TAINT !!SCIENCE!!
Table of contents
Partially or completely automated (POCA)
Filter stacks and stacking penalty
For contribution to taint science
For helping in the creation of this guide
“Brevity is the soul of wit”
Taint infection
- All of your taint related problems are caused by ambient (or atmospheric) taint
- Physical taint is only a symptom and sign of high ambient taint
- Destroying physical taint won't get rid of it, it will keep coming back until atmo’ taint is cleared
- Physical taint cannot spread on most “artificial” and manufactured blocks and blocks from other mods, such as cobble, planks, glass, bricks, chests, workbenches, etc.
- Some blocks, when tainted, will always remain tainted. So far the Taint Science Institute has found seven of these: wool, netherrack, glowstone, soulsand, pumpkin, and melon. The seventh is sandstone, but only because it turns into sand when untainted
- Physical taint is only a surface infection, meaning it can only infect blocks that have empty space next to them on any of a blocks 6 sides
- The infection can be slowed, but not stopped, by digging a trench and filling it with cobble, this can be 1 deep, but if atmospheric taint is high, it will “jump” the barrier
- Some biomes seem to resist physical taint infection better than others; forests will quickly vaporize any tainted ground created by a bottle of concentrated taint while doing the same in a jungle or plains biome will leave a purple spot for a long time. This more then likely is due to high vis levels in the aura.
Negative and positive charge
- Negative charge in a chunk is a percentage chance of that chunk receiving +1 ambient taint every 5 seconds, the same applies to positive charge and ambient vis
- Almost everything in TC2 creates at least a little bit negative charge when active
- Crucibles create negative charge when they melt an item
- Most seals constantly pump out negative charge while active
- Portal seals only create charge when an entity travels through the portal
- Infusers create a little bit of negative charge when in use
- Mining crystal ores increases the opposite charge by 5% for each crystal in the crystal ore.
- Thaumic crystallizers add 5% negative charge each time they create a crystal
- Gas pods add 10% (or more) negative charge each time they empty themselves
- Silverwood logs, silverwood leaves and totems of dawn create positive charge
- The opposite charge types (seem to) slowly destroy each other whenever they exist in the same chunk
Tainted creatures
Tainted passive mobs
(note: all tainted mobs are hostile, the category name only describes their original behavior)
- Health: 20 hearts (normal 5 hearts)
- Drops: Taint Spores, Tainted Organ, Writhing Taint Tendrils (rare drop)
- Special: High health
- Health: 10 ½ (normal 4 health)
- Drops: Taint Spores, Tainted Organ
- Special: Any grass blocks they eat will turn into tainted ground
- Health: 11 (normal 5 health)
- Drops: Taint Spores, Tainted Organ
- Special: nothing (?) :foreveralone:
- Health: 4 ½ hearts (normal 2 hearts)
- Drops: Taint spores, Tainted Organ
- Special: High Jump (?)
- Health: 10 hearts (normal 10 hearts)
- Drops: Taint Spores, Tainted Organ, Writhing Taint Tendrils (rare drop)
- Special: Spread taint as they walk. Incredibly fast. Walking gas pods.
Tainted hostile mobs
- Health: 15 hearts (normal 10 hearts)
- Drops: Taint Spores
- Special: Higher explosion power, explosion spreads tainted ground
- Tainted Fruit (Tainted Silverfish)
- Health: (normal 4 hearts)
- Drops: Tainted Fruit artifact
- Special: Can burrow into stone like silverfish, and will become silverfish once broken out. Cannot be tainted from normal silverfish.
New mobs
- Sentient Tainted Tree (2) (Eldritch Tree)
- Health:
- Drops: Tainted Branch
- Special: Spawns Tainted fruit to attack you, deflects arrows, never despawn
- Health: Same as normal wisps (?)
- Drops: Cracked Wisp Shell
- Special: Blinds you with lightning strikes (long range)
- Technically NOT a mob, but will damage you if you get close, drops Intact Taintspore Pods
Taint affected mobs
- Health: Largest: 75 hearts / Large: 15 ½ hearts / Medium: 8 hearts / Small: 2 hearts / Smallest: ½ hearts (health scales the more charge it eats.)
- Drops: Various artifacts, azanor says it drops something unique (in the future?)
- Special: Eats vis and taint charge in the atmosphere, and will change color depending on how much it ate (bright purple/vis - dark purple/taint)
Weapons of taint destruction
Taint Destroyers
Arranged by author, cost and size, oldest to newest
- TechnicalData
- Small and cheap
- Small and expensive
- CantankerousTank
- Small and cheap
- Large and expensive, but can have no purifiers
- Very large, expensive and complicated
- zantanzuken
- Large and completely impractical, but effective.
- Purifier Wall
- Purifier Tower (can be stacked indefinitely, but only purifies one chunk)
- Fustilarian
- Small but expensive, creates positive charge
- Sytruan
- Large and expensive
- Airwolf112
- Small and cheap
- Brooo007
- Large and expensive
- Zeisko
- Large and expensive, very fast
- Small and cheap
Positive Charge Boosters
Arranged by author, oldest to newest
- TXMount
- CantankerousTank
Taint Infection
Ambient taint
Ambient (or atmospheric) taint is the source of everyone’s taint-related problems. The most common mistake new players make is that they assume taint is like Terraria’s Corruption and simply destroy any physical taint (or tainted ground) they see, thinking “problem solved”. Problem not solved, not by a long shot. Physical taint is merely a symptom of the disease and it will slowly return unless the ambient taint is brought to much lower levels.
The difficulty of cleaning a chunk of all or most of the ambient taint usually depends on two things: amount of taint and the presence of gas pods.
The amount of ambient taint present in a chunk obviously makes clean up harder; the more taint, the longer it will take and the more crystals you’ll need to feed to your condensers. Luckily you don’t need to reduce the taint levels all the way to zero. Below 33% of maximum, or 5,000, is enough. That is the threshold for the spread of tainted ground, once you get below that you can start destroying any physical taint in that chunk without having it return later on. Alternatively, you can lower a chunks taint level below 3750. If the vis level is above 1500, it will heal itself.
During clean up the more important point is the presence of gas pods. If a chunk has a gas pod, you can be sure that there’s going to be a lot of ambient taint. The default maximum amount of vis and taint is 15,000 and gas pods start spawning around 66% (10,000) of that. Each time a gas pod spews out that toxic gas, it adds 10% or more to the local negative charge. That quickly builds up to 50% or even 90%. Not good at all. While clean up is not completely impossible at that point, it does slow it down significantly.
The mechanics of atmospheric taint flow changed quite a bit in v2.1.5*. Thankfully some awesome people, benski and qcor, have been working hard to figure this stuff out.
They both started with an untainted area on a superflat world, and heavily tainted it, creating a very large area of almost completely full taint, as close to 15,000 as they could get. The theory was that if you drain from just the center block, it would seep in from the nearby areas like so.
- 0 taint remaining in the center chunk
- 1500 taint in 4 adjacent chunks
- 3000 taint in 8 chunks around that in a diamond
- 4500 taint in 12 chunks around that in a diamond
More from Benski
- Taint flow definitely can't keep up with condensers. I had the center chunk dip below 1500 when the adjacent chunks were still at 11K+. It does fluctuate up and down with the moon cycle, between about 900 and 4600. (Those numbers are extremely approximate, and will depend on how many condensers you are running.)
- Even at really low taint levels, the center chunk didn't self-clean because the vis levels were too low, once i used condensed vis to get it above 1500, it cleaned right up.
- The taint expanded to the point where it hit my earlier silverwood experiments. The silverwood seemed to act much like a totem of the dawn, preventing physical taint in a 5x5 area centered on the tree. This makes actual totems of the dawn even less impressive. Note that the chunk with the silverwoods has much more atmospheric taint than the taint growth threshold, too.
- While I can't confirm the exact details of qcor's "1 vis cancels 5% taint charge when charge is above 50%", I definitely witnessed something like that. However, there was a rate limit -- I could get the charge % well above 50 in chunks where I was really pumping it (9 leaky crucibles). Also, it seemed to keep happening even after the vis level in that chunk hit 0; that is, taint charge would still drop at that accelerated pace when above 50%, even if there wasn't any vis left to consume. (Unknown whether it was consuming vis from nearby chunks or anything like that.)
- Gaspods seems to have an extremely high spawn rate if their spawn conditions are met; I think that's high enough taint level and no gaspods already in that chunk. I would often punch one only to have another spawn nearby within a few seconds.
Physical taint
As mentioned many times before, physical taint is only a symptom of high ambient taint. Getting rid of it shouldn’t be your #1 priority. It should only come after you’ve dealt with the atmospheric taint and any major sources of negative charge, as tainted blocks by themselves are mostly harmless. The only thing you can and should do is create a cobblestone barrier to slow down its spread.
It won’t hold the infection back forever. At some point the taint in the air will rise high enough and tainted ground will spawn on the other side of your barrier. However spawning new pieces of tainted ground seems to require a bit higher taint levels (over 7,500) than it simply spreading from a nearby taint block (over 3,750), possibly giving you a little bit more time to clean up or grab your stuff and get out before your lab turns purple.
TC2 actually gives a nice tool for this job, the Wand of Equal Trade. You can use it to quickly replace surface blocks with cobble in a large area. If you need to shield caves from the purple stuff it is simply amazing. It doesn’t work on the same principles as the Silk Touch enchantment, meaning for every stone block you replace, it gives you cobblestone back. In other words in caves you’ll almost never run out of barrier material as long as you use cobblestone.
Negative Charge
There are so many things in Thaumcraft that create negative charge that one can almost say everything in TC2 creates negative charge. Crucibles create it when they melt items, infusers constantly pump out small amounts of it when they are active, same goes for seals, portals create it whenever an entity moves through, mining vis crystals, certain tools, gas pods.... the list goes on and on and on. Long story short, you can’t eliminate all sources of negative charge. It’s simply impossible. There are, however, ways to destroy most of it.
Countermeasures
Thaumic slimes
The cheapest way to wipe out negative charge is to find and trap a thaumic slime. They come in two different colors, the more common bright purple and the darker, blackish purple with the taint “flowers” on all sides. They can change their color depending on which type of charge they’ve consumed more; the bright purple version has consumed more positive charge, the dark purple ones have devoured more negative charge.
A single thaumic slime can absolutely wreck any and all charge, positive or negative, in your local area. Their size doesn’t seem to be a factor so you can, and should, regularly cut your pet slime into smaller pieces to make sure he (she?) doesn’t grow large enough to wreck your home and to also have a chance of getting artifacts and crystals. The best way to do this is to keep them in a 3x3 cell, if they get too large for said cell, break it in half, more often than not, one of them will die in the wall, and the largest slime isn't big enough for a 3x3 cell.
Discoball
TXMount’s Discoball used to be one of the cheaper charge boosters available. Unfortunately recent updates have made it nearly useless and so it is time for him to retire from service. We salute you, Discoball.
Silverwood Sandwich
As of version 2.1.6+ the second cheapest charge booster is ChristopherPepin’s Silverwood Sandwich. In newer versions of TC2 silverwood leaves no longer have their magic charge boosting abilities. Silverwood logs are the new bread, and leaves are the cheese. So far in studies, (to my knowledge, correct me if i’m wrong -zan) one or two silverwood leaves to a log will produce optimal results
At least four logs are needed to keep a consistent positive charge.
Big Pile o’ Totems
And finally, if silverwood leaves are in short supply and there are no slimes around, you can always build a big pile o’ totems. It is arguably the most expensive of the three but takes the least space to build. The totems will also offer very limited protection from physical taint.
Taint Destroyers
Alright, lets get straight to the biscuits.
Small-scale
The small destroyer types are meant to be the cheapest and most efficient destroyers one could possibly build in their kitchen. Usually the less materials used the better. Small types are what basically kickstarted the whole taint science thread and we can all blame denkbert for that.
The first one to create anything even remotely small in the world of taint destroyers was TechnicalData. His first few designs concentrated on removing parts that were not needed. After a few revisions he made the smallest destroyers anyone could possibly build.
After that the science thread focused on improving efficiency and speed. CantankerousTank posted a setup with an additional purifier to allow the contraption to keep pace with a condenser. Later on zantanzuken suggested a third purifier should be added to allow the setup to run a quicksilver core condenser without slowing down. Beyond that there hasn’t been much change in small-scale destroyer designs as the smallest, fastest and cheapest designs had already been made.
Large-scale
Large-scale destroyers are meant to be able to clean several chunks at the same time as using several small types would have quickly become too expensive. Unlike small-scale destroyers, large designs are much more variable as there can never truly be a design that is “the most compact”, “the cheapest” and/or “the fastest”.
CantankerousTank posted the first large-scale design which may have been nice to look at and on the cheap side but was slower and more inefficient than a purifier variant would have been. The second large-scale design was posted by Sytruan, the TaintWand™. Very fast but also very large and very expensive. All subsequent designs have seen varying levels of cost, scale, speed and pure insanity.
Partially or completely automated (POCA)
Designs in this section rely heavily on other mods for item transportation.
POCA designs are meant to take the hassle out of micro-managing a whole bunch of destroyers. Usually this involves mods like Buildcraft and various addons for it or Redpower 2, and at least a small amount of knowledge on how to use them.
The finest example of destroyer automation is Brooo007’s Automatic Magic Buster.
Uses Buildcraft, Logistics Pipes and Additional Pipes (formerly Teleport pipes). The vis destroying part of the machine supplies the vast majority of all depleted crystals to the crystallizer, which has a concentrated evil upgrade. From there any tainted crystals get sent to the condenser which, thanks to teleport pipes and chunk loaders, can be separated from the vis buster component. However, this setup does require large initial supplies of crystals to start.
The next best thing, though quite a bit more complicated, CantankerousTank’s Sciencemobile ™
This amazing mobile taint destroyer runs entirely off of vis, through thaumic generators which produce power for other mods attached to caterpillar from Redpower 2, this allows the Sciencemobile ™ to travel in a N-E-S-W direction, though currently it cannot travel up or down. Built high enough in the air, this Mobile taint destroyer should have no problem reaching any tainted area, near or far, and will keep you safe from the taint menace. drawbacks include having to be “refueled” with vis, as Tank believes using any alternate mods (such as equivalent exchange to create dirt with energy condensers) in this endeavor is “too easy” and “easy is boring”.
Lancesr
This section is devoted entirely to Lancesr. The guy is a real wizard. Words wouldn’t do justice to his pure awesomeness so let us instead bask in the eternal glory of his latest creation, Shatter Crown.
“Cheater’s” taint destroyer
Finally if you’re getting desperate and nothing has helped solve your taint problem, there is a rather cheaty way to get rid of taint. TetwingDuck recently discovered that the spread of ambient taint and tainted ground isn’t based on any hard numbers but rather on percentages of the maximum allowed. As previously mentioned, below 33% of maximum ambient taint, tainted ground will slowly disappear or remain unchanged when closer to the threshold. Also mentioned before, the maximum is 15,000 by default but that number can be changed in Thaumcraft 2 config files. Setting it to 60,000 will cause all chunks in all worlds to be way below the physical taint threshold. This can be abused by first lowering your vis/taint maximums to as low as possible (or as low as you want, such as 1) then raising it as high as you want. Keep in mind however that this will also remove any VIS in your aura as well.
New Discoveries
A list of information that isn’t absolutely vital but good to keep in the back of your mind. Updated whenever new, “good-to-know” information pops up.
- Note: The five vis crystals (fire, water, air, earth, vis) can be fed to a concentrated evil crystallizer to turn them into tainted crystals at a cost of 25-30 liquid vis per crystal
- Tainted Creepers release around 130 taint into the atmosphere upon explosion
- Tainted ground will not suffocate you
- Tainted ground lets light through like glass
- Regular vis tanks, when completely filled with liquid taint, explode in a 7x7x7 area, corrupting surface blocks in that area
- DM and DMM seals are not recommended. They are way too slow for serious clean up and a little bit counterproductive as they create negative charge
- Silverwood logs, SW leaves and dawn totems cannot be duplicated
- Baby animals can get corrupted. The corruption comes with a weird super-growth hormone effect that instantly turns all babies into adults
- Water protects creatures from corruption, but not ground
- The best time to search for silverwood is at night as the trees emit light that you can see, by your eyes or on a mod like rei’s minimap, just don't mistake lava for a tree
- Soul braziers can be used with destroyers for large area taint destruction if efficiency is more important than speed
- Congealed taint can be obtained from tainted ore blocks. Simply place an ore block in a tainted area, wait for it to get tainted and then break it with a Shovel of Renewal
- Condensers auto-pause once there is no more vis or taint for them to draw from the air. They will unpause as soon as there is at least 1 unit of vis or taint.
- Crystals (tainted or not) start creating charge once a chunk reaches 1,500 or 10% vis/taint of the default maximum
- Shearing a tainted sheep yields purple wool
Numbers and math
Filter stacks and stacking penalty
- Number of filters - % of taint destroyed
- Two 9%
- Three 16%
- Four 23%
- Five 29%
- Six 33%
- Seven 37%
- Eight 41%
- Nine 44%
- Ten 47%
- Fifteen 58%
- Twenty 65%
The numbers above show how much taint is destroyed by stacked filters and the diminishing returns as more filters are added to a stack.
Evil Crystallizer
- Type of crystal - % produced by E-Crystallizer
- Taint 35.3%
- Vis 11.5%
- Biome-favored 21.8%
- Anti-biome 10.3%
- Other 1 10.8%
- Other 2 10.3%
Filter stack graph
Kudos and Cookies
The people listed below all helped in the creation of this short, handy guide and/or in furthering and understanding taint, and all of them deserve cookies.
For contribution to taint science
CantankerousTank TXMount benski
Gimgork NightlinerSGS wilsaljo
kodeake Fustilarian 8947jts
zergking The_Scary_One moonra_zk
Creeperkiller314 elijahpederson SpeedDaemon
Nightingales Airwolf112 Indras1
TechnicalData tarmon11 TetwingDuck
denkbert Sytruan qcor
zantanzuken Brooo007 huntercat
TheThaumaturgist Adagea Yusunoha
creeperking31 Ebkrem Lancesr
Valim1 Zeisko ChristopherPepin
jbg101 Fiery_Death MilConDoin
Rtheo1
TheWolfen
Drawingkid1313
an-idea
For helping in the creation of this guide
Thanks to TechnicalData, moonra_zk and 8947jts for editing and QC and for keeping me and zan from getting bored during the eight long hours we spent torturing our keyboards. (hurr needs moar candy and soda. -zan)
Very special thanks to zantanzuken for creating this nifty guide with me (CantankerousTank).
