Warp

Thaumcraft offers considerable power from its devices and tools. But power comes with a price.... As of version 4.2, that price is represented by Warp: A corruption of the characters mind and soul, inflicting progressively more dire effects upon them. While the effects of warp can range from annoying to deadly, accumulating enough of it can also grant you access to greater power... at the cost of increasing madness, and attention from dark powers. At least, others may call it madness... but is it truly insanity, when the voices in your head grant useful knowledge, and the monsters that appear before you leave remains behind?

Basics of Warp

There are four types of warp: Permanent warp is a permanent change to your character, it cannot be removed. "Normal" warp does not naturally go away, but can be removed by the advanced recipe Sanitizing Soap. (Unfortunately, you need to be somewhat warped already to discover that recipe....) "Temporary" warp will fade on its own over time, but can be removed immediately by the same soap. "Equipment" warp attaches to unholy items that the character makes use of.

The various sorts are gained as follows:

Researching Forbidden knowledge gives permanent and normal warp (50/50).
The first time crafting any item gained by forbidden knowledge gives normal and temporary warp (again, 50/50). Note that use of the Thaumatorium does count. Even after the first crafting, crafting such items counts as a "warping activity", see below.
Crafting Flesh Golems gives normal warp.
Eating zombie brains will give temporary warp and sometimes normal warp.
The attack of an eldritch guardian, or of some "Warped" champions, can also give warp, mostly temporary.
Certain advanced equipment has a "Warping" characteristic inherent to the items. While wearing or wielding this equipment, the character's effective warp will be increased by a small fixed amount. However, after using the equipment, merely taking it off will not cancel the warp: The item must actually be dropped or put away, that is leaving the player's inventory entirely. However, once this is done, the equipment warp will be gone.

Warp Effects

Once warped, you will suffer various effects at unpredictable intervals. However, if you then avoid warping activities, these will become less frequent over time and eventually stop entirely... until you gain more warp or craft a "forbidden" item, which will reawaken the effects.

With small amounts of warp, the effects will be minor -- various sinister visuals and sounds, and creepy messages. The "headaches" (darkened vision and heartbeat noises) will eventually inspire you to discover some useful recipes, as noted below. Some messages are mere incitements to paranoia: "There is something behind you." "You feel as though you are being watched, maybe it is time to stop."
Whispers: The message "Strange whispers reveal secrets to you." is displayed and you will receive a single research point into any of the primal aspects. This one is relatively common, making low levels of warp mostly beneficial to the player.
- Once, you will get the variant message: "Strange whispers reveal secrets to you. Surely there must be a way to stop these headaches?" This message tells you that you've unlocked the topics for Purifying Bath Salts, the Arcane Spa, and Sanitizing Soap, on the Alchemy page.
- A few examples of messages are:

"What was that noise? Something is behind you."
"Something is following you."
"Something is watching you. Maybe it is time to stop."

As you accumulate more warp, the effects can get more dangerous, including:

Unnatural Hunger: Tints the screen a reddish orange and rapidly depletes your food bar. A message should display, "An unnatural hunger consumes you." Eating rotten flesh or zombie brains returns the message "Your hunger begins to fade." and eating any type of normal food returns "Your hunger cannot be satisfied with normal food." You will still suffer the status effect Hunger from the rotten flesh, but for a much shorter duration.
Blurred vision: Fairly short duration, but still very inconvenient. Also creates a ton of lag on weaker computers.
Blindness: Identical to the vanilla status effect.
Flux Flu, Thaumarhia, Flux Phage:
- Flux Flu drastically increases your vis usage, both for crafting and when using foci.
- Thaumahria: "Your stomach suddenly gurgles very strangely." This effect causes you to leave occasional messes in your wake... remember, it's best not to leave pools of flux goo lying around too long.
- Flux Phage is a contagious version of Flux Flu: While your golems and farm animals won't be seriously affected themselves, they can remain infected even after you recover... and transmit the illness back to you. There are three "levels" of the condition, and you will initially have level III. However, the illness will drop by one level for each step of contagion.
Sun Scorned: "The light becomes overwhelmingly bright and burns your skin." Your eyes and even skin become very sensitive -- your view of the world will be half-washed out by the glare, and if you venture into sunlight, you will be burned. Helmets don't help, but a Fire Resistance potion effect will, and armor enchanted with at least 3 levels of Fire Protection will prevent the fire from lasting long enough to do damage. Also creates a ton of lag on weaker computers.
Eldritch Guardians: Once your madness passes a certain threshold, it will attract attention from dark realms. "A fog appears, something stirs within its depths." With luck, by this time your armor and weapons will be good enough to fight them off. (Tip: They're bigger than you, but that's their problem)
Mind spider Infestation: The message "They're Everywhere! Run!" is displayed and a massive number of mind spiders will spawn close to your character. Fortunately, these are pretty much harmless.
Deadly Gaze: The message "Your vision becomes strange and grim." is displayed and your screen will get black borders and a slight grey tint. Any creature or player whom the affected player looks at will be stricken with the Wither effect.
Mining Fatigue: The message "You suddenly feel reluctant to break things" is displayed and you are given severe mining fatigue as per the vanilla status effect.
Night Vision: The message "Your perception suddenly expands" appears, followed by the night vision potion effect.
Warp Reduction: When the message "You have a moment of clarity" is displayed, you will get a reduction in your levels of regular warp. It remains unknown if this reactivates the warp events.

Warp Progression

However, madness does have its benefits: At various levels of warp, you will receive key insights, leading to new discoveries:

At a fairly early stage, you will learn various remedies that can forestall or partly cure the effects of warp: Purifying Bath Salts that can block all effects for a limited time (less time as your warp becomes more severe), and Sanitizing Soap that removes warp (temporary and "regular" only).
Later, you will gain the Eldritch Epiphany, and a new page will appear in your Thaumonomicon with new devices and discoveries. Particularly important is the Sanity Checker, by which you can gauge your descent into horror.
Further exploration of dark knowledge will lead to the Eldritch Revelation, granting yet more insight into the secrets hidden from the mundane world.
Plunging still further into the depths will allow comprehension of the Crimson Cult's writings, and venturing into a darker world by use of the Apertis Oculis.

Negating and/or Removing warp

Without commands, only six ways of not suffering warp effects are possible.

It is technically possible to just avoid researching forbidden knowledge in the first place, but this is impractical and will severely limit your ability and research capabilities in Thaumcraft.
- Without researching or crafting forbidden knowledge, there are only a few ways to get warped: Using equipment with Warping, eating zombie brains, and being attacked by an Eldritch Guardian or a Warped champion mob. All of these will be mostly if not completely temporary warp.
Over time, the frequency and severity of warp events will fade -- until you gain more in any way, such as researching more forbidden knowledge, crafting such items, fighting Eldritch Guardians, or using Warping equipment. As soon as you do anything "warpy", your warp will reawaken, and the effects will resume.
Dousing yourself in Purifying Liquid will hold off the effects for some time, but this is only temporary. And the worse your warp becomes, the less respite you gain.
Sanitizing soap will immediately remove temporary warp, and has a chance of removing "regular" warp. It does not affect permanent or equipment warp.
If you have Botania installed, you can drink "Brew of Sane Thoughts", which will turn off any negative effects for 10 minutes.
You can turn warp option off in the config file - "Wuss Mode". Thus you will not gain any warp, but also any research that requires warp will be unavailable.
Finally, it is possible to resort to "creative/op" commands. The following commands will remove all warp (except from equipment):

/tc warp <playername> set 0 TEMP
/tc warp <playername> set 0 
/tc warp <playername> set 0 PERM

For more detailed information, refer to the "commands" page.

Bugs

Some players find that the shaders used in warp effects cause major graphical problems, with the screen going entirely black, or massive FPS drops. This is most often a conflict with Optifine or other graphical mods. It is possible to disable the shaders in the configuration file, by searching for the "shaders=" setting, and changing it to "false".

Videos

Thaumcraft 4.2 [Warp, Sanitizing Soap, Arcane Spa, Purifying Bath Salts]

This video was made by Zautos.

History

When warp was originally introduced, the effects were much more severe -- notably, Eldritch guardians appeared at full power, more frequently, and often in numbers. Also, warp effects were much more common and lacked the current "cooldown". After several versions, the effects were progressively weakened and modified, and ultimately changed to become less frequent over time if the player refrained from further "warpy" activities.