Mark of the Falling Tower

Mark of the Falling Tower is a Blood Magic Ritual used to summon meteors full of ore and other useful blocks.

As of GT:NH Version 2.7.2, the current earliest tier that Mark of the Falling Tower can be used is early EV. This is because the required Master Blood Orb needs two tungstensteel screws to craft.

• A Tier 4 Blood Altar
• 108 Ritual Stones + 1 Master Ritual Stone
• A Ritual Diviner to build the structure (one that can place dusk runes, the basic version will not work)
• A Master Blood Orb and a way to fill it with LP (the Well of Suffering is highly recommended)
• An Awakened Activation Crystal
• The "Focus Item" for your chosen meteor (top item in the NEI page)

• 1 Warded Glass, a Teleposer / Awakened Ichorium Pickaxe / other way to move Bedrock, or some other "unbreakable" block to "catch" the meteor above the ground and get the most ore
• 1 Orbis Terrae (1000 AR) per meteor (makes the meteor bigger for more ore yield), needs an Alchemic Calcinator and Alchemic Router to put it in the Master Ritual Stone
• Alchemic Segmenter if using multiple reagents
• Air Sigil, Flight Flask, Jetpack, etc. (some way to get up to it)
• Bound Pickaxe with Fortune 3 (for manually mining the meteor with its right-click ability)
• Arcane Bores, GT Miners, etc (for automatic mining)
• Upgraded Storage Drawers, JABBA Barrels, or ME System (to store all of the ores)
• Soul Compacter from Blood Arsenal (compact the ritual into a single block)

The ritual requires a round structure to be built with a total footprint of 17x17. Place your Master Ritual Stone down and use your dusk rune-placing Ritual Diviner set to Mark of the Falling Tower (shift right click with it in hand to go forwards or shift left click to go backwards) to build it. Remove any grass or other blocks in the way, or it will get stuck. Place your unbreakable block of choice about 35 blocks above the Master Ritual Stone (the biggest useful meteors have a radius of about 30 blocks; go higher if you intend to summon even bigger ones). Using an unbreakable block is not mandatory, but the Bound Pickaxe or any automated mining setup will break it, so you will need to find a way to replace it.

Place the ritual away from any mobs you don't wish to damage. Doing this in a different dimension or somewhere very far away from your base is recommended. The explosions will even damage mobs through blocks, which can kill any farm animals/villagers/etc after summoning enough meteors. You can fill out the "roof" of the ritual with glass blocks to limit the damage you take when it lands and have a nice view.

The Soul Compacter from Blood Arsenal may be placed underneath the Master Ritual Stone of a completed ritual structure and right clicked with any tier of blood orb (which is consumed in the process) to compact the structure into a single block.

Choose the meteor you want to summon and acquire its focus item. Right click the Master Ritual Stone with a bound Awakened Activation Crystal in hand and with at least 100k LP (which is consumed) in your Soul Network to start the ritual. After the ritual has started, an additional cost per-meteor (listed in NEI) is required when you throw the Focus Item in. Note that you can wait to throw the Focus Item to refill your Soul Network after starting the ritual. When you are ready, drop your Focus Item and take cover! The meteor will create a large explosion which will damage entities, but not blocks. After your meteor falls from the sky and lands on the block placed to catch it, it is ready to be harvested.

All meteors are able to be seen in NEI with the "Meteor Ritual" recipe handler. Meteors will show up in results for uses of items that are valid Focus Items or for recipes of ores or filler blocks present in them. All meteors may be seen by searching for uses of a Master Ritual Stone or by clicking on the arrow on the Meteor Ritual recipe page that points from the Focus Item to the Meteor Contents.

The top section shows the Focus Item required to summon the meteor.

The middle section shows the possible blocks that the meteor will place when summoned. Hovering over blocks will show their chance to be placed as well as an estimated yield amount calculated with no reagents applied. Filler blocks are listed on the start of the next line after the ores and will also include the text "Filler block" in their tooltip.

The bottom section shows the meteor's LP cost and radius. The radius is measured in full blocks out from the block where it lands, so a meteor's true diameter is actually 2r + 1.

1000 AR (the amount produced by 1 reagent item in the Alchemic Calcinator) of each Reagent in the Master Ritual Stone is used for each meteor summoned.

All 5 reagents currently interact with the Filler Blocks that are part of some meteors.

These reagents are currently the only ones with effects when added to Mark of the Falling Tower in GT:NH:

• Terrae will increase the radius by 1 and the amount of Filler Blocks by a negligible amount.
• Orbis Terrae will increase the radius by 2 and increase the amount of Filler Blocks by a slightly bigger but still quite small amount (does not stack with Terrae, so always use this instead if you can).
• Tenebrae will replace any filler with obsidian.
• Incendium will replace any filler with netherrack, soul sand, and glowstone in equal ratio.
• Crystallos will replace any filler with ice.

The reagents that replace the Filler Blocks will do so in equal ratio when combined. Tenebrae + Crystallos gives 1 obsidian : 1 ice. All three together gives 3 obsidian : 1 netherrack : 1 soul sand : 1 glowstone : 3 ice. They will have no effect when used to summon a meteor that has no filler.

Dropping reagent items on top of the Master Ritual Stone WILL NOT apply their effects. To add reagents to augment your meteor, place an Alchemic Calcinator anywhere within a few blocks of the Master Ritual Stone. Right click with a bound blood orb in hand to insert it (any tier of Blood Orb works fine). Use a hopper or other item transferring device to insert up to a stack of your reagent powder (1000 AR or 1 dust of each type is consumed by the Master Ritual Stone per meteor). Once one dust gets turned into 1000 AR, shift right click with your Alchemic Router to attune it to that reagent. Shift right click in the air to unset any blocks it could be bound to. Right click the Calcinator and then right click the Master Ritual Stone to set up the transfer for that reagent (will work for as long as those blocks are in the same position). Repeat for each reagent you want to use (up to 3 different ones).

The Alchemic Segmenter is useful to limit the amount of AR that will enter the Master Ritual Stone when dealing with multiple reagents. Shift right click an Alchemic Calcinator with an internal reagent to attune it, and then right click the Master Ritual Stone until your desired number of internal "tanks" is set for that reagent (one tank is recommended). Repeat for each reagent you want to use.

• The ritual won't build: Make sure there are no obstructions. Grass, torches, trees, etc will prevent it from continuing to build. Also make sure your Ritual Diviner is able to place dusk runes.
• "You feel a pull but you are too weak to push any further": Your Awakened Activation Crystal is not bound to you or you do not have enough LP in your soul network. Right click in the air with it in your hand and try again, or add more LP to your Soul Network. Many meteors need more LP than the 1 Million that the Master Blood Orb can store. Augment your altar with Runes of The Orb, or use a higher-tier blood orb.
• "Your crystal vibrates pathetically": You can't use a Weak Activation Crystal. Upgrade it to the Awakened one.
• Nausea effect when throwing Focus Item: You don't have enough LP in your soul network. Check your Divination Sigil and the LP cost of the meteor in NEI. Remember that the ritual takes 100k LP to start, and then costs more depending on the focus item you give it. You can start and leave the ritual to go refill your soul network and it will be fine.
• Alchemic Calcinator doesn't turn reagents into AR: Check to make sure the orb in the Calcinator is bound to you.
• Animals died: Due to how MC explosions work, entities will be damaged even many chunks away and even through some blocks. Place the ritual in another dimension or very far away from your base.
• Cost and Radius are not visible for meteors in NEI: At least for me, the text that shows Cost and Radius doesn't really fit into the NEI meteor pages with GUI Scale set to Auto. Try making your GUI scale slightly smaller if you have the same problem.

Meteors may be summoned automatically with a dropper of focus items and an Awakened Activation Crystal in a Thaumic Tinkerer Dynamism Tablet set to right click mode. For block-breaking solutions, check out the Arcane Bore from Thaumcraft or GT Miners.

Reagents may be automatically added to the Alchemic Calcinator through any regular item transfer method, such as hoppers, GT pipes, or AE2. Automatic crafting of reagents may most easily be done with the help of the Ballad of Alchemy Ritual.

For the Arcane Bore approach, you will need a large array of them to mine the whole meteor. Augment the excavation foci with Potency 3 Enlarge 2 (requires a Focal Manipluator and an Energized Node as well as many levels of XP) to cover the biggest area.

Any raw ores mined with the Arcane Bore do not benefit from fortune. This is an intended interaction.^[1]

Some pickaxes will work better than others.

• Bound Picks work well inside of Arcane Bores since they don't take any durability damage.
• Thaumcraft Void Metal picks will slowly auto-repair. Enchanting them with a very high level of Unbreaking (10+) will let them work forever.
• Extra Utilities Destruction Picks do take damage inside the bore despite normally being unbreakable, but they do have 6244 durability so they will last for a long while.
• Tinkers Tools do not work inside of the Arcane Bore.
• (Awakened) Ichorium Picks also do not work.

Arcane Bores will not mine past unbreakable blocks if you want to contain your setup (or have bores facing each other). They will also not mine blocks farther than 64 blocks away.

Note that you want all of your picks to have the highest level of Efficiency possible.

Arcane Bores may cause (potentially world-breaking!!!) lag if left activated while a very large meteor is spawned. Use some form of wireless redstone and only activate them once the meteor has landed.

They don't work very well on meteors that contain filler since they just dig the ore blocks; they cannot mine most filler materials including the blocks replaced using the reagents. In addition GT Miners will first mine out the chunk the controller block is in up down and once that chunk is mined out it will move on to others mining them from east to west, north to south; if you decide to use multiple MBMs expect that some chunks will finish faster than others. Once all the ore is removed from the meteor the filler blocks will remain and should be removed before summoning another meteor as the next meteor will not replace the blocks and if filler is in the path of the next meteor it will be improperly placed.

LP Costs are listed under the blood orb capable of summoning the meteor without any Runes of the Orb. However, some meteors are highly recommended to summon before you can make the next blood orb. These are marked in bold teal.

Meteors with parenthetical numbers in the contents column have simple and memorable percentages.

The "planet" meteors are summoned with their respective heavy duty plate, with the exception of T1 and T2 planets, which use the uncompressed alloy ingot. Planet meteors are listed in bold purple.

The Ion Thruster Jet meteor actually uses raw tengam ore as filler, however, the salt ore is at such high percentage that it works like any other meteor (but with Orbis Terrae being more beneficial than usual). This meteor is required for no-rocket runs.