Describe the request

The theme of this pack is to automate recipes as you unlock them, generally needing to batch craft a bit to be able to automate it. In my playthrough I have found Thaumcraft a standout exception, because some important tools for automating essentia, arcane crafting and infusion are either missing or gated to the point where you have to manually grind 100s of recipes to make it first. Specifically:

• Essentia storage busses can do priority and essentia transfusers cannot do priority. Storage bussed essentia can also be extracted at incredible speeds through IO ports compared to transfusers (>32k/tick). To make essentia storage busses requires eldritch stone which requires impetus crystals to enter the nothingness dimension. In other words most of witchery chapter 20 progress.
• The arcane assembler also requires this as it uses essentia storage busses in its recipe, and the blank knowledge core also needs a primordial fragment so it can't be reached even if a player gets exceptionally lucky and finds an impetus fracture without an impetus locator.
• There are no essentia level emitters in 1.12 which means one of the only ways to both use digisentia storage and stocking up to a limit is to have low priority storage bussed jars on the same network. I understand there are plans to make this in future, but I point this out because not having them reduces the flexibility of digisentia and the balancing of digisentia recipes should be made with that in mind.

So in line to make the pack less grindy with thaumcraft manual infusion/essentia/arcane crafting I have some suggestions on how to do that by recipe changes and mechanic changes.

Crafting recipe changes I will suggest just to get the conversation started:

• instead of using blank greater focus in the knowledge core recipe, use blank advanced focus, that way no primordial pearl is needed first
• Add an alternate recipe for void stone from something else, for example maybe a low-essentia infusion with ethereal slate + 2 empowered void crystals + void reagent + Chisel voidstone as central block. That way players have the option of doing the more expensive recipe if they like, similar to elevatium where cheaper recipes are unlocked much later on for economy of scale.
• Another option to reduce the general grindiness is to provide something like a recipe for 20 void seeds -> one zero durability primordial pearl, so that players don't have to dice roll on causality collapsers which is frequently complained about in the official discord. That would indirectly reduce the grinding required to reach a fully automated thaumcraft setup for alchemy and infusion.

Reasons why this should be changed

In this situation towards the end of chapter 19, the player has basically two options: either manually make essentia to grind past witchery to unlock digisentia and arcane crafting, or build a passive 41-smeltery setup and either fully commit to it (which means the digisentia upgrade won't be very worthwhile), or dismantle it later to modify/replace with digisentia (which means a lot of excess smelteries which can't be reused). For me personally this is because I want to do on demand essentia, and I think it is a strong option in terms of mechanics, but purely because of this void/eldritch stone gate it's very impractical to do. I think the player should be free to choose a different option compared to what I consider the relatively boring approach of 41 smelteries for each essentia type, and shouldn't have to do excessive manual crafting in the process.

I also personally think it's excessive to gate the arcane assembler and its knowledge core so much, since it just means more grinding, this isn't really a good kind of grinding either.

On a related note, with the crucible, ID player simulators can't learn the cheater thaumonomicon but can deposit items into a crucible, and mechanical users can learn the cheater thaumonomicon but can't deposit items into a crucible. I'm not sure if this is intended since it would be an interesting option to allow players to fully automate at least some alchemy recipes via the mechanical user + crucible combo, that would circumvent some of the pressure to obtain digisentia and dedicated alchemy smeltery setups and could reduce grinding in early thaumcraft progress.

A similar argument could be made for gating the well of suffering in chapter 15, since some botania progression is required although I think it is less of an issue since there are multiple options for advancing blood magic at that point, both dagger of sacrifice and incense altars and rune customisation.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

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Your Divine Journey 2 Discord Username

ivelieu