Guide - [GUIDE] Iron Man: Early Game Tutorial (2024)

Hi, it's Minnow. And this is my guide on how to play an Ironman profile in Skyblock.
If you don't know what an Ironman profile is, well, when you create a new Skyblock profile, you have the option to create a 'Special Profile'. Clicking on this will give you the option to play an Ironman profile. In an Ironman profile, you cannot use the Bazaar or the Auction House, trade with players outside of your Co-op, or pick up items dropped by players outside your co⁻op. Everything you get will require YOU grinding for it. Want a Runaan's Bow? You'll need to get the bones yourself. Want Superior Dragon Armour? You'll have to grind it yourself. This gamemode is extremely difficult, and I would only recommend it to experienced players who want a good challenge, and who also are alright with spending a ton of time on tiny upgrades.
This guide is for already experienced players who have already reached at least the Mid Game in a normal profile, and have an advanced grasp on how this game works. This guide will show you my method of taking on an Ironman profile for the entirety of the Early Game. So hop into your Ironman profile, and let's get started.

PART ONE: Getting Started

1. Now that you're in the Skyblock profile, you need to know your priorities. For this step, it is to get ten minion slots, and level up your skills in the process. Remember that after five hours of playtime, you can go talk to Elizabeth and receive the free Minion Slot from her, so you can get that after not too long.
2. Talk to all the villagers in the Village to get money and a Rogue Sword, and then purchase a Rookie Hoe, Rookie Pickaxe, and Promising Axe. You want to start your journey by doing some farming. Take your hoe and farm wheat until you reach Wheat 3. Now, you can craft the Farm Suit, which is a very decent set of armour for right now. You can buy some wood from the Lumber Merchant and make a Wheat 2 minion. Grab a bit more wood to be prepared to craft some more new minions.
3. Go to the Barn in the Farming Islands. Here, you want a few minions to unlock new minion slots. Potato 2 and Carrot 2 are easy takers. It's necessary to get a few Chicken 2 minions, as eggs are important, so do that as well. Get two Cow 2 minions, as later, you will need a ton of enchanted leather, and it's good to get it now. Once you have those, go to the Mushroom Desert, where you will farm some of the easy to get minions: Sugar Cane 2, Cocoa Beans 2, Cactus 1, Mushroom 2. You can also get a Melon 1 and Pumpkin 1.
4. Now, it's time to leave the Farming Islands. Sell all the excess farming supplies for some extra coin. Anyway, take your pickaxe out and go on over to the Coal Mine. Just mine up ten pieces of coal to unlock Mining 1, so you can move on to the Gold Mine. Here, get the Lazy Miner's Pickaxe and put Telekinesis on it. Then, you need to get 440 cobblestone, 242 coal, 240 iron ingots, and 240 gold ingots. With this, craft one Cobblestone 2 minion, two Auto-Smelters, one Coal 2 minion, one Iron 2 minion, and one Gold 2 minion. If you want to go to the Deep Caverns, if would go faster, but it would also be much more dangerous.
5. Leave the mines for now, and go to the Woodcutting area in the Hub. Once you get 560 oak wood, craft a t3 Oak minion. You'll want to repeat the same with each of the types of wood: Birch, Spruce, Dark Oak, Acacia, and Jungle. After that, try to run the Woods Race in less than 1 minute. It may take some trial and error, but it is definitely possible to finish it with the rogue sword and just 100 mana, and if you reforge the Rogue Sword to Heroic, it'd become easier. Once you complete it in less than a minute, you'll be awarded with a Hunter's Knife. This is a decent weapon for this stage of the game which you will use for a while.
6. The last thing you need to do to get the tenth minion slot besides wait for Elizabeth's minion slot is finished is get eight more unique minions. The Nether Wart 2 minion won't take long to get. You can kill zombies to farm for the Vaccine Talisman and make a Zombie 2 minion. Now, you just need four more unique minions. These should be a Lapis 1, as many Redstone 2s as you can, as these will be one of the minions you will be using for a while now, and a Diamond 1.
7. The minion setup you should use when you have ten slots is as follows: 4x t2 Redstone, 5x t2 Cobblestone, 1x t2 Diamond.

PART TWO: The Grind Begins

1. Firstly, use enchanted bread on your minions. It is very useful and extremely cheap. Anyway, your next big goal is to get Compactors. This should not take that long, but it will take a decent amount of time. Try to level up your Redstone and Cobblestone minions to t4 until they all are. You'll have to check in on them a lot. However, when you get enough cobblestone and redstone to make compactors, put them in the Redstone Minions. Once you have ten compactors, replace the cobblestone minions and diamond minion with more Redstone minions. By the way, the diamond minion was just for the small amount of diamonds needed to do some of the simple things you would normally do using the auction.
2. You now have your ten compactors, and the next thing to grind for is the Super Compactors. To start grinding for these, get a gold pickaxe, enchant with Efficiency 5, and mine a ton of cobblestone. In fact, it will probably be about three to four hours if not in a co-op, and ten to twelve hours among each member if in a co-op. I'd suggest turning a long movie series, like Lord of the Rings, and GroupWatch it with your friends to not get bored. Anyway, after many gruelling hours of grinding cobblestone, you should have unlocked the super compactor recipe. Next, you'll want to get eight Enchanted Redstone Blocks from your minions. Yep. Eight. This should probably take about two weeks if you check in twice a day when their storage is full, and when you get a super compactor, use it on them to boost efficiency. Also, while you grind out the redstone, you can also grind out even more cobblestone. You need 573k cobblestone, total, in enchanted cobblestone. However, it will probably only take about three hours of grinding for two weeks, which just about covers how long the redstone minions spend on this.
3. After you have eight super compactors, go fishing. Well, this is a nice change of pace. You need Raw Fish 2 in your collection to craft Fishing Minions. Once you have it, sell all of the stuff you got from fishing to an NPC merchant, and buy 10 stacks of Raw Fish from the Fishing Merchant. This allows you to craft 8 Fishing 1 minions. You should also use Lapis Minions upgraded with Compactors to get Grand Experience Bottles. And well done. You have moved on to part 3.

PART THREE: The Long Haul

1. There are a few big things you'll need to do throughout this part. They have no specific order, but you should be able to complete them. Here is a list of what you'll need to do.
   1. Build a very large potato farm. This will not only help with making money, which is required to obtain a lot of things in this part, but it will also help you make Hot Potato Books, which you can use to upgrade gear.
   2. Unlock Minion Chests. You must do this before you move onto grinding Skeleton Minions. This is so that you have more storage in your minion, and the Super Compactors are used to their fullest effect.
   3. Buy a Raider Axe from the Melancholic Viking after asking someone in the lobby to do its quest for you.
   4. Unlock the Jungle Axe and craft one. This requires mining 5000 jungle logs to unlock it in the collection.
   5. Grind 50k logs in your wood collection to max out the strength on your Raider Axe.
   6. Get 10 HPBs and use them all on your Raider Axe.
   7. That is all. If you still have to grind minions any more, I suggest getting 40 more HPBs so you can put it on your armour later on, or getting all of the easily-accessible Fairy Souls.
2. Grind Fishing Minions for a few days. During this time, you will need to purchase 30 stacks of bones from the Adventurer NPC and you can also get a head start on the 30 stacks of string and gunpowder you will need later on. Once you have obtained 4 stacks of prismarine crystals and shards for each member of your co-op, craft up 8 t2 Skeleton minions using the 30 stacks of bones you got from the Adventurer NPC. Also, upgrade them with minion storage and Super Compactors.
3. It will take about 5 days for each member of your co-op (if it is a co-op) to get the five stacks of enchanted bones needed. After that, use the exact same setup for Spider Minions, which takes about 4 days to get 4 stacks of enchanted string with that setup, and Creeper Minions, which takes about 3 days to get 3 and a half stacks of enchanted gunpowder.
4. Once you have completed all of this, you should also have done everything mentioned above from 1-6. If you haven't already finished that list, do it now (you don't have to do step 7). Anyway, now, you can craft the ultimate armour set: the Monster Hunter Armour. Craft up a Guardian Chestplate, Skeleton's Helmet, Spider's Boots, and Creeper Pants. The set may look lacking, being most comparable to Golem Armour, but it gives +50 Mana and +5 Speed! Still lacking. Well, it has two protective abilities that make you take less damage, a utility ability that allows you to FLY, and a defensive ability that deals mass damage when you get low on health. Eh, it's good, but not really worth it. Well, here's the big thing. You TAKE 25% LESS DAMAGE and DEAL 25% MORE DAMAGE! Yeah, worth it, isn't it? If no, you should probably stop playing Ironman. This gamemode is not for the faint of heart who spend two weeks getting great stuff and think it's not worth it afterwards. But honestly, if you think that was hard, and not worth it, stop and play regular skyblock. This is not worth your time if you don't think it is. That's the point of skyblock.

PART FOUR: The Knife Sharpens

1. The goal for this part is to obtain enough talismans and a pet, so that you can deal the last bit of damage needed to be able to one-hit Zealots, as that leads to the next big thing on our list: fighting dragons. However, before we can do that, we'll need a few things. There will be two steps after this introductory one, and they can be completed in either order.
2. In this step, you will need to get as many talismans as you can get. Here is a list of the order I suggest you get them, and how to get them.
   1. Farming Talisman. Obtained from farming wheat and crafting hay bales and seeds together.
   2. Wood Affinity Talisman. Obtained from foraging oak trees and leaves and crafting them together.
   3. Campfire Badge. Obtained from doing the Campfire tests at the Dark Thicket of the Park.
   4. Vaccine Talisman. Obtained from killing zombies to get poisonous potatoes, then crafting nine of them together.
   5. Zombie, Skeleton, Village Affinity, Mine Affinity, Intimidation & Scavenger Talismans. Obtained by spending a total of 2600 coins at the Adventurer NPC for the raw talismans.
   6. Speed Talisman. Obtained from farming sugar cane and crafting 108 together.
   7. Potion Affinity Talisman. Obtained from farming nether wart and crafting 144 together.
   8. Talisman of Coins. Obtained from mining emeralds and gold.
   9. Magnetic Talisman. Obtained from mining emeralds and redstone.
   10. Melody's Hair. It's p2w - Ping to win. better internet makes it easy, worse internet makes it impossible.
   11. Wolf Paw. Obtained from Woods Race in 32 seconds or less.
   12. Pig's Foot. Obtained from End Race in 48 seconds or less.
   13. Frozen Chicken. Obtained from Checkpoint 3 in Chicken Race during Season of Jerry event.
   14. Cheetah Talisman. Obtained from 4/4 on all 3 Dungeon Hub Races.
   15. Mediocre Ring of Love. Obtained from Romero and Juliette Quest.
   16. Zombie Ring. Zombie Slayer 2, Zombie Talisman + 64 Rev. Flesh crafted together.
   17. Red Claw Talisman. Wolf Slayer 1, Enchanted Bone + 8 Wolf Tooth crafted together.
   18. Spider Talisman. Dropped from Brood Mother.
   19. That is all. Now, reforge the commons into Unpleasant until you have 75 Crit Chance, and reforge the rest to Forceful.
3. As for your pet, you have quite a few options. I will list each of the best ones underneath this. If, after their descriptions, the letter E in parentheses is written, it means that they require building an egg farm using Chicken Minions to use. If you want to know how to build one, there's some really good ones on Youtube. Anyway, here are the pets I suggest.
   1. Enderman Pet. This pet requires a lot of grinding endermen, but is can be well worth it. This pet gives a ton of extra Crit Damage, but no extra Crit Chance. That's its biggest flaw.
   2. Griffin Pet. You can only get this pet while a Mythological Ritual is happening when Mayor Diana is active. However, it is extremely strong and is probably the best pet on this list. When at Uncommon and higher, this pet also gives permanent Strength Regeneration 5 and Strength 7, which is extremely helpful in Dungeons. It also gives excellent Crit Chance.
   3. Skeleton Pet. This pet gives amazing Crit Chance but lacks badly in Crit Damage and Strength. However, it is an amazing pet if you plan to be an Archer in Dungeons, giving you ranged weapon boosts. It requires grinding up bones and eggs. (E)
   4. Tiger Pet. This pet isn't the strongest and gives a minimal Crit Chance boost, but it gives extra Ferocity, which is very fun to use. It is quite a good pet, but it's also difficult to get, as it can only possibly appear in Travelling Zoo events, and even then it may be difficult to afford it. It's just very random when thinking of how you get it in the first place.
   5. Wither Skeleton Pet. I saved one of the best for last. It doesn't give very much Crit Chance, but it's a Jack-of-all-trades. Every level it gets, it receives +.25 strength, crit damage, intelligence, and defense, and +.05 crit chance. Its abilities aren't too good, but when fighting wither mobs, it SHREDS. However, it requires a ton of coal grinding. (E)
   6. That's it. If you asked my opinion, it would be this: Griffin if it's possible. If not, Skeleton if you lack a lot of Crit Chance or plan on being an Archer. Tiger if it's convenient. Wither Skeleton if you are fine with doing a lot of minion grinding. Enderman if you have a lot of Crit Chance to begin with.

PART FIVE: The Final Stretch.

1. During the last part, you got yourself started on Slayer quests. Try to get to level two in all of them, if you hadn't already. Now you can craft a Wand of Healing, a Radiant Power Orb, and some other cool things.
2. Back to task. Go to Elizabeth and take her free booster cookie. Build an AFK machine, consume the booster cookie, and go AFK for 19.2 hours over the next four IRL days. Use the Bits obtained to purchase, from Elizabeth, a God Potion. After consuming the God Potion, you should be able to one-shot Zealots.
3. Farm Zealots in the End until you have four summoning eyes, or farm the zealots until your co-op has eight, total. If in a solo profile, find an End lobby with a lot of pros who could help you in the Dragon fight, and tell everyone in the chat that you're looking for someone else to put summoning eyes. Once you find one, put in your 4 summoning eyes. All you need to do now, when the Dragon spawns, is hit it one time. Then, run away. DO NOT ENGAGE WITH THE DRAGON, it WILL kill you. Keep your Remnants of the Eye with you at all times, as they may save you from dying to the dragon. Shoot it with the bow once, and then completely ignore it until it is dead. You will still receive a major loot item, as you had earned 400 dragon weight from putting in the summoning eyes and at least 75 from taking part in the dragon fight. You have a 25% chance that you will get an AOTD from each dragon, which is why having co-op members can be so useful.
4. Repeat the above process until each member of your co-op has an Aspect of the Dragons. Fully Enchant those, reforge to Sharp, HPB, etc. And after you've done that, I think you've completed this guide.

PART SIX: The End... of the Beginning.

So, was it all for nought? Did it pay off? Well, that's your desicion, remember. But let's start by looking at then, and then now.
You started with a Rogue Sword, and now, you have a fully-Hot Potato Booked, fully enchanted and reforged Aspect of the Dragons and you're dealing tens of thousands of damage in one hit.
Instead of a Farm Suit with Growth 3 at best, you now have fully enchanted, reforged and hot-potato'ed armour with 4 godlike abilities including FLIGHT.
You have slayed dragons, leveled up skills hugely, got OP items, and you did it all by yourself; no handouts, nothing.
Skyblock teaches us that no matter how ridiculous the odds may seem, within us resides the power to overcome these challenges to achieve something beautiful. And one day, we'll look back on where we started...
and be amazed by how far we've come.

Thank you for reading this guide. I hope I've teached you!
Again, it's been Minnow, and I'm out.