Advanced Alchemical Furnace

The Advanced Alchemical Furnace (AAF) is an HV tier multiblock for smelting items into essentia. The AAF is a direct upgrade from the thaumium alchemical furnace because it has significantly higher throughput, a 500 essentia output buffer, perfect efficiency with no pollution or flux gas released into the atmosphere, and is more easily automated. The AAF consumes 2+ ignis CV/t for heat, 1+ perditio CV/t to break down inputs, and 1+ aqua CV/t to prevent the slurry from settling. As a non-GregTech multiblock, the AAF may be world accelerated to reduce the cooldown between items without needing any additional CV/t. The AAF is technically superseded by the Large Essentia Smeltery, but it is generally not recommended to upgrade because the AAF is much cheaper to build/run.

As a Thaumcraft multiblock, the AAF has no controller or buses/hatches and is not compatible with the Multiblock Structure Hologram Projector. The structure also requires 50 ignis, 50 aqua, and 50 ordo vis to form; place everything in the correct spot based on the diagram in the Thaumonomicon and then right-click one of the alchemical constructs with a wand. The alchemical furnace at the bottom center of the structure must specifically be the basic one, not a thaumium one. The primordial pearl is not consumed in the crafting recipe for the advanced alchemical constructs.

Unique to the AAF is the alchemical grate which is placed in the top center opening of the structure and acts as an input bus for the machine. It has five inventory slots and prioritizes items left-to-right. The alchemical grate is not technically required since items can just be dropped through the opening, but having an actual inventory instead of a dropper is generally better for performance and automation.

Structure

• 8 Advanced Alchemical Construct
• 4 Alchemical Construct
• 4 Arcane Alembic
• 1 Alchemical Furnace
• 0-1 Alchemical Grate

Vis Relay

Use vis relays to extract centivis (CV) from nearby energized node(s) and transport it to the AAF. Vis relays must be within 8 blocks of an energized node to connect and are limited to a single source connection but may have any number of output connections. The final output connection must be within four blocks of the AAF to power it, as seen in the following image. If multiple nodes are connected, then their CV amounts are summed together. If the AAF does not run despite having enough CV, then try breaking one of the blocks and re-forming the structure.

The AAF smelts items into essentia much like the thaumium alchemical furnace except it consumes ignis CV for heat, perditio CV to break down inputs, and aqua CV to prevent the slurry from settling. There is a 500 essentia output buffer shared between all aspects and its current fill level is depicted as a vertical bar on the sides of the alembics. The type and amount of essentia in the output buffer is visible in WAILA while wearing goggles of revealing and looking at one of the holes on the side of the structure.

Smelt items by dropping them through the top center opening of the structure or placing them inside an alchemical grate in the exact same location. Extract the essentia by connecting tubes and/or essentia import buses to one or more of the "output hatches" on the sides of the structure. Each tube extracts up to 4 essentia per second and each essentia import bus (with four acceleration cards) extracts up to 28 essentia per second.

The AAF runs on a fixed 5 tick cycle that begins with adding up to 50 ignis CV , 50 perditio CV , and 50 aqua CV to their own respective input buffers. All three buffers have a maximum capacity of 500 CV and their current amounts are only visible through NBTEdit as heat, power1, and power2 respectively. If a nearby aura node has 5 ignis CV/t, for example, then 20 ignis CV is added to the heat buffer every second.

Heat loss then reduces the ignis buffer by 1 which means an aura node with at least 2 ignis CV/t is required to gain and maintain heat. Otherwise, the heat would just remain at 0 which cannot smelt anything. There is no loss for perditio or aqua so they only require an aura node with at least 1 CV/t each. However, it is highly recommended to provide more of all three aspects to increase the throughput of the machine, as discussed in the following subsection. The max input is 13 CV/t for each aspect, but anything above 4 CV/t is perfectly fine for small to medium sized batches.

Before smelting an item, the AAF attempts to subtract the total amount of essentia it would produce from both the perditio and aqua buffers, and 2x the total amount of essentia it would produce from the ignis buffer. If all three input buffers have enough CV available and there is enough room in the essentia output buffer, then the item is immediately consumed and converted with 100% efficiency. Otherwise, nothing is consumed and the item must wait until all conditions pass. No pollution or flux gas is released into the atmosphere because there is never any waste.

${\displaystyle {\displaystyle {\text{Cooldown (t)}}=\lfloor 104-0.2\times {\text{Current Ignis CV}}\rfloor }}$

After smelting an item, the AAF goes on cooldown for several ticks based on the remaining amount of ignis CV in its buffer. The minimum cooldown (without WA) is 4 ticks but that starts after the initial tick that consumed the item so the minimum length of each operation is 5 ticks, matching perfectly with the centivis cycle discussed earlier. It is therefore highly recommended to prioritize ignis CV over the other two inputs because it is consumed more than twice as fast and it is the only one that impacts the cooldown time.

World acceleratoring the AAF also reduces the 5 tick cycle for adding and consuming CV, but they perfectly cancel each other out so no additional CV/t is required. In other words, there is additional heat loss but there is a proportional amount of heat gain which makes no difference in the end. The same goes for perditio and aqua CV when consuming items.

With up to 500% increased smelting speed, the next chokepoint becomes extracting the essentia from the output buffer. Four essentia import buses with four acceleration cards each is 112 essentia per second, but an even better option is to place an essentia storage bus over one of the "output hatches" and then use an ME IO Port to pull all the essentia out as quickly as possible. Next, use an item conduit to move the essentia storage cell into a second ME IO Port that empties the contents into a proper storage network, as seen in the following diagram.