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Automation Tier List

Ranked by effort vs yield, sourced from your installed mod list + configs.

Tier 0 — zero effort, day 1​

AFK Fishing — fishontheline-1.20.1-3.5​

Hold rod near water → mod auto-recasts forever. Get:

  • Mending books (the cornerstone of permanent gear)
  • Enchanted books, name tags, saddles, treasure
  • XP while AFK

Vein Mining + Excavators — veinmining-fabric, justhammers, OnlyExcavators​

  • Vein Mining enchant: 50 blocks per level (config/veinmining-server.toml: maxBlocksPerLevel = 50)
  • Hammer: 3×3 break
  • Excavator: shovel 3×3

TreeChop — TreeChop-1.20.1-fabric-0.19.0​

Chop bottom log → whole tree drops at once.

CarryOn — carryon-fabric​

Pick up full furnaces, chests, machines and relocate.

Spawner pickup is BLOCKED (forbiddenBlocks includes minecraft:spawner). Don't bother trying.

Tier 1 — cheap & passive​

Botania Mana Flowers — Botania​

  • Endoflame — eats coal/charcoal → mana
  • Hydroangeas — water → mana (no input)
  • Rosa Arcana — XP → mana
  • Hopperhock — auto-pickup item magnet (no power needed)
  • Orechid (later) — stone → ore passively. Pair with cobblegen for infinite ores.

Beekeeper Hut — beekeeperhut-fabric​

Place → bees produce honey, wax, resources. Set and forget.

Farmers' Delight farms — FarmersDelight, letsdo-API-fabric​

Pair with crop farms → sell to villagers for emeralds.

Tier 2 — real engines​

Create — create-fabric-6.0.8.1​

Cheapest startup of any tech mod:

  1. Water wheel — free rotation, no fuel, day 1
  2. Millstone + Crushing Wheels — grind ores → nuggets/dust
  3. Cobblegen → Fan washing — passive iron/gold/copper from crushed stone
  4. Mechanical Harvester — auto-crop farms
  5. Mechanical Drill array — auto-mine veins (infinite due to Loophole #4)

Bonus: createaddition-fabric adds electricity → bridges Create to other tech mods.

MI Steel Steam Quarry — Modern-Industrialization-1.8.6​

See MI Quarry Diamond Farm loophole for full math.

  • 12% diamond + 10% emerald per 30s cycle
  • Powered by basic steam boiler

Tier 3 — endgame logistics​

Applied Energistics 2 — appliedenergistics2-fabric, megacells, merequester, ae2wtlib​

  • MEGA cells: billions of items per cell
  • ME Requester: order from anywhere
  • Wireless terminal: shop from your inventory
  • Autocrafting: request finished item, AE2 builds the whole recipe tree

Powah — Powah-5.0.11​

Easiest tech-mod power generation:

  • Solar panels with Lens of Ender (config: lens_of_ender: true) — generate solar through blocks
  • Magmator (lava power)
  • Reactor (uraninite — 8 veins/chunk worldgen, very common)

TechReborn — TechReborn-5.8.14​

Older, slower start. Skip unless you specifically want IC2-style content.