Getting Started

HBM's Nuclear Tech Mod is a pretty big mod, and over 10 years of development and counting, it’s amassed plenty of content. Understanding the mechanics of the mod can be difficult for new players, which is why this article serves as a resource for starting players.

Preemption

Before directly starting, it is recommended to know a few tips and information, as it will help a ton in the oncoming journey:

Pre-Mod Preparation

HBM's Nuclear Tech Mod has a myriad of recipes. It is highly unlikely that one person can memorize them all. While there are plenty of mods that aid in that regard, only Not Enough Items will show all of the recipes, including ones that make use of modded machines. Using NEI is crucial, and understanding how it works is just as crucial. Here are some quality-of-life tips:

The NEI overlay can be toggled by pressing 'O' while looking at the inventory
On the bottom left corner of the inventory, given that the overlay is enabled, there is a button for an options menu. It is advised that the "Highlight Tooltips" option in the "World" category is turned on, as it will display the name of whatever block is being currently aiming at on screen. Alternatively, there is a NEI addon called "WAILA" which has the same core functionality, plus some extras.
Pressing R or left clicking on an item will show the item's recipe. In addition, pressing U or right clicking shows all the recipes it is used in.
When navigating the recipe interface, the bottom arrow buttons cycle through additional recipes for the currently selected machine, such as a workbench. If available, the top arrow buttons allow navigation between different machines that can produce the same item, such as switching from a workbench recipe to a furnace recipe. This functionality is important because certain items are compatible with multiple machines; the default machine displayed may not always be accessible to the player at their current stage of progression.

Please for the love of god use NEI, and while you're at it, fucking delete Optifine if you have it. You know what why not go the whole fucking hog and kill the default Microshit launcher and get something like Prism—It has fucking cats, you like cats right? Get the cats launcher. Thankyouuu

In-Mod Preparation

One thing that can be done before engaging in the progression, as well as something that a player should always do given they have free time, is looting structures. The world is littered with buildings and dungeons alike, all full of stuff free for the taking. One shouldn't solely rely on structures for your resources, but they provide a good amount of resources for the early-game. Here's a list of structures which are great for raiding for some loot:

Antennas: A common structure with a few resources, mainly steel ingots, wires and basic circuits.
Radio stations: A great source of concrete and steel, the small side building also has tanks filled with diesel. The chests often also contain revolvers and sometimes weaker shotguns which are fantastic alternatives to your stinky old vanilla bow.
Relay stations: Huge antenna-like structures with loads and loads of steel. Steel sets are only marginally better than iron - but with steel so easily accessible and in such quantities, one is able to make steel tools easily.
Crashed space ships: Uncommon spaceships filled with items that aren't very useful in early game, although they still contain a considerable amount of steel and the chests may contain advanced alloy and tungsten blocks, which are great especially early on.
Crashed vertibirds: Helicopters that are buried in the desert, they are a good source of steel and often contain parts for power armor.
Factories: Large brick structures that contain machines and chests full of raw materials. There are explosive barrels the can be harvested and used to fuel diesel generators. Some say there's a treasure hidden in the lava.

However, this world isn't a place filled with just candy and free stuff, there's also places which a non well-equipped absolutely should not enter, or even approach:

Nuclear power plants: Easily recognizable by their large cooling towers and by the fact that everything in proximity to it is dead. These structures contain many valuable resources, however, every power plant also has its own on-site nuclear waste storage, which causes ambient radiation levels to skyrocket. Unprotected players can die in less than a minute if they choose to approach a power plant. To add insult to injury, high levels of radiation can also turn creepers into mutated nuclear creepers, may Lauren have mercy on your soul if you encounter one of these.
Sellafield: Rare, but extremely dangerous craters filled with rocks that are boiling from radiation. They offer no noteworthy loot, so it's best to avoid them.
Nuclear waste storage tanks: Tower-like structures with nuclear waste leaking out of them. Buried deep within all the nuclear waste usually lies a treasure chest, but without the equipment, you are unlikely to even get to see any of it without dying a dozen times.
Duds: Undetonated bombs dropped and scattered around the world that aren't that much of a threat, unless a player turns one into a threat. Using a high-tech bomb defusing device on a dud will extract the warhead's component.
Poison geysers: Easily recognizable from the lack of grass surrounding a patch of crumbled rock, the geyser periodically spits out a jet of toxic gas. Below it lies a few blocks of yellowcake, although these aren't very useful until you have reached the nuclear age.
Missile Silos: Quite rare, but can be looted for some great resources. It also contains a damaged, but highly destructive weapon, forgotten by civilization, which can later be repaired and activated with the right pieces...

Gathering Time

The first few machines and infrastructure will need quite a stockpile of basic materials. These materials are vital to start and progress within the mod:

Large quantities of iron, copper, and redstone
Small quantities of industrial metals like aluminum, titanium, and lead
Burnables like coal or charcoal, preferably a source of lava
Resources for building like clay and sand (for glass and bricks)
Hemp (for string), sugarcane, saplings, and dandelions

It should be noted that aluminium-bearing ore can be used to produce fireclay, and a surplus of this ore should be kept due to their utility.

The Beginning

No matter the end goal, the very beginning of the tech tree always looks the same. These items must be obtained for progression:

A burner press, made from iron, a piston and a furnace.
A special anvil, made from either iron or lead.

Optionally, utility machines can be used to slightly assist with early-game progression, such as an iron furnace and a bricked furnace.

Early Hazard Protection

Mining coal will visibly affect the lungs of a nearby player. Coal dust can be prevented from entering vital organs by equipping a rudimentary trench mask made from cloth that has been soaked. Note that this crude protection will not block out finer particles of asbestos, albeit asbestos plays no role early into the tech tree.

Fortunately, lung damage slowly dissipates over time when the hazard is no longer in the vicinity.

Blacksmithing

This mod adds various kinds of instruments for specific tasks and gathering materials, that are often crucial for progression. These are the machines needed at this stage for the essential requirements to progress:

Anvils

The Anvil is a must-need as they are used to create important machinery and items, differentiated from the vanilla anvil by their significantly cheaper recipe (they are made with a block and six ingots of the respective metal). They come in many tiers, distinguished by the metal they are made from. An iron or lead anvil is sufficient now.

The Burner Press

The Burner Press uses fuel and a stamp to process metal. Stamps have limited durability, and will need to be replaced occasionally.

Flat stamps can be crafted with a desired material and some bricks. The other stamp shapes can be made in the anvil.

Once the plate stamp is created, put the stamp in the top slot of the press and some copper at the bottom. The burner press will now use combustion to press the stamp into the copper.

The burner press speed depends on its temperature, starting off quite slow and only becoming reasonably swift after a few seconds of use. Because the machine takes a lengthy time to heat up when running, it is recommended to process in batches. Don't worry about fuel efficiency, fuel is measured in completed crafting operations, not time taken.

If the time taken to warm up seems excessive, then I have some good news! You can craft a burner press preheater with copper plates, lava, and tungsten. When placed underneath the burner press, the preheater reduces the time needed to warm up, making the machine much more effective for small batches.

Metallurgy 101

Before basic metallurgy, firebrick must be obtained, which requires aluminium-bearing ore and clay. Alternatively, limestone and sand can be used.

The bricked furnace will be helpful here, because it gets a 100% speed boost when smelting construction materials like stone or bricks, and a 200% boost when smelting firebricks.

With copper plates and firebricks, the blast furnace can now be created. The blast furnace can be powered with any sufficient solid fuel (e.g. coal, lignite, blaze rods) except for wood, which fills an internal buffer so that nothing is lost while the furnace is idling.

Eventually, many alloys will be needed, but these are the vital alloys:

Steel : an iron ingot and a lump of coal make one ingot of steel.
Grade Copper : industrial-grade copper and some redstone make two ingots of minecraft-grade copper.
Advanced Alloy : minecraft-grade copper and steel can be alloyed together to make a superconductive advanced alloy.

Steel can additionally be made by directly smelting iron ore with flux, yielding 3 full ingots per ore, or made in the blast furnace by mixing iron ore and coal to produce 2 ingots of steel.

Many of the recipes are additive, meaning alloying will produce 2 ingots. With this in mind, advanced alloy should be used for tools, being far more resource efficient.

Once steel ingots are obtained, it is possible to craft a blast furnace extension. The extension provides a dramatic increase in speed when placed on top of the blast furnace and keeps fuel consumption the same, it is highly recommended. Even with the extension, the blast furnace remains slow, so multiple furnaces would be more time-efficient.

The Road to Automation

Soon it'll be time for the next machine, but we aren't quite there yet. We'll need one more stamp: A wire stamp . Using the newly made red copper and some tungsten, the player can make new wires. With tungsten wires, a glass pane and an insulator make a vacuum tube. Once the player has a sizable amount of red copper wires, crafting motors becomes possible, which, combined with the vacuum tubes and some metal blocks, can make an assembly machine!

The Factory Grows

The Assembly Machine is a vital machine, as it is required to produce the majority of advanced items and machinery within the mod. To operate the device, a recipe must first be selected via the template folder button in the GUI, which changes the red indicator to yellow. This selection is necessary to distinguish between recipes that share identical base ingredients. Required components can be identified through the NEI overlay or by hovering over the selected recipe icon.

The machine requires electrical power to function. In the early game, players can utilize either a wood-burning generator or a stirling engine. The wood-burning generator is the most straightforward option; it can be placed adjacent to the assembly machine to connect the side wires to the generator's ports, or linked using red copper cables. The stirling engine must be placed directly above a heat-producing machine, such as a firebox, heating oven, or a fluid burner. Once a power source is connected and fueled, the assembly machine will begin the assembling process.

Shredding Like There's No Tomorrow

The Shredder is not only required to progress with all the machines, it is also an incredible utility machine. Once powered and equipped with shredder blades, it will crush ores into two piles of dust each, doubling ore yield (similar to a macerator from IC2). If a surplus of raw ores are available, it would be beneficial to shred them to increase ingot yield once smelted. It can also remove unwanted items such as dirt or half broken tools and turn them into scrap which can be used as furnace fuel.

We Need to Go Deeper

NTM does not significantly change the Nether, however:

There's now a couple of ores that can spawn in the Nether, most notably uranium, tungsten and sulfur, all of which are also found in the overworld albeit less common.
The Nether now has a small background radiation.

The mention of radiation may alarm the reader, though rest assured it is a mild 0.1 RAD/s. It would take almost 3 hours for a player to die in the Nether from radiation without any armour, so take some time and get some quartz. Red phosphorus should be taken into consideration when mining, which can be used as a powerful fuel.

White phosphorus, however, is pyrophoric and will set the holder on fire if they are not wearing a fire-retardant or protective suit. Uranium can also be gathered within the Nether. Along with the aforementioned, stay vigilant for infernal coal - mining it releases carbon monoxide which is suffocating. To mine infernal coal, it is recommended an appropriate gas mask or armor set is being worn.

The Electrical Age

Using cast steel plates, copper coils, tungsten bolts, and vacuum tubes, a Soldering Station can be created. With the soldering station, many types of circuits can be crafted using somewhat basic parts. The only circuit that can be crafted in this stage is the analog circuit board. Utilizing more vacuum tubes, capacitors, lead wires, and printed circuit boards (PCBs), the analog circuit board can be soldered together. Now with soldering, the chemical plant can be created next. From here, the player's choice is free, although oil refinement is the direct next step to progression.

Welding

Main page: Arc Welder

Before proceeding into oil refinement, power shortages may be apparent. For that, a generator which uses welded plates is needed. The arc welder is an important machine, being needed for building other key machines - required for the welded plates in the progression of the mod.

It can be made in a steel (Tier 2) anvil with the following recipe:

4 8 2

Usage

The arc welder has three item slots and one fluid slot. All recipes have item inputs, and some (notably Welded Plates) use fluids. Each recipe has a specific power consumption, measured in HE/t and amount of time required, measured in ticks.

For I/O, the arc welder is more special. Each of the three item slots are color-coded (red, yellow and green respectively), which correspond to those of the welder's ports(4 red, 4 green and 2 yellow). The fluid input can be done on any of the welder's ports.

Working with Fluids

Note: The different type of fluid ducts are purely cosmetic, there is no functional difference between them.

Fluids are an essential component to a variety of recipes and whole processing chains in NTM, and as the player advances further into the electrical age, a clear understanding of their function will become more and more necessary. Unlike most other mods, fluid transferring pipes in NTM do not actually hold fluid but instead define connections between machines or containers, meaning that transfer is instantaneous. To contrast this significant increase in simplicity of use, each fluid pipe must have the exact type of fluid it will carry designated manually by a Fluid ID. They will designate any fluid transfer pipe right clicked with them as a valid route for a fluid to travel. As well as this, fluid IDs can be used to designate storage tanks, machines, and certain buffers inside of machines as accepting a specific type of fluid.

Crafting Table

Power Shortages

Before proceeding to oil refinement, acquiring more efficient power sources is necessary, as the machinery involved carries a high power drain. The wood-burning generator and stirling engine are likely insufficient for these requirements; the following options provide the necessary output.

Solar Power

The steam engine and the solar tower boiler are effective power sources but require specific configurations. This setup introduces the use of a cooling loop to allow for continuous power generation. A primary limitation is that functionality is restricted to daytime hours. The solar tower boiler heats water using sunlight reflected from heliostat mirrors to generate steam, which is then converted into electricity.

Required Materials:

2 Steam Engines
1 Solar Tower Boiler
Support blocks (to raise the boiler 10 blocks)
Fluid Ducts and Cables
Steel Barrel
2 Steam Condensers
Mirror Adjustment Tool
16 Heliostat Mirrors

Construction Procedure:

Identify a large, flat area, as the Solar Tower Boiler occupies a 3x3 space.
Elevate the Solar Tower Boiler on a 10-block tall tower and surround the base with Heliostat mirrors on the ground.
Align the mirrors by using Shift + Right-Click on the boiler and then Right-Clicking each mirror with the Mirror Adjustment Tool to ensure sunlight reflects toward the boiler.
Place the Steel Barrel on the ground and connect it to the boiler using fluid ducts set to the water ID. The boiler contains two fluid duct slots located at the top and bottom.
Position the Steam Engines and connect them to the boiler via fluid ducts set to steam.
Connect Steam Condensers to the Steam Engines using fluid ducts set to low-pressure steam to manage the byproduct.
Route the condensers back to the barrel using fluid ducts set to water. The input/output switch in the barrel GUI must be set to green.
Fill the barrel with water to initiate power generation. Power is extracted from the red cable slot on the Steam Engines.

The Foundry

The oil derrick, which is used to extract oil, needs a new type of alloy formed by combining cobalt , tungsten and steel which creates High-Speed Steel. This alloy is used to create the drill of the derrick. It can be made by using a foundry which is basically a more larger and powerful version of the blast furnace. To create a foundry, these instruments are required:

Crucible
Shallow Foundry Basin
Firebox / Heating Oven

Once these components are obtained, building the foundry can be started by putting down the firebox and placing the crucible on top. The crucible has outlets green and red. The green one outputs the material which is made by a recipe template and the red outlet is the waste side where it outputs the material when no recipe is set. Put the shallow foundry basin on the green outlet side as a recipe will be used. After this, these items are needed

Foundry Mold - Ingot x1

Set the recipe and put the foundry mold on the shallow foundry basin. Now the required alloys can be placed to create high-speed steel which can be viewed by using NEI.

Oil Processing

Oil processing is a large feature in this mod and a very crucial part of progression. Currently a basic oil refinery is needed, which will then be upgraded into an intermediate one later on. Detailed information needed can be found here.