It is interesting to me how many games, Minecraft in particular, rely on wikis - they're very different experiences, sometimes almost unplayable, if you don't read up on how to make progress.
I played quite a few hours of the game, both alone and together with a couple of friends.
One day, after a couple of weeks or something, I learned about a crafting wiki that told you how to craft different items.
At the time, at least for me, it was not clear how you figure out what items you can craft and what items need to be combined in what patterns to craft those new items.
So for me, that crafting wiki became quite essential.
Maybe other people were figuring out how to craft things by trial and error? Or maybe there was something in the game that told them how to craft specific things?
But NEI (and of course, NEI in GregTech New Horizons) is the only way to play.
Because what is Minecraft without regular expressions in your inventory?
https://wiki.gtnewhorizons.com/wiki/Not_Enough_Items#Search_...
Certainly my experience. I don't think there was much/any guidance in-game at the beginning.
Sometimes I forget how to build a gate versus a fence in MC, the trial and error takes just about the same time as search the MC wiki, I still search the wiki more often than flail.
There's also a "recipe book", which tells you how to craft[1] items. More recipes get added as you collect the ingredients needed to make them.
However, these systems were only added in 2017. (For contrast, the game started development in 2009 and reached 1.0 in 2011.) Before that, how to progress was a lot less clear. It was assumed you had someone teaching you how to play, that you watched videos of other people playing, or that you read the wiki.
[1]: The process of combining the items you've collected, by slotting them into a 3×3 grid in a specific pattern (the "recipe"), to make new, more useful items.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqkLu2V1bJJUQ2aLZjFd...
This series is notable for inspiring the addition of Ruined Portals, as construction of a Nether Portal had no in-game hints at the time, and was the only thing he needed a spoiler to figure out.
Eerily reminiscent of w3schools for people getting into web dev.
One of the premises is that wikis are required reading; because if you aren't min/maxing, you're breaking the social contract with your guildmates. It's a totally emergent and novel way for a game to become 'unplayable'!