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[Leyic]

Alpha currently has around 40 stacks of various cobble. May be easier to use that than deliberately quarrying stone.

[Sappho]

Also, you can condense a lot of materials, including any kind of cobblestone. Just fill a 3x3 crafting grid with any type of cobble and it'll give you one "condensed cobble". It's like making a block of coal or redstone. When you uncondense them, they'll be normal cobble, though, so don't do it if you want to keep colored stone.

Just finished editing my second episode of my LP (finally). It'll take a couple hours to process, then I might jump on the server for a while. (I'll upload it tomorrow at work.)

EDIT: Just a few more grown-up responsibilities for today then I'll come play for a while. Where shall we set up Botania? It'll take a lot of space... Should get its own dome, I think. I think the desert one is still unused, but we'd have to replace all the sand with dirt (not that hard though). Then there's the frozen ones up north. I think the underwater one is probably not too good for that. The other option is to use the swamp for this, since there's plenty of space there.

EDIT2: Can't log in. It says authentication servers are down? Is that an issue with the actual Minecraft servers, rather than our server? Nevermind, got in!

[Silfurdreki]

I think the swamp island is a good idea. It's spacious and easy to reach by boat for anyone that might not have access to the beacon.

Also: I popped in earlier and built an alchemical construct at delta, so making ethereal blooms should be a bit more straightforward now.

[Sappho]

Well I did some more mining, a bit of organization at Delta (made a chest just for Botania), raided the waterfall lab for all useful stuff.

I'm watching someone else's LP of this pack and he says you can get Sano from eggs! That's useful... Gotta start breeding chickens. Sounds easier than making stacks of heavy cream.

Whoever understands how all the advanced Thaumcraft stuff works, I'd love a tutorial. I have no idea how to do anything beyond burning stuff in the furnace and manually harvesting it from the alembics. Maybe there's a good tutorial video series or something? It takes me forever to figure out how stuff works on my own, just reading those books in-game...

EDIT: Is it possible for us to get mana beans? Can they spawn in magical forest biomes eventually, or do they only spawn at world gen?

[Silfurdreki]

We can get mana beans, they grow in the magic forest to the south. They grow on the various uncorrupted silverwoods that have pure nodes in them. They seem to be fairly rare, though, so a steady supply will be hard.

I've found two in total, but I haven't been there much and only crossed it once or twice. Main problem with exploring it is that all areas between uncorrupted silverwoods is corrupted forest and is thus swarming with taint swarms.

Edit: Realized just after posting that it should be possible to set up a contraption that automatically makes ethereal blooms when given eggs, moss stone, tainted goo/tendrils and shimmerleafs. We might need void jars, though, depending on if there's any other way of venting superfluous essentia. Those need blaze powders, which I think we can't get yet. You can unlock requesting them, but I'm not sure how. I have a theory that visiting the eerie island will unlock them, but we'll have to see.

[Sappho]

Well we can farm the mana beans, right? Just like cocoa beans, except on the bottoms of logs instead of the sides?

[Silfurdreki]

Maybe? I have no idea if the ones I found grew there or has been there since worldgen.

[Sappho]

Right, but we should be able to grow more of them. The silverwood trees (the ones that have nodes) create a magical forest biome around them, so we should be able to grow more of them there.

EDIT: Well, we should be able to grow more of them if I don't screw it up... I found a mana bean in the chest at Delta and tried to plant it, then realized it wasn't in a good spot. Tried to break it to move it, and it was gone. Didn't even drop the original bean. Sorry... Next time I get a chance to come on, I'll try to spend some more time exploring and hopefully find some more. (I haven't gotten far yet.) Or if our kind and loving server admin is willing to help us out and give us a replacement bean, that might be just wonderful... It was an Iter mana bean.

[Silfurdreki]

Don't worry about it, I think I have one more in my inventory, had to leave in a rush when I was on last.

Edit: Turns out I didn't, but I got two from the magical forest. They were both Iter beans, which is not terribly helpful since Iter is pretty easy to get via boats. I'm not sure if the fact that all three beans we've found are Iter is some sort of coincidence or not, but it's certainly not helpful. I planted both on the silverwood in the swamp at any case.

I also went ahead and visited the eerie island with its obsidian pillar. Turns out the pillar held some sort of boss, the crazed hemathurge. I actually managed to kill him without dying and went on to get a couple of ethereal blooms, grey mystical flowers and enough language scraps for two more translators (we now have three). We'll have to decide what to use them on. I already translated a lexica botanica and a tome which revealed some thaumaturgy research. I believe the rest of the grimoires and tomes are the same thing as these, so we might want to translate the journal scraps instead. These might only be backstory though, but personally I love backstory.

The obsidian pillar also held a blood magic altar and blocks related to it which I left for the time being. Blood magic doesn't sound like something we want to be messing with right now. Moreover, the visit to the island did not unlock ender pearl and blaze rod requesting, but rather "The Dark One" quests. The first one called for a bucket of blood. I'm gonna go ahead and leave those alone for now. Entities going by "The Dark One" doesn't strike me as good things to deal with when one wants to remove the taint...

Finally, I researched "Shovel of the Purifier" which is a shovel that works on tainted stuff at full efficiency. It seems like a good thing to have, so I started preparing things for the infusion. Didn't get very far, though.

[Sappho]

Wow, you were productive! That shovel sounds very handy indeed. I've heard there's a focus you can make for your wand that will let you clean up taint with it, too, but I don't know what it's called or how to make it.

And well done on beating the boss on the island! I've always been too afraid to go down there because I heard you should have good ranged weapons first. I need to get myself moving in terms of exploration. I've only been to a few sites on the server (compared to most of the map in my single-player world). It's tougher on the server because with so many people around, the trees are decaying more, leading to way more swarm spawners...

[Silfurdreki]

Yeah, I think I researched the focus at some point, but went on to other things since it required infusion. Now that we have an altar up and running it's probably worth revisiting.

I freely admit to cheesing the boss slightly. This one had no ranged attack and no health regen so I could just run away to regen health every time he did damage. The tainted botanists in the iceberg were far worse due to ranged fireballs.

[andrea]

By the way,  any advice on how to defeat those fireballing guys? Will steel gear be enough or do  I have to move even further?

[Leyic]

I've set up an automated egg (and feather) collector at Alpha (basement level 3). ~500 eggs and counting (capacity is 1024).

[Silfurdreki]

By the way,  any advice on how to defeat those fireballing guys? Will steel gear be enough or do  I have to move even further?

Depends. I used oureclase armour, which is a few points better than steel. A lot of damage is in the form of burning, though, which armour does not help against. I used a corridor where I could barely see the enemy and then shot him with a machine gun I requested from the ship as soon as I saw him. The machine gun was not a very good weapon, though. It fired fast but every shot did very little damage (I assume due to armour) so it was very inefficient.

Edit: If you want oureclase armour, you should be able to find some oureclase in the mine under the swamp without too many problems.

Edit 2: I did some more thamcraft crafting today. Of note is that I made the purity focus and it works amazingly well for cleaning taint. It cleares a 3x3x3 block of taint for 0.15 ordo and 0.1 terra essentia. Using it and some ethereal blooms I cleared a chunk of land outside delta. I also researched a ton of stuff. I recommend reading my tome of knowledge sharing if you want to do thaumcraft stuff as research is pretty tedious. It sits in the bookshelf in the thaumcraft research area at delta. Oh, and I left the purity focus in the chest in the research area if someone wants to use it to clear some place.

[Sappho]

Whoever is building the wall around the marble shrine, you need to move it at least a block further from the teleporter. I teleported inside the ground and just barely managed to dig myself out before suffocating.