Finally caught up on reading the thread and aside from the normal questions that come up every few pages, there sure are a lot of people having issues with flux. I'm on a 3 player survival hard difficulty game on SMP and it's really not been a problem, even with the three of us carrying hand mirrors, using the infernal furnace, lots of essentia brewing?
We moved several km from the spawn point in the beginning of the game, living off wild animals, camping at night, and harvesting silverwoods and looting chests along the way (and also maybe killing a few pech for sweet drops). This gave us a big buffer of 'stuff' to start with when we finally decided on a place to settle. I farmed silverwoods to generate a ring of pure nodes around the thaumaturge castle that we built, and we haven't destroyed a single node yet. Pure nodes take a ton of abuse to actually destroy. It's mind boggling to me that so many players are having difficulty with flux buildup in and around the areas where they settle. Getting enough saplings can be rough, and I did have to go on a silverwood sapling discovery trek a couple of times to get more. It really wasn't that bad, though??
The essentia crystalizer does bottom out the local terra aura almost instantly. Is this functioning as intended? It makes the crystalizer unuseable - yeah yeah I know about storing phials in chests etc. etc. We might have to do this with the crystalizer out of commission, but it doesn't change the fact that the crystalizer seems broken in the way it totally ruins the aura within 1-2 seconds.
I love essentia tubes and the crazy meth labs that you can build with them. It's got this great mad scientist feel. It's also clumsy, things clog and break, it can be confusing. Personally I feel like this adds to the game play and the feeling of the setting where you're a thaumaturge that is always reaching past the possible, pushing the boundaries. You are accomplishing things your colleagues said couldn't be done. Your processes aren't perfect, you can't break down matter completely all the time and sometimes your work generates magic-toxin that poisons the aether. It is your punishment for trying to harness the energy that built the world. Being a thaumaturge is messy work, and I feel like the imperfect-but-so-close lab setup embodies that to some degree.
I just opened my second Oculis and explored most of the dungeon. The weird thing was, when I came back out, there were tainted rainstorms and spots of vitium in the aura all over my (formerly pristine) magic forest. Anyone know what happened there?
I was lucky enough to catch it early and make sure it didn't take hold, but that still doesn't seem like it was supposed to happen.
This happened on our SMP game right after we opened the eye - I think the actual opening the eye ritual dumps a bunch of vitium into the aura. We were careful not to mess up our own local aura with the vis charge for the staff, so it wasn't from being bottomed out.
The outside of the outerlands is filled with a block called 'stary void'. When this block is in contact with air blocks, it darkens the area and makes windy sounds aswell as airy particles being sucked in towards the block. It does not suck mobs, blocks or items, actualy.
RIP void base design from tc4.
I tried mining out this block but no luck - need to go back with an equal trade focus because it looks SO COOL. Do you still fall through the bottom of the world if you stand directly on it?
I use MultiMC and it works really well for changing between versions and mods. Kinda surprised that nobody's brought it up yet? But, it's a great utility and I like it a lot.
This 1.8 derail is exactly that, a derail. This is the same complaint over and over whenever there's a new version of a game that has any mods about how everything is ruined. Frankly, it's disrespectful to Azanor (and other modders) to continually complain about moving to a new version, especially after they've already done the work to make it so. It's taken hundreds of hours of work for him to upgrade, and his big leap into the newer version will encourage other modders to jump in as well. New players who are just getting in to modding aren't going to want to downgrade and then have to install a bunch of other mods just to have access to content that is available in a newer official patch (never mind missing out on rendering and backend improvements in new patches as well). This change will also make it easier for him to move to 1.9, and I'm looking forward to the opportunities that modders are going to have with the main hand offhand system. Duel wield void sword and greatwood wand? Yes, please!
Back on topic, eldritch crabs aren't dropping any vis crystals when they're killed by liquid death. We have three crusted openings continually funneling crabs into liquid death over a hangry chest and haven't gotten a single vis crystal. Not sure if this is intentional or not?
There's also a weird issue with the wand/staff GUI when using an equal trade focus and slabs. The selected slabs are showing up as the textureless placeholder pink/black cube in the wand GUI. When the focus is actually used, it makes the chime sound, uses vis, and then doesn't actually switch over any blocks.
Duping ore is super easy considering that tainted wood is really easy to get. Hell, it's fast in the crucible, too, and use dirt blocks to soak up the extra herba. Put some logs down in a tainted biome and they'll turn into tainted wood quite quickly.
Pure nodes remove flux from the atmosphere, at a small chance to reduce their own size (and eventually disappear) as they do so. I don't know if they do anything to the taint biome. They don't appear to spread Magical Forest biome like they did in TC4.
Spamming silverwoods until your base is littered with pure nodes seems to be the best way to make sure the low unavoidable levels of flux production don't eventually build up and become a problem, with the added benefit that it'll improve the aura around your base.
I miss the magical forest biome spreading that it used to do. We're setup in a desert biome and I was hoping that all the pure nodes would let us convert the biome and have this sort of oasis thing going on with green grass and trees. Oh well!
It was a lot of work planting, chopping, and replanting trees to populate our magic castle with nodes. Totally worth it, though, the aura recharge in the area is aweeesommeeee. So far, in the entire time playing, only one of them has completely evaporated.
Is there any way to transfer the contents from a jar of essentia to another jar? I didn't immediately notice that Inventory Tweaks had "restocked" my initial empty jar with others from my inventory when I was grabbing essentia from the alembics, so now I have one jar containing a single ignis, another with 2 ignis, and a 3rd with 18 ignis. Is it possible to empty the smaller amounts into the 3rd jar? I tried right-clicking on them with the more full jar, and I tried emptying them back into the alembics so I could re-collect them into the main jar, but neither worked. Any solution?
Take two essentia pipes and put them up horizontally and then hook both jars together. It looks super silly but it works!
Remember that labeled, unlabeled, and void jars all have different suction. You may need a couple of bellows to get enough suction to pull into a void jar from a labeled jar. We have one of these ridiculous things setup in the corner of our totally not illegal essentia lab for this exact purpose.
On the one hand, I have always agreed with the idea that mods need to be balanced against vanilla, not other mods.
But ... I am trying to put together a "one mod" server for some friends. And started with Thaumcraft. Oh, and Chisel because the decorative blocks are awesome. And Carpenters Blocks. Because you cant make a thumaturges tower without angles. And Antique Atlas. Because one can't go without *some* kind of minimap. And then someone said it would be a deal breaker if there wasn't Blood Magic as an alternative. And someone else said they'd prefer to try Witchery. Twilight Forest is already being punted as "something to explore" to give a purpose to the gear the magic mods are giving. Roguelike dungeons and probably Recurrent Complex are also "in" but as server only mods...
So no, your singular experience notwithstanding, single mod modpacks are actually a fallacy.
I agree that it's a really hard job for Azanor to balance Thaumcraft against vanilla while also keeping it balanced against other mods. Keeping everyone in a village happy is a big task. I feel like balancing it against other mods eventually leads to this kind of power creep situation where mods keep introducing tougher and tougher mobs, more and more powerful tools, etc. Then everyone on a server has creative-style unlimited flight and cool items like the harness end up collecting dust.
In regards to the discussion of wands and such draining the aura:
Stuff like the repair enchant, the hover harness and so forth should stay as they are - they give fairly powerful effects and one of the drawbacks should be that they have a nasty effect on the aura. The repair enchant is maybe a bit expensive (and I will tweak that cost for the next update), but I will be removing that for the 1.9 update anyway since it is basically becomes part of vanilla then.
In regards to wands:
I am considering changing them so they only ever charge while being held. Possibly even with an additional restriction that you have to maybe a) not move, or press some sort of hotkey to actively charge them.
The function of the vis amulet will then be that it will give wands passive recharge in your inventory. If you don't want that then don't use the amulet.
Thoughts?
The repair thing only started to add up to the bad on our server when it was three players with 1-3 pieces of repair gear each taking a lot of damage consistently, like monster farming at night or in the outer lands. Not sure how draining it is on single player, but I also hold out for as long as possible with cheapie crap armor until I can make void armor. In this roll we were able to get void tools fairly early because we were brave and stupid enough to get some void seeds from mob drops. Totally worth getting killed for.
Having wands recharge only when held + some kind of restriction sounds like it would alleviate a lot of problems. I vote for the hotkey option, personally. Having to press and hold F is convenient to change foci but also difficult enough that it can be hard to change in the middle of a fight. It's a good balance. I feel like having a hotkey function for charging would be the same.
Regarding the hover harness explicitly: It seems largely impossible nowadays to find Thaumcraft in a modpack that does not include really cheesy unlimited free creative flight. No one, on any server, ever uses the hover harness. It is, practically, the most useless item TC offers. This annoys me a lot for I really like the harness and I totally agree that flight - for exploring / fighting is a very powerful thing to posses - and thr harness should be balanced to not trivialize that kind of content.
I play on a a server that is running only Thaumcraft with no other mods and the harness is awesome. It's great for getting around in the end and the nether. In the overworld it's maybe not as useful, but there's less environmental hazards that make traveling long distances difficult or inconvenient. It seems like almost everyone in this thread besides me is playing Thaumcraft with some other mods, so it makes sense that the harness is less relevant when there's other options. That said, Thaumcraft needs to be fun and balanced for playing without any other add ons. The fact that other modpacks include freebie flight god mode in survival is irrelevant. IMHO that kind of inclusion feels like it's actually a removal of gameplay.
It's just a band-aid solution anyway. There won't be a compelling reason to use any vis battery item until you can actually run out of mana again. My first thought is to change the way the aura handles running dry. Instead of generating a trickle of vis plus some vitium, just let it plain old-fashioned run out. That way instead of the one-dimensional threat of taint, your bases start to develop places where certain items stop working and crafting starts to require those vis "shopping sprees" again. Having a vis battery becomes an actual concern, at least as a stopgap until you're able to start growing/moving nodes.
I really like the old new aura mechanic in TC5 and how there's actually consequences for abusing/overdrawing from it. But, those consequences mean that it's important for the player to be able to manage their impact. Right now with repair, runic shield, and the harness all drawing automatically from the aura and not from a staff, wand, or amulet first, our ability to manage the aura feels fairly hampered. The aura getting first priority for draw from all of these sources seems like it's the real root of the problem. An amulet of vis storage is a fairly expensive accessory (and not to mention giving up the option of a runic shield amulet) that doesn't have an appreciable benefit right now.
But it won't be perfectly safe unless all personal vis consumption only draw from wands. Yesterday I read about the Thaumostatic Harness in my Thaumonomicon, and it turns out it drains aer and ignis vis directly from the aura... Was there anything wrong with it running on liquid potentia? Anyways, the repair enchantment and runic shielding also draw directly from the aura (the former has an incorrect description in the Thaumonomicon).
Oh, you reminded me about this but I forgot to post about it! Repair and runic shield drawing from the aura first and not from a wand/staff/amulet is kinda harsh with three players on SMP. We damaged the terra in our aura pretty bad before realizing what the problem was. Thing is, we're all carrying staves/wands or have a vis storage amulet.
I TC4 getting shards was quite easy, you just have to go mining, and mining the ore shards had no real impact on the aura, nodes or vis in anyway, that i know off, however in TC5 that all changed. As i understand it, mining a shard cluster (not an ore vein) have an impact on the aura in that chunk.
My question is then, how do you produce or go about getting the shards you need/want without ruining the aura in the chunkcs you are?
Can be that I'm missing something, though i have been trying to use a wand to get the shards (right click the cluster with the wand) but didnt seam to do anything. In my test world I noticed you could make shard clusters or a sort of seed to plant on smoothstone.
You don't hurt the aura by mining out shards. Shards only grow when the aura is high, above the gold tick in the thaumometer meter. Shards will grow all on their own in areas where the aura is high (fire for fire shards, etc.). They'll stop growing in areas where the aura has been drained out. When you take shards out of a chunk, be careful to leave one or two so they can naturally regrow.
Later on you can unlock research that lets you manufacture and plant a single 'seed' shard. You can plant these in areas with high aura and they grow quite quickly. Shards are renewable now, unlike in TC4. It's great, makes things like elemental arrows feel like it's not a 'waste' of shards.
Really happy to hear about the staff changes. Having a built in frugal will make the staff a lot more attractive as an option. But, there's still a problem of automatic draw nuking the aura. The scepter doesn't recharge on the table unless you specifically put the workbench charger on it. It's easy to stop the scepter from overdrawing simply by adding or removing the charger depending on the status of your local aura. For a scepter that isn't time-sensitive it's not a big deal; it really does act like a big vis battery. For a staff, shuffling it in and out of your hotbar can be a real hassle, especially if you're in the middle of fighting some terribad mobs. It reduces the utility of it as a weapon and tool when it needs to be taken off, put back, taken off, put back etc. to manage the auto-recharge.
There's something weird about staves in this version, and it took me a while to figure out exactly what. Mostly it's that there's really no point in making one.
In TC4, the big vis reserve made a big difference, especially if you were going into an area that didn't have the kinds of nodes you need. Taking your beefy frost focus into the Nether and having a big staff battery to power it made a lot of sense. Same thing for taking it to the Outer Lands or The End where you're going to be engaged in heavy combat and might not have a chance to recharge it.
Now that you automagically draw from the aura no matter what, why make a staff at all? The Master Aura Tapping research makes you draw from the aura even if you have a big reserve of vis on hand. It's not responsible thaumaturgy to, for example, take your equal trade focus and make your cobblestone castle less ugly. No matter what the focus is attached to, you're still going to bottom out the aura. Yeah sure, the staff has a nice +6 damage bonus and the primal staff has the +1 potency enhancement. In terms of aura management, though, they're really both the same thing.
Maybe it would be possible to make staff or wand capacity have priority for draw and only recharge from the aura once they get below X%? This would make the capacity meaningful again.
Got this no texture error after mining out a crusted opening in the outer lands with a silk touch pick. Using just Thaumcraft and Forge, no other mods.
2
Finally caught up on reading the thread and aside from the normal questions that come up every few pages, there sure are a lot of people having issues with flux. I'm on a 3 player survival hard difficulty game on SMP and it's really not been a problem, even with the three of us carrying hand mirrors, using the infernal furnace, lots of essentia brewing?
We moved several km from the spawn point in the beginning of the game, living off wild animals, camping at night, and harvesting silverwoods and looting chests along the way (and also maybe killing a few pech for sweet drops). This gave us a big buffer of 'stuff' to start with when we finally decided on a place to settle. I farmed silverwoods to generate a ring of pure nodes around the thaumaturge castle that we built, and we haven't destroyed a single node yet. Pure nodes take a ton of abuse to actually destroy. It's mind boggling to me that so many players are having difficulty with flux buildup in and around the areas where they settle. Getting enough saplings can be rough, and I did have to go on a silverwood sapling discovery trek a couple of times to get more. It really wasn't that bad, though??
The essentia crystalizer does bottom out the local terra aura almost instantly. Is this functioning as intended? It makes the crystalizer unuseable - yeah yeah I know about storing phials in chests etc. etc. We might have to do this with the crystalizer out of commission, but it doesn't change the fact that the crystalizer seems broken in the way it totally ruins the aura within 1-2 seconds.
I love essentia tubes and the crazy meth labs that you can build with them. It's got this great mad scientist feel. It's also clumsy, things clog and break, it can be confusing. Personally I feel like this adds to the game play and the feeling of the setting where you're a thaumaturge that is always reaching past the possible, pushing the boundaries. You are accomplishing things your colleagues said couldn't be done. Your processes aren't perfect, you can't break down matter completely all the time and sometimes your work generates magic-toxin that poisons the aether. It is your punishment for trying to harness the energy that built the world. Being a thaumaturge is messy work, and I feel like the imperfect-but-so-close lab setup embodies that to some degree.
0
Silverwood and greatwood trees are still made from asbestos in the latest patch
Looking forward to getting an army golems to sort my crap agian, oh man oh man oh man
1
Wow very nice! I <3 seeing big constructs like that in survival mode, super impressive!
0
This happened on our SMP game right after we opened the eye - I think the actual opening the eye ritual dumps a bunch of vitium into the aura. We were careful not to mess up our own local aura with the vis charge for the staff, so it wasn't from being bottomed out.
I tried mining out this block but no luck - need to go back with an equal trade focus because it looks SO COOL. Do you still fall through the bottom of the world if you stand directly on it?
4
I use MultiMC and it works really well for changing between versions and mods. Kinda surprised that nobody's brought it up yet? But, it's a great utility and I like it a lot.
This 1.8 derail is exactly that, a derail. This is the same complaint over and over whenever there's a new version of a game that has any mods about how everything is ruined. Frankly, it's disrespectful to Azanor (and other modders) to continually complain about moving to a new version, especially after they've already done the work to make it so. It's taken hundreds of hours of work for him to upgrade, and his big leap into the newer version will encourage other modders to jump in as well. New players who are just getting in to modding aren't going to want to downgrade and then have to install a bunch of other mods just to have access to content that is available in a newer official patch (never mind missing out on rendering and backend improvements in new patches as well). This change will also make it easier for him to move to 1.9, and I'm looking forward to the opportunities that modders are going to have with the main hand offhand system. Duel wield void sword and greatwood wand? Yes, please!
Back on topic, eldritch crabs aren't dropping any vis crystals when they're killed by liquid death. We have three crusted openings continually funneling crabs into liquid death over a hangry chest and haven't gotten a single vis crystal. Not sure if this is intentional or not?
There's also a weird issue with the wand/staff GUI when using an equal trade focus and slabs. The selected slabs are showing up as the textureless placeholder pink/black cube in the wand GUI. When the focus is actually used, it makes the chime sound, uses vis, and then doesn't actually switch over any blocks.
1
Duping ore is super easy considering that tainted wood is really easy to get. Hell, it's fast in the crucible, too, and use dirt blocks to soak up the extra herba. Put some logs down in a tainted biome and they'll turn into tainted wood quite quickly.
1
I miss the magical forest biome spreading that it used to do. We're setup in a desert biome and I was hoping that all the pure nodes would let us convert the biome and have this sort of oasis thing going on with green grass and trees. Oh well!
It was a lot of work planting, chopping, and replanting trees to populate our magic castle with nodes. Totally worth it, though, the aura recharge in the area is aweeesommeeee. So far, in the entire time playing, only one of them has completely evaporated.
0
Take two essentia pipes and put them up horizontally and then hook both jars together. It looks super silly but it works!
Remember that labeled, unlabeled, and void jars all have different suction. You may need a couple of bellows to get enough suction to pull into a void jar from a labeled jar. We have one of these ridiculous things setup in the corner of our totally not illegal essentia lab for this exact purpose.
1
I agree that it's a really hard job for Azanor to balance Thaumcraft against vanilla while also keeping it balanced against other mods. Keeping everyone in a village happy is a big task. I feel like balancing it against other mods eventually leads to this kind of power creep situation where mods keep introducing tougher and tougher mobs, more and more powerful tools, etc. Then everyone on a server has creative-style unlimited flight and cool items like the harness end up collecting dust.
1
The repair thing only started to add up to the bad on our server when it was three players with 1-3 pieces of repair gear each taking a lot of damage consistently, like monster farming at night or in the outer lands. Not sure how draining it is on single player, but I also hold out for as long as possible with cheapie crap armor until I can make void armor. In this roll we were able to get void tools fairly early because we were brave and stupid enough to get some void seeds from mob drops. Totally worth getting killed for.
Having wands recharge only when held + some kind of restriction sounds like it would alleviate a lot of problems. I vote for the hotkey option, personally. Having to press and hold F is convenient to change foci but also difficult enough that it can be hard to change in the middle of a fight. It's a good balance. I feel like having a hotkey function for charging would be the same.
I play on a a server that is running only Thaumcraft with no other mods and the harness is awesome. It's great for getting around in the end and the nether. In the overworld it's maybe not as useful, but there's less environmental hazards that make traveling long distances difficult or inconvenient. It seems like almost everyone in this thread besides me is playing Thaumcraft with some other mods, so it makes sense that the harness is less relevant when there's other options. That said, Thaumcraft needs to be fun and balanced for playing without any other add ons. The fact that other modpacks include freebie flight god mode in survival is irrelevant. IMHO that kind of inclusion feels like it's actually a removal of gameplay.
0
I really like the
oldnew aura mechanic in TC5 and how there's actually consequences for abusing/overdrawing from it. But, those consequences mean that it's important for the player to be able to manage their impact. Right now with repair, runic shield, and the harness all drawing automatically from the aura and not from a staff, wand, or amulet first, our ability to manage the aura feels fairly hampered. The aura getting first priority for draw from all of these sources seems like it's the real root of the problem. An amulet of vis storage is a fairly expensive accessory (and not to mention giving up the option of a runic shield amulet) that doesn't have an appreciable benefit right now.0
Oh, you reminded me about this but I forgot to post about it! Repair and runic shield drawing from the aura first and not from a wand/staff/amulet is kinda harsh with three players on SMP. We damaged the terra in our aura pretty bad before realizing what the problem was. Thing is, we're all carrying staves/wands or have a vis storage amulet.
2
You don't hurt the aura by mining out shards. Shards only grow when the aura is high, above the gold tick in the thaumometer meter. Shards will grow all on their own in areas where the aura is high (fire for fire shards, etc.). They'll stop growing in areas where the aura has been drained out. When you take shards out of a chunk, be careful to leave one or two so they can naturally regrow.
Later on you can unlock research that lets you manufacture and plant a single 'seed' shard. You can plant these in areas with high aura and they grow quite quickly. Shards are renewable now, unlike in TC4. It's great, makes things like elemental arrows feel like it's not a 'waste' of shards.
Really happy to hear about the staff changes. Having a built in frugal will make the staff a lot more attractive as an option. But, there's still a problem of automatic draw nuking the aura. The scepter doesn't recharge on the table unless you specifically put the workbench charger on it. It's easy to stop the scepter from overdrawing simply by adding or removing the charger depending on the status of your local aura. For a scepter that isn't time-sensitive it's not a big deal; it really does act like a big vis battery. For a staff, shuffling it in and out of your hotbar can be a real hassle, especially if you're in the middle of fighting some terribad mobs. It reduces the utility of it as a weapon and tool when it needs to be taken off, put back, taken off, put back etc. to manage the auto-recharge.
1
There's something weird about staves in this version, and it took me a while to figure out exactly what. Mostly it's that there's really no point in making one.
In TC4, the big vis reserve made a big difference, especially if you were going into an area that didn't have the kinds of nodes you need. Taking your beefy frost focus into the Nether and having a big staff battery to power it made a lot of sense. Same thing for taking it to the Outer Lands or The End where you're going to be engaged in heavy combat and might not have a chance to recharge it.
Now that you automagically draw from the aura no matter what, why make a staff at all? The Master Aura Tapping research makes you draw from the aura even if you have a big reserve of vis on hand. It's not responsible thaumaturgy to, for example, take your equal trade focus and make your cobblestone castle less ugly. No matter what the focus is attached to, you're still going to bottom out the aura. Yeah sure, the staff has a nice +6 damage bonus and the primal staff has the +1 potency enhancement. In terms of aura management, though, they're really both the same thing.
Maybe it would be possible to make staff or wand capacity have priority for draw and only recharge from the aura once they get below X%? This would make the capacity meaningful again.
0
Got this no texture error after mining out a crusted opening in the outer lands with a silk touch pick. Using just Thaumcraft and Forge, no other mods.