Dec 7, 2025 - My stupid-but-functional essentia setup pt. 1
I never heard a single person on the internet pronounce Thaumcraft names correctly. In the word essentia, the t is pronounced ts as in tsunami, while i is pronounced like the vowel “e”. So it’s es-sen-tsi-ah. It’s obviously latin for “essence”.
Ok, so. This might be difficult to explain to those who don’t know Thaumcraft. Basically essentia is the essence of each item, block, liquid or mob of the game (including those from almost all other mods). It comes in 48 types (52 with our addons) and can be obtained by smelting the chosen item in the alchemical furnace. For example a wooden door contains 3 Arbor (tree), 1 Machina (machine) and 1 Motus (movement).
A lot of recipes for crafting Thaumcraft’s items require specific types and quantities of essentia. For example making thaumium ingots requires an iron ingot and 4 Præcantatio (magic).
Essentia distillation
It’s stupid in the sense that maybe it’s not that optimal and compact, but it works really well and it was really fun to design!
The first and most important part is the alchemical furnace. It is loaded with fuel (I’m thinking of a way to keep it replenished) and items to be smelt are loaded with a hopper. Once they are smelted, the obtained essentia is put into an arcane alembic and loaded in the buffer ring. It’s a loop of connected buffers (they allow multiple essentia travelling in the same tube), to which every essentia jar (the storage) is connected. So essentia travels from the alembic into the loop and, once it finds a matching jar for its type (the jars are “typed” with a label), it gets there.
There are empty spaces because the system it’s still WIP, but the planning is finished
Each jar can hold 64 units of essentia. I obviously want more as a reserve when needed. So I added two other jars behind each main one. I could put a label on each one, but it would be tedious. So I used a filtered tube to connect the extra label, so that only the desired type can pass through.
Now I can have 64*3 for each type of essentia. It’s not scalable, I could want more for some specific types. I could add other extra jars, but managing them might become difficult and it would use a lot of space. I thought of two methods for dealing with the eccess. The choice of the method depends on how much needed the essentia type in question is.
Crystallizers
The essentia crystallizer is an item that can transform 1 unit of liquid essentia into a crystal, which is a normal Minecraft item that can be stored in a normal chest. The crystal can later be smelted in the alchemical furnace to return to its liquid form.
In my case, I used a crystallizer for each jar (wich is a bit wasteful resource-wise, but I don’t care) attached to a storage drawers, so that the max essentia I can have is very VERY high (in the order of 10^5 I think).
I use crystallizers for the types I need the most.
Centrifuges
Essentia types are called aspects. There are 6 primal aspect and the others are compound, made by combining together two aspects. The alchemical centrifuge allows to separate compound essentia into its aspects.
For the essentia types I care less (like Machina) I put a centrifuge instead of the crystallizer. The output of the centrifuge is fed back into the buffer ring, so that the centrifuged essentia can be put in place.
That brown thing is the bellow, used to pump the essentia out of the centrifuge.
In the second part I will talk about how I better control these systems (they have a lot of problems) and how I actually use essentia in infusion and actual alchemy.