Mods/Thaumcraft/Getting Started

Early Game
A Thaumcraft game starts off as a mostly ordinary Minecraft game, in that you need to accumulate various resources before you can start playing with magic. So, gather your tools and resources as usual, building farms and mining ores. Thaumcraft adds a few special wrinkles:
 * ../Node/s -- If you happen to spot one, don't mess with it until you get the Thaumometer, but you can mark them for later.
 * Three magical biomes: Magical Forest is valuable, especially the silverwood trees.  Eerie biomes and ../Taint/ed land are hazardous, and you should avoid making lairs near them.
 * New ores. Amber and Cinnabar need iron picks, and aren't useful until later.  Stockpile them.
 * Aspect-Infused Stone -- Unlike regular ores, these glow in the dark, and are visible at great distances. They drop shards of Aspect crystal, which you need to collect.  They come in six flavors, for the six Primal ../Aspect/s -- while all six types can be found in any biome, each aspect is much more common in some biomes than others.  You need at least one shard of each type to build your first Thaumometer, and you'll want a backup.  To complete your research equipment, you'll eventually need 9 or 10 of each.  (That's for a crystal cluster of each type, one mixed cluster, and three more Thaumometers as part of other equipment.)  More will be useful later on, as you begin crafting and infusing.
 * New mobs with new drops (again, save the drops for later):
 * Angry Zombies: Slightly tougher zombie that appears in magical biomes, and drops brains as well as the usual.  They get bigger as they lose health.
 * Wisps: Flying orbs of light.  Some of them will zap you with lightning -- just run out of range, they're not big on following you.  If killed, they drop ethereal essence, which is valuable for more advanced magics.
 * Pech: These duck-people can be traded with.  They value anything made of gold (such as golden armor from mob drops), and certain magical things such as mana beans.  You need to throw them a few freebies before they become willing to trade with you (green sparkles), but then you can right-click them to open an interface, where you will offer similar items in exchange for a semi-random grab bag of items.  Pech will run to pick up any loose items, this can be used to lead them into captivity.  Special tip: they can despawn only when their inventories are empty -- their trade goods don't count, but any non-precious items they've picked up, do.  When they start trading back the trash they picked up while you were trapping them, top them off with more junk, especially stuff that doesn't stack.
 * Ink and Paper -- stockpile them. Wreak havoc among the squids!
 * Sand/Glass -- you'll be using a lot of glass too, so collect sand.

Beginning Magic
There are several things to craft and build here -- just do each of them as you get the materials.

First Wand
Create your first wand as soon as you have a couple of spare ingots of iron. This will be an iron-capped wooden wand, which is the weakest but the only one you can make with a vanilla crafting table. Carry it around in your hotbar -- even without nodes, the wand will collect small amounts of vis from mobs you kill, which will come in handy later.

You need to make two iron caps from nuggets, then attach them to a stick:

Reading Material


Next, grab some paper, leather, and wood to make a bookcase. Place that somewhere, and right-click it with your wand. This will produce a ../Thaumonomicon/, the in-game reference manual. Take some time to read everything you can so far before you go on to research -- the information here is incomplete, but what you get is important. More pages will become readable as your research progresses, and some items will get new pages when you make discoveries.

Research and Arcane Crafting
You need to read the Thaumonomicon entry for this.

The easiest parts of this will be the Research Table, and while you're at it, you might as well make an Arcane Crafting Table. Start by making three Tables, as below. Place one of them, and right-click it with the wand. It will become an Arcane Crafting Table, which you can mine and move like any other block. This will let you make the next round of magical devices and tools. Then make two sets of Scribing Tools and some paper. Place the other two tables next to each other, and right-click either of them with one of your Scribing Tools, to create the Research Table. Right-click the research table to open it, and put some of your paper in the slot provided. Note that breaking a research table will reduce it to its components (2 tables, scribing tools, and paper.)

Keep the other Scribing Tools and the rest of the paper in your inventory, so that when inspiration strikes as you're scanning stuff, you can write a quick research note to solve once you get back home. These can also double as spares for when the table runs out of ink or paper. (Just remember to refill the empty scribing tools after replacing them.)

As you gain resources, you can place crystal clusters and bookshelves near the research table (within 9 blocks) to provide "ghost" points, which let you continue research slowly even when you've run out of a critical aspect. See the Research article for more details. Note also that you will start with a handful of research points (about 16 for each primal aspect), but you're going to need lots more....

Through A Glass, Darkly
Once you've got at least one of each crystal types (and some gold, plus a bit of glass and ink), it's time to make your ../Thaumometer/. At first, you won't be able to scan everything because you don't know the aspects for them -- specifically, for each aspect possessed by an item, block, or creature, you need to know either that aspect, or its component aspects. (In the latter case, you will discover the new aspect, and get double research points for doing so.) In particular, you will need to make Victus at the research table (as detailed in the Thaumonomicon) before you can scan almost anything alive. (Or dead, or undead for that matter. You might also want to make Mortuus.)   Once that's done, your learning should be pretty straightforward:

Scan everything in sight -- blocks, items, mobs. Different varieties of a mob or item usually can be scanned separately (including baby animals). Go through your chests for more items to scan, and make and scan samples of all the ordinary crafted items you can. Remember that you can't read many items until you've discovered the necessary aspects -- think about what else might have the aspects you need. As you research devices, make samples of anything you can, and scan those. This will get you plenty of research points.

With your Thaumometer, you can much more easily find nodes, and you can scan those too. Scanning a node will identify its aspects and type, and will also get you research points equal to about 1/10th the node's strength in each aspect. You can also draw vis from the nodes, to fuel your arcane craftings and other work. Watch out for hungry nodes!

Onward To Power
If you haven't already, get your first few diamonds, set up your enchanting table, and grab some extra obsidian while you're at it, because you will eventually need Nether materials. As soon as you've got the materials and research, upgrade to a gold-capped greatwood wand.

As you research more recipes, you will gain access to an assortment of useful devices. The ../Crucible/ lets you produce a few items that will be important later, but the real next steps will be Essentia Distillation and ../Infusion/, which give access to an assortment of special items, more powerful wands, and the ability to enchant your tools and weapons with chosen enchantments. Note that diamonds will mostly go to your magical crafting -- once you can make thaumium, equipment made from it will be much more available than diamond stuff, and nearly as powerful.

Once you've faced the Nether, the materials found there will let you produce even more powerful items, such as wand foci and functional golems.