I strike out to harvest my first Greatwood tree.



I step out to see my first weather of the game. I suspect one of my mods is shutting off weather, with Thaumcraft the most likely culprit. In my last game I had all my current mods except Thaumcraft and Metallurgy and weather was normal (I won't say "fine" because the rain gets annoying sometimes). Thaumcraft alters the weather to create "flux weather" so it's obviously a prime suspect for the suspicious absence of precipitation.

Just as in the real world, precipitation is nice when it's rare. I'm actually enjoying the snow.

I head for the tree with cave spiders I saw in the plain, near where I found the horses. I plan to expose and light the cave spider spawner so I can convert it to a string farm later.



The denizens are predictably unhappy at my arrival. I endure a bite to get a torch down and reduce the rate of future spawns. Then I pull out my normal axe and whack him to death.



I use my normal axe to chop out the bottom and expose the spawner. No more spiders now until I want them.



Now I use the Axe of the Stream to down the tree. It chops the most distant wood block, not the one you're aiming at, so in practice trees are effectively chopped from the top down. But the Greatwood tree is so huge I chop for what seems like a minute before all the chopped wood and saplings come pouring down. I get 2 and a half stacks of Greatwood from this.

I forgot my shears so I have to leave about a half-dozen cobwebs floating in midair.

As long as I'm out here, I want to do some exploring. I explore more of the Steppe, encountering more of the dangerous caves I saw to the south. After crossing some hills, I come to a large lake and boat across.



On the other side is a Highlands Sahel sub-biome of the desert I'd found before. But over the next hill:



AAAAAHHH! TAINT!

The purple, for those not familiar with Thaumcraft, is a Tainted Biome, a biome of magic gone bad. Animals and monsters in it are powered up and made evil, and it can grow these Taintacles to attack you. Worse, it spreads while you're nearby. There's a Thaumcraft item to block it, but I can't make it yet and it's pretty hard to make in large enough quantities to block it. Thaumcraft itself makes them rather small, about the size of sub-biomes, but Climate Control + Thaumcraft makes them come out as full biomes.

So I leave. Quickly.



Here's my map after I've run a bit. The green area right behind me is the tainted area. I'll have to stay away from there for the foreseeable future. I'm not actually sure how I missed it on my node exploration back in Episode 10; I must have walked pretty close to it but I only had one map so there's no record.

From there I basically explore just north of where I've already explored.



Past the Sahel is an inland Estuary. I take the opportunity to go boating and find some nodes out on the water.



North of that is a Woodlands, probably the same Woodlands where I found the cows. I find wolves here, which will be very useful once I have enough bones. Right now I have about 6.

I'm far tougher than when I found the cows so I proceed through.



Here is a Highlands large Birch. I think you can see why the vanilla large Birches in Birch Hills M, which are interesting compared to most vanilla trees, are kind of disappointing once you get used to Highlands trees.



The Woodlands is adjacent to a Roofed Forest, probably the same I saw from the coast in my circumnavigation. This looks pretty foreboding in the Halcyon Days texture pack. In vanilla the brighter green, fluffier wood, and candy-colored mushrooms look a little too cartoonish to exude an air of danger.

Soon I transition into the Cold Taiga north of my base. I get through this fairly uneventfully until almost at the coast:



I run into a large outdoor lava pool - the biggest I've ever seen. I obsidian it up promptly so it won't start a fire. I thought I'd modded these lava pools to use Underground Biomes stone rather than vanilla but apparently not. Gotta work on that.

I turn south towards home and spot a node up in the trees. That happens from time to time. I pillar up and use it to refill my wands but



I forget that my iron capped wand will drain a node to zero even thought I've done the research to leave a little. Draining a node to 0 permanently damages it. I'm a pretty ecologically minded guy and in about 4 months playing Thaumcraft this is the first time I've ever done it. I feel awful.

After a little struggling with the big hills and river just north of my base, I'm home. I need to build a travel route through that - I go to that triple node spot a lot, and I'l probably go more in the future because that wisp spawner will be my only reasonable source of Auram Essentia and Essentia drops for Salis Mundus.



I take a shot of my tower behind my altar. I realize from this angle the tower is a bit like an taotie, or chinese stylized monster mask, with the windows eyes and the upper balcony ears. Well, that's working out.

An here's my spawn map now - a little better filled in that before. Although with that tainted biome it may be a long time before I completely fill this out.

Next episode - an unanticipated invasion!