Now I want to set up some Thaumcraft Essentia processing and make some golems to harvest for me. Originally I'd been thinking about building some more on top of the hill for this but I'm spending a lot of time going up and down in my base. So I decide I'll dig a basement for the tower, which will be on the ladder route from the tower to the original hideyhole (and then the mine).



The room for the essentia purification needs to be 6 high to have room for the alchemical furnace and 5 alembics on top. I continue the spiral motif, and continue with different materials for each level. The walls I leave unchanged for now. Many of these walls are also exterior walls so I'm going to rebuild the outside for outside looks first then decide what to do with the rest. The patterned grey stone is Greywackle, a good decorative sedimentary stone; I hadn't know I had some in my base but it will be useful.



I also do some more Thaumcraft research. Azanor's research mini game really hits my sweet spot.

I have to make another outside trip to fill up my wand, and then I have enough vis to make the Alchemical Furnace and Alembics. The recipes are characteristically complex (for Thaumcraft), but that's part of the charm of Thaumcraft. IMO it's a good match for Survival, which is fundamentally about gathering resources. I've already gathered the Iron, Silverwood, glass, etc. I need so it's relatively straightforward at this point. I set it up in the Essentia room:



Looks good.

Next I want to build an Alchemical Centrifuge room right beneath it. The centrifuge can separate certain Essentia into components and is very valuable for getting certain types of essential that are hard to get by themselves. In particular, for golems, I need Spiritus, where the best direct source is Soul Sand - not so easy to get. However, Cogitio can be split into Spiritus and Terra, and *that* you can get out of paper.

I carve out a room for it underneath the Essentia room. I want the floor on the same level as the hideyhole, which only allows a height of 3. Not imposing, but that's actually the height actually needed for a working centrifuge setup, so I'm OK.

Another trip outside to refill my wand and some more complex recipes later:



Eventually I'll work on some automated piping but for now I'll just run it manually.

Next I make a Crucible - a Thaumcraft Cauldron - for actually making the golems.

I toss in one vial each of Humanus, Spiritus, and Motus essentia, plus 2 Greatwood blocks for the material, and poof! I've got 2 Golems.

I need to make controllers before they're usable. First, I want to take a break from Thaumcrafting and spruce up the look of the tower a bit. I replace all the exposed basement tower wall with smooth Soapstone.



After looking at the Essentia room from the inside, I decide I need to make the rest of the walls into smooth Soapstone as well.



I also put in a door towards the south (the ocean). This also provides a direct route from the tower to the outside - before I had to go through the old hideyhole entrance, which is a bit of a detour.



The tower does indeed look much better from the outside.

Now I go back to finish my golems. Let's see - a golem controller needs Nitor (magical flame), which I can make from glowstone dust - uhoh -

I got a little spoiled in my first Thaumcraft game. In that game I found a village with a wizard fairly early on and was able to buy a lot of materials from him - including Nitor. Well, no village in this game yet, so I've got to make my *own* supplies - in this case including glowstone dust, which means another trip to the Nether.