Thaumcraft 4.2 node capturing strategies

[desht]

So, I'm at the point with TC 4.2 (in the DW20 pack) where I'm going to start jarring up a few nodes to bring home. I'm aware of how nodes "bully" each other, and node stabilisation/transducing mechanics, but it seems to me there are two possible ways to handle this...

1) Grab one big node, and slowly add smaller nodes around it, letting the big one absorb as much as possible from the little ones, until it has a ton of aspects. Then use a transducer to energise it and just tap that for wand recharge etc.

2) Grab a bunch of nodes like in previous versions, and either keep them well-separated (4? 5? blocks apart), or use stabilisers on them, which will reduce their recharge rate.

Which is a smarter strategy here?

 

[Wagon153]

Long run, it'd be the first option. It'd allow for quick recharging of your wand in the workbench and fueling other machines that need/use essentia.

 

[epidemia78]

Keep a few separate so they dont eat one another and use those for wand charging while you work on feeding your mega node.

 

[GreenZombie]

Never feed nodes to a bully one at a time. It will drain them to 0vis and rapidly destroy them without gaining much capacity.

Rather go out and capture 9 varied nodes with base aspects. Place 8 of them in the corners of a 7x7x7 space. One node - bright if possible- goes in the center. If the bright node is not the largest put it in an advanced node stabilizer. This puts the center node within bully range of the corner nodes but the corner nodes have 5 blocks between them and are far apart to not bully each other.

The bully node does not grow any faster. But that means that each tick 7 of the 8 feeder nodes get a chance to recharge any vis drained. They still loose a point of capacity but that process is much slower. I let my node grow to over 120 in all aspects before energizing it.

 

[desht]

@Chris Becke useful info, thanks. I presume the aspect size of a node before energisation affects the vis/tick you can get once it's energised?

 

[GreenZombie]

An energized node has only primal aspects. Each compound aspect counts as the primals that it breaks down into. When there are multiple sources of the same aspect only the largest counts.

The resulting primal aspect totals are multiplied by a factor: 1.2 if bright or .8 if pale. The cv/t is the truncated integer square root of this.

So a normal node with ~25vis in all aspects will energize to 5cv/t. There are 20 ticks in a second so that will generate 1vis per second (in each aspect)

--
Edit to clarify that the 20% bonus is applied AFTER the square root operation which makes the result much better (unless pale, then much worse).