Getting Started

 Early Game

A Thaumcraft game starts off as an ordinary Minecraft game, more or less up to iron armor and an enchantment table. As you accumulate various resources, you can start preparing for and then 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. Certain nodes are dangerous towards you (e.g. hungry nodes, tainted nodes and sinister nodes) but all of it can be spotted at a distance (due to damaging effects of a hungry node, dark-coloured/purplish grass.)
• Three magical biomes. All of these can spawn several of Thaumcraft's special mobs, and can later be used to farm mana beans.
  • Magical Forests appear bright and shiny. It is extremely valuable, especially due to the presence of silverwood trees. Magical forests are the only place to find naturally-spawned mana beans (though they can also be purchased from Pech or Thaumcraft villagers).
  • Eerie biomes have darkened lands and skies. 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.
• Several new structures in the world. All of these have Sinister nodes at their core, and some also have additional mob spawners and loot chests.
  • Obsidian Totems: These posts of obsidian tile offer little more than the sinister node in their head.
  • Wisp Shrines: Found atop mountains, these obsidian-and-tile structures have a loot chest and a nicely farmable wisp spawner.
  • Barrows: A larger structure made mostly of cobble and moss stone. They have two mob spawners (plus the sinister node) and a large darkened area, guarding several loot chests.
  • Eldritch Obelisks: These bizarre floating monoliths are sometimes guarded by cultists, who may attack if approached, but once disturbed will eventually despawn. Even without cultists, some Obelisks can spawn Eldritch Guardians regardless of light level. (Make sure to bring good equipment if you want to fight them)
• Materials of interest:
  • You will be using a fair bit of ink, and a great deal of gold and glass, so collect accordingly.
  • Once you have your enchanting table, 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.
  • New Ores: Amber-Bearing Stone and Cinnabar need iron picks and aren't useful until later. Stockpile them. Amber drops do respond to Fortune. Cinnabar can be smelted into Quicksilver, but you might want to save most of the ore until you have a Pickaxe of the Core.
  • Aspect-Infused Stone: Unlike regular ores, they glow in the dark and are visible at great distances. (However, they do not illuminate their surroundings.) They drop Aspect shards, which you need to collect. They come in six different types, 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 (crystal clusters for your research table), and another 8 that can be of any type (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: These slightly tougher zombies drop "brains" as well as the usual. Their "big brothers", Furious Zombies, are even tougher, and appear to get bigger as they lose health. Note that the size growth is illusionary, and their hitboxes do not change.
  • Wisps: These look like flying orbs of light. They will zap you with electricity. If you're under attacked by it, just run out of range. They're not big on following you. If they are killed, they will drop ethereal essence, which is valuable for more advanced magics.
  • Pech: These duck-people can be traded with. The Pech will run to pick up any loose items, and this can be used to lead them into captivity. If you give them enough valuable items (items with the "Lucrum" aspect), they will become willing to trade with you, but then you can exchange similar items for a semi-random grab bag of items. See their own page for more details and advice.
  • Champions: Hostile mobs (both vanilla and modded) will occasionally spawn as a "champion", with a special ability and perhaps better stats. They will show various particles around them, and up close you can see their name. Names are of the form <epithet> <mob>, where the epithet gives a hint about their special ability. Example: Sickly skeleton.

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 (even before armor). 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 (animals included), which will come in handy later.

Once you have your Thaumometer, you can think about placing your base for convenience to local nodes. Your base will also need spaces for your distillery and essentia jars, for your infusion altar, and eventually for a node room. When thinking about a place for the future node room, remember that eventually you will be using goggles of revealing almost continuously, so nodes will be visible through walls and ground.

Magic Wand

Thaumcraft allows you to craft an iron ingot into 9 iron nuggets. Pity you need 10 nuggets, so you'll need to use two ingots for your new wand.

Iron Wand Cap Crafting:

Wand Crafting:

Magic Book

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 in the Thaumonomicon is sometimes 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.

Now it's time for a Research Table, and while you're at it, you might as well make an Arcane Workbench. Start by making three Tables, as shown above. Place one of them, and right-click it with the wand. It will become an Arcane Workbench (AWB), 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 (using an axe).

Now make a set of Scribing Tools (shapeless recipe: ink sac, glass phial, 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 your wand), to create the Research Table. Right-click the research table with your now-empty hand to open it, and look around, comping it to the Thaumonomicon entry. In older versions, you needed to put paper in here too, but currently you instead carry the paper (and another set of scribing tools) to make research notes from your Thaumonomicon. 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. (Putting it next to your enchanting table's library makes a good start.)

See the Research article for more details. 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. (Right click to scan. Hold down the shift key while right clicking to scan things you would otherwise interact with by using the right mouse button.) At first, you won't be able to scan everything because you don't know the necessary 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 especially 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. Don't forget to scan intermediate items such as wand cores and caps, before crafting them into something else. 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

As soon as you've got the materials and research, upgrade to a gold-capped greatwood wand, and learn the Node Preserver research. 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.

Some of the early (and later) researches will be marked as forbidden knowledge, and will give you warp when you learn them. Don't panic about this, as small amounts of warp are more beneficial than not, and there are ways to manage even the later effects.

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.