(Minecraft) Blightfall: T'ain't nothin' to worry about

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > (Minecraft) Blightfall: T'ain't nothin' to worry about

Magres: Jul 14, 2011

Credit to Ariong and Glory of Arioch for the thread title. I'm an idiot and forgot to change off of the poo poo Post tag, but considering the entire gameworld is coated in awful purple poo poo, ti's kind of fitting.

Blightfall is an excellent modpack slash quest map by Talonos, with help from the Technic team and some others, including thread regular 30.5 Days. Blightfall chat was clogging up and dominating the modded minecraft thread, so people asked for a split off thread.

Blightfall is, in a nutshell, a Thaumcraft HQM modpack, though it's much more than that. Take a dash of skyblock map, some HQM, some storyline, a little bit of technology, a pile of exploration, a boatload of magic, and a whole planet's worth of nasty purple goo and you've got Blightfall. While the mod centers around Thaumcraft, and heavy use of Thaumcraft is required to complete the map, Thermal Dynamics, BigReactors, Blood Magic, Botania, and Tinker's Construct are all also included and well worth using, particularly because Talonos and Co. have tweaked all of them to make a cohesive package from all of them, and oftentimes your best solution to a problem is a couple mods in tandem, sometimes more. My best idea for automating a specific task in Blightfall is going to use Thermal Dynamics, Thaumcraft, Botania, and Blood Magic all at the same time!

In addition to the mods themselves, Blightfall is an adventure map that is, as best I can tell, painstakingly made by a human with love and care. Biomes matter in Blightfall - most materials are restricted to specific biomes, and the biomes all have different feelings. It is definitely normal if you come to fear going near Forests! In addition to the biomes themselves, Blightfall includes numerous quests that significantly reward braving the blighted hellscape of the planet you're on to survey new land for the good of humankind, as well as dozens (that I've found) of secret caches of useful goodies that can significantly improve your odds of successfully establishing a foothold on the planet and cleaning it all up.

Story-wise, in Blightfall you are the last hope of a failing mission to establish a new colony for humankind - the planet is perfect! It's the right temperature for humanity, has new metals for you to play with, and has abundant carbon-based flora and fauna. But sadly :itwaspoo:

and the flora is a giant purple biomass that has mutated all of the local fauna and will attempt to assimilate you as well! You are given your choice of several protected domes to start in and have to carve out a living for yourself, scout the land, figure out what exactly happened to the planet, and how to clear it of the Blight.

To get Blightfall, you'll need to own Minecraft and have it installed, and will need to download the Technic Launcer here. Download it, run it, and under the Modpacks page you'll see Blightfall, and can install it from there. Next up, Dr. Sprouse or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Blight.

Q: I found the Portal to The Last Millenium but it's just a void world, and I can't get out. What gives?

A:

30.5 Days posted:

We figured out the cause of this & a fix will be in the next version. In the meantime, setting allow-nether=true in server.properties will fix it (but allow nether portals, so make sure everyone knows what's up). It turns out that while that bit DOES disallow use of hte nether, it also stops the server from running updates in non-overworld dimensions which is like ???

Q: How do I break the bad nodes?

A:

Mzbundifund posted:

Faced with a rift in space-time spewing out an endless stream of pure corruption, you walk up and beat the poo poo out of it.

Magres fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Sep 10, 2015

# ? Aug 30, 2015 08:11

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# ? Jun 11, 2024 09:54

Magres: Jul 14, 2011

How to survive in Blightfall, the short version.

Your first meaningful choice in Blightfall is what starting location to use - there are six, in (arguably) ascending order of difficulty. Alpha and Beta are very easy, Gamma and Delta are medium, Epsilon is tough, and Omega is downright hard. I personally like Beta, as easy and early access to the ocean is important to me, but other goons have liked a lot of the domes, and I've heard arguments for literally every dome as to why its that person's favorite start location. For my own ease, I'm going to assume an Alpha/Beta start.

First off, READ THE QUEST BOOK. The Blightfall team has put a ton of work into making the quest system good - the entire thing centers around a currency named Reputation that represents how well your senior officers think you're doing at saving the mission. Every time you die and have to be cloned, they think you're an incompetent idiot and your reputation drops. Every time you tell them you need something from the ship's supplies, they think less of you. Every time you get things done, they think better of you. Fundamentally, losing too much reputation is how you lose at Blightfall, though, unlike most HQM maps, there's no "you're out of lives and the game just deleted your world" moment, getting too low on reputation just locks you out of the victory quest, and from what I understand winning the game actually triggers some pretty cool events.

Do the basic Instructor Quests and you'll get some basic supplies, as well as the extremely important ability to requisition things from your ship's supplies, in the form of various reward bags. There are animal, seed, sapling, and machine bags. As soon as you can, start hammering to requisition seed bags, as food diversity is important in Blightfall - SpiceOfLife is part of the modpack and has an extremely long food history, though the diminishing returns curve is dramatically less punishing than in most modpacks, and it is possible to survive indefinitely on bread, it's just really inefficient. Additionally, hammering on the sapling requisition is a good idea, as saplings can serve as a quick way to jump up in material levels for mining, new sources of food, and, most importantly, a source of rubber so you can make MineFactory Reloaded machines easily once you've got power generation established.

Second big priority is to never, ever hurt the Silverwood Tree in your dome. If you read the questbook you'll know this, but if you missed it somehow and are thinking of doing something foolish, DONT CUT IT DOWN. It's part of Thaumcraft and it's what keeps you safe from the Blight. Additionally, be careful when digging outside your dome - nasty blight crap can spread underground and screw you over, though it won't spread past the inside of your dome (the absolute outside ring of open space in the dome can get a little blight in it, so be careful, but I've never seen it spread past that).

An early goal should be to begin completing the Scout quests - they give tons of reputation and are very easy once you get a feel for traversing and surviving Blighted areas, and getting access to new biomes is important for advancing in Blightfall. Thankfully, all of the scout points (barring a couple lategame ones) have teleport points at them that get unlocked when you first click on the teleport blob NPC. Additionally, you'll see big white glowing flowers around called Ethereal Blooms - these are very important, as they're your first major way to push back blight - over time they'll purge all land within an ~8 block radius of blight. These flowers can frequently be found near scout points, and are well worth grabbing so you can start pushing the Blight away from your dome and claiming some land as your own.

Tech metals are very rare in Blightfall, so you shouldn't be trying to build an industrial empire right off the bat. Even getting to Iron is tough. You'll need to make a Flint Pickaxe, find some Prometheum (it's under plains and savannahs), mine that, and make a Prometheum pickaxe, which can be used to mine iron. To mine gold and really get rolling (you need gold or aluminum+copper to make casts to make good tools) you'll need to head to the swamp and dig around for Oureclase, which can mine gold. If you don't know where to find a metal, check the Volume 1 book you get from the Instructor, it will tell you just about everything you need to know as you unlock info about more materials, which is done by acquiring materials of a hardness that can mine them.

Magres fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Sep 4, 2015

# ? Aug 30, 2015 08:11

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

So a few things people don't always immediately understand:

- The way the supplier works is you build up mission outlook from quests and then spend it on stuff at the supplier store. Please note that all his repeatable quests cost you mission outlook. Getting mission outlook isn't that hard, but it can be slow until you get confident enough to start doing scouting quests, which are worth like 20-30 mission outlook apiece. Mission outlook is very easy later in the game because there are a lot of solid repeatable missions to do things like hunt down taint monsters & generate obscene amounts of bread.
- You don't lose your inventory when you die and there are no limited lives, but you lose 10 Mission Outlook each time you die. You get most of that refunded the first 3 times you die. As you lose rep, you gradually lose access to supplier purchasing. If you hit -150 rep, you lose access to the ending, but can keep playing.
- You'll be asked to find copper as part of an early quest. This process is supposed to be you discovering that copper is very hard to find, then you mine up some prometheum and the questgivers point out that it may be a better alternative. But maybe you have started in a location where prometheum isn't available (check your mining & resources book for other soft metal alternatives that are more common). Also sometimes people tunnel vision on copper and don't notice the new quests, so don't do that.
- This isn't really a skyblock. You'll be asked to leave your bubble by quests, and there's a lot of cool POI's that give you free stuff out there. You also have to go out there for other stuff: you don't gain access to a botania flower until you find it in the world, some vegetables have to be gathered from tainted villages, many important ores are only available in certain areas, and there's a whole quest chapter that's not even accessible until you visit the right area. You unlock fast travel locations as you visit major landmarks, too.
- Cleaning a swamp island for space is a really, really, really good idea!
- Other things that are great: grinding sapling bags for nether wood and then making a crossbow out of it, wearing armor, and more!

# ? Aug 30, 2015 08:29

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

A top tip: if you only get a few gold and are having a hard time finding more, don't use it to make casts. Instead, use it to make a thaumometer, because it unlocks a supplier request for "antique tools" that come in both iron and gold variety. So you can request a gold pickaxe for 6 mission outlook and melt it down for 3 gold ingots.

Oh, other things: cooking is real important, don't put it off. Build a cooking for blockheads table ASAP, but be aware that it is KIND of janky. It has the following issues:

- It will pull stuff from adjacent inventories, but it doesn't handle double chests properly.
- It won't notice any recipe that has intermediate steps. So for instance, mashed potatoes take butter, baked potato, and a kitchen implement. If you have milk, salt, potato, and the implement, you'll see the option for heavy cream and a baked potato, but not anything else.
- Butter isn't edible, so butter isn't a food, so cooking for blockheads doesn't know about it.

BUTTER IS REAL DANG IMPORTANT.

So be vaguely aware of what your food options are. Be aware of things like, butter, cheese, and dough unlock a crapton of recipes, so just keep some in your cooking chest. If you think cooking for blockheads is lying to you, just type Pam's into NEI and page through some options. If you keep your diet varied, even 4 crappy foods will easily fill your hunger bar + full saturation, which will keep you good for awhile.

Build a lunchbag and upgrade to a lunchbox when you get plenty of metal. These are special satchels for food. Shift+Click to change them back and forth between "closed" (satchel mode) and "open" (food mode). When you eat the lunchbag/box in food mode, it pulls a food from inside and you eat that instead. It's a great way to carry a lot of varied food with you on an expedition without taking up a lot of inventory space.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 08:41

Magres: Jul 14, 2011

Magic Guides Post

Thaumcraft for dummies

Thaumcraft is a large magic mod by Azanor that Blightfall centers around. For better or worse, Azanor is rather committed to his vision of what a good mod is, and while huge chunks of Thaumcraft are really well made and very flavorful, it can be a very dense mod to get into at first and there are a couple mechanics in it that are, depending on who you ask, anywhere from decent to utterly heinous. I'm just going to rip off my early start to Thaumcraft guide I wrote in the modded minecraft thread

quote:

I'm not gonna do a basics setup guide because it takes forever to explain all of it, but the short version of it is follow the quest line. For a dangerous but quick way to get a thaumonomicon, you can sprint to your nearest local infested village and click one of their bookshelves with a wand to turn it into a thaumonomicon. It's what I usually do, but you'll probably die in the process because tainted guards are fast and hit like trucks (really all of the customNPC tainted NPCs hit like goddamned freight trains, the blighted botanist will oneshot you from afar with his gun if you don't have armor on )

First thing to research, get Research Expertise and Mastery (don't worry about the warp on the Mastery, it's a small enough amount that the worst thing that will happen to you is the edges of your screen will darken slightly and a heartpounding sound clip will play. Spooky, and if you're in a tight spot it can scare the poo poo out of you, but ultimately harmless). They make research a lot easier and more pleasant, and can save you some research points now and then.

Second, research the greatwood wand core and gold capped wands tech, as well as the expert node tapping, master node tapping, and node preserving researches. For the ambitious, research node in a jar (you'll want this either way, eventually, but it can wait if you don't want to do it). Take your crappy iron stick wand and go tap some nodes, but BE CAREFUL because it's such a lovely wand that you can over-drain nodes and hurt them. My recommendation is to go sail around the ocean with your thaumometer out and find nodes to tap. Scan them, too. You'll have to hop in and out of your boat to scan things, and will want to hop out to tap them (it's possible to tap them without getting out of your boat but it's really annoying). Getting in and out of boats is annoying as hell, but it's much safer and faster than finding and scanning and tapping nodes on land. I literally have not tapped a single node on land in Blightfall 2. Once you've got enough vis, put together your greatwood+gold wand. Its got double the capacity of the iron+stick wand and won't hurt nodes.

Next up, in alchemy, work your way to the right - research nitor and alumentum, then essentia distillation, and work your way down that chain until you get to the automated alchemy research. A good arcane furnace and auto-alchemy setup makes thaumcraft so much more pleasant, if you just use a crucible for everything then your drat essentia points disappear at random and you produce a good deal of magical pollution because of inefficiency and such. It's also just an annoying process in general.

At this point, you are now ready to produce Ethereal Blooms, sort of. You'll want a cow for milk for Sano (put a milk bucket and a glass bottle in a crafting grid to get a bottle of milk, which has 2 points of Sano in it, which you need for blooms), Tainted stuff for Vitium (do the thaumcraft quest line, the paranormalist will accept tainted goo and tendrils and give you Vitium, it's much easier than trying to do it yourself), and Nether Wart for Herba and Praecantatio. You can get nether wart from seed bags, or from the eerie island in the south ocean though the place has wandering tainted wizard mobs that will gently caress you up. You can get soul sand from that place or, more safely, from the volcano island, check near the waypoint where there's like 40 you can grab. I got my nether wart from a seed bag and my soul sand from the safe option.

Another source for Sano, once you've done the bulk of the thaumcraft questline, is the Paranormalist can give you some for a little bit of reputation. I don't recommend this though, it's a little pricey for my tastes and it's not that bad to do by hand (if you need a cow, do the second black market promethium quest for a pair of cow eggs). Additionally, if you do the thaumcraft quest line, one of the later quests is to submit 10 Ethereal Blooms, and it gives you back 20 Ethereal Blooms. I rush this quest super hard because it's a really, really good reward and 20 Ethereal Blooms is plenty for your early game taint clearing needs - I've got about a 100x100 area around my biodome cleared, and I'm aggressively expanding it, with 20 Blooms.

VOILA, your crash course on ethereal blooms in thaumcraft. Get node tapping tech, get the greatwood gold wand, get (good) alchemy running, and you're ready to do blooms. Thaumcraft is kinda cool in that there's lots of ways you can invest in your magical infrastructure to make your life easier. And happily, for ethereal blooms, you can do it all without teching to infusions, which are kind of a pain to get together in Blightfall, though there's free infusion altars both in the bay by the swamp and underneath the iceberg waypoint though the latter demands you kill a trio of extremely dangerous tainted wizards - it's doable with a tinker's construct wooden crossbow if you dig around in the walls and cheese them with some guerilla warfare and line of sight games.

For unlocking knowledge of all of the various aspects of existence in Thaumcraft, I always use this guide, though some of the specifics change a little due to the unique material restrictions Blightfall places on you. If you're having trouble, ask in thread. Biggest and first thing though, mash together Terra and Aqua on a Research Table to get Victus. Unlocking Victus without doing this is an annoying process even if you know what you're doing, and nigh impossible if you don't.

One of the things that gets old really fast, particularly in Blightfall, is finding and tapping nodes, a process where you charge a magic wand with mana to do magic. It generally requires focusing on a thing and holding still for several seconds, which is a quick way to die in Blightfall. To remedy this, you can pick up, move, and 'transduce' a node to give you a constant trickle of magic, and it can solve all of your problems when done right. So:

Like a lazy goon, I want my mana to come to me

Magres posted:

Are you lazy and tired of running around for paltry scraps of vis like a plebeian? Of course you are, wizards are too busy pondering the mysteries of the universe and destroying life as we know it with horrible mutating purple monstrosities to run around gathering vis for their wands! Lore-wise, nodes are tiny gaps in reality where magic trickles through. With the proper application of magical leverage, you can tear that gap in reality a little wider (fortunately, with no ill effects unless you screw up) to get a constant stream of vis in the form of centivis, kinda like an electric current. And fortunately, the research to do this is super easy, though the fabrication can be a tad material intensive, particularly on gold, if I recall correctly. To solve your gold needs, requisition and melt down gold pickaxes and wood axes as needed. It'll ding you for a bit of rep, but nothing that expensive, and gold is rare enough that it's worth burning rep for. I'm not sure what exactly the tool requisition quest is locked behind, but I think it's finding all of the tech metals.

Needed Research and where it is

Right, so, in terms of actual research, you'll need the Node Stabilizer research in the top left of the Thaumaturgy page, the Vis for the masses or whatever quest that comes off the top right of that, the wand recharge pedestal that comes off the top left of that, and the wand recharge relay that's in between the two of them.

Another piece of research you'll really want is the Node In A Jar tech. It's on the basic info page, on the bottom left by the node tapping and preserving researches. Bottling a node takes 26 glass, 9 slabs of wood, and 70 of every kind of mana. If you followed my crash course on getting Ethereal Bloom production rolling, you'll still have a gold capped greatwood wand, which is not up to this task. Here, you have two options. Either the Gold Capped Greatwood Scepter or Gold Capped Greatwood Stafc. Where wands are generalist tools, scepters are non-combat tools (and staves are combat tools). Scepters hold 150% as much as a wand of the same material, get a 10% vis discount on top of whatever your wand caps and magical gear give, but cannot use wand foci.
Staffs can use foci and hold twice as much vis as a wand, but cannot be placed into an arcane workbench to provide vis for crafting, or to recharge with your centivis technology. I prefer the scepter personally, but many goons in thread have sworn by the staff. I'm going to write up the scepter process because it's what I remember, but the staff process isn't much different.

To get to the scepter research, research Infusion on the artifice page (you won't actually be infusing things, you just need to know how), then head to the thaumaturgy page and research the silverwood wand core - the scepter research is gated behind it. From there, follow your nose through the process of making a balanced shard (make 4 - in general you want to use essentia in multiples of 8 because phials hold exactly 8 essentia) and a primal charm, a greatwood wand core, and a trio of gold caps. Slap it together for a gold greatwood scepter. This is what I did because I'm procrastinating with regards to actually setting up an infusion altar and getting all of that crap going.

Actually getting Centi-vis

Go find an appropriate node! If you're a seafaring wizard like me (I do all of my node tapping out on the ocean, it's the easiest and safest way to find, scan, and tap nodes) then you'll probably be running short on terra vis, and because our world is a blighted hellscape, you'll probably be running short on ordo vis. So you, again, have two choices, an easy one and a mildly harder one that's better in the long run. You can either find a node with terra and ordo, or you can search for a node with everything. The latter is less awful than it sounds, though it's not always easy. However, compound vis (ie anything but the primal six) will break down into every kind of component primal vis in that compound element. So, say, if you have anything that involves Humanus or breaks down into Humanus at some point (which includes Instrumentum, and thus all of the aspects Instrumentum builds from) then you've got an omni node on hand. Notably, there's one with 30 Messis out on the ice sheets way up north, between the tundra and taiga waypoints and if you haven't been in the area yet, you can even scoop it up fresh before it gets tainted by the surrounding area if you show up with a charged wand and jarring materials on hand. Don't tap it though! Tapping nodes before you jar them permanently caps their aspect values at whatever they're at before you jar them.

So, yeah! The hardest part is jarring a node, probably, just because getting 70 of every vis without centivis is a decent pain. Use the ocean to, it's the safest way to fill a wand, and boating around is very fast until you have some more endgame movespeed tech available.

Oh, it's also worth mentioning that the centivis current scales with the square root of the amount of vis the node had on hand, to a cap of 10 CV per tick. However, getting a node with 100 in every aspect, while possible, is a huge pain in the rear end even when you don't have the nodes, and the land itself, actively trying to murder you. Additionally, bright nodes will output 20% more CV, and pale nodes (which you'll probably have) output 20% less per tick. I've used both 4 CV nodes and 12 CV nodes and, yeah, there's a difference if you're in a big drat hurry, but you can almost entirely mitigate the difference between them by just making a couple spare wands (gold capped greatwood wands make for great spares, they're easy as hell to make compared to everything better than them, and are just fine for most work), some extra wand charge relays, and extra arcane work benches and just having a vis battery waiting for you. Making a 100 point bright supernode is really, really not worth it, even outside of Blightfall. I'd maybe consider it if like 5+ people are working together and you all use absolute tons of vis constantly, but even then I'd just make a dozen wands, a dozen charging station, and have a huge mana battery for everyone to work with.

Finally, once you've trivialized Vis, it's time to move on to Infusion, which is where you make the big stuff! Most mid and late game tech is gated behind Infusion, and it can be a tricky and irritating process, so I wrote a crash course on Infusion:

Infusion basics

Magres posted:

Next up! Infusion! Infusion Rituals are a lot more complex than just putting things together on an Arcane Workbench, but are also required for the majority of the mid and end game tech in Thaumcraft, and Blightfall in particular (Blightfall adds another tier or two of tech to your blight busting capabilities, and adds some fairly endgame-y non blight busting stuff too).

Infusion basics:

To do Infusion, you need an Infusion Altar! This can be researched in the Artificing tab of the Thaumbook, and will unlock the ability to create the multiblock structure that is the Infusion Altar. It takes a bunch of Arcane Stone and an Arcane Pedestal (or whatever they're called, I'm just doing this from memory) and an Infusion Matrix! This last one is the hardest part, because it takes an Ender Pearl, which is almost wholly gated behind getting all of the tech metals and unlocking the ability to requisition Ender Pearls. However, there are (minimum) two Infusion Altars sitting around in the world. One is at the bottom of the bay near the swamp waypoint, while the other is in the cave in the Iceberg, guarded by three extremely dangerous tainted mobs - a thaumaturge, an arcanist, and a botanist - so be ready for a fight. You can take apart either one with a pick to whisk it away to your base, though personally I use the second one where it is because it's good to have a pretty sizable designated Infusion area.

So, now that you have an altar, you'll need a ritual to do! This is just a matter of researching an item you want to make and seeing the ritual recipe in your thaumbook. Really, any of the stuff that leads directly from the Infusion Altar research is good - Boots of the Traveler are phenomenal and everyone should have a pair, Pickaxes of the Core are one of the best ways to speed up ore gathering in the game, Hoes of Growth give you semi-infinite bonemeal capabilities that can be extended to be truly infinite, Swords of the Zephyr swing in a (big) conical AOE and come with an AOE mob repel on their right click, and Axes of the Stream function similar to a TiC Lumber Axe. Really the Axe is the only one I can't overwhelmingly recommend because TiC Lumber Axes are really good and much easier to make, though they're still worth using and can be made infinite use more easily than TiC tools can be in Blightfall. Oh, also Living Moss extends from the Infusion Altar research, but it takes midgame Botania tech and an early game Blood Magic item to make, as well as mid/late game Thaum infrastructure. Pretty tough, but totally worth doing to put on TiC stuff made of valuable materials.

To actually do the ritual, you'll need to get all the items proscribed by the ritual. Iirc Boots of the Traveler take a pair of leather boots in the middle (they're the item being infused), some leather, a fish, an air shard, and a feather. You'll need to put all of these items on pedestals in the immediate vicinity of the Infusion Altar. Additionally, to actually power the magic, you need Essentia of the appropriate types, listed in the ritual book. Put these in Warded Jars within like 10 blocks of the Altar and it'll suck the essentia out of the jars once the ritual starts. From there, if you're lucky, it's as simple as place items, place essentia jars, boop the Infusion Matrix with your wand, wait 30s-2m, receive awesome magic item. But there's instability, so if you just barely skate by, supplies-wise, you're praying that RNG is nice and screwed if it isn't.

Dealing with instability and making your Infusion process easier:

Fluff-wise, Infusion magic is so powerful it creates magical instability because you're wrenching the fabric of reality into a different configuration or something. Instability is rated at the bottom of the ritual and ranges from negligible (which is not the same as none) to Dangerous. Instability generally either knocks items off pedestals, zaps you with purple lightning, inflicts pretty harmless debuffs (oh no my vis costs are increased for the next minute that I was planning to spend watching this ritual anyway), but can also destroy your offered items. KEEP BACKUPS. Even for Negligible rituals, one one server I set up to rush for Boots of the Traveler, had a really hard time getting the fish for it, and only had one fish. Lo and behold the goddamned ritual blasted my fish to smithereens after consuming most of the rest of the items, and I had to shut the drat thing down. If a Ritual can't find the item it's seeking on a nearby pedestal, its essentia price rises (it doesn't demand new kinds of essentia, just a bit more of what it took already) and, iirc, if it can't find essentia, it'll basically start tearing itself apart and the thing can explode. Not sure, but I've never had a ritual fail that badly, cause you can stop it yourself.

The good news is that instability can be mitigated with stabilizing items like mob heads, shard clusters, and candles. I like candles because they're easy to mass produce, and the more stabilizing items you have, the better. Basically to help stabilize crap, just get a bunch of your stabilizing items and place them in a pattern that is symmetric in both the X and Z axes. The Y axis (up/down) doesn't have to be held symmetrical, thank god, or it'd be friggin impossible. Symmetry does matter, if it's not symmetrical then not only do those items not count as stabilizers, they actually make the instability worse. I recommend not putting your candles and such on the floor next to the pedestals, because if an item explodes into flux despite your attempts at stabilization, the liquid flux will uproot your candles (crystal clusters don't get washed away by liquids, though, but are expensive to make). The search range for stabilizing items extends by like 12 blocks in all directions though, so there's plenty of room to build (multiple) platforms to spam candles on above and below your Infusion Altar. With enough stabilizing items you can pretty much negate even Dangerous instability, though I usually just spam like 20-30 candles and it makes instability largely trivial.

Finally, if you place your items, start the ritual, then re-grab all your items, you can force any instability effects to come out as (fairly piddly) damage to you or those insignificant debuffs I mentioned before. The ritual doesn't get pissy about items missing until it's actually looking for that specific item, and it doesn't get pissy if there's more of that item than is strictly necessary. Easy way to largely negate instability is to start the ritual, grab all the items, and then watch the ritual (you'll need goggles of revealing for this) until the last type of essentia is about to be done, then place two of the first item - it starts at the top and goes clockwise. As each item gets taken by the ritual, place the next item, grab the spare of the previous item, and place a spare of the new item. The majority of the length of most rituals is sitting around waiting for the damned essentia to trickle into the matrix, so you can mitigate all instability from the first 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the ritual by not giving it the chance to hurt your precious items.

Yeah I can't think of anything else, Infusion rituals are pretty much just feed it essentia, feed it items, get something shiny. They just take a lot of setup - if you're hurting for a kind of essentia, there are guides to sources out there on google, and if you're really stumped because of some of the unique material constraints Blightfall puts on us, ask in thread and someone can help you out.

The best Infusion ritual in the game:

One difficult and lengthy bit of Infusion tech that is REALLY REALLY REALLY worth doing is the Osmotic Enchanter. I'm calling it in particular out because it is unarguably my favorite piece of tech in all of Thaumcraft. The Osmotic Enchanter is a part of Thaumic Tinkerer, gated behind the Spellbinding Cloth page. Also, all the new (and often rad) Thaumic Tinkerer enchants have their research gated behind the Osmotic Enchanter.

The Osmotic Enchanter takes a whole ton of essentia (it's like close to 150 points total of several different kinds, some of which are a pain to get), a lot of items - some of which suck to get - and is a super unstable ritual. After that thing's done, you have to set up a whole altar around it that, while easier than the ritual, is not trivial to do. But it's worth it because it lets you put whatever enchantments you like on anything enchantable, for a cost of vis. Being able to say "yes this pick should have maxed out Efficiency, Fortune, AND repair itself for vis" for no hard material cost is absolutely phenomenal. Having a bow that has a quick draw enchant, flaming arrows, maxed power, infinty, AND is self-repairing is really nice, too. It works on non-Thaum items too, though your pick of enchantments is a little more restricted (Repair only works on Thaum items iirc, unless Talonos and co have done the godly task of making them compatible with Thaum enchants).

When you combine a good Centivis'd node with an Osmotic Enchanter, you can literally just pick and choose any enchantments and have them done in a minute or two at little/no effort, and have easy vis batteries to power all your self-repairing gear. It's a ton of work to get all the infrastructure set up (like several hours probably) but is SO worth it.

Finally, do not be afraid to cheat when it comes to Thaumcraft. If the research minigame doesn't appeal to you, don't be afraid to turn on cheats and give yourself a billion of every aspect, and to change the Thaumcraft config file to set research to Easy. I don't recommend just unlocking all the research at once unless you know Thaumcraft already, because it's easy to get lost in the mod. Work through it the quick and dirty way and read things as you go so you actually understand the progression of the mod. Additionally, if you don't like Warp, don't be afraid to just set your Warp back down to 0. Warp has a couple effects that are somewhere between dumb and completely awful (the effect that starves you in 30 seconds flat if you don't have Rotten Flesh on hand in a modpack where starvation kills you instantly and Rotten Flesh is really rare is a really unfortunate interaction between mods), and generally just becomes more annoying than spooky fun when you've gotten a warp effect every ten minutes for a week or so of Minecraft. Warp effects go from spooky and fun to tedious, to terrifying and fun (there's a second set of more severe events that are pretty horrifying when you first get them) and back to tedious when you're far enough in that all of the events are trivial to handle. The problem is that certain kinds of research give you permanent and irrevocable amounts of warp, and not being able to clean that crap off every is really dumb.

Blightfall Botania Done Easy

Magres posted:

Botania in Blightfall is hard to get started. If you don't know Botania already when you start, it's semi-impossible to get into it until you're very far along in the game, and even then it's not an easy mod to get into in Blightfall. This, in my opinion, is partly because Botania is the only reliable source of industrial power (ie Redstone Flux) in Blightfall, which makes it an extremely valuable mod because several other mods are semi-gated behind getting a good Botania setup going. The trick to circumventing most of this issue is the Jaded Amaranthus flower. When fed mana, it makes flowers of all colors spontaneously erupt from the ground around in a 9x9 square centered on the Jaded Amaranthus. However, making it requires mana, as does powering it, so you first need a form of power generation.

The easiest way of getting started with power generation, by far, is to loot some Dayblooms. There's a stash of them in the little lab behind the waterfall at Waterfall Lake along with a bunch of language samples you'll want later. After that, you'll need to go find Green, Lime, and Purple flowers.

Lime - the flying island west of the Obsidian Tower. I think they're near the teleport point up there, though I'm not positive. Look for the purple, blue, and teal splotch on the map to see where the teleport point is.
Green - In the village on the east end of the Jungle biome, around 730, 1450. Be ready to suicide dive for these, getting past tainted swarms and tainted guards is pretty tough
Purple - West by Southwest of the teleport point on the flying island in the Northwest corner of the map. Not that bad to get to, though there's probably at least one blighted wizard hanging around

Mind you, you'll also see some white flowers hanging around with these guys - make sure you grab those, Pure Daisies are critical to progressing in Botania, and it's extremely hard to get the ingredients to make them before you have a Jaded Amaranthus.

Once you've got that, the rest is pretty straightforward. Raid towns for enough language samples to translate the Lexica Botania (there's one in the same spot as the Dayblooms). Once you've got the Lexica Botania, a Jaded Amaranthus, and some mana generation, you have everything you need to get rolling with Botania! Honestly translating the Lexica Botania is semi-optional for a while if you really, really know Botania or are exceptionally good with google, wikis, and NEI, but Botania has probably the best in-game documentation of any mod in existence, so you may as well take advantage of it.

For an easier learning curve on Botania if you're struggling, I highly recommend FTB Botania - it's an HQM pack that is centered entirely around teaching people how to have fun doing silly things with magic flowers.

Magres fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Sep 9, 2015

# ? Aug 30, 2015 08:45

Magres: Jul 14, 2011

Actually gonna put Tech Guides here

Power in Blightfall is tough to come by, as no Thermal Dynamics Dynamos work in Blightfall. Your choices are requisitioning power from the ship (can't be automated, costs reputation), BigReactors (very, very hard to make self-sustaining, and Yellorium is rather rare), or Botania Mana Fluxfields (my preferred choice). An efficient Mana Fluxfield setup is pretty involved, but also really satisfying to build because its easy to use 4-5 different mods and some vanilla redstone tricks to put together, and is kind of a giant Rube Goldberg machine. People really liked my setup I posted in the old thread, so

Magres posted:

I finally have stable and self-sustaining power! Here's my setup:

Big overview shot including my base. Basic setup is a thaumcraft golem powered tree farm feeding into an Infernal Furnace feeding into Endoflames, and a spreader firing into a Redstone Fluxfield.

Closer shot of the tree farm and infrenal furnace. There are barrels for wood, apples, and saplings, with a (wholly unnecessary) dense pipe giving the barrels priority over the infernal furnace. The infernal furnace doubles as charcoal production and disposal of excess saplings and apples. The furnace spits out to the left into a Hungry Chest you can just barely see, and the Hungry Chest has a servo on the underside that pumps charcoal out of the chest, underground, over to...

Here! The dense pipe here on the barrel actually matters, as I want feeding the Endoflames to take priority over amassing charcoal at this point. I'm using the simple setup someone posted earlier in the thread to make the open crate self-limiting so it doesn't waste all of my charcoal. Here I need to add some space upgrades and a void upgrade to the barrel, but that's low on my priorities list at the moment.

Finally, REDSTONE FLUX! The Endoflames feed the mana distributor, which feeds four mana pools so I can have a huge mana battery available. There's one final mana spreader that fires at the Redstone Fluxfield. I've currently got a Resonant cell hooked up to it, charging

The efficiency is atrocious compared to dynamos (it produces half as much RF per charcoal as a steam dynamo) but it's self-sustaining power in Blightfall

E: A small edit I made, I moved the mana spreader so it only pulls from one pool instead of two.

E2: More updates, added a second, better gathering golem (advanced tallow instead of plain clay, the new tallow guy has two aquas and a terra in him, as well as spectacles, so he's got really good vision range), and a Brain In A Jar right by the Infernal Furnace to capture all the XP from smelting. A few thousand smelts is a loooot of XP

For what it's worth, the above setup generates somewhere in the neighborhood of 20k RF per second, though it's much slower (more like 5k RF per second) while the extra mana pools are filling up. It'll also give you more logs and charcoal than you know what to do with, so I'm sure that you can add more Endoflames, since the ones I have aren't using all the charcoal production I have.

AE2 starter guide

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

This won't be a super post but this should get things started.

Applied Energistics handles storage and automation. You can consider the way it handles items is by keeping them in files on a series of disks, and you access them from a terminal. This condenses storage down very neatly. Instead of having to manage the logistics of lots of chests and external storage solutions, you can shove all your stuff into your disks from a terminal as if it were just one big, hungry mouth, and it will sort it all out for you. They then went a step further of letting it automatically import and export items for you based on conditions. One step above that was giving the system the ability to craft items for you on request. This is where the automation comes in. You can have zero of an item, but have all the steps in place towards crafting it--including intermediate steps to ram it through various machines and devices--and it will figure out the dependencies and send it through everything for you.

Applied Energistics 2 is a controversial 2.0-style release of the original mod that changed many of the mechanics. This had the effect of drawing out the progression, and making many people complain about grinds--including yours truly. I've kind of tamped down on that just a little bit, but it's still harder to set it up now than the original. Their idea was to let you get the basics together even earlier by not mandating a controller, but then they made acquiring a controller so much harder that it got drawn out. You now have to go on scavenger hunts--the meteor hunting--for processor presses, and you need a little bit of a normally-very-rare charged certus quartz. They tried to make it easier to draw out whatever quartz you get by grinding it down, mixing it with sand, and growing purer crystals in water. However, this takes several real-life hours to complete at a time you're trying to get things kicking. Just keep this all in mind while you're setting things up.

There's some trick to remembering the processors, their presses, and their dependencies:
Engineering presses are advanced and require diamonds. Your first encounter with one of these will probably be making your controller.
Logic presses are simple and are very common when crafting actual storage cells. They require gold.
Calculation presses span various intermediate gear and some of the in-between phases. They require certus quartz.
Silicon presses always require silicon. You will always need to press out one of these to finish any other type of processor.

Any processor is made by smashing its pressed version of a pressed silicon, with redstone in the middle.

The classic starter network for Applied Energistics involves a terminal, an ME drive, a storage cell, some cables, and a controller. Depending on your mod pack's integration, you may need to make its energy cell to accept external power. Always have some backup fuel/energy in a chest nearby in case you run out of power and need to boot up everything enough to get your automated power generation working correctly again.

Most people will complain that the recipes for AE and AE2 are tedious, and they kind of are. The trick is everybody immediately throws a crafting terminal up, sets up autocrafting, gets recipes into the system, and then forgets all the recipes. Need more cables? Beep beep boop done.

The controller has become pickier in AE2 by requiring channels. This has been another bone of contention. I think most people that do computer crap for a living don't mind it, but that's not everybody. The general gist is that the controller is really more like a router, and it accept cabling freely from different sides. However, there is a limit on every side for how many devices you can place. It's limited by the cable hitting the controller. A basic cable can only handle 8 devices. For your starter network, that's fine, since an ME drive is just one device, regardless if it has 12 storage cells in it. But automation nutcases have to worry about it. The general strategy is to create the largest cables, and color them by task. Every major task then comes out of the controller from one side and goes off to their area. The color prevents these big cables from connecting and creating loops. If you do this, you can probably be ignorant of channels for even intermediate networks.

The storage cells can hold 64 different types of items. The difference then is how many of each they can hold. So a 4k cell can hold 4096 of 64 different items. Important point: if you fill up the maximum of one item, it will then move on to another slide in the cell to put more. So it's possible to have a 4k storage cell hold 262,144 of one thing (64 * 4096), although kind of dumb. There are tricks for effectively partitioning cells and restricting items to go to certain cells if you want to get into that game. For the most part, you probably don't. You can use a storage interface to go out to deep storage units, barrels, or whatever for large, monolithic storage. The hardcore autocrafting folks just make the 64M storage cells for everything once they get going.

This does not really get into autocrafting, other than to acknowledge it exists. It also ignores spatial storage, which lets you build frames around areas and suck them up into disks. Yes, you can walk inside this region and beam yourself into your own storage, but you better have brought a means of getting out!

AE2 Autocrafting Guide

Black Pants posted:

Autocrafting -used- to be handled by just a big multiblock in AE1, but it's made into seperate machines now. I can write a post about how to AE2 autocrafting works in general, but I don't know how to make it apply to Blightfall specifically. Since I'm in love with this part of AE2 I guess I'll do it anyway. Note this doesn't include some of the fancier tricks, it's more of a basic guide. This also assumes basic knowledge of dealing with cables and channels and such. Because, I mean, Rocko Bonaparte's post.

So, AE2 Autocrafting!

In AE2 there are three primary components that are involved in autocrafting: Molecular Assemblers, ME Interfaces, and Crafting CPUs. The CPUs -are- multiblocks, but it's not the big monolith from AE1. Also necessary for the process is the ME Pattern Terminal, and incredibly useful to the process is the ME Interface Terminal.

The Crafting CPU

A Crafting CPU is what is going to be handling organizing the crafting jobs (and their subjobs). These take a single channel regardless of size, but the minimum they can be is 2x2x1, and it -must- be a rectangular prism (or cube). The size you make it determines its capabilities. First of all, there must be at least one Crafting Storage block as part of it, these are made by combining a Crafting Unit with a ME Storage Component of any size. The rest of the multiblock can be made with any combination of Crafting Storage, Crafting Unit, Crafting Co-Processing Unit, and Crafting Monitor.

The most crucial part to its capabilities is the Crafting Storage. When you ask your ME system to craft for you, the crafting CPU takes those items from your storage and stores them to be processed. Thus, the Storage Component(s) you provide the CPU determine how many 'ingredients' your crafting jobs may entail. A 1k Crafting Storage block is fine for making a simple machine, but it will start to become inadequate if you start crafting things enmasse.

The other factor to your crafting capabilities is the Co-Processing Unit. But its role involves the Interfaces I'm going to be speaking of. To put it simply, the more Co-Processing Units your CPU has, the more tasks it can potentially do in parallel.

Finally, an important note: Each CPU can only be assigned one crafting job at a time regardless of its size, and will become unavailable until the job has finished (or you have canceled it. You can do that by right-clicking on the CPU itself.) Especially early game, it's better to have a couple of small CPUs than one big one.

The Molecular Assembler

These are actually dead simple, really. You put things into a Molecular Assembler, they automatically combine just like doing it on a crafting bench, then import the created item into the network. Bam. That's it. Seriously.

Their true power comes from combining them with ME Interfaces. They are the fun part.

Note that Molecular Assemblers require power and a channel each. I would also recommend looking into Acceleration Cards if you have the diamonds to spare. These can be slotted into AE2 devices such as the Assemblers to greatly speed up their workings.

The ME Interface

..is actually pretty simple too, really. Interfaces contain 9 slots for Encoded Patterns which are, essentially, "(item list) = (completed item)". When the Crafting CPU calls for an item to be made, the interface will see (completed item) is required, and push the relevant (item list) into whatever it is attached to. For example, a Molecular Assembler.

Interfaces come in two flavours: a block, or a panel. Blocks can have multiple Assemblers attached (and use them all at once if possible), while you can have up to five panel Interfaces attached to a single Assembler allowing for 5x9 Pattern slots on a single block taking up much less space. Of course, each interface will require its own cable/channel.

As I mentioned earlier, Crafting Co-Processors allow for more Interfaces to be engaged at the same time. When you start having your patterns spread across multiple Assemblers and machines, it can help speed things up.

The ME Pattern Terminal

This is.. what you're going to be staring at a LOT of the time if you get into autocrafting. The Pattern Terminal takes recipes you input onto a grid and encodes them on Blank Patterns.

(Protip: make Blank Patterns your first autocrafting recipe, always.)

The default state works just like a crafting table: you put in the recipe, and if it's a valid recipe it will show the completed item on the right. Then you click on the Encode Pattern downwards arrow button and you'll get an Encoded Pattern that shows "Crafts: ... with: ...". These then are placed into the slot of a relevant Interface, and, beep boop beep! You will be able to autocraft it.

Now, if you click on the little button on the right that looks like a crafting bench, you'll go from Crafting Pattern mode to Processing Pattern mode, and the Completed Item area changes. This is how you do more advanced autocrafting. As the name suggests, processing. For an example: place an Iron Ore in the grid on the left, and an Iron Ingot in one of the slots on the right, then encode the pattern. If you then place an interface on a Furnace and stick the pattern into it, it will automatically put iron ore into the furnace when called upon, with the expectation that it's going to get an iron ingot out the other end.

On that note...

Other Helpful Parts

For the previous example to work, it actually requires another part: an ME Import Bus. By default these just take anything from the 'inventory' of a thing they are attached to, indiscriminately. They can do more, but that's not really within the purview of this post. Suffice it to say that an Import Bus will whisk created items from the machine back into the network, closing the processing loop.

As I mentioned up at the start, there is another Terminal that you should add to your list: the Interface Terminal. As the name suggests, this uh.. interfaces with your Interfaces. It will list every Interface on the network, sorted into categories by what kind of thing they are attached to: Molecular Assemblers, Pulverizers, Furnaces and so on. Which is nifty. But its true power is that you can insert the patterns into the Interfaces from where you are making them. Each row is an Interface.

Now what?

Once you've followed these steps, anything you have a recipe for but have 0 of will have a 'Craft' line in place of an amount. Best thing is? Autocrafting something that requires something else that you also have a pattern for will craft that as well, as a subjob that is part of the main job.

So, new autocrafteers, go forth and make patterns of absolutely everything you could possibly want to have! It's fun and your life will be infinitely easier with just a bit of simple work.

Edit: Inscribers can be automated too! The way I did it was having 5(+) Inscribers. One for each of the presses, and then one more for creating the finished processors.

For each of the press inscribers, simply have an interface on the back of them with a pattern for item -> circuit, with an import bus on its left side (your right when facing it from the front).

The processor inscriber should have two export busses, one on the back, one on the bottom. The back one exporting Redstone, the bottom exporting the Silicon bases. Then an interface on top with all of the processor patterns, and finally an import bus on the left hand side again.

There might be easier ways of doing this? I don't know them though.

My own personal advice, when you're getting into AE2, make five inscribers - one for each press, and one for assembling parts into completed products. Crafting in AE2 is much less tedious when you're doing three things at once. They're not terribly expensive, and you'll want them all eventually for autocrafting anyway.

BIG reactors!

BlondRobin posted:

I also didn't want to fill the thread with what was likely redundant information for 90% of the players here!

Anyway, without further ado;

Big Reactors In A Small Guide

Build a base out of Reactor Casing!

Extend it to the top and fill in the outside with Reactor Glass.

Place control rods in the roof over where you want your fuel.

Put the bits in on the side; Controller, Access Port, Power Tap. Only one controller.

Fill in below the control rods with fuel rods.

Fill in between the fuel rods with something to mitigate heat but not radiation. I use graphite blocks.

Fill in the outside with a coolant to mitigate heat and radiation. I use liquid ender.

Once you add the last block it'll have ~actual texturing~ suddenly so you know you did it.

Set the control rods. This reactor runs at 65% to 70% down. It varies, experiment!

Turn it on at the controller (put fuel in at the access port!) and see how it runs.

Then give it a dumb name like 'Betsy' like you're still in the nuclear age!

If you want a guide about how to actually design your own it'll be a few pages and no longer 'short' by any real definition, but that's how you build a reactor. Good luck!

Magres fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Oct 1, 2015

# ? Aug 30, 2015 08:46

Ambaire: Sep 4, 2009; by Shine; Oven Wrangler

Once an Ethereal Bloom has cleansed the surface including any tainted dirt, can I safely assume that it has also removed any taint below it down to bedrock as well or should one wait a bit longer? I don't know exactly how they work. Do they clean a y strip from 0-255 at a time? If so, could taint in a cavern spread back into that y square while it's cleaning other squares and it would definitely need a bit extra time? Or can taint not spread in an ethereal bloom radius? Thanks.

Also, if I really want to save research points, should I think about switching TC to hard research or would it not be worth the additional pain in the rear end?

# ? Aug 30, 2015 14:09

Demiurge4: Aug 10, 2011

Ambaire posted:

Once an Ethereal Bloom has cleansed the surface including any tainted dirt, can I safely assume that it has also removed any taint below it down to bedrock as well or should one wait a bit longer? I don't know exactly how they work. Do they clean a y strip from 0-255 at a time? If so, could taint in a cavern spread back into that y square while it's cleaning other squares and it would definitely need a bit extra time? Or can taint not spread in an ethereal bloom radius? Thanks.

Also, if I really want to save research points, should I think about switching TC to hard research or would it not be worth the additional pain in the rear end?

Early on it's best if you keep blooms close and spread out organically. There's a lot of tunnels underneath the ground so taint will probably grow back and change the biome back, you can see this from the color of the grass. If that happens just park a bloom there to block it off if you've built something important there. Rush an energized node and get a recharge pedestal up, then make a cleansing wand focus. With a few extra wands you can start removing taint manually in large areas and use the blooms to block the edges so it doesn't grow back. I can heartily recommend manasteel caps for a cheap option that lets you clean large areas before changing out the wand.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 14:34

ellie the beep: Jun 15, 2007; Vaginas, my subject.
Plane hulls, my medium.

Hopefully someone can answer the question here because it got ignored in the main thread. I got to the Glacier but accidentally panic-lava'd the loot from the dude with the blue sphere projectiles Does anyone know what I should have gotten? I know I saw a black lotus go poof but there were other things I didn't recognise but are probably way above my tech level (iron armour + fusewood) so any help would be appreciated.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 14:44

Gwyneth Palpate: Jun 7, 2010; Do you want your breadcrumbs highlighted?

~SMcD

Edminster posted:

Hopefully someone can answer the question here because it got ignored in the main thread. I got to the Glacier but accidentally panic-lava'd the loot from the dude with the blue sphere projectiles Does anyone know what I should have gotten? I know I saw a black lotus go poof but there were other things I didn't recognise but are probably way above my tech level (iron armour + fusewood) so any help would be appreciated.

None of the loot from those guys is crucial to the game. They're just nice-to-haves.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 14:55

Demiurge4: Aug 10, 2011

Edminster posted:

Hopefully someone can answer the question here because it got ignored in the main thread. I got to the Glacier but accidentally panic-lava'd the loot from the dude with the blue sphere projectiles Does anyone know what I should have gotten? I know I saw a black lotus go poof but there were other things I didn't recognise but are probably way above my tech level (iron armour + fusewood) so any help would be appreciated.

I've killed more tainted thaumaturges and botanists and the best thing I got so far was a blazing staff core and some armor pieces. I did get a warp thaumaturges cowl from one mob (which is a really nice void metal tier fortress armor piece) but I'm not wearing it because I don't have a good stock of salts yet.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 15:21

Gwyneth Palpate: Jun 7, 2010; Do you want your breadcrumbs highlighted?

~SMcD

Here's some mechanisms you can use to make things easier:

INVENTORY RECLAIMER 4000:

Using the magic hand mirror, you can stuff items through it and they'll appear wherever your magic mirror block is. The hungry chest then gobbles up the items as they appear. If your chunk with the magic mirror isn't loaded, the items will just exist in limbo and not tick down their despawn timer until you load the chunk (by, e.g., visiting the area.) The hopper drains the hungry chest into a double chest for extra storage. You could also use a golem with an Empty animation core; this was just less work.

This setup extends the amount of time you can be out in the world before your inventory fills up, as you can just use the magic hand mirror to shove all your loot over to a central storage location.

Upgrades involve using an AE2 Annihilation Plane to suck items directly into your AE system instead of using a hungry chest.

BOTANIA AUTOMATION:

Here's a really simple way to automate the endoflame:

Load coal or charcoal into the hopper, and the mechanism will mete out the charcoal perfectly without wasting any.

RANDOM HINTS:

* Make a pam's harvestcraft presser, then put wood logs into the top slot. It will slowly convert them into paper.
* Don't let Thaumcraft harvest golems near fruit trees; they will destroy the fruit.
* If you're using the default hunger settings and not relying on bread or emergency rations, make a Food Journal with a piece of paper and one wheat. This will show you everything you've eaten recently, allowing you to know what you can craft and eat soon.
* One of your early tasks should be making a ranged weapon. Wading into melee in Blightfall is very risky. It's much better to snipe things from afar with a crossbow or a shock focus wand.
* Mining becomes a lot easier with the Tinker's Construct hammer. Make one of these as soon as you can spare 27 ingots of the hardest metal you got.
* Tinker's Construct has gloves that you can upgrade with redstone. They go into a specialized equipment slot on the Diamond Armor tab of your inventory. Wearing these upgraded gloves increases the mining speed of anything you wield (including your bare hands.) These are a great way to counteract the slowness of the ticon hammers.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 15:24

Demiurge4: Aug 10, 2011

You can also upgrade to hungry hand mirror which automatically eats anything in its whitelist that enters your inventory, like ores.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 15:37

central dogma: Feb 25, 2012; Come to the Undead Settlement in the next 20 mins if u want an ash kicking

Haven't played Blightfall for a couple months. Were the xp requirements for TiC tools increased? Because holy poo poo is it taking forever to level up my flint tools!

# ? Aug 30, 2015 15:49

Gwyneth Palpate: Jun 7, 2010; Do you want your breadcrumbs highlighted?

~SMcD

Also, if you're using the Mana Fluxfield to generate power, be wary of its behavior when your energy cell is close to full. Any time there's room for RF to be stored in the fluxfield, any mana spreaders pointed at it will immediately fire, with no concern as to whether the majority of the mana would be wasted. It's highly recommended to use a comparator on your energy cell to read its level, and turn off any mana spreaders pointed at your fluxfield when the comparator reads a signal of 13 or above. I burned through about 4 manapoolsworth of mana before I figured this out; now my Rube Goldberg machine for making power is net positive :v:

# ? Aug 30, 2015 15:54

Talonos: Aug 11, 2015

central dogma posted:

Haven't played Blightfall for a couple months. Were the xp requirements for TiC tools increased? Because holy poo poo is it taking forever to level up my flint tools!

All materials have different XP requirements. Flint is unusually hard to level up, as is stone. Wood is slightly easier to level up, as are highly enchantable materials such as Thaumium. If materials are something people are interested in, I'll put up a materials page on the wiki today.

Also, if you're playing Blightfall for the first time in months, yes, XP requirements were increased since 2.1.0. On the plus side, all TiC tools were given a free modifier slot to start with. These changes make level 1 as good as level 2 used to be, but makes it as hard to go from 1 to 2 as it used to be to get from 2 to 3.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 17:09

goodness: Jan 3, 2012; just keep swimming

Talonos posted:

All materials have different XP requirements. Flint is unusually hard to level up, as is stone. Wood is slightly easier to level up, as are highly enchantable materials such as Thaumium. If materials are something people are interested in, I'll put up a materials page on the wiki today.

Also, if you're playing Blightfall for the first time in months, yes, XP requirements were increased since 2.1.0. On the plus side, all TiC tools were given a free modifier slot to start with. These changes make level 1 as good as level 2 used to be, but makes it as hard to go from 1 to 2 as it used to be to get from 2 to 3.

Materials is definitely something I have been interested in! One of the most confusing parts for me is knowing how they all lie on a tier scale and what is actually important to keep.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 17:51

MOVIE MAJICK: Jan 4, 2012; by Pragmatica

Is this something you play on huge server or can you do it by yourself with a handful of pals?

# ? Aug 30, 2015 18:02

goodness: Jan 3, 2012; just keep swimming

MOVIE MAJICK posted:

Is this something you play on huge server or can you do it by yourself with a handful of pals?

You can do it solo, with a few buddies or more and it will work out well. Having a couple people makes teching up faster but you might lose out on exploring secrets and such yourself.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 18:04

Meme Poker Party: Sep 1, 2006; by Azathoth

Blightenfall, drop a taint on it!

# ? Aug 30, 2015 18:07

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

It's not really recommended to play with more than 4 people on a team, and 3 is ideal. That said, if you have more than 3 or 4 people you can split up into different biodomes. Just don't put people from different biodomes into one HQM party. 1 person can play alone, but there's a lot of stuff to do so keep that in mind- you'll be playing a long time

# ? Aug 30, 2015 18:11

Taffer: Oct 15, 2010

The inclusion of Blood Magic into Blighfall feels odd. It has like 1 quest and it's kind of out of place and feels like an afterthought.

Then again I think Blood Magic is a really stupid mod so that could be my resentment talking.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 18:13

Thyrork: Apr 21, 2010; "COME PLAY MECHS M'LANCER."

Or at least use Retrograde Mini's to make cool mechs and fantasy stuff.; Slippery Tilde

It was intended to be more, but it is damned useful as it is.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 18:18

Demiurge4: Aug 10, 2011

I finally made my way into the void dimension. It was honestly kind of a let-down but the easy access to alienis is appreciated. Also the boss loving wrecked me :stare:

I've never done boss fights and I don't bother enchanting my poo poo, maybe that should change...

# ? Aug 30, 2015 18:28

Doorknob Slobber: Sep 10, 2006; by Fluffdaddy

One thing about the quests I don't like is that even if you don't pick the tutorial the Instructor quests are pretty hand-holdy and then you go into the Paranormalist and he's like "lol make me a totem of the dawn" and you're like wha? More Thaumcraft quests in the Paranormalist tree that sort of walk you through building up to that would be neat.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 18:30

Gwyneth Palpate: Jun 7, 2010; Do you want your breadcrumbs highlighted?

~SMcD

Another tip: type "not eaten recently" into NEI, this will list all foods that you can currently get 100% nutrition from

Another another tip: if you find a sunflower in the field, plant it, then bonemeal it to get more sunflowers, then craft 2 sunflowers together to get seeds

Gwyneth Palpate fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Aug 30, 2015

# ? Aug 30, 2015 18:58

Eschers Basement: Sep 13, 2007; by exmarx

Two other notes for new players: the tree in each base makes stuff safe in about a 12-radius/24-diameter circle around the tree at all levels. Expand down, not out, and stay in that ring, and you shouldn't have taint creep in.

Second: at some point in the first week, animals show up in your biodome (at least Alpha and Beta - haven't tried the underwater ones). If you've set up some underground areas in that first week and can l lead the animals to fences, it'll make your life tons easier. Just don't get greedy for space - if a little taint sneaks into your farm, an animal can wander through it and turn, and usually goes to kill your other animals.

ETA: ooh, one other tip: rather than trying to get the two diamonds you need for the cooking table that doesn't quite work, open up the Feed The Beast wiki at ftbwiki.org and search by one ingredient you have. The bottom of the page will give you all of the recipes that use the ingredient, which makes it easy to answer "The ship gave me cabbages - what the hell can I use those for?"

Eschers Basement fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Aug 30, 2015

# ? Aug 30, 2015 19:00

heard u like girls: Mar 25, 2013

Don't be like me and have all the happy animals kill themselves on the enderpearl-plants. :classiclol:

# ? Aug 30, 2015 19:15

Ambaire: Sep 4, 2009; by Shine; Oven Wrangler

Eschers Basement posted:

rather than trying to get the two diamonds you need for the cooking table that doesn't quite work

The recipe got hotfixed iirc, it's now craftable with basic materials.

Edit:
Cooking table recipe is Cooking for blockheads II book + Weighted pressure plate + Crafting table

Ambaire fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Aug 30, 2015

# ? Aug 30, 2015 19:44

Magres: Jul 14, 2011

It also works much better than it used to.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 19:52

Blind Duke: Nov 8, 2013

If you only have the biodome just kill the animals

they respawn super quickly because there's no other passive animals and there's only one space in the loaded world with grass. As long as you spend time in the mines they will come back.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 19:54

President Ark: May 16, 2010

Regarding the tainted NPC drops: Don't sweat them, nothing they drop is irreplaceable. Most of the ones you run into commonly just drop some basic thaumcraft stuff and/or cosmetic armor.

The only ones with drops I'd consider notable are:

Tainted Sniper: Found mostly in the floating city, drop the components for the iron longbows they're using which translate into 5+ iron ingots per kill.
Tainted hero: One-of-a-kind in the floating city, drops some heavily-enchanted armor made from high-end materials like altarus, sanguinite, etc. It'll be nearly broken but if you can repair it it's pretty cool gear.
Tainted king: One of a kind in the floating city, drops a cool crown and all the components for a silverwood wand, albiet with inert caps so you still have to do some infusion

# ? Aug 30, 2015 19:59

Magres: Jul 14, 2011

poo poo what's the crown the third one drops do? I blew his rear end up with fireballs I tossed into his house and never went in for loot because that city terrifies me

# ? Aug 30, 2015 20:01

President Ark: May 16, 2010

Magres posted:

poo poo what's the crown the third one drops do? I blew his rear end up with fireballs I tossed into his house and never went in for loot because that city terrifies me

Near as I can tell, nothing besides look cool.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 20:03

Magres: Jul 14, 2011

Anyone know what the hell the drop rate on Tainted Shards is? I'm trying to make a Tainted Scepter so I can make my Elementium Capped Dreamwood Staff, and I just cannot get these shards to drop.

E: Nm I'm just gonna make a void-capped silverwood scepter.

Demiurge4 posted:

I finally made my way into the void dimension. It was honestly kind of a let-down but the easy access to alienis is appreciated. Also the boss loving wrecked me I've never done boss fights and I don't bother enchanting my poo poo, maybe that should change...

Details? I'm hurting for Alienis so bad

Magres fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Aug 30, 2015

# ? Aug 30, 2015 20:22

Demiurge4: Aug 10, 2011

Magres posted:

Anyone know what the hell the drop rate on Tainted Shards is? I'm trying to make a Tainted Scepter so I can make my Elementium Capped Dreamwood Staff, and I just cannot get these shards to drop.

E: Nm I'm just gonna make a void-capped silverwood scepter.

Details? I'm hurting for Alienis so bad

Basically every block you find in there has alienis in it. It's also a good source of ender pearls and knowledge fragments, but it also has ghost mobs that wither you for like 20 seconds so watch out for that.

And the shovel of the purifier is the best for corruption shards. Only drop off tainted crust btw, not the tainted grass blocks.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 20:27

Mzbundifund: Nov 5, 2011; I'm afraid so.

How are you getting your tainted shards? Because I got a Shovel of the Purifier with fortune III on it and like every four tainted fibers I break with it gets me a tainted shard.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 20:29

Magres: Jul 14, 2011

thought it was the tainted soil

Demiurge4 posted:

Basically every block you find in there has alienis in it. It's also a good source of ender pearls and knowledge fragments, but it also has ghost mobs that wither you for like 20 seconds so watch out for that.

And the shovel of the purifier is the best for corruption shards. Only drop off tainted crust btw, not the tainted grass blocks.

How do you get there?

# ? Aug 30, 2015 20:37

Thyrork: Apr 21, 2010; "COME PLAY MECHS M'LANCER."

Or at least use Retrograde Mini's to make cool mechs and fantasy stuff.; Slippery Tilde

Unspoiled way of finding out: Find my corpse, it has a clue.

Spoiled: Eat a crimson cult book, go insane twice, research the way to create the eyes, i forget what they are called, put 4 of them on a monolith's plinth, right click the monolith with a charged wand (100 of all i think) and it will open a portal

Thyrork fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Aug 30, 2015

# ? Aug 30, 2015 20:53

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# ? Jun 11, 2024 09:54

McFrugal: Oct 11, 2003

Magres posted:

thought it was the tainted soil

How do you get there?

If you're hurting for Alienis it's out of your reach. Takes like three whole jars of alienis to make the mats to get there.

# ? Aug 30, 2015 20:56

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > (Minecraft) Blightfall: T'ain't nothin' to worry about

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