Way to combine Essentia

There's already an Essentia Centrifuge, a way to separate Essentia into one of its base components. Some Essentia types, such as Preamunio, are absolutely awful to attempt to distill. It would be interesting, therefor, to have a machine that operates almost exactly the opposite to the Essentia Centrifuge, in that it accepts 2 types of Essentia and, if compatible, combines them into a single point of the aspect they'd normally create, in Essentia form. Going back to the example ff Preamunio, simply putting a jar of Spiritus and Terra Essentia hooked to the device by pipes would yield x points of Preamunio Essentia.

Yea... and if you try to combine aspects that don't go together, most often, TNT sized to massive explosion, depending on the complexity of the aspects. But, 1/42 ( or other fraction) times a pure node forms, again size depending on the complexity of the aspects and the aspects in the node roughly correlate to the makeup of the aspects you were trying to combine.

This is a great idea by the way.

Thanks. However, I don't feel that any type of reaction would really fit into the lore of the game. I think if you tried it would be just like trying to use one of the Primal aspects in an Essentia Centrifuge - it just wouldn't work.

This has been suggested multiple times and my answer is always the same: Nope.

The simple reason for this is that you would be able to make infinite essentia of any type with nothing more than a couple of farms.

I have toyed with the idea in the past, but it is not something you could just simply add to the mod - it will have to be redesigned from the ground up with combining aspects forming the core gameplay mechanic. I've floated the idea on the forums in the past, but it didn't appear to be very popular.

How about you are only able to combine primal aspects? This still might be op, but it I don't think it would be too game breaking, and it would make every thaumaturge's life easier. OR visa versa, any aspect that has primal directly as a component can't be created, this might be more useful but less op, easier to get the more complex aspects, while still having to hunt down the components.

It's not all that significant, most of the first tier aspects are easy to obtain anyway. In that, the idea was already denied. Once again, thanks to Azanor for taking the time to deny it personally. Haha. Much appreciated.

Since this has not been closed, I figure it is still open for comment. I understand that this idea has been rejected more than once, but I would like to offer a suggestion. If it does not change your mind, that is perfectly fine, but perhaps I can provide a new perspective (maybe for everyone).

First, the problem with this suggestion is that it undermines a core feature of the mod: Scarcity. Essentia is a currency. Each type is like a different type of currency with different uses. So uses are pretty mundane. Some are very powerful. Scarcity is used to maintain balance. A mechanic that allows cheaply synthesizing more complex and scarce essentia from common essentia would break that balance. I see at least one suggestion that includes a price: Each output point costs two input points. The problem here is that it is so easy and cheap to obtain the primals that even 1 to 100 would not be a high enough cost to maintain balance.

Second, there is a solution: Don't make essentia the cost. Instead have an additional cost of some material that is much harder to obtain. The Flux Condenser provides a good example of this. It is not terribly expensive to build, but it requires Lattice pieces. These lattice pieces periodically get clogged, and the filters that are consumed when unclogging them require gold, which is rare. This manes the Flux Condenser expensive to operate, even though the fuel it merely almost any kind of essentia. Of course, gold can be farmed, with a zombie pigman farm, but even this is a pretty slow way of obtaining gold. It makes it a little bit easier, but not a lot. The Flux Condenser also consumes one more resource: Time. The device is slow. You can increase its speed with more lattice elements, but that means more clogs and thus more gold spent. Gold is a renewable resource, but time is not, so making a gold farm is certainly more efficient, but it takes so long to mine the obsidian required. In short, the Flux Condenser is expensive to operate, and it is expensive in resource that are rare and slow to farm.

So, here is my suggestion for a device that combines essentia to create more complex ones:

To begin with, I like the idea of 50% of the essentia being lost. It could just be consumed as part of the process, or, for higher stakes, it could be released as flux. Making it generate flux would make the process pretty unsafe to do at home. Next, make it slow. One essentia generated per minute might be a good starting place. That would take 4 hours and 20 minutes to create an entire jar. (Note that for some of the multiple compound essentias, you would have to go through the process multiple times to get from primal or close to primal to the desired end product. That means many times longer, and paying costs multiple times.) But that is not to bad to deal with, if you just let the game run overnight. The third cost is either gold or some other very rare resource. If the process consumed a gold nugget for every essentia generated, that would probably be expensive enough. If not though, you could go for something straight up non-renewable, like lapis. Maybe one piece of lapis would be worth 10 essentia. Or perhaps even make it cost emeralds (yes, renewable, but rarer to find than lapis, and tedious to farm stuff to sell villagers).

Of course, many of these options could be altered in magnitude or material to get a specific balance. There could be an option for increasing speed similar to the Flux Condenser, that ultimately consumes even more resources. The key here is to make sure there are added costs beyond just essentia, which is plentiful. Given the power of this kind of feature, the cost should be pretty steep, and it should be an ongoing cost. The catch is that it should not be so steep that it is always easier to just get the essentia manually. That last part is why I think something like one gold nugget per essentia would be a reasonable cost. It is high enough to not be game breaking, but it is low enough to sometimes be worth doing.

For an example, I find Alienis to be one of the most difficult essentias to obtain. It is composed of Vacuos and Tenebrae. To make a jar of Alienis, I would need a jar of each of those. Vacuos is composed of Aer and Perdito, both primals. So, first I would take a jar of each, and I would spend about 4 hours and 250 gold nuggets to make a jar of Vacuos. Tenebrae is made from Vacuos and Lux. So that is another 4 hours and 250 gold nuggets for another jar of Vacuos and 4 more hours and 250 gold nuggets to make the jar of Lux from Aer and Ignis. Now we can make the Tenebrae from those, for 4 hour and 250 more gold nuggets. At last, another 4 hours and 250 gold nuggets later, we have a whole jar of Alienis. The total cost of the jar comes out to 3 jars or Aer, 2 jars of Perditio, 1 jar of Ignis, 20+ hours, and 1,250 gold nuggets (about 139 gold ingots). Is this too cheap for one jar of Alienis? I don't feel like it is. If anything, it might be too expensive. It feels to me to about right for that much of a fairly rare essentia though.

Anyhow, just a suggestion. I understand adding more stuff is always more work. I am pretty happy with the mod as it currently is (thank you for making it). I do think a method for combining essentia should exist though, mostly because it just makes sense that you would be able to do so, and because it would provide some amount of relief when unable to find the necessary materials*. Making it a very expensive, end game class process would avoid the imbalance that would occur if mixing essentia was cheap and easy though.

*(Before Thaumcraft was ported to more recent MC versions, I spent several real-life days waiting outside at night for an Enderman (just one) to appear so I could get an ender pearl for something in Botanica, and it never happened. That was incredibly frustrating. Admittedly, it is not the mod's fault, but with some things costing a lot of Alienis, something like this could just plain make Thuamcraft lose all of its fun.)

@Rybec you make several good points about scarcity and time, but I think that there isn't a need for essentia synthesis in the first place. I feel that the current system is quite well balanced already. Using your example of Alienis, when would you need to synthesize it? Right now, it's only used for two things: Sanitizing soap, and the void thaumaturge hood. Both of these are end-game items, by which point you'll most likely have access to the end, and with it, a virtually unlimited supply of ender pearls and chorus fruit anyways.

Take Praecantatio for another example. Its component aspects are very common, and it's used in items ranging from early to late game, so it seems like a good candidate for synthesis. However, Praecantatio is already covered pretty well by the centrifuge (Alkimia from brewing materials, notably nether wart, or Auram from silverwood) and cheap materials like salis mundus. You can even take Vitium from the flux condenser (you produce quite a lot of it over time) and centrifuge it, effectively turning any type of essentia into praecantatio, at approximately a 10:1 ratio.

When other mods are added to the mix, this point becomes even more true - e.g., Extra Utilities allows you to grow ender pearls, so you'll have at least a couple by the time you need Alienis anyways.

What actually prompted me to write this was needing Alienis for the soap. It's not an urgent need right now, but it's pretty frustrating when it is not too difficult to unlock a technology but then it's going to be a long time before I can afford to use it. And access to the End is always problematic, because you can't get back before beating the dragon. So right now, I have 5 or 6 technologies I can research that will give me warp, but it's going to be a while before I am in a good position to go to the End. And I am lucky if I can get one or two Endermen a night, which comes out to rather a lot of time, just to make one bar of soap. It's great to know that plenty will be available long after i end up needing it. (I played this mod during 1.7, and I actually got bored and quit when I hit the point I am at now, because progression became far too difficult far too quickly. Up to this point though, it has been really fun. It's just that eventually, I am going to hit a point where it is more frustrating than fun, and something that could mitigate that, even at a fairly high cost, would at least help me feel like I am still progressing.)

Praecantatio is trivial to get, though a bit expensive. Vitium, which can be obtained from the air with the Flux Condenser, and producing a little bit of flux now and then, breaks into Praecantatio and Perditio. This is actually a 20:1 ratio. Getting the Vitium costs 10 per point, and then it breaks 50/50, so you only get 1 Praecantatio for every 2 points of Vitium (on average). (On a side note, I have also been unable to find a nether fortress this time around, so no nether wart. I got lucky getting a few blaze rods from a Pech.) The setup with Praecantatio is actually really good. Initially, when you first need it, it is expensive to get, but it is not so difficult that it is terribly frustrating. From there, it is not too hard to work up to getting the Flux Condenser, at which point it becomes easier. It still takes a while, and the Flux Condenser has a steep price for use when you first get it, but progress is steady with a bit of work. Alienis is problematic as soon as you research the first few things that need it. Endermen are not exactly plentiful on the surface, the pearl drop rate is not great, and the essentia per pearl is pretty low. In short, all it takes is a little bit of bad luck to make the mod not very fun anymore. And yeah, you can get plenty in the End, which is great unless you are unlucky and can't get an ender pearl or blaze rod due to poor luck with the random number generator. In short, there are some parts of the mod that rely especially heavily on luck (another I have seen complaints about is finding a llama to spit at you, which is problematic, because they only rarely appear, and they are found in biomes that are uncommon enough to be very difficult to find sometimes).

As far as adding other mods goes, that is not even valid. If the mod cannot stand on its own, then any mods necessary to make it playable should be listed as dependencies. It's nice that other mods make up for some of the deficiencies, but they should not have to. Not that these are serious deficiencies, but bad luck should not be enough to make the mod unplayable.

All of that said though, you make a good point in favor of my argument: If, by the end game, these are all plentiful, then there is no value in not having the ability to mix essentia. And in fact, if this is true, then maybe it doesn't need any special balancing costs.

It's not up to us though. Personally, I think the fact that so many people are asking about it strongly suggests there is a need, but I will admit that it is not critical to the success of the mod. It could improve the quality-of-life for the mod in the late game though. That would be incredibly valuable for long term multi-player servers. Of course, the current iteration of the mod is not even complete yet, so maybe there is something I don't know that would make this idea game breaking. I'll leave it to Azanor, as he knows about all of that stuff.

What actually prompted me to write this was needing Alienis for the soap.

Sanitizing soap can be unlocked relatively early, but even if it is, it's not really necessary until you get deep into eldritch stuff anyways, at which point you likely will have access to the end. In the current state of the mod, even with all the forbidden knowledge completed, warp is hardly an issue, just some creepy messages and occasionally a debuff or mind spiders. TC also gives you ways to handle warp before sanitizing soap - notably, the grinning devil faceplate for thaumium fortress armor.

Alienis is problematic as soon as you research the first few things that need it.

That's why it's only used for two late-game items, by which point it shouldn't be an issue to get large quantities of Alienis.

In short, all it takes is a little bit of bad luck to make the mod not very fun anymore.

If you're having bad luck, you can use thaumium or elemental tools, which have very high enchantability, making it easier to get looting. There's also an infusion enchantment, "essence harvester", which could help. On top of this, luck is part of Minecraft as a game: You can argue that Minecraft becomes a lot less fun if you get unlucky and don't find any diamonds.

This is actually a 20:1 ratio. Getting the Vitium costs 10 per point, and then it breaks 50/50, so you only get 1 Praecantatio for every 2 points of Vitium (on average).

The essentia condenser was changed in B22, it takes a base value of 5 essentia per point of flux/vitium now.

If the mod cannot stand on its own, then any mods necessary to make it playable should be listed as dependencies.

I agree that mods should be able to stand on their own, and I feel that TC does a very good job at that. I was just pointing out that in modpacks (which a large portion of players use) it's even less difficult to get aspects like Alienis.

All of that said though, you make a good point in favor of my argument: If, by the end game, these are all plentiful, then there is no value in not having the ability to mix essentia. And in fact, if this is true, then maybe it doesn't need any special balancing costs.

The point I'm trying to make is that TC is already built around not having essentia synthesis, and gives you the tools to acquire essentia in other ways. I'd compare this to Minecraft adding a way to turn dirt into diamonds (simplified, but you get the idea): It's an unnecessary feature that the game wasn't designed for. If you want essentia synthesis just for these edge cases (lots of warp, bad luck with ender pearls, etc) or for fun, then I think it would be better suited to an addon.

@TekterBR Wait, so you are saying that separating things into pure components is easier than putting them together in a container and stirring?

Logically, breaking parts into pure components in chemistry is very difficult, while mixing things together is typically trivial. Of course, for extremely complex compounds, chemical reactions sometimes must be done in exactly the correct order to get what you want, but many 2 to 3 element compounds are as easy to make as stirring them together and maybe adding heat. (Metal oxides are as easy to make as merely exposing them to atmosphere. That said, I guess that is how you make Vitium with any type of essentia, elemental or not.)

From a chemistry point of view, what should really happen is that some compounds should be as easy to make as stirring together elements in a container. Some should require adding and stirring a specific order. Some should require the application of heat or cold. Some should just cause explosions of varying magnitude when mixed (producing the desired compound, but instantly venting it to the atmosphere unless contained in a chamber designed to withstand the blast). Fitting all of these into the mod would take a lot of work to design all of the "chemical" interactions though.

But yeah, no. It does not make sense that breaking down and purifying is simpler than mixing compounds. And making it slow does not make it impractical. Making it too slow could make it impractical, but just making it slower in general does not. Let's say it is really slow to combine essentia. Yes, it might be faster to go obtain it through items that contain it, but that reaches a practical limit. Mixing essentia could be automated. I could create a large array of mixing devices, and now it is not faster to get it through more direct means. If the mixing devices are reasonably expensive, it is also not OP, because the work put into getting the materials for making them is my labor capital paid in exchange for a more convenient system. (Making it cost vis is a good idea though, because it would require automation systems to be spread out across multiple chunks for large scale production.)

So, how about this: Have several mixing devices. The lowest cost one can only mix two elements to make two element compounds, but it can only make more common compounds (the justification being that they are more common because they are easy enough to mix that it happens in nature spontaneously). The next one can make all two element compounds, but it consumes vis to do so, and it is significantly slower than the first. It is also more expensive to make. The third is really expensive to make, probably requires eldritch knowledge, requires even more vis, and it can only make 3+ element compounds. Further, it requires specific inputs. So, you cannot just throw in a two element compound and a third element and get what you want. You have to put in the right combination of compounds and elements, otherwise it will make something unexpected (maybe even 2 element compounds or pure elements, but still from the elements provided) and vent the rest into the atmosphere as flux. Some compounds made with this device might require multiple compounds that include elements not in the final product, and the leftovers from those will also be vented as flux.

Not that I have any expectation that any essentia mixing system will ever be added, but something similar to what I just described could really help without being serious OP.

@dmarcuse You make some good points. And maybe an essentia mixer would be better as an addon mod. Thank you for pointing out some of the other options for dealing with warp. If the soap is really intended for very late game though, then it should probably not be unlockable so early on.

The high element of luck in vanilla Minecraft is actually a serious balance problem itself. It is not as bad as the balance problem created by parts of TC that rely heavily on those luck elements though. (I design games, so I actually have a very solid understanding of this stuff.)

The biggest failure of TC though is not any of this stuff. It is the same as the biggest failure of a vast majority of the best mods: Early game resource management. Ore doubling helps with this, but Thaumcraft requires so much more than the double helps with. I find myself spending 90% to 95% of my time mining in the early game with TC, when in vanilla, I only spend maybe 60% to 70%. In vanilla, I quickly reach a point where I have a massive stock of surplus iron, and plenty of diamonds and gold, but in TC, I am constantly running out and having to go mine again. And when I try to combine TC with Botania or another heavy content mod, it gets even worse. The mid game essentia problem actually makes this worse, by requiring the acquisition of even more rare and time consuming materials. I feel like TC makes Minecraft even more about mining than it already is. (But at the same time, I love the content of the mod, so I don't want to just walk away. TC is legitimately one of the best content mods out there!)

Anyhow, thanks for the response and the explanations for some of the things. You didn't change my mind, but you did give me a better understanding of a few things!

Azanor / thaumcraft-suggestions

Way to combine Essentia #55