Forge version: 14.23.0.2501
Botania version: r1.10-349

Steps to reproduce:

1. Craft Terrasteel (or Gaia Spirit) Ingot
2. Use it to summon and kill Gaia Guardian
3. Utilize all net gain gaia spirits to kill the produce manastorm charges
4. Utilize all said charges to power a 100% efficient manastorm reactor
5. Have a sad face, as you have less mana than you started with

What I expected to happen:
I'd expect for a properly setup (captures 100% of energy available) manastorm reactor to produce a net gain in mana.

What happened instead:
Each manastorm charge produce 250 mana bursts, each mana burst carries 120 mana. This means each manastorm charge contains 30k mana. A normal mode gaia guardian kill has 8 gaia spirits, a hard mode gaia guardian has 16, less 4 for the ingot used to summon is 12. If all of these manastorm charges are funneled back into a mana storm reactor, they net you 240 (normal mode kill) or 360 (hard mode kill) mana which is less than the 500k used to make terrasteel.

Some possible solutions, I'm certain there are more:
The bursts released by the manastorm say they have a max mana of 340 but only actually carry 120. This may be to cause a visual effect of less bright mana bursts as I believe their brightness is determined by the ratio between the max and current mana. However, if their starting mana was set to 340 this would result in 85k per charge or 680k for a normal mode kill, 1020 for a hardmode kill. Less the 500k for the terrasteel and you have a net gain of 180k or 520k respectively. That's roughly 1/6th or 1/2 of a mana pool for each kill once the ingredients are cycled through a manastorm reactor. I'm still not certain that this is worth it for what I'm not certain is a fully automatable process (is there a way to summon and kill a gaia guardian without player interaction?) however it is at least a net gain.

Another possible solution is to allow the entropinnyum to absorb the final explosion from the manastorm or possibly the explosions from the bursts to generate more mana. Having an array of entropinnyums soaking down mana from explosive mana bursts seems really funny to me. I might just be odd though.

Credit where due. This was originally discovered by @Solonarv and reported in issue #2437

Once you get going, the hard mode gaia fight should be net positive on manasteel ingots (90% chance for 16-27, avg. 19.4), mana pearls (70% chance for 8-14, avg. 7.4), and mana diamonds (50% chance for 4-6, avg. 2.5) already, so costs for producing those can likely be neglected.

To summarize the discussion so far: Currently a "manastorm reactor" would cover 72% of the mana cost for making a terrasteel ingot (since that's the only relevant cost, if you consider the average loot availability). Increasing the mana burst size by about 40% would make the reactor barely break even. It shouldn't be massively net positive though, since you also get a whole bunch of other things from the gaia fight, worth roughly 35% of a mana pool's capacity.

How about simply doubling the mana per burst? That would be a net gain of 22% of a mana pool after making the next terrasteel ingot, assuming a 100% efficient manastorm reactor.

[edit] On second thought, safely capturing all the mana will be tricky enough, since spreaders are no longer full blocks. Bumping it up to 250% of what it was for about a pool worth of mana in total per hard-mode gaia fight.

Bumping up mana per burst to 150 (from 120) increases the mana recapture rate to 90% for a Gaia II fight. Accounting for loot dropped, it's a net gain. Tbh I don't think it should be thaaat mana-positive considering how easy it is to collect the mana from a manastorm charge.

Although if you wanted to guarantee Gaia II being mana-positive ignoring drops, increasing the number of bursts to 300 (from 250) along with the above buff can do that. Any thoughts on which approach is preferred?

This topic just came up on Discord again. For the record: Your gaia ingot for the hard mode gaia fight not only turns into gaia spirits, but also a bunch of other loot, most of which either can be turned into mana (black[er] lotus) or can be created with mana (manasteel, mana pearl, mana diamond, various runes).
As it turns out, adding up all that potential or "saved" mana ends up being roughly in the same range as the mana obtainable from 12 manastorm charges. With the exception of the black(er) lotuses, you don't get much say in what exactly the mana is spent for, of course.

It may have been a while since I've played through Botania, but I'm still happy to see this come back up.

This long after the last time I played with Botania (and almost 6 years after when I made this issue) it's difficult for me to come up with a good answer. I do feel like killing the Gaia Guardian II should be mana positive in and of itself. How much I feel could be given a lot of debate. When I last played, killing Gaia Guardian II was the end game. If you were able to farm it, you were effectively done with the mod. It took a lot of effort to get to that point. So to say that each kill should net you a fair bit of mana I don't feel is unreasonable.

I guess I still feel that my original calculations are decent. An iron ingot, ender pearl, and diamond, plus all of the infrastructure to turn that into terrasteel and then being able to fight the gaia guardian netting you 161k mana (my original calculations didn't take into account the mana costs of the manasteel, mana pearl, or mana diamond) doesn't actually seem all that unreasonable. Essentially this is just trading direct, consistent effort for short term boosts to your mana pool. Even with the calculations above for the Gaia Guardian II and almost half a mana pool... that's the very end game effect. I still don't consider it unreasonable. I'm not certain it's even worthwhile to setup when I can setup a tree farm (or any number of other rube goldberg machines) that will give me unlimited mana.

This issue is stale because it has been open for a while with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed soon.

Ever resolved?