Asteroids Challenge

Asteroids Adventure is a new game mode offered in Galacticraft 3.0.13 (preview available from 3.0.12.431 onwards).

The player starts the game stranded in the Asteroids dimension, with a small quantity of starting items. The aim of the game is to survive long enough to build a functioning base, gather resources, and eventually get yourself back to the Overworld.

It is a challenging game:

you will need to kill mobs to gain essential resources
the Evolved mobs present a tough fight when you have only basic items
if you are killed, you may lose items which are crucial for survival or for continuing in the game: death may be game-ending
there are the ever-present dangers of running out of oxygen, extreme cold and falling off an asteroid
you have limited food, wood and oxygen until you are able to make some

The game mode is designed to test your knowledge of Galacticraft as well as vanilla Minecraft. To survive and flourish you will need to make use of many of the different possibilities which Galacticraft offers.

It can also allow for quick completion of a game of Minecraft if you just want to play through to a specific goal, for example fueling your rocket and returning to the Overworld.

Story

You are a young and talented miner, planning to make a fortune from mining titanium in the Asteroids. You set off on a well-planned expedition, with supplies to last for many months.

As you make your approach to an area which scanners indicate is rich in ores, there's the sound of an impact and the next thing you know, that sound which every astronaut dreads: the rush of escaping air.

"WARNING: Oxygen setup invalid" flashes in large red letters on your HUD. You just have enough time to activate the escape pod. As your pod plunges away towards the nearest large asteroid, you have a fine view of your ship, tearing itself apart.

Unfortunately, somebody forgot to pay the insurance premium to the salvage company. Whether it was administrative error or embezzlement, who knows. That's really the least of your concerns right now. There'll be time enough to deal with that when you return to the Overworld.

You assess your situation: you're in an escape pod, on an unknown asteroid, with only the emergency survival pack in the pod and the few basic materials you were able to salvage from the wreckage of your ship. And it's dark out there. Very, very dark...

Starting items

These items are in your Entry Pod:

Life support items:

Salvaged from your wrecked ship:

16 x Glass Pane
32 x Wooden Plank (birch)
16 x Desh Ingot
8 x Basic Wafer
2 x Full Solar Panel
16 x Can of Food
12 x Egg
2 x Spawn Egg: Cow
4 x Night Vision Potion
1 x Cryogenic Chamber
1 x Tier 2 Rocket
a small amount of fuel

Activating the game mode

In Galacticraft's config core.conf look for the following settings and set them as shown B:"Adventure Game Mode"=true

B:"Quick Game Mode"=true

B:"Force Overworld Spawn"=false

Now start Minecraft, create a new world, and start the game as normal.

You should play the game in Easy or Normal mode. In Peaceful mode it will be impossible to progress, because you need mob drops.

Note that Galacticraft's config setting "Adventure Game Mode" is not connected with Adventure maps in vanilla Minecraft nor with the 'A' game mode setting in NEI.

Galacticraft can be played alongside other mods in this game mode, the same as any other. But you may find the other mods are unplayable, or very limited in what they can do, due to lack of some ore or resource which spawns only on the Overworld.

Optional settings

For an even more challenging game, approaching insane difficulty level, in core.conf you could set

B:"Disable rockets from returning to Overworld"=true and

B:"Harder Difficulty"=true.

But this is really not recommended. You will probably just end up dying. A lot. If you have other mods installed, you may also make it impossible for yourself to manufacture Compressed Steel.

Note for servers

The config settings detailed above on the server are effective, even if clients (players) have set their own configs differently.

On a server, all new players joining the game will land on the same asteroid. That could be a good thing - they can help each other out and share resources - or it could be a bad thing. A future Galacticraft release will provide a config option to allow the server to spawn new players at separated asteroid positions.

Goals

There are various goals in this game mode. Like everything else in Minecraft it's really up to what you want from the game! How about:

just survive longer than 2 hours
successfully return to the Overworld with some valuable resources
build a basic base so you can survive indefinitely in the Asteroids
build an advanced base so you can live in the Asteroids in style with everything you might need
reach a specific technology stage, for example building the Short Range Telepad

Crafting recipe

You can make cobblestone from crunching together 2 blocks of Asteroid Rock. Note that it must be two different types (colors) of Asteroid Rock:

2

Compressor recipes

In Adventure game mode only, the following recipes are enabled for use in the Compressor and the Electric Compressor.

Charcoal to Coal:

2

Cobblestone to Gravel:

9

Gravel to Sand:

9

Sand to 8 Clay:

32x32px8

Soul Sand:

4

Obsidian from plain Stone and 1 Blaze Powder:

Mob drops

In Adventure game mode only, there are a few extra mob drops to help you.

These are dropped occasionally: not often, but more common than the iron ingot drops from vanilla Zombies:

Evolved Zombie will sometimes drop a Copper Ingot
Evolved Skeleton will occasionally drop Lapis Lazuli - Evolved Skeletons like the color blue, who knew?

These are extra possibilities for rare drops, in addition to the other rare drops already possible for each mob (see each mob's individual Wiki page for details):

Evolved Zombie has a rare drop of Melon Seeds
Evolved Skeleton has a rare drop of Pumpkin Seeds
Evolved Creeper has a rare drop of Sugar Cane
Evolved Spider has a rare drop of Nether Wart

Tips

When you move away from your starting position, make sure to remember the coordinates of your Entry Pod: you will need to come back to it eventually to retrieve the rocket and fuel.
Practice jumping between small asteroids - due to the microgravity, you can jump a surprisingly long distance (especially from a running start).
An 'Asteroid Staircase' - nerdpole five blocks up, one across, and repeat - allows you to climb safely up to higher levels.
If you fall, you can normally aim for a small asteroid below you and so not fall out of the world. Always carry a spare stack of blocks so you can get back up to a higher level again.
A Grapple can be shot a surprisingly long distance, and is a great way to reach a nearby large asteroid. If you shoot the Grapple at a small (1 block) asteroid, you will not land on top of it, but this can be a good way to reach another small asteroid near it.
A Hollow Asteroid makes an excellent place for a base.
Mark the end of a walkway with a Glowstone Torch - this gives you a point to aim for if you need to run quickly in the darkness.
Mobs are killed more quickly if you can get critical strikes.
You can use Canisters of Liquid Oxygen to replenish your oxygen tanks, just place them together in your 2x2 crafting grid, like repairing an item.
Do not carry all your spare oxygen tanks with you - if you die and lose them, they will be difficult or impossible to replace.
Make sure any base you build has walls at least 2-3 blocks thick around anything important. Creepers and meteors can damage your base from the outside.
You have some interesting choices about whether to use the 16 Desh Ingots immediately, or save some of them for later.

How to obtain items

SPOILER (highlight to view):

Thermal Padding - you start with enough Thermal Cloth to craft a full set of thermal padding, with 8 spare so that you can replace 1 item if you lose it. If you need more after that, you will have to obtain Wool.
Iron Ingot - from Asteroid Iron Ore. Some large asteroids have a solid core of Iron Ore, making Iron in plentiful supply.
Copper Ingot - this is an occasional drop from an Evolved Zombie. Note it is a similar colour to rotten flesh and is only dropped if the player kills the zombie. Killing 50 Evolved Zombies should give you around 4 copper ingots, more if you have a Looting enchantment.
Tin Ingot - tin is in very limited supply: smelting a Tin Canister produces 3 Tin Ingots. (This is in contrast to the Moon and Mars where tin is abundant.) The only way to replenish your supply is that Evolved Skeletons and Evolved Zombies make rare drops of Tin Canister and Canned Food.
Meteoric Iron Ingot - meteors occasionally land on Asteroids. Also some large asteroids have a solid core of Meteoric Iron (rare, but a rich supply if you find one).
Desh Ingot - you start out with 16 ingots, these cannot be replaced unless you travel to Mars.
Titanium Ingot - Some large asteroids have Ilmenite Ore, note you will need a diamond pickaxe or better, to mine it.
Coal - this can be manufactured in the Compressor out of Charcoal, so it is unlimited if you have a tree farm.
Sand - this can be manufactured from Gravel, see Compressor Recipes above.
Ice - it is a rare drop from Evolved Creepers, alternatively if you need a lot of it, you would need to mine Dense Ice with a tool with the Silk Touch enchantment, and compress that in the Compressor.
Water - either make this from Ice, or search for a Hollow Asteroid which contains a pool of water - around 1 in 5 will contain a pool.
Lava - lava pools can also, rarely, be found in Hollow Asteroids - though never at the same time as water.
Redstone - dropped by Evolved Creeper on death.
Lapis Lazuli - this is an occasional drop from Evolved Skeletons, you should not need much of it except to fabricate extra Solar Panels.
Silicon - some large asteroids have solid cores of silicon ore (rare, but a good supply if you can find one - worth getting a Fortune enchantment for)
Diamond - some large asteroids have solid cores of diamond ore (rare, but an incredibly rich supply if you can find it - worth getting a Fortune enchantment for)
Wool - can be crafted from string, this is a vanilla recipe. String is dropped by Evolved Spiders.
Glowstone Dust - glowstone blocks are plentiful inside Hollow Asteroids.
Blaze Rod - if an Evolved Creeper is burning when it is killed by the player, it will drop a Blaze Rod. This is difficult to achieve in an airless dimension but not completely impossible.

==Walkthrough SPOILER (highlight to view):

While inside the Entry Pod you will not take damage from lack of oxygen or from cold. Summon up your courage, and exit the Entry Pod.
If there are hostile mobs nearby, it's best not to take any items yet, just try to punch the mobs to death (alternatively, push them off the asteroid). Even if you die quite a few times, you will respawn next to the Entry Pod with full health so it doesn't matter.
At this point, Evolved Creepers are your friend - they mine Asteroid Rock for you.
Once there are no mobs nearby, right-click on the Entry Pod and move into the player inventory: Oxygen Mask, Oxygen Gear, 1 Heavy Oxygen Tank, the wood, the Thermal Cloth, and the Desh Ingots. Quickly switch to the Galacticraft inventory tab, and wear the Oxygen Mask, Oxygen Gear and oxygen tank.
Use 4 wood to craft a Crafting Table, 2 wood to craft sticks, and 2 Desh ingots to craft a Desh stick.
Craft the following: a full set of Thermal Padding (and wear it immediately).

1 wood pickaxe, 1 Desh Sword, 1 Desh Chestplate. Wear the Desh Chestplate. Return the rest of the wood, Desh ingots, and Thermal Cloth to the Entry Pod, it will be safe in there. (Pro tip: Thermal Helm, Leggings and Boots can be crafted quickly by laying out 16 Thermal Cloth in the crafting grid in the pattern made by the three recipes super-imposed, then Shift-Click three times.)

(There are other options for what you can craft out of the Desh Ingots - for example, 16 ingots could make either 2 pieces of Desh armor (Chestplate + Boots is best) and a sword, or it could be Helmet, Desh Pickaxe and a sword - or you could stay with a stone sword for now. The Desh Pickaxe has a higher harvest level than diamond, so it can mine any Ilmenite or Diamond Ore you find, which could be handy if you find those before you have diamond / iron tools. This might also allow you to skip the wooden and stone picks stage for a luxury start.)
Using the wooden pickaxe, mine a short way down inside the asteroid you are standing on, you are looking to have 2 different types of Asteroid Rock. Once you have a few blocks of 2 different types (which don't stack), craft them together to make Cobblestone, and make a Stone Pickaxe + a three or four spare Stone Pickaxes as well.
Mine 2 stacks of Asteroid Rock, you will use this to build bridges to other Asteroids.
You are now looking for two things, essential to make any progress: a Hollow Asteroid where you can start farming, and iron ore.
Look around to see if you can find any nearby large asteroids. (In the game Options / Video Options, increase your viewing distance if you need to.) Any large asteroid could contain Iron Ore or another valuable ore - the larger it is, the higher the chance. For a chance for a Hollow Asteroid you want one whose appearance is pure ice, not mixed rock and ice. Ice asteroids are easy to see because ice is brighter than rock.
Note down the exact co-ordinates of your current location where the Entry Pod is - it will be tough to find it again later if you don't.
Bring with you: sword, spare pickaxes, crafting table, spare wood (because you might need another pickaxe, and you will need to craft an axe when you find that Hollow Asteroid), all the food, 1 Canister of Liquid Oxygen, 1 Basic Wafer, and the Cryogenic Chamber.
Pick a nearby large asteroid, and build a bridge out towards it, or carefully jump towards it on small asteroids so that you don't need to build such a long bridge. If the large asteroid is somewhere below you, you may not even need a bridge, you could just 'fall with style' down to it.
Mine to the center of the large asteroid to see if it has anything useful in it. Even if it has no ores, stacks of Asteroid Rock are useful too at this stage of the game, you need plenty of rock for bridges and (later) for making cobblestone, sand, glass, flints, etc.
Mark asteroids you have explored / mined, so you can see your mark from some distance away. For example a cobblestone X, or a pillar of Asteroid Rock: later you can use Glowstone Torches.
Keep doing this until you find a Hollow Asteroid and also a good source of Iron Ore. You should not need to travel too far from your starting position, you are likely to find both within 150-200 blocks, though that could be in any direction and also 100 blocks above or below you.
Keep an eye on your oxygen levels. You can use your Liquid Oxygen Canister to top up your oxygen tank (you can do this quickly enough that you only lose half a heart).
Keep an eye on your food levels, the can of food restores around 2-2.5 hearts. Be careful eating the can of food, the Tin Canister will be thrown away afterwards somewhere nearby. That tin can is very precious, smelting it gives 3 Tin Ingots which you have no other way to obtain. So it's best to eat canned food only when you are inside an enclosed space so that you can't lose the can.
Fight any isolated mobs you find along the way, the mob drops are extremely valuable - at this stage of the game, you especially need the bones from Evolved Skeletons and the string from Evolved Spiders, but it's all good. But run from any large groups of mobs (especially multiple skeletons), those may be fights you can't win, and the items you are carrying are too valuable to take a chance. You do not need to fight Evolved Creepers yet.
When fighting mobs on Asteroids, the main problem is the knockback from their attacks, which knocks you up. Use this to your advantage: while in the air move so you are above the mob and score a critical strike as you come down. This is a great way to fight Evolved Skeletons (which are otherwise very challenging to fight...): if you are directly above their heads, they have a hard time targeting you. It doesn't work so well with Evolved Creepers, you need to attack and run back from them, the same as with vanilla creepers.
90% of Hollow Asteroids contain a tree. Break its leaves for saplings (and maybe an apple). Harvest its wood. Plant the sapling(s) and wait for more trees to grow.
A few Hollow Asteroids contain tall grass, but often not even enough to harvest any seeds. Use bonemeal on the grass to grow more tall grass (also flowers...). Gather seeds. Craft a stone hoe, make farmland and plant the seeds. You need to build up your wheat farm as quickly as possible, so that you have a food supply by the time your 16 starting cans of food are finished.
Craft one or more Furnaces from cobblestone. Use 1 wood to smelt 4 wood into charcoal. From now on, you will always use charcoal as your fuel source. (Pro tip: when you have too many saplings you can also use saplings as fuel. 2 saplings makes a nice fuel source for a furnace for when you only need to smelt 1 item, it saves you from wasting a whole charcoal on 1 item.)
If you have wood to spare, you can smelt cobblestone into plain stone, and craft half slabs - these are good for long bridges between asteroids, as you only need half the amount of stone.
As soon as you have iron, the priority is an Iron Pickaxe. And a full set of iron armor (+ 1 Desh item if you still have that from the start) gives reasonable protection so you can fight mobs properly.
Now that you have iron tools, you are looking for Aluminium Ore. If while looking for it you find other ores, make a note of where they are, although you probably do not yet have the tools to mine them.
By now, you should be fighting Evolved Zombies whenever you see them: you are hoping that one will drop a copper ingot when it dies (1 in 12 chance of that). Likewise, fight Evolved Spiders whenever you see them, you want the string they drop, so that you can make wool, so that you can craft Aluminium Wire.
When you have 6 Aluminium Ingots, 1 Copper Ingot, and 31 Iron Ingots, you are ready to craft your Compressor.
If iron and charcoal are plentiful, you should make a full set of Heavy Duty Armor and tools from Compressed Steel. This gives you strong protection (better than Diamond Armor) and strong tools which can mine everything.
A Grapple is also a pretty handy thing to have, note that you need spare string as well to use it properly.
Around now would be a good time to go all the way back to the original Entry Pod and fetch the rocket and items left in it and bring them safely to your base, if you didn't do that already. Any Liquid Oxygen Canister which is empty can be used to take the fuel out of the Entry Pod.
Using Once you have a Compressor, you could now fairly quickly craft only the items needed to build a Fuel Loader, a Solar Generator to power it, and a Launch Pad, so that you can leave the Asteroids dimension and return to the Overworld before your original oxygen tanks run out.
Alternatively you can create start to create other Galacticraft machines, starting with the Oxygen Collector, and build up a sustainable Asteroids base.
If you are lucky enough to get mob drops of netherwart and fermented spider eye, then you only need 1 blaze rod (from an Evolved Creeper, see above) and you can start brewing potions. A carrot (dropped rarely by Evolved Zombies, though this is even rare than cans of food) will be needed to start carrot farming for Night Vision potions.
If you have a pool of water in your Hollow Asteroid base, you can fish in it. (Yes, we know that the idea of wild fish spawning in space is weird...) If you don't have water, you should probably check out some other nearby Hollow Asteroids to find some.
For your power systems, you do not need an Energy Storage Unit (which is incredibly costly, requiring 15 tin ingots). The internal storage in your Solar Generator should be enough to power your first two machines (Oxygen Collector + Oxygen Compressor).
Once you have a Circuit Fabricator you should be looking to build Advanced Solar Generators if possible, that is the best way to gather enough energy to power a sealed base, and should reduce the amount of Aluminium Wire you need. Aluminium Wire is probably limited by how many spiders you can kill.
Unless you are totally desperate for food, do not use your chicken or cow eggs until you have a sealed base (or a bubble distributor: but a sealed base is better). Making a sustainable cow farm is your only way to get enough leather to make a book and start enchanting.
At some point you might want to build a mob spawner + grinder. Although plenty of mobs spawn naturally in the Asteroids, a more efficient system for harvesting mob resources will be nice to have. If you have a good design for a mob spawner + grinder which works in this dimension, please share it on the forum.

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