewable clay, and no glass - and uses less pickaxe (yay for us metal cheapskates). You will, however, have longer trips to and from your home. However, you’re also more likely to find Time Crystals and Cave Trolls!
Here is a thread that briefly explains the mining styles.
Additional Sources that May Be Helpful
How To Get Iron by @ErickMatrix (hey, that’s mee!)
Information on every gem/ingot/ore in the game by @Buddy9104
A neat little chart showing mining improvements after version 1.6 by @Skeeve
Mining Styles by @PercyJackson
Deluxe mining base- some tips by @Joe
Converting Copper to Gold & Vice Versa by @ErickMatrix