I'm so confused by the whole "LP" mechanic, I don't even know which sentences in your post to quote. So I'll quote it all. LOL
First off, the only reason I'm doing Blood Magic mod at all is so I can progress thru Infinity Evolved Expert Mode. Point is, I'm a noob at magic mods and I know nothing. Literally.
Ok, so with that mental picture, all I've done so far is figure out how to make a Tier 3 Altar and expand the capacity to 26,000 so I could make the Magician's Orb which requires 25K LP to make. And I did it! Felt happy about it. But the only way I know to get LP is to use the Sacrificial Orb on myself repeatedly. And I'm talking hours of it, not minutes. LOL Yes, I did make some "Sacrificial Runes" and tried to kill mobs with the Sacrificial Dagger and all of that... but in the end, I concluded that adding 5 "Self-Sacrifice Runes" and just clicking the Orb over and over again (alternating with eating food to heal) was my best (i.e. simplest) choice. That's where I'm at, currently, with the plan to just keep adding more and more "Self-Sacrifice Runes" to the Altar.
So basically, I am that person who plays Botania mod while only making the Tier Zero Dayblooms to make all my mana. LOL I'm the reason mod developers have to change their mod so people like me will actually progess thru it somewhat.
What would be a simple piece of advice for someone like me, in terms of doing Blood Magic? I do not understand how the orbs work - I always use the red/yellow Sacrificial Orb to get my LP into the altar, and then I craft the stuff I need, taking the LP down to zero... and I repeat this ad nauseum. But in your reply, you seem to be indicating that LP can be put into the orbs somehow? For additional storage? I suppose that's the information I'm lacking, and why I don't understand this mod very well. And I am quite certain I need to stop using the red/yellow orb to manually fill the altar with LP... but what should I be doing instead?
So, as I understand it, you're using the Sacrificial Orb to fill the Altar with your own blood. That's the "self-sacrifice" way to produce LP. If you want to continue doing that, install some Self-Sacrifice Runes in your altar. This will make each point of your health put more than the usual amount of LP into your altar- that is, they make your blood worth more. I don't remember the exact amount, but it adds up. In addition, look into Incense. Burning incense nearby will supercharge your Sacrificial Orb, causing each click to take you all the way down to one heart, but multiplying the amount of LP generated. Each additional tier of incense you use at once will multiply the amount of LP using the orb generates again.
Alternatively, you can switch over to sacrificing mobs. Tossing an Iron Sword into a Tier 2 (or higher) blood altar (if the recipe hasn't been changed) will give you a Sacrificial Dagger. Then you can get a mob within a few blocks of the Altar and punch it with this dagger, it will kill the mob in one hit and dump some LP into the Altar. The amount of LP generated this way depends on the mob sacrificed- passive mobs don't provide very much, hostile mobs provide quite a bit more, and villagers are the best. However, due to the multitude of ways of producing large numbers of hostile mobs in modded Minecraft (and Cursed Earth from Extra Utilities in particular), most players opt for sacrificing hostile mobs. You can further increase the amount of LP generated this way by installing Runes of Sacrifice in your altar. Once again, each rune increases the amount of LP produced by a little bit. I don't remember how much off the top of my head, but I think it's multiplicative. So it adds up.
Thanks rhn... more questions/comments:
The tooltip for each Orb says "Stores raw Life Essence". The tooltip for the Altar (via right clicking it with the Divination Sigil in-hand) says "Altar's Current Essence: 17800 LP" and also "Capacity: 26000 LP"
So the confusion lies in terminology. We have "Life Essence" and "LP", which I've been assuming stands for "Life Points"? Why isn't it "LE" instead, so the terminology matches? Then we also have the actual blood liquid in the Altar, which clearly goes up and down as the LP in the Altar goes up and down. So the red blood represents the "LP" numerical quantity shown for the Altar. This means that all three terms - "blood", "LP" and "Life Essence" are one and the same thing. Correct? By the use of 3 different terms for the same thing, the same concept, that's why the mod becomes confusing. IMO, perhaps it is just me.
So that leaves the Orbs. There is indication in the responses that Orbs can be placed "in" an Altar? So I did try that, and I did get the graphical representation that the Orb was filling with blood/LP/Essence. And indeed, the Altar's LP level dropped some before I pulled the Orb out. So... why doesn't the Orb now show a quantity of "LP"? You say "the LP's are in your network, not your orbs"... so where is my network then? Is the network the Altar itself? Where do I find out how much LP is stored in my network? Perhaps there is a tool for that, similar to the Divination Sigil showing the Altar's stats?
LP, life essence, and millibuckets of blood are all different names for the same thing. The main difference, I guess, is where they're stored (and even then, the terms are pretty interchangable).
Before you can upgrade your altar to tier 4, you'll need to create a Bound Blade, which gives mobs a strong weakness debuff that also causes them to drop blood shards (protip: it doesn't work if the blade kills them in one hit. You can smack them with the blade and then kill them with something else, if you prefer; that works too). In order to get your Bound Blade, you will need to set up a Ritual of Binding. Craft a Master Ritual Stone, a Ritual Diviner, and a bunch of Ritual Stones; right-click the Diviner until it says "Ritual of Binding", place down your master ritual stone, and then click it a bunch with the Diviner until it's done. The diviner will color the ritual stones for you; no need to worry about that.
However, as you do so, you may find yourself taking damage; and activating the ritual (with an Activation Crystal bound to your player (be sure to click it on air before you click it on the master ritual stone)) may well kill you. You need to learn about the Soul Network.
Your Soul Network is kind of a wireless... network that stores LP, which is used to power essentially everything in Blood Magic other than crafting in the Blood Altar. All rituals, sigils, alchemical chemistry sets, tools, armor, weapons, and the miscellaneous items like the Lava Crystal draw LP from your soul network. If there's not enough LP there (or if you didn't bind them to your player- be sure you right-click them before you try to use any of them), they will draw from your health bar, so be warned. In order to get LP into your soul network, you need to use a Blood Orb. Either right-click with the orb in your hand, which will take one heart of health and produce a piddling amount of LP, or place the orb in a Blood Altar. As you saw, this will drain LP from the Altar. You can check on how much LP is in your soul network by right-clicking on air with a Divination Sigil. In addition, holding it in your hand will show a bar on the side of your screen with how much LP is in your network as a fraction of the maximum amount storable with the highest-tier orb you've bound to yourself.
The higher tier the orb you put in your Altar, the faster it will drain LP into your network, and the more LP it will be able to store there before it's "full". Also note that there's no way to get the LP back into your altar, aside from a very expensive and endgame ritual. Not that you're likely to need to need to do that ever- it's easier to just spawn and kill more mobs.
If I remember correctly, the Ritual of Binding needs something like 5000 LP, so make sure you've got more than that in your network before you activate it. Then, toss in a diamond sword, put out the fires, stand back, wait a minute, and pick up your shiny new Bound Blade. Right-click it to turn it on; be warned that it'll slowly draw LP form your soul network until you turn it off again.