TerraFirmaCraft is a minecraft survival mod that claims to re-create minecraft ‘survival mode as it should have been.’ That’s a big and entirely subjective claim, which makes it the perfect sort of claim to make.
TerraFirmaCraft comes with its own automatic launcher – which I very much like because it means one download and one click. No more, no less.
The first thing I notice upon opening my new TerraFirmaCraft world is that the trees are oblong and there are weird little grey things on the grass. I punch one and it turns out to be a rock. A Dacite Rock, to be precise.
The second thing I notice, as I begin punching trees, is that leaves drop sticks (twigs, perhaps?) and it is much, much harder to chop my way through a tree trunk with my bare hands. Fists have been nerfed in TerraFirmaCraft.
It turns out that there is NO WAY TO PUNCH TREES INTO WOOD BLOCKS WITH YOUR FISTS. This isn’t survival mode as it was meant to be, this is survival mode as it was… ow my bloody knuckles.
Other things I can’t do with my bare hands include killing a chicken. Chickens are super easy to kill, so this seems a little ridiculous.
It would seem as if the only thing I can do with relative ease is pick up rocks and stones. So I do.
Then I notice that right clicking whilst holding a stack of rocks opens up something that looks like a crafting grid, except it is all full of rock. I surmise that this is my opportunity to chip away at the stone and perhaps form a stone tool. This turns out to be a correct assumption. TerraFirmaCraft calls the turning of stone into tools knapping. I’d advise checking out the knapping guide here. Knapping is not an easy task. Like sculpting, it involves taking away certain parts of the stone in order to be left with something more useful.
My main critique of the TerraFirmaCraft stone tool building guide is that it’s non intuitive. My first instinct was to try to make a spear, but all I did was waste a rock. My second attempt was no more successful. My third attempt resulted in a stone knife, which was actually more useful than the axe head I’d been trying for.
This knife kills the chicken.
Now I have a medium sized raw chicken, I need a way to cook it. Stand by for Playing TerraFirmaCraft PT 2: Introduction To Cooking