Essentia

Essentia is the liquid form of vis in Thaumcraft and created by tossing items into a crucible or by smelting items in a magical furnace. Essentia cannot be handled with conventional means such as a bucket or fluid pipe, but it can flow through essentia tubes/mirrors and stored in phials, warded jars, essentia reservoirs, and/or ME essentia storage cells. Essentia always contains exactly one aspect, like vis, and its amount is always an integer, like any other fluid. There is nothing inherently dangerous or volatile about Essentia, but there are potential consequences for mishandling it.

Essentia is the basis for both alchemy and infusion in Thaumcraft, since nothing else is capable of providing the necessary aspects to recipes in those fields. The crucible, thaumatorium, and infusion matrix, for example, are all unable to use vis in its raw, vaporous form and need something a little more concentrated. Therefore, it is absolutely crucial to understand how essentia works and to develop a proper essentia handling system.

There are several different methods or machines for producing essentia, and their effectiveness generally scales with the amount of Thaumcraft progression or research required to unlock them. Their input is always a solid item with at least one aspect, except for the crucible of souls which consumes mobs instead. A few also require centi-vis (CV) to run which means energizing an aura node nearby and using vis relays to carry the CV to the machine. Their output is always essentia, and potentially some pollution or flux gas depending on the machine. Expect to use around 3-4 of these methods in a single playthrough.

(LV) The crucible smelts items into essentia using boiling water, and can even recombine the essentia into new magical items. Create a crucible by right-clicking a regular cauldron with any type of wand at no vis cost, or alternatively by combining a cauldron with three salis mundus, 2 ordo , 2 perditio , and 2 ignis in an arcane worktable.

The only input requirements for the crucible are a heat source underneath (e.g. fire or nitor) and a constant source of water, since a few liters are passively lost overtime if there is essentia present. The options for unlimited water early-on are a Water Tank and a thirsty thank. The Water Tank only needs to be outside and has a capacity of 400,000L but it is very slow. The thirsty tank must be touching a block of water and is very fast, but has capacity of 16,000 L.

Drop an item containing at least one aspect into the crucible to convert it into essentia. The item is consumed in the process but it is 100% efficient so none of the aspects are initially lost. However, the essentia cannot leave the crucible and 2L of water + 1 point of a random essentia is decomposed or voided every 5 seconds until there is no more essentia remaining. It is therefore highly recommended to prepare items/recipes ahead of time and be very fast when using the crucible. Furthermore, do not exceed 100 total essentia at once because it voids an additional point of essentia every 5 ticks and has a 20% chance to spawn flux gas when it does.

Use the essentia inside the crucible by dropping in the necessary catalyst item AFTER creating the required essentia first. For example, craft a thaumium ingot by throwing an iron ingot into crucible with at least 4 praecantatio inside, but never before. Otherwise, the iron ingot is converted into essentia like any other item. The applicable research also needs to be completed first or else the recipe is impossible.

Left-over essentia is wasteful and occupies space that could be used by other aspects. To avoid that, try using some of the following clean crucible combinations that end with zero essentia left inside. These can be batch crafted but never exceed 100 total essentia at once and always verify that all the prerequisite research has been completed first.

(MV) The alchemical furnace smelts items into a slurry of raw, unprocessed essentia using the heat from combustible fuels. The raw essentia is then distilled in arcane alembics directly above the machine and pushed to any adjacent essentia tubes/buffers. Craft an alchemical furnace at an arcane crafting table after researching "Essentia Distillation" in the Thaumonomicon under alchemy. The fuel can be anything with a burn time but it is highly recommended to use alumentum because it halves the distillation time.

The alchemical furnace has a built-in 50 point essentia tank (which may contain any combination of essentia types), a base smelting speed of 1 aspect per 0.5 seconds, and a base distillation speed of 1 aspect per 2 seconds, as seen in the following equations. The thaumium alchemical furnace is nearly identical except its distillation speed with alumentum is 1 aspect per 0.5 seconds instead. Optionally, attach arcane bellows to the sides of the furnace to reduce the smelt time by -12.5% each, but that is never the chokepoint so it only ever helps with the very first input.

Each arcane alembic has a built-in 32 point essentia tank but can only hold one aspect at a time, similar to output hatches on a Distillation Tower. Therefore, stack 2-5 alembics on top of the furnace to create a larger buffer and avoid getting stuck on a single aspect.

Essentia is also likely to get stuck in the essentia tubes connected to the alembics without a robust piping system. One solution is building a chain of essentia buffers leading from the alembics to warded jars, as seen in the image to the left. Sneak right-click the connections twice with a wand to add the dark red bands and force flow into one direction. Optionally loop the entire chain to prevent anything from getting stuck at the very end if its warded jar(s) were full. More details on setting that up can be found here. Another solution is using golems outfitted with alchemy cores to carry essentia from the alembics to any marked jars, avoiding the eccentricities of the essentia tube system altogether.

As a non-GregTech machine, the alchemical furnace may be world accelerated to increase both its smelting speed and distillation speed. The World Accelerator (WA) must be set to tile entity mode and touching the furnace to work, and its speed does not have to be very high to reach the absolute maximum throughput of 1 item per tick. Use a wrench to adjust the speed of the WA as necessary.

(HV) The crucible of souls produces essentia by slowly damaging and eventually killing mobs within a 5 block spherical radius. The crucible of souls works through walls and does not damage players or magical golems, but it can damage pets so keep them far away. Mobs killed by the machine do not drop any experience or items and there is a very high probability that some of the aspects are either converted to flux or automatically broken down into its component aspects.

The crucible of souls does not require any power, fuel, or centivis to run, and it can hold an unlimited amount of essentia without any of it decaying over time. The only limitation is that the block directly above the machine must be air, which means it is not possible to fully prevent flux gas from spawning by filling the entire 3x3x3 area around the machine like with the regular crucible. Most of the air gaps could still be filled, though, to at least force the flux gas directly up. Tainthistles from Botania could then slurp up the flux gas and generate a bit of mana in the process, but the gas disappears harmlessly once it escapes the world anyway.

Essentia is only produced when a mob dies which means it is not possible to repeatedly heal the same mob for an unlimited amount of essentia, but it does mean that the mob can be damaged by other means as long as the killing blow is done by the crucible of souls. For example, use wooden spikes from Extra Utilities to damage mobs down to half a heart without killing them to prep them for the machine and significantly increase the rate of essentia production, assuming there is always enough mobs around. The options for providing mobs early-on are using a diamond dolly to move mob spawners, surrounding the machine with cursed earth, or investing in a powered spawner specifically for the crucible of souls.

The type and amount of essentia produced depends on the mob--scan it with a thaumometer to see which aspects it contains. The amount does NOT scale with the mob's maximum health and again some of the aspects may be converted to flux or automatically broken down into its component aspects. For example, a cow contains 3 bestia and 3 terra but the former could output as motus or victus instead, since those are the two components of bestia.

(HV) The Advanced Alchemical Furnace or AAF smelts items directly into usable essentia without any distillation necessary. The AAF is a direct upgrade from the thaumium alchemical furnace because it has significantly higher throughput, a 500L 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. See the AAF page for more information.

(IV) The Large Essentia Smeltery or LES also smelts items directly into usable essentia without any distillation necessary. The LES is a direct upgrade from the Advanced Alchemical Furnace because it runs at 100-200% speed, offers up to 64 parallels, supports multi-amp and laser energy hatches, and runs unlimited perfect overclocks. The speed scales with the amount of perditio CV provided and the number of parallels scales with both the length of the machine and the tier of the essentia diffusion cells. However, the processing time of recipes is directly proportional to the output vis so parallels do not actually increase the throughput of the machine. The LES also requires both aqua CV and ignis CV to run, and optionally ordo CV to reduce the amount of pollution and flux gas released from the muffler hatches every second. See the LES page for more information.

The following table lists some of the best sources for each type of essentia. These all contain only the target aspect or at least very few other aspects to prevent an excess from building up. Excess essentia is not always problematic but it does occupy space that could be used for other types, produces flux in the crucible, and significantly slows down throughput in the alchemical furnace.

Not included in this list are wisp essences and infused seed drops, which can both produce every single aspect in the game. For very rare/difficult aspects, those might be better than the listed sources below. For example, farming a wisp in the Extreme Entity Crusher for a 0.15% chance of obtaining a terminus essence is probably easier than smelting crystal matrix ingots or infinity catalysts.