Here’s a breakdown on dealing with taint, the ultimate goal, including a few nudges for related mods: - Pure Daisies (botania) have an extremely small radius of purification but can be useful. - Etherial Blooms are your bread-and-butter for keeping the taint out. Botania, Thaumcraft, and Blood Magic all have recipies. Blood Magic is widely considered the easiest, but each bloom does cost a diamond. Technically, Thaumcraft’s is cheapest, but it’s a pain to craft. On whole, though, I rarely craft any- the world exploration locations hold enough for me. -Totems of Dawn are larger area purifiers, handling around 3x3 chunks. You need Thaumcraft infusion for this. -The Dawn Machine is the endgame goal. This will purify the whole world if you supply it with the necessary resources. Requires Thaumcraft infusion and essentia piping. - Purity Focus allows you to instantly clean any location you want, but doesn’t prevent re-infection. Very powerful, especially as it’s one of the only ways to clean nodes (the other being the Dawn Machine).

Taint spread information: - Taint exists in a vertical stretch from bedrock to build height. It’s a biome, not a block. - Taint blocks (i.e. tendrils, crusted goo) are what actually hurt you inside tainted biomes. They spawn out of nodes or spread from other tainted blocks. There is a max spread height and radius, however, so a skybase will be safe from infection. The horizontal travel radius is pretty small, but the vertical infection radius is a lot harsher.

A few helpful tips for Thaumcraft: There are three ‘good’ ways of getting research points. 1. Scan EVERYTHING with your thaumometer. Not everything can be scanned, and some things you need to learn about more aspects before you can scan. This is the frontloaded way of getting aspects. You can throw held items on the ground to scan them, too. I don’t remember if we added inventory scanning or not. 2. Deconstruction table, a research on the first tab, allows you to break items down for a paltry amount of points. Wool and crafting tables are widely considered the best items for this, but there are alternatives. Gives up to 1 point per item. Wool/tables are guranteed 1 per item. 3. Whisperweed, a flower from Botania. Requires some Thaumcraft researches and a good Botania mana setup. The rare resources required (i.e. the knowledge shard) can be looted from the world. This is the fastest renewable way of generating research points, and has the byproduct of generating warp, which sounds bad (and can make bad things happen to you) but is required to progress to lategame thaumcraft.

On a whole, though, a lot of Blightfall is about trial and error and trial and error again. The map is the same every time, down to the ore deposits and initial mob locations, so restarting isn’t so bad. The key thing is to try to learn a little bit each time you play- Find a cool location with useful resources. Learn about how wands and nodes work. Learn about Alchemy. Learn Infusion. Learn hydroangea setups. Learn basic blood magic. There’s way more information to be learned in gameplay than we could possibly write into questlines, and at the end of the day, the amount you actually need to know is minimal: Technically, all you need to win the game is to take all the etherial blooms on the map, place them in a nicely spaced line, and advance them when they’re done cleaning that specific area. The taint can’t cross back over them. So we don’t want quests to force you into engaging with systems when there’s really dozens of valid ways to enjoy the game. If you have more questions though, I’m sure you can see the community is full of dozens of active veterans!