Blood Altar
The Blood Altar, named "Altar of GregoriousT's Blood" in GT:NH is both a key block from Blood Magic: Alchemical Wizardry and a large Multiblock structure that serves as a storage for the mod's currency/energy, Life Essence. The Blood Altar also has capability to craft various items by infusing them with the Life Essence. There are six tiers of Blood Altar, each of them becoming larger and more complex. There are notable changes in the GTNH version of Blood Magic, which will be detailed below.
Starting The Mod
Starting Blood Magic requires several other mods to be progressed:
- GregTech will need to be progressed through the MV tier. This is required to make an Implosion Compressor for the Compressed Cobblestone, access the Precision Laser Engraver for the Arcane Stone, and access to HV Circuits.
- Thaumcraft will need to be progressed far enough to access the Arcane Workbench, and will require multiple low-tier Thaumcraft items as detailed in the crafting section. You will also need access to a wand with a minimum capacity of twenty Vis.
- Witchery will need to be progressed far enough to access the Attuned Stone.
Crafting the Altar
The Blood Magic altar can be initially crafted as a single block, which acts as Tier 1. This most basic form of the altar can be crafted using the recipe below. Once made, it only needs to be placed without any other dependent blocks to start using it. Higher tier Blood Altars will need a larger multiblock structure.
The list of items in the recipe are as follows, with their requirements:
- Attuned Stone - Requires introductory Witchery or access to a Witches Oven.
- Arcane Stone Bricks (x2) - Requires MV power for the Precision Laser Engraver and a red hue Lens.
- Double Compressed Cobblestone(x2) - Requires MV tier to create the Implosion Compressor multiblock.
- Crucible - Requires introductory Thaumcraft
- Pulsating Crystal - Requires an EBF at MV power
- Alchemical Furnace - Requires introductory Thaumcraft
Upgrading the Altar
If you have been progressing through the Blood Magic quests, you will have already made a Weak Blood Orb and some blank slates. If you do not recall how to make these, or have not yet, refer back to the quest book. Now, the primary way of upgrading the altar is through the use of Runes. At first, the most basic rune, the Blood Rune, do not offer any meaningful upgrades to the altar other than the tier of the altar. However, you will be able to follow through the quest line to make new Runes that do give you bonuses to your altar.
Material List
- 32 Slates
- From 4 Arcane Stone Blocks and 4 Buckets of Life Essence in a Cutter
- 9,216 L of Wet Concrete (equivalent to 64 blocks of Concrete)
Building the Tier 2 Altar
Creating the blood runes is fairly easy, and will not require any further progression from the previous tier of altar. The recipe for the blood rune is as follows:
This only requires 1152L of Wet Concrete, made in an LV mixer, and the previous slates and orb that you have already made. You will need 8 runes for your first altar upgrade. The first altar upgrade will consist of simply creating a ring around the base altar structure. Going forward, all of your altar upgrades will require Blood Runes, as well as occasionally some new items. Each section following this will focus on the structure itself, and any new items.
Tier 3 Altar
The Tier 3 altar adds in a new structure to your altar -- The pillars. These pillars are created with new materials, which will be overviewed below as well as the basic structure. At this point, your structure will reach a total size of 7x7x4(WxLxH). The pillars that you will be creating are going to have a Blood-Soaked Thaumium base with a Glowstone top. This tier of Blood Magic will not require any new requirements over the previous -- Just access to some Glowstone and a lot of Thaumium Ingots.
Material List
- 8 Blood-Soaked Thaumium Blocks
- 4 Glowstone Blocks
- An Additional 20 Blood Rune or upgraded variants blocks
- 80 Blank slates and 23040L of Wet Concrete
- 80 Blank slates and 23040L of Wet Concrete
Building the Tier 3 Altar
At this point in Blood Magic, you should be familiar with how to infuse items with Life Essence, and that is all you will be doing with the Thaumium blocks to create blood-soaked Thaumium Blocks. The recipes are as follows:
Once created, you will now need to construct the altar. Unlike the previous tier, you will not put these blocks diagonally adjacent to the previous set of Blood Runes. Instead, you will place any cosmetic block that you like, and then attach the blood runes at each end. In the corner of the Tier 3 ring, you will have 1 pillar each. It is important to note that the pillars do not need to be on Blood Runes, and can also be placed upon cosmetic blocks. For the example picture below, Ancient Diamond Blocks were used as a cosmetic block to contrast the rest of the blocks, but you are free to replace them with any block of your choosing, including no block at all.
Tier 4 Altar
The Tier 4 altar is substantially more involved than the previous altar tiers, and comes with a much higher requirement of progression in GTNH to access.
Requirements:
- Access to a Runic Matrix in Thaumcraft. This will require an eye of ender, which can either be purchased through villagers if you are lucky, or created in an HV Chemical Reactor with Blaze Powder and an Ender Pearl. Although not required, it would be helpful to have a high stability on your Runic Matrix, as you will be using the Matrix quite frequently from here on out in Blood Magic.
- You will want to have progressed far enough to make a significant amount of void seeds and turn them into void ingots. This can be a tedious process if you have not set-up a Thaumcraft infrastructure to handle essentia yet.
- You will also need to have the ability to complete the binding ritual using Blood Magic's Ritual system. This binding ritual is needed to get access to a bound blade which is then used on mobs to get access to the weak blood shards from Blood Magic to create the Bloodstone Bricks (Process explained below). You may be able to bypass this requirement if you are able to get weak blood shards via a different method(Weakness II splash potion affected mobs may drop the item. (Not yet tested in most recent version).
Material List
- 16 Blood-Soaked Void Blocks
- An Additional 28 Blood Runes or upgraded rune blocks
- 4 Large Bloodstone Bricks
- 4 Ritual Stones
- 1 Weak Blood Shard
Building the Tier 4 Altar
The Tier 4 altar expands on the concept of the Tier 3 altar with more pillars made from new blocks. This time, you will be making Blood-Soaked Void Blocks. The recipe for these is straightforward, place void blocks into your Tier 3 altar to infuse them. These will be topped with Bloodstone Bricks, which are created using an Alchemic Chemistry Set. The recipes for each of these is shown below:
Constructing the altar will look like this, again, with Ancient diamond blocks as the cosmetic blocks.
Tier 5 Altar
The Tier 5 Altar does not have a significant jump in requirements, although it does require some Nether Stars, which may be difficult at lower tiers. However, the wither can be safely killed with the right tools. The only addition to the altar at this point is the addition of 4 beacons.
Material List
- 4 Beacons (They do not need to be active beacons)
- An Additional 52 Blood Runes or upgraded rune blocks
Building the Tier 5 Altar
The recipe for the beacons is as follows in GTNH:
This time, the notable difference in the Altar structure is going to be that you skip two rows instead of one. Again, the cosmetic blocks are Ancient Diamond Blocks.
Tier 6 Altar
This is the final tier of altar for Blood Magic in GTNH as of the time of writing. This also contains the largest jump required so far, requiring some fairly substantial upgrades. This will take quite a few more nether stars, and some dangerous infusions. It requires the Convocation of the Damned ritual to obtain some key crafting ingredients.
Requirements
- Ichorium Ingots take nether stars + dangerous infusions. The recipe themselves is not that difficult, but requires a significantly upgraded wand. You will need a wand that can hold 100 Vis with significant vis% discounts, or you will need a wand or scepter that can hold 125 vis. In my opinion, this is not something that you will mess with until late EV or early IV, as you will need tungstensteel screws for most of the wands that can hold the amount of Vis that you require.
- You will need to be sufficiently far into Twilight Forest to make one of the wands above.
- You will need to have completed the ritual 'Convocation of the Damned' for the soul crystals required.
- To make blocks of Ichorium cheaper you will need to have access to Mytryl which can be found as a small ore on some T3 planets or in an ore vein on some t4 planets. If you do not have access to Mytryl you will need to get just under 900 Ichor instead of the 280.
Material List
- x28 Blood-Soaked Ichorium Block
- x280 Ichor
- x28 Blocks of Mytryl (See above for more information)
- x28 Blood & Life Shards
- x28 Concentrated Catalyst
- x28 Standard Binding Agent
- x56 Osmiridium
- x112 Void Ingots
- x112 Flawless Diamonds
- x4 Crystal Cluster
- x36 Ethereal Slates
- x20 Blood & Life Shards
- x84 Blood Runes
Building the Tier 6 Altar
The tier 6 altar once again skips 2 blocks, just like the Tier 5 altar. The final product is as follows:
Tips and Tricks
Getting life essence for all the required crafts is a difficult undertaking with almost all recipes requiring multiple times more LP then base Blood Magic. We suggest using a mixture of different techniques to get the most out of your LP collections these include the following;
- Using any regeneration effects from the tier you are currently in if using the self-sacrifice method (Need to add a list and its relevent tier)
- Using a mob spawners if using the sacrificial dagger allows for quicker blood collection then the self-sacrifice method. As if any mob is hit with the sacrificial dagger within a short range of the altar block (Possible 5-6 blocks *Testing required) it will insta-kill it regardless of health and almost all mob variants, internals included( Be aware that it does not kill baby zombies). Also works a manual hostile mob farm if you collect the drops.
- Once you are EV tier the use of the EEC alongside the well of suffering ritual allows almost full automation of blood collection for the altar.
- When progressing through the tiers of blood altars, always attempt to use the upgraded blood runes rather then sticking with the base blood runes.
- Getting a large number of Speed Runes early on is always tempting but be aware that too many can lead to your LP usage outmatching your ability to replenish the LP in the altar stalling and losing progress of the recipe. If a recipe does not have enough blood to complete it will show black particles and slowly decrease in progress losing the LP that has been already included into the crafting action.