The blightfall subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/ is an amazing source of info and help.

http://blightfall.wikia.com/wiki/Getting_started , and the Blightfall quest book, are good places to get started, but the interaction of the many Blightfall mods is *so* complex that it's worth having a list of things that you might not have thought of, hence this page.

General Starting Out Tips

http://blightfall.wikia.com/wiki/Getting_started is a decent early game guide.

Follow the Quests. They will guide you through various aspects of this modpack and will definitely help you decide what you want to do after you finish a lot of quests.
Craft a Longsword as soon as possible. Longswords are not only a decent weapon, but also a handy movement tool - holding rightclick will allow for a movement lunge that moves you far.
Complete The Scout quests. Scout quests are focused purely on adventuring to different areas. They grant around 10 reputation per quest and allow for easy navigation.
It's okay to request nutrient bars early ingame. Food is difficult to obtain and diminishing returns make things a pain. The Desert Oasis has raspberry bushes and between Silverwood Grove and the Summit there's a cluster of tomato plants.
Replacing parts in a Tinkers' Construct tool swaps them. This preserves XP and alters the experience cap required for the next level. Some materials have a larger cap, some have a smaller cap.
The Smeltery will be your most valuable tool. Either raid a village via tunnels to take their smeltery parts or make your own out of gravel, sand and clay (the swamp bay is good for this).
Taint cannot cross a flat 3-block-dense wall or Fenceposts.

How To Get Very Powerful Tinker's Construct Tools

This mod forces you, in the beginning, to use Tinker's Construct tools instead of regular ones. There are a couple of very important non-obvious things about these tools:

You can replace the parts and keep all modifiers.
You can level them up to get access to more modifiers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNTuf-xlCuk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c5kb7PGlTI show how to do this in Some Detail. If you don't have access to Celenegil or lead yet, you can start this process off with wood or stone parts. https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/66o56o/tinkers_tool_not_getting_xp/ has all the lead vs. celenegil charts in text, and some associated discussion.

Once you have your item levelled up, it's just a matter of pumping it full of mods as able (in particular, redstone and quartz almost always help), and replacing parts with successively more powerful materials (with the goal usually being Enderium, Manyullyn or Tartarite for the main sections).

The recipe for a Tinker's Construct Ball Of Moss is in the west end of the Artiface tab in the Thaumonomicon, and requires low-level items from both Blood Magic and Botania. This is surprisingly easy to get - enter the Eerie Island tower to gain access to its altar, and find dayblooms (some spawn in the map) to generate mana for the seeds, using mushrooms from the Mushroom Island.

Early Game Ranged Weapons

See the Crossbow section for some early game options, but you can also get good mileage out of Thaumcraft Staffs. Having a Reed Staff just for the lightning focus works very well, and you can have other staffs for other focuses. Ice and Portable Hole (into rock) can both be very effective for killing enemies.

Crossbows And Bolts

Making a good crossbow can make the game significantly easier. For details on constructing a good crossbow, see https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/6gk94d/psa_life_gets_so_easier_after_you_make_a_signalum/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/4hkmsh/crossbows_and_other_weapons/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/65hun9/ranged_weapon_armor_suggestions/ for ideas on what early, mid and late game crossbows look like.

It is possible to make a crossbow out of signalum without touching a technology mod. In the floating city area, there is a house with a bucket of destabilised redstone in it - just enough for the four ingots needed for a signalum crossbow limb. However, enough destabilised redstone for a techless cyber totem has not yet been located.

See the Tinker's Construct section for how to level things up, but in this case you can only level them by actually shooting things, not just hitting them with the crossbow or something.

There may or may not be an issue with replacing parts of bolts; search for bolts on https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/6j8pjz/extra_modifiers_in_blightfall/

Materials

There's a complete list of the Blightfall materials and their levels at http://blightfall.wikia.com/wiki/Metals

Some materials have special effects; paper and thaumium both give extra modifier slots, for example.

Many people recommend spamming the sapling bags to get Bloodwood.

For crossbows and bolts, see that section. For everything else, do what https://ftbwiki.org/Weapons_(Tinkers%27_Construct) says except use Enderium or Tartarite instead of Manyullyn.

Armor

See https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/65hun9/ranged_weapon_armor_suggestions/

An important aspect here is that you can use Thaumcraft's Infusion Enchanting and later Osmotic Enchanter to put arbitrary enchantments on most armor you can make, including normal armors. Protection IV + Repair makes a huge difference to survivability.

To get Infusion Enchanting requires scanning an Angry Zombie or Zombie Brain; you can get those by standing near a Sinister Node at night and dealing with the attacks.

Thaumcraft's Runic Shields can help, though they're less useful in Blightfall than in other modpacks since Tainted enemies aren't as likely to drop Terra or Aer vis.

You will almost certainly want to get Thaumcraft's Boots Of The Traveller as soon as you can and keep thum until you have a replacement, so bear that in mind in your plans. The Traveller's Gear ( http://tinkers-construct.wikia.com/wiki/Traveller%27s_Gear ) bits can substitute for some of what the Boots do.

Early on, the Traveller's armour set is incredibly useful for navigation. They cost leather and basic metal, the vest gives fast swimming and the wing give a double jump (and eventually a slow fall) effect.

For the armor pieces themselves are a number of options here, listed approximately by how hard they are to get:

Thaumcraft's Thaumium Fortress Armor
Blood Magic Sanguine Armor
Botania Armor (Manasteel); you can recharge it with a mana tablet
Blood Magic Bound Armor; customizable, indestructable as long as you don't run out of LP, quite expensive to make

Mining And Inventory Management

http://wiki.technicpack.net/Mining_in_Blightfall has good tips on mining and inventory management, like a list of inventory-expanding items. ((Note Link doesn't work and needs to be updated.))

Early Game Taint Management

It may not be obvious, but once taint has been removed from an area with an Ethereal Bloom, it can only come back by spreading from other tainted areas, and also it doesn't (usually) spread over water. This means that you can clean out an area of arbitrary size by walking Ethereal Blooms slowly outward in an ever-expanding circle, although you have to have enough blooms for the entire circle or taint will get back in through the hole. It also doesn't have to be a circle; the point is that if taint can't get in through the edges, the center will also remain untainted.

Also, taint doesn't normally spread through water.

This means that islands are actually pretty easy to completely clean up.

In underground tunnels and cave systems, a three-blocks thick wall will block them from spreading over. Make sure that there are no holes in the wall, including on the ceilling. On the other hand, on the ground, Taint can be blocked by slabs. They cannot grow over slabs and will not spread over walls with a slab on top of it. Be careful not to stack two slabs on top of each other as it will be considered as a full block which Taint can spread over.

Also, when you're mining, you do NOT need to care about mining into Tainted Lands biome - even if the biome is tainted, you're fine as long as Fibrous Taint is not present. Just make sure that you block off caves -that will almost always be Tainted- and you can do some serious Branch Mining just like you did in Vanila Minecraft.

Later on, the Purity focus for your Thaumcraft wand will allow you to manage taint quickly in situations where it is necessary, for example if you are about to die to taint poison or

Food Tips

Blightfall uses The Spice Of Life, a mod that forces you to constantly change foods by giving diminishing returns to food you eat. It's a huge pain. Don't feel bad about requesting nutrient bars!

Bread can be cooked again to make Toast.

Cheesecake on the floor is Immune to Reduced Hunger over time. so it always gives the same amount of hunger. This is considered cheating by some.

Cooking Table from Cooking for Blockheads can help immensely, although it apparently has difficulties with multistep recipes though be aware. It's a good idea to make a few of everything, as this "unlocks" the multi-step recipes that require the things you just made.

Lunch bag (to lunchbox) can hold plenty of food, Shift+click to change them from closed(satchel mode) to open(food mode) . You can cary more varied foods on you without taking up alot of inventory space.

Mana cookies do not have diminishing returns, 1 Mana cookie wil allways restore you hunger to full. Fruit of Grisaia is an late game Botania artefact which does not have diminishing returns and is infinite.

Creating a healing axe from unstable ingots allows for infinite hunger regeneration.

Time Management

The more time you spend in an area, the worse the taint decay gets. In particular, try to spend as little time in the jungle as you possibly can until you're ready to clean it up, because having hundreds of trees turning into Taint Spore Spawners is extremely bad. Silverwood Grove is an almost unavoidable decay spot due to the number of nodes in the area (especially for the purity focus), but with careful management it can be used as a spot to farm spore spawners for reputation.

Early Game Scouting

See https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/64oacm/tips_for_travelscouting/

Run past things. Use the longsword jump ability. You don't need to stop and engage the monsters, just get to the scout points.

Use boats. Boats avoid a lot of the annoyance of tainted wildlife.

Early on, make wood armor or Leather Armor (from cotton). You'll need it!

The pan is a good weapon to knock back taint early on.

Taint Swarms can't get you if you dig 2 Squares down into the ground.

Get Boots Of The Traveller (thaumcraft artifice tab) as soon as you possibly can. The Traveller's Gear ( http://tinkers-construct.wikia.com/wiki/Traveller%27s_Gear ) bits can substitute for some of what the Boots do as well.

If you see a greatwood, stop and get a sapling or two. They make great sources of wood and you'll absolutely need them for their essentia later in Thaumcraft.

Villagers are hostile until untainted.

Recharging Wands

Besides the normal Thaumcraft stuff (pulling from nodes, the Wand Recharge Pedestal, and the Vis Charge Relay), note that:

Slain mobs drop aspect orbs (little balls like experience balls that charge wands).
Primal Charms drop aspect orbs at random; having 5 or so in your inventory will recharge wands at a pretty decent rate.

On the general topic of all the different kinds of magical power in Thaumcraft, see https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/65hun9/ranged_weapon_armor_suggestions/dgghubb/

How To Get Started In Blood Magic

Visit the Eerie Island. Follow the Dark One quest tab in the Blightfall book.

There are many tutorials on it around the web, too, such as https://ftbwiki.org/Tutorial:Blood_Magic and https://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/beginners-guide-to-blood-magic.39927/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKK2Eu-jsJM and the rest of that video series.

How To Get Started In Botania

See https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/64oacm/tips_for_travelscouting/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/5pwotr/how_do_i_get_started_in_botania/

The Botania flowers can be found at many scouting points and at other places nearby. Taking one will unlock a quest with the xenobiologist, then a whole series with the paranormalist; see the Botania Quests section in http://blightfall.wikia.com/wiki/Paranormalist

If you do the 3 quests to get the scanner there, you get a bunch of locations of all the flower types, which is important because floral fertilizer doesn't make all the flowers in Blightfall, just the ones you used to make it.

You don't *have* to do the scanner quests to continue in Botania, but you probably won't be able to find many of the flowers without them, and going to at least one of the locations described (the waterfall-related one) will find you a great cache of stuff you likely wouldn't have otherwise found.

Several of the scanner quests are easier than they appear. In particular, the slime one can be gotten with Thaumic Slimes, which can be found in cavers, or generated by overfilling a thaumcraft cauldron. Also, the diamond saw one is pretty easy if you've gotten far enough to make steel. Travelling Trunks aren't that hard if you're into the thaumcraft tree.

If you do lots of the scout quests, you'll get enough fragments to decipher the Lexica Botanica (which is the untranslated book that looks exactly like the Lexica Botanica). More info on this process at https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/5pwotr/how_do_i_get_started_in_botania/

Note that you can get an arbitrary amonut of petals of a flower you've found by planting a petal, using bonemeal on it to get a tall flower which gives 4 petals, repeat. You can then use those petals to make floral fertilizer to get the normal flower if you need them.

Get yourself an Jaded Amaranthus as soon as possible. For a little mana this flower produces all the mystical flowers, even those you have not found yet!

Non-Obvious But Valuable Things To Make

In approximate order of how hard they are to do.

Tinker's Construct hammers are amazing.
The Traveller's Gear ( http://tinkers-construct.wikia.com/wiki/Traveller%27s_Gear ) has some useful bits, in particular the gloves with a bunch of redstone added means that you really don't need any tools for dirt/sand/etc, and the belt gives you an entire extra hotbar. Wearing these upgraded gloves increases the mining speed of anything you wield (including your bare hands.) These are a great way to counteract the slowness of the ticon hammers.
You can make paper using the Presser from Pam's Harvestcraft; give it any wood.
From the Apocrypha tab of Thaumcraft, requiring a decent amount of Botania, get a Euclidaisy ( https://ftbwiki.org/Euclidaisy ). They generate Etherial Essences. This gets you access to the Auram aspect, which is otherwise incredibly hard to acquire unless you like breaking nodes -_-. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/495iy9/best_way_to_get_auram/
Better Swimming: Ring of Chordata (Botania). If you add a Mana Tablet, it'll let you breath underwater, too. Swimming allows you to avoid a lot of the nasties on land, and there are some secrets underwater as well. Until you can manage to make it, a Traveller's Vest enables fast travel through water but very little else.
Moving chests: Dolly from JABBA can move chests around.
Stabilized Infusion altar: You're likely to do a lot of Infusion, so it's worth stabilizing the altar. The normal way to do this is to build a room below and fill it with candles.
Automated mining: Blood magic: Combining a Ritual of the Crusher with a Ritual of Magnetism can create an automated mining system.
The Mana Fluxfield converts mana into redstone flux - this is one of the only two(?) ways of generating RF besides reactors, and is much safer in comparison.
Generate Blood Magic LP: Well of Suffering (blood magic ritual) + Ritual of the Shepherd (blood magic) + lamp of fertility (Thaumcraft).
Unlimited hunger curing: Healing Axe cures your hunger bar when wielded. Needs a Division Sigil. You can also use a slaughterhouse + some form of mob spawning (see the section on mob spawners) to produce liquid meat, which can be drank with a straw for 2 hunger points.
Flight: Angel Ring requires a Nether Star (from the wither) and Division Sigil, but gives very cheap flight. Thaumostatic Harness is probably easier to make but requires Potentia essentia. Air Sigil (Blood Magic) is another option; it requires 50 LP per hit, and you *really* want a Sigil Of Elemental Affinity to go with it to negate fall damage.
It is possible to triple your ores, with some effort; see https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/6i0bv6/tip_easy_ore_tripling/

Random Tips

Don't let Thaumcraft harvest golems near fruit trees; they will destroy the fruit.
Type "not eaten recently" into NEI, this will list all foods that you can currently get 100% nutrition from.
If you find a sunflower in the field, plant it, then bonemeal it to get more sunflowers, then craft 2 sunflowers together to get seeds
Breaking an assembled Infernal furnace spawns a Blaze. Capture it with either a ~~Pokeball-~~ Safari net or an Imprinting Crystal and you can continuously respawn them given the correct requirements. This can also be done with several CustomNPCs mods to gain their valuable drops.

Smeltery Tips & Tricks

Having trouble making Grout? Build a small smeltery and smelt Cobblestone in it (compressed cobble works as well and saves you a lot of space.) It turns into seared stone which can be used for smeltery building and can be cast as both blocks and bricks (in basin and ingot cast, respectively). It can also be chiseled for decoration purposes.
Some items, like Redstone will not smelt using lava as fuel. If your items seem to stop smelting half way and just constantly eat your lava, you need to use Blazing pyrotheum as a fuel which is kinda rare in Blightfall.
Smelting redstone and glowstone for signalum and lumium requires Blazing Pyrotheum, a material hotter than lava, which can only be acquired in liquid form through a Magma Crucible. This in turn requires redstone flux. However, it is worth the effort - dawn machines can be created through these materials, and the signalum crossbow is a worthy ranged weapon.
Smeltery Drains can be used both for output and input of liquids from/into the smeltery. They can also output into Hardened Fluiducts. Experiment a bit and you can get better redstone controll and/or filters going to better automate the Smeltery.
The recipe for making molten Obsidian by draining water and lava into the Smeltery is not an option in Blightfall. Either water-lava combinations (finite) or Magma Crucibles (if set up well, infinite) can generate obsidian.
Smeltery Controller functions as the inventory interface and will receive items from ducts/hoppers and such.
Pushing certain mobs into a working smeltery damages them and produces specific liquids:
- Most mobs including player: Blood
- Horses and Donkeys: Glue
- Villagers: Liquified Emeralds
- Endermen: Molten Enderium

Dealing With Tainted Tendrils/Goo

Note that Tainted Goo and Taint Tendrils DO NOT DECAY in anything but your primary inventory. This makes a Satchel or a Travelling Trunk invaluable.

Extracting Materials From Items

Fully repaired armor and Tinker's Construct parts will melt in a smeltery. Tinker's Construct tools, of any kind, will not melt, and there's no way to extract parts from a tool, so once material is in a tool, you can't get it back. Thaumium stuff also won't melt.

You can combine two pairs of damaged armor to get less-damaged armor, repeat until it's fully repaired, then you can melt it.

Alternatively, you can repair things with the Thaumic Restorer from the Thaumic Tinkerer tab in your Thaumonomicon. This requires Instrumentum essentia, which you can get from flint, rubber bars, or centrifuging anything that gives machina such as levers.

Managing Thaumcraft Nodes

It is extremely useful to make an Energized Aura Node ; see https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/65hun9/ranged_weapon_armor_suggestions/dgbb795/ for lots of info on this (that entire post and comments has very useful advice). See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW-XJD47bvI

To make a really *powerful* Energized Node, though, you want to merge multiple nodes into each other using node bullying. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ao1JchZ_Og and https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthebeast/comments/3bjwv1/thaumcraft_how_do_i_build_a_super_node/

You can also make a giant node using a hungry node if you can find one; this is difficult and risky. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i64Ul0Fu40

There are several methods for moving nodes around (see https://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/moving-aura-nodes-alternatives.87677/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugJ5Z8sNoj4 and https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthebeast/comments/2wyarx/moving_aura_nodes/ ).

The normal way (node in a jar); leaves about 3/4 nodes pale (this is bad)
Blood Magic teleposers ; https://ftbwiki.org/Teleposer
Automagy apparently has a warded glass jar or something?
It may be possible to move nodes with Archimedes ships?

How To Get Vanilla Monsters

Sinister Nodes double as Furious Zombie spawners; there are several of these, including one near Alpha. They can sometimes be seen on the map because the Eerie Biome prevents taint, so the land appears dark green. Usual spawning rules apply, so you need to be within 16 blocks and it needs to be dark.

There are spawners for many things, including spiders and skeletons, scattered about the map. There's a zombie spawner on the island adjacent to the swamp waypoint. You can find spawners in the desert more easily because the sand falls strangely around them (??, see )

Cursed Earth generates many monsters very rapidly in low light; see the Cursed Earth section for how to get that.

Making Your Own Mob Spawners

Once you have access to a particular mob, you can use a Safari Net + an MFR Auto-Spawner to spawn that mob for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSju7GH_jLg shows such a setup in Blightfall; I don't know if the trick shown there (doing it with the custom Blightfall enemies) still works.

You DO NOT need the safari net launcher.

MineFactory Reloaded Auto-Spawners work with Grinders to generate the essence needed for the Auto-Spawner; there are several tutorials for this around the web.

If you just need a bunch of monsters, though, try Cursed Earth instead, which has its own section.

Division Sigil / Cursed Earth

YOU NEED SILK TOUCH FOR THIS.

Cursed Earth is generated by activating a Division Sigil. See https://ftbwiki.org/Division_Sigil for the activation ritual. Doing so will give you some Cursed Earth ( https://ftbwiki.org/Cursed_Earth ) , which you should immediately collect it with a silk touch tool, because sunlight destroys it. You can then use it to build an (underground!) monster spawning room, because non-sun-light will prevent spawning without burning the soil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNTuf-xlCuk has a section on how to do all this.

The Division Sigil can be gotten from the Wither (see that section) or found on the map; see https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/59940f/can_anyone_tell_me_to_find_a_division_sigil_on/

Wither

According to https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/4t2b0h/strategy/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/6jfteh/help_me_with_an_older_post/ , the Wither can't escape Obsidian in this mod, thus making it relatively easy to kill. The wither can get you Nether Stars and Division Sigils (although there are other ways to get the latter; see its section).

Per https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/3q5poq/unofficial_hottoget_thread/ , you can get wither skulls from normal skulls using a Thaumcraft recipe; you need 3 to summon the wither. You can get two in the map; see http://forums.technicpack.net/topic/170764-nether-stars-beacon-for-high-tier-botania/

How To Get Things

Necrotic Bone, Wither Skulls (sort of), Bucket Of Blood, Shiitake's Head: https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/3q5poq/unofficial_hottoget_thread/

Wither Skulls: http://forums.technicpack.net/topic/170764-nether-stars-beacon-for-high-tier-botania/

Silk Touch: Tinker's Construct has a silk touch recipe (see NEI) which isn't that bad once you go hunting on the map for Emerald. You can also use Thaumcraft's Infusion Enchanting, but that WON'T WORK on Tinker's Construct tools.

Ridiculous End-Game Thaumcraft Items

The KAMI module of Thaumic Tinkerer is installed; this has ridiculously powerful things in it, including the Bedrock Dimension. See https://ftbwiki.org/Ichor to get started.

General Tips If You Want To Rush The Game

https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/4t2b0h/strategy/

Some of these are obscure. Some of them could be considered cheating. Further non-cheating notes:

The blue wool thing: Arguably an exploit?, you can get infinite lapis lazuli from blue wool with a pulverizer; see https://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/infinite-lapis-lazuli.40509/page-2 ; or you can use blue sheep
The yellow lens thing is https://ftbwiki.org/Laser_Drill and https://ftbwiki.org/Laser_Focus ; this will get you lots of yellorium to drive a passive reactor (this is from Big Reactors; there are lots of tutorials).
The part about wither and flight was expanded on at https://www.reddit.com/r/Blightfall/comments/6jfteh/help_me_with_an_older_post/
Entering The Last Millenium as early as possible is highly recommended. The chest in there contains 64 blooms and 4 dawn totems.

CHEATING / RUSHING TIPS

Most of the tips in this section are what many people would likely consider exploits, and some are outright cheats.

Botania: Exact Flower Locations

Can be found at http://blightfall.wikia.com/wiki/Mystical_Flowers

General tips if you want to rush the game