Taumcraft infusion crafting never completing

[EricBuist]

Hi,

My first infusion crafting just completely fails. I am trying to get the portable hole, put all the items on pedestals, filled jars with needed essentia and the runic matrix starts when I right click with my wand. However, after the runic matrix drained the essentias, it starts zapping random items on the pedestals and I just cannot figure out exactly what went in the center and what went away. The shards are just too similar to each other so I cannot figure out which one I have to replace. I recorded my attempt and looking at the recording, I could figure out the air shard got zapped, and by randomly placing new items on pedestals, I came up to placing a new air shard, and that just didn't help. Looking at the top of the runic matrix, I saw some aspect symbols, so maybe that beast is expecting more esentia of some kind. Then if the process takes too long, I am starting to take damage. I just cnanot be proactive enough to react and fix as the needs change like this. Is there a way to get the process more stable or automate it? This is just insane and very frustrating.

I put pedestals all around the center altar and tried to balance the items around. That didn't help.
Maybe that requires yet other items like candles, but every crafting with Taumcraft is just too painful: no NEI recipes, so no way to do text-based search, and no way to do shift-? to put the items in, so I need to constantly alternate between the Taumononicon and the arcane workbench to figure out what was placed wrong, and then vis are missing and I have to walk around to find aura nodes.

I don't need to super advanced items like the pickax of the core, ax of the stream, etc., but I would like the lamp of growth and the kinetic attractors. Are there other mods offering similar items easier to craft?

 

[Qazplm601]

"Taumcraft" (i really dunno, sorry, i don't use thaumcraft a lot)

 

[Zenthon_127]

Hoppers can auto-fill the pedestals when things fall off.

But yeah, you'll need candles.

 

[RJS]

Portable hole is one of the less stable infusions. Candles, crystal clusters or mob heads will be your friend here. Also, you said you put pedestals all round. Make sure that every pedestal is balanced by a pedestal on the opposite side and, when placing items, make sure that wherever possible, there is an item on the opposing pedestal. If there's an odd number of items, one unbalanced one is fine, as it's better to have an empty pedestal than no pedestal opposite.

In terms of why it wasn't taking the extra, the altar will always take items in a specific order. It will not jump ahead if one is missing when it tries to take it, it will instead stop and require an extra essentia of one of the ones needed for the infusion. Instability effects such as damage, flux gas/goo production etc. can all still happen.

Oh, and those super advanced items you mentioned are some of the easiest things to make If you aren't comfortable with infusion crafting, try some of the less difficult infusions such as boots of the traveller and some of the cool tools (seriously, pickaxe of the core is a life-saver when you're manually mining for resources).

As for alternatives, I'm not sure if anything offers the functionality of the kinetic attractor, but Blood Magic's ritual/sigil of the green grove and the openblocks sprinkler provide similar functionality to the lamp of growth. The sprinkler does require both water and bonemeal though.

 

[epidemia78]

Place a ton of skulls under the floor of your infusion room.

 

[EricBuist]

Thanks. The Thaumononicon was saying the instability is minor for the portable hole, so I guessed that was an easy item. I won't try anything with major instability! For the other tools, I don't have the research for them, and I don't feel spending an afternoon guessing a sequence of aspects or trying to search on the Internet to find working sequences. Yes, I can disable research, but this is AGAIN a configuration that needs to be done separately for every player. That issue would really need to be addressed somehow.

I tried placing barrels near the pedestals with extra copies of the items so I would be able, when an item falls off, to grab a copy from the barrel and put it back, but items fall off or are destroyed in a somewhat random fashion. You have to see everything at once, but I am visually impaired so I cannot see everything at once. This is just very frustrating, because each game I tried, each and every game, ended up with such a dead end. Minecraft was the exception, with some workarounds against mobs, but now it's the rule and I am just angry, tired of being angry and pissed off.

Yes, hopper is an interesting idea. If extra items on the pedestals don't cause problems during the infusion, that could do the trick. I will have to fill up the jars of iter, permutio, alienis and perdito to give this a shot. Unfortunately I don't have golems yet to automate this process.

Blood magic is an interesting mod. I watched some YouTube videos about it when I found out it was bundled with FTB Monster. But it is not enabled by default on FTB Monster. If I enable it, my friend won't be able anymore to log in, because he won't know what to do to enable that mod on his side. Anyway, this is yet another infrastructure that will take me hours to build, then I will end up having to fight a demon to get some items and will be in a dead end again.

 

[RJS]

Thanks. The Thaumononicon was saying the instability is minor for the portable hole, so I guessed that was an easy item. I won't try anything with major instability! For the other tools, I don't have the research for them, and I don't feel spending an afternoon guessing a sequence of aspects or trying to search on the Internet to find working sequences. Yes, I can disable research, but this is AGAIN a configuration that needs to be done separately for every player. That issue would really need to be addressed somehow.

I tried placing barrels near the pedestals with extra copies of the items so I would be able, when an item falls off, to grab a copy from the barrel and put it back, but items fall off or are destroyed in a somewhat random fashion. You have to see everything at once, but I am visually impaired so I cannot see everything at once. This is just very frustrating, because each game I tried, each and every game, ended up with such a dead end. Minecraft was the exception, with some workarounds against mobs, but now it's the rule and I am just angry, tired of being angry and pissed off.

Yes, hopper is an interesting idea. If extra items on the pedestals don't cause problems during the infusion, that could do the trick. I will have to fill up the jars of iter, permutio, alienis and perdito to give this a shot. Unfortunately I don't have golems yet to automate this process.

Blood magic is an interesting mod. I watched some YouTube videos about it when I found out it was bundled with FTB Monster. But it is not enabled by default on FTB Monster. If I enable it, my friend won't be able anymore to log in, because he won't know what to do to enable that mod on his side. Anyway, this is yet another infrastructure that will take me hours to build, then I will end up having to fight a demon to get some items and will be in a dead end again.

Guessing a sequence of aspects? If you haven't researched the research-boosting stuff in Thaumcraft yet, you need to. Seriously, it's the first thing I research. Once you're done with that, you can see what any compound aspect is composed of by hovering over it in the research table. In addition, it gives chances for free placement of aspects onto the parchment, which in the long run really helps your researches. In addition, with some practice you learn a few combinations of aspects that are really useful. I always find I have plenty of terra, saxum, and metallum research points, so anything that has two or more aspects that can be easily converted to one of those I usually do via that. My main way of researching is to start from each initial aspect and convert it to stuff that has a common aspect with one of the other conversions from starting. From there I use what I think of as carrier sequences to link up these pairs, and then if I've used multiple 'carriers' I find a sequence of aspects that links the two together. It's hard to explain, but research gets easier the more you do it.

Having extra items and essentia is an excellent idea whenever you do any infusion crafting. Using hoppers to automatically replace items that fall off sounds like a perfect solution for you given your circumstances. Bear in mind that you could also put more items than you need onto the pedestals, but only once the infusion has started - if you have duplicates, the infusion won't start, but once it has started, it will run regardless of what you put on the pedestals. Using hoppers is easier.

Automating your essentia in general needs golems. You can do a cheap way of filling jars by just connecting them to an alembic via tubes. If what you're burning has three aspects or less, you can hook all the jars up to the bottom alembic and just leave it, as long as each jar has an independent tube onto the alembic. 4 or more aspects in the item and that trick doesn't work, but there aren't so many items like that.

Blood magic is definitely a lot of fun to play with - and demon fighting is only necessary for the very endgame toys. Both the sigil and ritual of the Green grove are in early-to-mid game in blood magic, and mostly require a bit of time and later on a bit of infrastructure if you want a fully fire-and-forget process.

 

[EricBuist]

Thanks very much. The idea of hoppers worked like a charm. The items were probably dropping during the phase where essentias were drained. Fascinated by the essentia flow, I didn't notice it. With the hoppers, the runic matrix didn't even have a chance to generate flux. Nice, so I can now enjoy my new focus of portable hole!
I will have to figure out a way to clean up the mess of flux on my ceiling now. Did by any chance somebody try with MFFS. If the flux behaves like a liquid, creating a force field with sponge upgrade (if that still exists) inside my thaumcraft room would be a super elegant way to clean all flux, even better than Direwolf20's retractable ceiling. I will reproduce the retractable ceiling if the MFFS idea doesn't work.

 

[Succubism]

That Taumcraft, man. It's a mod alright!

 

[suprra]

I never had issues with things ever falling off my pedestals or getting destroyed but I used to take damage and it was purely because I had the objects unbalanced, to compensate for my inability to create balanced items on the pedestals I went overboard in my infusion room and put down a bajillion skulls and candles LOL, I have never seen flux in my room either xD
I also installed a mod called symcalc, my numbers were in the low 50's and now it's in the 140's so stability is fairly solid heh, I had to go into the thaumcraft config and change the research so I could see it all because symcalc wouldn't show up (it's a button next to the tools in the thaumonomicon i think)

The vinteum blocks in the corners with candles on them are out of reach, I keep meaning to move them down a few blocks but haven't got round to it heh

I kinda went overboard because I didn't want to make a mess and have to clean it