These are mostly for people begining to mapmake/mod for goldsrc. If you are literally just starting out and do not know what to do, hopefully there is something here. There is not much content for cs/day of defeat here however, just out of a lack of personal interest tbh. :/
In general everything should be pretty much the same, you will just need to set up your editor differently and figure out the game specific entities and all that.
Overall there is a lack of doccumentation for tfc, despite the popularity it had and the talent of the modding community. I think that a lot of guides are just lost to time and the lack of angelfire/neocities archival.
Personally i have found it rather hard to find any kind of in depth doccumentation around some of the lesser known custom game modes (like minigolf, racing or basketball) let alone deep dives into how they work. but that is far from beginner stuff. And this is a constant work in progress anyway so perhaps some will surface, or i will figure it out myself.
If you own half life on steam you can download the half life SDK, which contains hammer. This is the most popular editor for the engine. But it isnt the only one. Configuring hammer for half life.
Hammer used to be known as Worldcraft before valve brought it and rereleased it for goldsrc, any guides which reference worldcraft are relevant to hammer.
JACK General Quake 1-3/half life/etc editor, buit very similarly to hammer but with some extra features and dev support. Even if you are following a guide built for hammer/worldcraft you should be able to work things out. Personally i switch between JACK and Hammer depending on what i am building. But it really depends on what you like the look/feel of. FEATURES
BSP QUAKE EDITOR freeware map editor for Quake, Quake 2, Half life 1, Hexen2 and games built in those engines.
QuArK Quake army knife. Quake editor which supports 5 different engines and tons of games! Including source and goldsrc. Incredibly user friendly and pretty different to hammer and jack.
HALF LIFE total beginners tutorial for when you first load up hammer and have no idea what to do from there.
sven co-op site, but applies to pretty much everything Sadly svenmanor doesnt rlly exist anymore :( but there is an archived mirror. super in depth and covers practically everything, lots of troubleshooting help also!
TFC SPECIFIC how to set up hammer for tfc
TFC SPECIFIC but not really a modding/mapmaking resource but it is still worth mentioning: the tfc maps archive (clicking on the ? next to the maps column gives you a guide to modes and some nice recommendations!)
TFC SPECIFIC simple ctf tutorial refers to worldcraft (just use hammer/jack/bsp/whatever) all of the entity and brush names are the same, they are just more up to date and feature rich editors.
TFC SPECIFIC guide but the technique can apply to whatever you want. How to make symmetrical maps
Modelling tutorial For milkshape (donwload below) the site also hosts really good Goldsrc specific tutorials.
Milkshape 3d was made for half life modelling and skeletal animating. Download Milkshape will run on practically anything these days and was built for the engine. Also possible to decompile half life MDLs in this program to edit and use and reskin.
WAD TOOLS - goldsrc uses wad3 for its textures. Names for textures do not allow spaces. If they are longer than 15 letters the word gets cut off. Put { before the texture name to keep transparency. put ! for water. you will see this if you open up the default textures and look at their names. half life's textures have to be bmp files, and multiples of 16. The most common and easily managable sizes are 64 X 64, 128 X 128, 256 X 256, and the maximum is 512 X 512 if you want something really big. If the number is on the 16 times table it will be fine. There is no compression here. If you want to use a lot of tectures or a lot of big ones please keep that in mind. Your filesize will be huge and it will not be nice to play.Wally A tool for creating tectures and wads, probably the most widely used one there is.
Wadmaker A tool for creating and editing wads, Files no not need to be .bmp for it to work. Keeps png transparecy.
SourceIO is a blender addon for porting .bsp files and more into blender. It supports source, goldsrc and source 2. note: if there is anything you would like me to include/remove let me know. thumbs up.