praecipitator
commented
6 years ago I like this idea.
Maybe this could also be an alternative way to start thaumcraft. You find a thaumonomicon in such a lab, and bypass the part about mining vis crystals and having to sleep.
The infuser setups should obviously be lacking the runic matrix. Or have a special block in it's place, like, "Broken/Corrupted/Tainted Infusion Matrix", which can't be used.
Other failed laboratory ideas:
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Distillation Room: Has some non-functional essentia smelters and alembics, connected to some jars. There could be a "cracked essentia jar" block for this, which breaks and spills flux if you try to mine it. one or two of the jars might still be intact, filled with random essentia. The tubes could also still be salvageable.
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Smeltery: Has several incomplete/broken Infernal Furnaces standing around. Some of them might contain blaze spawners. Or, they look intact, but when you get close, they explode and release a blaze. At most one could be still functional.
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Eldrich Research Lab: has a research desk, bookshelves, skulls, candles, maybe a brain in a jar. Also has an Eldrich Guardian or two, implying that they killed the owner. Might have a chest with something eldrich-related.
Edit: as an alternative to having the equipment being non-functional, it could be some special uncratable stuff with extra features, but also downsides. As you said, whoever built this has messed up. For example, the essentia smelter you find could be especially fast and efficient, but produce a lot more flux than anything you can craft. The alembic could be able to hold more than one type of essentia, but will start spilling it as flux if you don't remove it fast enouh. The infusion matrix could be incredibly stable, but only if you have, like, 70 flux around it.
I feel like this would add some nice flavor and would give a good reason to brave a naturally-generated taint biome.
I think it'd be cool to see the likely cause of a taint biome in the form of having abandoned labs at different stages of progression in the mod, possibly with deliberately dirty/inefficient/dangerous setups (which could be a way to reinforce the importance of safety). For example, a low progression one might be a small wooden shack with a cauldron, workbench, research table, and a bed, with a chest with some relatively low level loot in it (probably nothing much more advanced than Goggles of Revealing). A higher tier one might have an infuser set up with comically bad symmetry problems and maybe a thaumatorium, could be made of arcane stone, and might contain higher-level loot and notes. Or if you are really going for a comically bad setup, maybe one that has a nice infuser setup but still has a cauldron with lava underneath it.
I wouldn't expect a fully decked-out lab that allows the player to bypass all the progression through luck, or maybe the research gained through this would not be main branch research (after all, whatever these labs' owners were doing was something that went catastrophically wrong). Or maybe extra warp could be a penalty for bypassing research by simply looting stuff.