Essentia

Essentia is the "liquid" form of magical energy. While it's technically a form of vis, in practice "vis" refers to the "vaporous" or beamed (centivis) forms, in contrast to essentia as the liquid form. Essentia always has an aspect, and it comes in whole-number points. It can not be used to recharge a Wand/Sceptre/Staff. Essentia is stored in glass phials, Warded/Void Jars and (eventually) in essentia reservoirs. Each has a different storage capacity and usage.

Most blocks and items contain some aspects that can be used to perform alchemy. With the help of an alchemical furnace, these aspects can be extracted as liquid essentia. The use of an alchemical centrifuge can split essentia of compound aspects into its components, but essentia can never be combined aspect-wise. The Aspects page gives common sources for each aspect, including compounds that can be centrifuged.

Essentia is used in the various alchemical recipes using the Crucible, where it can be provided directly as items, or purified in phials. It can also be used in the Thaumatorium (with the crucible recipes), and in infusion crafting, but for both of those it must be in purified form, from jars or reservoirs.

Essentia can be transferred through essentia tubes (some of which have special behavior), stored in various receptacles, and used by a number of devices. The movement of essentia through a system is controlled by "suction", which has simple rules that nevertheless can require considerable thought to manage. However, the various options for tubes and buffers allow a fair bit of flexibility. The remainder of this page discusses the components used for handling and transferring essentia.

Components[]

Component Overview
Device	Capacity	Suction
Tube	1	-1
Warded jar (unlabeled)	64	32/0
Warded jar (labeled)	64	64/0
Void jar (unlabeled)	64	32
Void jar (labeled)	64	48/32
Reservoir	256	24/0
Device	small	128/0
Buffer, per active bellows	8	32

Suction after the slash indicates "full" behavior, see Devices below for details.
Only the buffer and the reservoir can hold multiple types of essentia at once.
Void jars will continue to accept essentia when full, discarding the excess.

Tubes[]

Tubes will connect to any adjacent component which offers a connection. Most often they are assembled linearly, but they can also fork when connected to more than two points. For this page, "each tube" refers to each block of tube in a setup. Any tube connection can be turned on or off by right-clicking with a wand. The basic rules for tubes are as follows:

Each tube can carry 1 essentia. When a tube is broken, its essentia (if any) is lost.
Each tube also has a suction value, which can be of one aspect, or untyped. The suction value of a basic tube is 1 less than, and the same type as, the strongest suction of any component it is connected to. Various special tube types can modify this value according to their nature. In effect, a series of tubes will:
- carry suction along its length from the strongest connected suction to the weakest,
- reducing it by 1 point per block travelled,
- and any lesser suction along side connections will effectively be blocked.
Each second (?), a tube will try to pass its essentia point one block toward the strongest suction it is connected to, if and only if there is room for it in that direction, and the suction is either untyped, or of the same type. A tube with 0 suction will not pass its essentia. This means that for a simple layout, devices will generally pull essentia toward them, but their high suction can also prevent jars from filling, even with essentia that the device can't accept. Also, a single tube line can usually carry only one type of essentia at a time, or points of the wrong aspect are likely to block the system. For example, a single point of primal essentia can jam the input for a centrifuge, because the suction will keep it in the input pipe, but it can't move through the centrifuge. However, if the input of one centrifuge is known to be a compound of two compounds, the output can be fed to a second centrifuge ("double-spinning").
Various special tubes can modify suction:
- A filtered tube with a label has an aspect. It will pass its own type of suction like any other tube, will block suction of a different type, and will convert untyped suction on one end to its own type on the other.
- A restricted tube will halve the suction passing through it, in both directions.
- A directional tube can be set to pass suction from either or both ends. If set to one-way, it will accept suction only from the blue-marked end ("output"), and block suction from the other end. However, if the item attached to the output can't accept the point that's in the pipe, the pipe will effectively be blocked.
- A valve has a knob which can be turned on or off by "hand" or with a redstone signal. It is toggled with a right-click, turned off when a redstone signal turns on (rising edge), and turned on when a redstone signal turns off (falling edge). If the valve is turned off (flush to the pipe), it will block suction in both directions (and will not hold a point of essentia).

Jars[]

Jars can be "warded jars" or "void jars", either of which can be labeled or unlabeled. A labeled jar can only hold essentia of the label's aspect. An unlabeled, empty, jar can take in an initial point of any aspect, but then can only take more of the same until it becomes empty again. Jars can hold up to 64 essentia, and unlike any other components, they will keep their contents if broken and picked up as an item.

When a warded jar becomes full, it will reduce its suction to zero, and can accept no more essentia. A void jar will always have suction and accept essentia, but if it is full, incoming essentia (of the proper aspect) is silently discarded.

Buffers[]

A buffer can hold up to 8 points of essentia, in any combination of aspects. By default, they have 1 suction themselves. They can pass essentia to any matching or untyped suction, but do not transmit the suction to their other connections. If a buffer is broken, any essentia in it is silently lost.

However, one or more bellows can be attached to them, each of which adds 32 suction. They have 6 attachment points, each of which can be used for a bellows, or a connection to another component. each bellows block can be individually turned off by applying redstone power.

If a buffer has bellows attached to it, any (other) connections can be configured by shift-right-clicking with a wand. The connection can be left as normal (full suction), marked "black" (0 suction), or marked 'red" (1 suction).

Reservoir[]

An Essentia Reservoir is an advanced container which can hold up to 256 points of essentia in any combination. If broken while they hold essentia, they will explode and produce flux. Both the explosion strength and the amount of flux produced will depend on how much essentia they were holding. Naturally, the essentia is lost. Essentia reservoirs have less suction (24) than almost anything else, so without special measures, even a void jar will drain them.

Devices[]

Devices and their aspects
Lamp of Growth	Herba
Lamp of Fertility	Victus
Infernal Furnace	Ignis
Arcane Bore	Perditio
Alchemical Centrifuge	Any compound
Essentia Crystallizer	Any aspect

The "device" category includes several different machines, which vary widely in what essentia aspects they can accept. All of these have 128 suction when "working", but when their internal buffer is full, most will reduce suction to zero. Individual notes:

The centrifuge never drops suction even when backed up. The output is normally held in a buffer with pipes to two or more jars or other destinations.

The crystallizer cannot back up; if its target inventory is full or absent, it will drop crystals on the floor.
Both lamps do cut suction. Their essentia usage depends on how much work they have to do, for example the lamp of growth will use more essentia, the more eligible crops are within its range.
The infernal furnace and arcane bore use essentia as their "backup fuel"; they will work somewhat better if fed with centivis instead.