Homestead modpack guide: what to do first

What to do first in Homestead

1. Open the two books you join with. You start with a short welcome book and the quest book, whose icon also sits at the top left of your inventory. The authors call the quest book the main guide and point you to its Tips chapter early. Ticking the first quest pays a random reward and some experience.
2. Wood and stone tools. Sixteen logs pay a stone axe, 32 sticks pay sixteen torches, and placing twenty torches pays coal. A full set of stone tools pays five raw iron. Chop one log with an axe and the whole tree falls; sneak to cut a single log, and do that near anything you built.
3. Iron. Dig down to deepslate: 16 cobbled deepslate pay five raw iron, and 20 raw iron pay ten ingots. An iron pickaxe pays the iron sword, shovel and axe, and 64 iron ingots pay a Blast Furnace.
4. A bed and armour. Craft a bed, sleep in it once and place two chests. A full set of iron armour pays an Iron Chest and a plushie. Night is fifteen minutes of a forty-minute day here, so the bed is worth making early.
5. Dig for a diamond pickaxe. Diggy Diggy Hole asks you to break 500 stone and hold 500 cobblestone, and pays a Diamond Pickaxe and 1,000 experience. A hundred uses of a crafting table pay a backpack Crafting Upgrade.
6. Furnish the base for your first Golden Leaf. Place ten chests, four barrels, two crafting tables and four each of furnaces, blast furnaces and smokers. The reward is a Golden Leaf, a draw from the op items table and the Roots Take Hold book. Keep the leaf: carried, it heals you slowly, and with eight lanterns it crafts a Tranquil Lantern, which stops hostile mobs spawning within 13 blocks.
7. Diamonds, obsidian and enchanting. Polish a rough diamond on a Diamond Grindstone, make eight Obsidian Ingots for the obsidian tools, and build an enchanting table with 15 bookshelves.
8. Crops, the Nether, then the kitchen. Eight each of carrots, potatoes, wheat and beetroot pay golden carrots, hay and a Straw Hat, and stepping into the Nether pays netherrack and quartz. Then open The Heart of The Homestead: Rich Soil, a first harvest of rice, cabbage, tomato and onion, then a Cooking Pot, a Skillet and a Cutting Board.

After the first chapter

After The First Sprout the book has no fixed path. Progression is flexible, so anything you already carry counts toward a quest, and you can work on several chapters at once.

On a server, claim your land and set a home before you build much: /sethome saves the spot and the ' key opens the claims menu. Playing Homestead with friends explains claims and a shared quest book.

Then the farm and kitchen chapters, Tidy Corners and The Portable Life for storage, Cogs and Whimsy for Create, and the Nether, End and Deep Dark chapters for gear. Gear climbs from iron and diamond to obsidian, which sits between diamond and netherite, then to the eight gem sets of Mythic Upgrades, netherite and warden armour. Every chapter in order has what each one asks for.

How to teleport in Homestead

Homestead has no Waystones. On a server you teleport with FTB Essentials commands, and anywhere you can fast travel along roads you build yourself with Via Romana.

• /sethome saves your home and /home takes you back. You get one home, with ten seconds between trips.
• /tpa and a friend's name asks to go to them; they accept from the message in their chat.
• /spawn takes you to spawn.
• /back returns you to where you last teleported from, or to where you died, every thirty seconds at most.
• /rtp drops you somewhere random 500 to 25,000 blocks from spawn, once every ten minutes, and not from the End.
• /warp goes to the warps a server admin has set.
• Via Romana: craft a Charting Map from a map, an ink sac, a feather and string. Use it to start charting, walk a road of path blocks (dirt path, packed mud, cobblestone, bricks, slabs and the like), and use it again to finish. Then choose Add To Path on a sign at each end. Left-click a linked sign to open the travel map.
• A Brew of Homestead from Hexalia's small cauldron sends you back to your bed or spawn point.

These are the settings on our Homestead server, and they are the mod's own defaults.

How to heal in Homestead

Health comes back on its own while your hunger bar is nearly full, as in plain Minecraft: natural regeneration is on, our server included. To heal faster, carry a Golden Leaf, eat it in an emergency, or use a salve or a potion.

• Eat well. AppleSkin shows on the hunger bar how much a food restores and how much saturation you have left, and the cooked meals from Farmer's Delight and the other kitchen mods fill it far more than raw food.
• A Golden Leaf in your inventory gives slow regeneration that never runs out. Right-click to eat it for a Golden Apple's effect, up to three times, then it is gone.
• A Mender's Salve gives Regeneration. Grind a cornflower, tree resin and an oxeye daisy in Hexalia's mortar and pestle.
• Potions of Healing and Regeneration work as usual.
• Later, a full set of Ruby armour from Mythic Upgrades heals you whenever something near you takes damage.

Hunger stays on in Peaceful: the pack's own mod keeps it, so you still have to eat.

How to open a backpack in Homestead

Press B. That is the pack's key for opening the backpack you wear in the backpack slot of your inventory screen. You can also hold the backpack and right-click.

• Craft a Backpack from leather, string and a chest.
• Put it in the backpack slot, then press B from anywhere.
• If B opens something else: the pack also puts Tom's Simple Storage's terminal and Xaero's new waypoint on B. Change one in Options, Controls, Key Binds, where clashing keys show in red.
• The Portable Life covers every tier from iron to netherite and every upgrade.

How to get redstone in Homestead

Mining redstone ore in Homestead drops one or two Rough Cinnabar, more with Fortune, and no dust. Spelunkery changes every redstone ore this way, its granite, andesite, diorite, tuff and calcite ones included. Turn the Rough Cinnabar into redstone:

• Use Rough Cinnabar on a Grindstone. Each one gives a Cinnabar and one to three Redstone Dust; a Diamond Grindstone gives two to four.
• Crush it with Create's Crushing Wheels: three redstone each, with a chance of a fourth.
• Create's Sand Paper polishes it into Cinnabar, and crushing Cinnabar gives one or two redstone.
• Mine the ore with Silk Touch and smelt it, for one redstone per ore.

Keep some Cinnabar: Spelunkery uses it for its item magnet and lodestones. The Spelunkery guide has every ore it changes.

How to get a Golden Leaf in Homestead

There is no recipe for it. You get Golden Leaves from quests, from the Mystical Trader, and from the quest book's reward draws. The first sure one is the Getting Settled quest in The First Sprout.

• Quests: Getting Settled in The First Sprout, Golden Fish in Catch of the Day, I Am Inevitable in Forged Fables, and the last Mastery quest. The random rewards and op items draws can give one too.
• The Mystical Trader sells them, with Mystical Berries and Cozy Crumbs. It turns up the way a Wandering Trader does and leaves when its time runs out.
• What it does: carried, it gives regeneration that never runs out; eaten (right-click), it gives a Golden Apple's effect, three times.
• It crafts the Tranquil Lantern: eight lanterns around one leaf. Hostile mobs cannot spawn within 13 blocks of it, and any inside are pushed out. Press R inside the radius to see it.
• Upgrade the lantern with eight gold blocks (25 blocks), eight diamond blocks (50) and eight netherite ingots (100).

Eating a leaf uses it up, so keep one aside if you want a lantern.

Coins in the Homestead modpack

Homestead has no money system: no quest pays in coins and no villager trades for them. The coins you find are Clutter's, and players can use them as a currency between themselves through shop blocks.

• Clutter's copper, silver and golden coins come out of Coin Pouches. Pouches turn up in mineshaft, dungeon, temple, shipwreck and village chests among others, and drop from blazes, elder guardians, piglin brutes, the Wither and the Ender Dragon.
• Right-click a pouch to open it. The Greed enchantment gives mobs a chance to drop coins.
• Four copper coins make a silver one and four silver a golden one. Silver Coins and golden ones pay for a beacon.
• Spud's shops let a player sell items for a price they choose, coins included, and take the payment from the buyer's inventory.
• Create Deco's coins are decoration, pressed from nuggets.

Does the Homestead modpack have seasons?

No. Homestead 2.0 has no seasons mod, so crops grow the same all year. What changes the rhythm is the day, which lasts forty minutes (25 of day, 15 of night), and the rain, which makes crops grow faster.

Does Homestead have Create?

Yes. Homestead 2.0 runs Create 6 (Create Fabric 6.0.8) with six add-ons, and the longest chapter of the quest book is about it: Cogs and Whimsy, 73 quests.

• Steam 'n' Rails for more trains and tracks, Slice & Dice to run Farmer's Delight's cutting by machine, Copycats+, Create Deco, Create: Oxidized and Contraption Terminals.
• The chapter starts with Andesite Alloy, cogs and a water wheel, builds an automatic crop farm and a tree farm, then goes on to brass, fluids and trains.
• Create Aeronautics is not in the pack.

The full list is on the mod list.

Villagers in Homestead: jobs and how to move them

Homestead adds seven villager jobs, each taken from a work block placed near an unemployed villager, and you can pick a villager up and carry it with Carry On.

• Arborist: Arborist Table, from the pack's own mod, which also adds building blocks to the Mason's trades.
• Chef: Cooking Pot. Cook: Skillet. Both from Chef's Delight.
• Alchemist: Alchemist Table. Occultist: Enchanted Basin. Oceanographer: Aquarium. Horticulturist: a Flower Tub. All from VillagersPlus.
• Trade Cycling puts a button at the top left of the trading screen that rolls a villager's offers again, until you trade with it.
• To move one, sneak and right-click it with both hands empty, then right-click where it should go. A Spiritroot Tether from Hexalia stores a mob and lets it out again.

Cooking and the kitchen in Homestead

Cooking in Homestead starts with Farmer's Delight: a Cooking Pot over a heat source, a Skillet and a Cutting Board. The Heart of The Homestead walks you through it, and five more chapters add a bakery, teas, beer, wine and plated dinners.

• Stove, Cooking Pot, Skillet and Cutting Board: soups, stews, pies and feasts.
• Seasoned and Settled: Farm & Charm's stove, roaster and Mincer, and Candlelight's dinners. The Farm & Charm guide has every station.
• Bread 'n' Butter: the bakery, with its own guide.
• Tranquili-TEA for teas, Liquid Courage for beer and whiskey, Vines and Vintage for wine and cider, with its own Vinery guide.
• The kitchen quest, A Cozy Kitchen, asks for a stove, 32 canvas rugs, three cutting boards, six cabinets and three baskets.

Farming in Homestead

Right-click a ripe crop to harvest and replant it, farmland can't be trampled, and crops grow faster in the rain. Farmer's Delight and Farm & Charm add the soils, sprinklers and tools.

• Rich Soil from Farmer's Delight, and Farm & Charm's Water Sprinkler, fertilized soil and plow.
• Harvesting by right-click needs no hoe and costs a little hunger.
• Tame a Fernling with Cozy Crumbs (honey bottle, wheat and a red mushroom) and it bone meals the ground around it now and then.
• Bone meal also works on sugar cane, cactus, vines, nether wart and small flowers.
• A feeding trough filled with seeds breeds your animals for you.

Seasoned and Settled is the farm chapter, and Roots That Run Deep asks for 500 of each berry over weeks of play.

Homestead tips and tricks

• Put enchanted gear in a grindstone with a book underneath to move its enchantments onto the book.
• Lootr gives every player their own loot from a chest, so leave loot chests standing for the next person.
• Twigs from the forest floor craft straight into sticks, and seashells into bone meal.
• Rotten flesh smelts into leather, and saddles and name tags have crafting recipes.
• Right-click wool, a bed or a banner with a dye to recolour it where it stands.
• M opens the world map. In JEI, R over an item shows its recipe and U what it is used for.
• When you die, your items and all your experience go into a grave that never disappears, and only you can open it for the first fifteen minutes. /back takes you there.

Questions

Who makes Homestead

Homestead is made by Tokimi and Meleon of CozyStudios. Its home is the CurseForge page, the official Homestead wiki has the authors' own guides, and their Discord is where to ask them about the pack.

Their wiki has pages on progression, peaceful play and the pack's creatures. This page follows the quest book they wrote and the pack's own files.