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Early Game[]

A Thaumcraft game starts off as a mostly ordinary Minecraft game, in that you need to accumulate various resources before you can start playing with magic. So, gather your tools and resources as usual, building farms and mining ores. Thaumcraft adds a few special wrinkles:

  • Nodes -- If you happen to spot one, don't mess with it until you get the Thaumometer, but you can mark them for later.
  • Three magical biomes. All of these can spawn several of Thaumcraft's special mobs.
    • Magical Forest appears bright and shiny, and is valuable territory, especially the silverwood trees.
    • Eerie biomes have darkened land and sky. They are not very hazardous, but each is centered around a "sinister node", which doubles as a monster spawner for Furious Zombies (see below).
    • Tainted Lands, in unnatural purple, are horribly dangerous -- any mobs you see are or soon will be hostile, and even the land itself will inflict damaging status effects. They can spread somewhat, but will only rarely expand beyond an already-tainted chunk. Place your base far away from these.
  • Materials:
    • You will be using a fair bit of ink, and a great deal of gold and glass, so collect accordingly.
    • Diamonds will mostly go to your magical crafting -- once you can make thaumium, even the simplest equipment made from it will be nearly as good as diamond stuff, and much cheaper. And once you gain access to Thaumcraft's advanced tools and armor, diamond equipment will mostly be trash.
    • The new ores Amber-Bearing Stone, and Cinnabar need iron picks, and aren't useful until later. Stockpile them. Amber drops do respond to Fortune, while Cinnabar must be smelted into Quicksilver.
    • Aspect-Infused Stone: Unlike regular ores, these glow in the dark, and are visible at great distances.  (However, they do not cast light on their surroundings.)  They drop Aspect shards, which you need to collect. They come in six flavors, for the six Primal Aspects -- while all six types can be found in any biome, each aspect is much more common in some biomes than others. To complete your first round of research equipment, you'll eventually need 7 of each type, and another 8 that can be of any type.(That's for a crystal cluster of each type, one mixed cluster, and four Thaumometers for various purposes.) More will be useful later on, as you begin crafting and infusing.
    • Blocks of Flesh: Thaumcraft provides a storage block for rotten flesh, which can be crafted 9:1. The pieces of flesh can be recovered by placing and mining the block. Besides saving space, some work with the Crucible can make these masses of dead flesh get up and walk... at a price.
  • New mobs with new drops (again, save the drops for later):
    • Angry Zombies: Slightly tougher zombie drops "brains" as well as the usual. Their "big brothers" Furious Zombies are even tougher, and appear to get bigger as they lose health.
    • Wisps: Flying orbs of light. Some of them will zap you with lightning -- just run out of range, they're not big on following you. If killed, they drop ethereal essence, which is valuable for more advanced magics.
    • Pech: These duck-people can be traded with. They value anything made of gold (such as golden armor from mob drops), and certain magical things such as mana beans. You will need to throw them a few freebies before they become willing to trade with you, but then you can right-click them to open an interface, where you will offer similar items in exchange for a semi-random grab bag of items. Pech will run to pick up any loose items, and this can be used to lead them into captivity. Special tip:  Unless a Pech has been named with a nametag, they can despawn.  They will not do so if they have at least 5 different kinds of item in their inventory; their trade goods don't count, but any non-precious items they've picked up, do. 

Beginning Magic[]

To begin your career as a thaumaturge, your first step is to make a wand (after all, every wizard needs a wand), and your second is to obtain the magical book which will guide you and record your progress. Then you can make a Research Table to assist you in your studies, and an Arcane Workbench for later crafting of magical items.

Create your first wand as soon as you have a couple of spare ingots of iron. This will be an iron-capped wooden wand, which is the weakest, but the only one you can make with a vanilla crafting table. Carry it around in your hotbar -- even without nodes, the wand will collect small amounts of vis from mobs you kill, which will come in handy later.

Magic Wand[]

Thaumcraft allows you to craft an iron ingot into 9 iron nuggets. Pity you need 10 nuggets, so you'll need to craft two ingots into nuggets. Just leave the extras in a chest for later.... Arrange your 10 nuggets on the crafting table in a "helmet" shape, and claim two iron wand caps. Then place these in diagonal corners of the crafting table, with an ordinary stick in the center, and take your new wand.


C iron capped wooden wand 32


C iron cap 32
C stick 32
C iron cap 32



C iron cap 32
C iron nugget 32
C iron nugget 32
C iron nugget 32
C iron nugget 32
C iron nugget 32


Magic Book[]

The icon of the Thaumonomicon

Next, grab some paper, leather, and wood to make a vanilla bookcase. Place that somewhere in the world, and right-click it with your wand. This will produce a Thaumonomicon, the in-game reference manual. When you take this in hand and right-click it, you will see a number of topic icons, some of which are darkened. Click on each topic icon to read the contents -- some of them represent items you can craft, or abilities you can gain, while others simply provide information. Take some time now to read all the articles you can, before you go on to research. The rest of this page, and indeed this wiki, will assume that you have done so. The information here is incomplete, but what you get is important. More pages will become readable and appear as your research progresses, and some topics will get new pages when you make discoveries.

Furniture[]

Now it's time for a Research Table, and while you're at it, you might as well make an Arcane Workbench as well. Start by making three Tables, as described in your new book: Three wooden slabs in a row, with a plank below each end. Place one of them, and right-click it with the wand. It will become an Arcane Workbench, and its GUI will show your wand in the slot to the upper right. This will let you make many magical devices and tools, but you will need to accumulate magical energies (vis) first, so for now, retrieve your wand, and exit the GUI. In the meantime, the AWB can do anything a crafting table can do, with the bonus feature that it does not drop items when you exit its GUI. Note that the AWB is an ordinary block which you can mine (use an axe) and move like any other block.

Now make a set of Scribing Tools (shapeless recipe: ink sac, glass bottle, and feather), and some paper. Place the other two tables next to each other, and right-click either of them with the Scribing Tools (not the wand), to create the Research Table. Right-click the research table with your now-empty hand to open it, and put some of your paper in the slot provided. Note that breaking a research table will reduce it to its components (2 tables, scribing tools, and paper.)

As you gain resources, you can place crystal clusters and bookshelves near the research table (within 9 blocks) to provide "ghost" points, which let you continue research slowly even when you've run out of a critical aspect. See the Research article for more details. Note also that you will start with a handful of research points (about 16 for each primal aspect), but you're going to need lots more....

Through A Glass, Darkly[]

Once you've got a couple of shards (and some gold, plus a bit of glass), it's time to make your Thaumometer, using the recipe from the Thaumonomicon. At first, you won't be able to scan everything because you don't know the neccessary aspects; specifically, for each aspect possessed by an item, block, or creature, you need to know either that aspect, or its component aspects. (In the latter case, you will discover the new aspect, and get triple research points for doing so.) In particular, you will need to make Victus at the research table (as hinted in the "Aspects" topic) before you can scan almost anything alive. (Or dead, or undead for that matter. You might also want to make Mortuus and Spiritus.) Once that's done, your learning should be pretty straightforward:

Scan everything in sight -- blocks, items, mobs.  (For materials with storage blocks, like coal or iron, it's best to scan the block before the "piece".)  Different varieties of a mob or item usually can be scanned separately (including baby animals). Go through your chests for more items to scan, and make and scan samples of all the ordinary crafted items you can. Remember that you can't read many items until you've discovered the necessary aspects -- think about what else might have the aspects you need. As you research devices, make samples of anything you can, and scan those. This will get you plenty of research points.

With your Thaumometer, you can much more easily find nodes, and you can scan those too. Scanning a node will identify its aspects and type, and will also get you research points equal to about 1/10th the node's strength in each aspect. You can also draw vis from the nodes, to fuel your arcane craftings and other work. Watch out for hungry nodes!

Onward To Power[]

If you haven't already, get your first few diamonds, and set up your enchanting table. (Thaumcraft does offer an alternative to vanilla enchanting, but it will be a while before you can use it.) Grab some extra obsidian while you're at it, because you will eventually need Nether materials. As soon as you've got the materials and research, upgrade to a gold-capped greatwood wand.

As you research more recipes, you will gain access to an series of useful devices:

  1. The Crucible lets you produce several key materials, such as Nitor and Thaumium.
  2. The Arcane Furnace will let you distill items into their magical aspects, as essentia. Initially this will help with crucible crafting, but in time it will be even more useful.
  3. A Centrifuge will let you split essentia into simpler aspects, which is important for all sorts of reasons
  4. The Infusion Altar provides the most powerful level of arcane crafting, letting you make an assortment of special items and granting the ability to enchant your tools and weapons with chosen enchantments.
  5. Once you've faced the Nether, the materials found there will let you produce even more powerful items, such as wand foci and golems.
  6. With your magical powers, confronting the Ender Dragon in its own world will become trivial. But those same powers can lead you onto the eldritch path opened by the Crimson Cult, to a far more dangerous realm known as the Outer Lands.
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