So, after testing the waters as to people's general aversion to the
GAF Modded Server, I noticed that there's a general feeling of people being overwhelmed by all the mods in your average mod pack. While I can understand that (personally, I like the flood of new toys to play around with), I figured I'd at least write up a preliminary guide on how to find your way around most mod packs.
Specifically, the usage of one tool that's, as far as I know, included in every mod pack: NEI (Not Enough Items). When NEI is installed, this is what you see when you open your inventory screen:
All that stuff on the right is an 83-page list of blocks and items. Everything available to be crafted, both modded items and vanilla, is listed there. You can use the box at the bottom to search for specific items, and double-click it to activate a "highlight" mode, where items that match what you've typed are highlighted in your inventory, like so:
Notice how everything in my inventory is greyed out except for the sword in my hotbar. this also works with chests, which is great if you're disorganized like me and often keep all sorts of random junk in several Diamond Chests (the extra-large chests added by the Iron Chests mod):
NEI's biggest feature, however, isn't the ability to search inventories, as handy as that is, it's the recipe lookup feature. Say you hop onto Mirk's server and wander around. Eventually you stumble upon Mirk's home:
Gorgeous, ain't it? I'd use my place for this demonstration, but it isn't nearly as pretty. So, even from a distance you can see there's lots of stuff even on the surface that just isn't available in the vanilla game. Let's take a closer look:
Notice that box that's popped up on the top of the screen? That's also part of NEI (technically a plugin for it called WAILA, or "What Am I Looking At?"). This will display that information automatically for whatever block your cursor is on, as long as you're close enough. This not only tells you what the block is called, but what mod it's from. In this case, I really like the look of the Infernal Stone Lamp from the Railcraft mod. I want to make some of my own without vandalizing the home of the person who runs the server, so I go back into my inventory and type the name of the block into the search box:
And when I click on it, that's when NEI really works its magic:
So now I know how to make one of those neat lamps! It's a torch sandwiched between two blocks of Infernal Stone. Don't know how to make Infernal Stone (another Railcraft addition)? Just click on the Infernal Stone block in the crafting grid and:
You can go all the way through any recipe this way. Anything you don't know how to make, you can click on to get the recipe for. Also, take a look at the two arrows on either side of the words "Shaped Crafting". Those allow you to cycle through different available methods of crafting the block in question. in this case, you can also get Infernal Stone by...
.. smelting Infernal Cobblestone!
So, you now know how to find out how to make any item on the server now! Not only that, but NEI has another incredibly useful feature, especially when you're starting out... Let's say you're doing some mining and you come across this:
Certus Quartz Ore? Certainly not a vanilla ore, and the popup tells us it's from a mod called Applied Energistics. While that mod is one of the more complicated ones, let's say that, in true Minecraft tradition, we want to hold on to it just in case we need some later. We mine it and end up with several pieces of Certus Quartz. Let's say we're curious to see everything that it can be used for. Well, if we hover over the Certus Quartz in our inventory and press the U key:
Instead of giving us a list of all the way to make the item in question, this shows us everything that the item in question can be used to make.
So, now we know how to use NEI to craft any item in the game. However, this doesn't tell us how to use the things we'll be making. Unfortunately, this isn't as easily resolved, but it's still workable. A recent trend among a lot of mods has been to include in-game instructions. Factorization and Tinker's Construct have in-game manuals you can craft, Galacticraft has tooltips that pop up when you hover over a machine in your inventory or in NEI, and Extra Utilities has instructions for most of its blocks and machines built into the NEI interface. For example, heading back to my place, I've got this setup:
Liquid XP Drum? What's that? Well, we go back to NEI, look it up, click on the drum, and we get this:
We can use the arrows to cycle over to the crafting recipe and back, but this will tell us what the heck the thing actually does without the need to trek over to a wiki.
The rest of the mods do require a bit of outside reading, however, but then again, so did vanilla Minecraft when we all first started out with it. At this point there's more than enough documentation out there on most mods such that you can find whatever answers you're looking for with a quick google search.
Also, worse comes to worst, you can always ask somebody, either in this thread or in-game, how something works. Every time I've been on a modded GAF server, everybody on there has been exceptionally helpful, and more than willing to pop over to somebody's house to help them figure out how something works.