Taint

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Description

Taint is a form of magical corruption that spreads throughout the land and affects terrain, plants, animals and monsters.

Plants and creatures begin to change as a strange, purple growth appears and subsequently spreads everywhere. The ground will become a nasty, purple mud that squishes under your steps. Glowing weeds and purple gas pods that spew poisonous gas clouds will start to grow everywhere. The gas from those pods will negatively charge the aura, which further increases the Taint rating and speeds up the corruption of the surrounding terrain. Normally docile creatures like pigs, cows and chickens suddenly become aggressive and will attack all uncorrupted life forms, including players.

Taint as a biome

Taint isn't merely the byproduct of too much Flux in an area. Such zones also appear on world generation, as biomes with slightly purple-tinted vegetation. The biome starts relatively tame, yet corrupts itself over time within its own borders; the latter tend to expand externally, too, but very slowly.

Tainted creatures

Tainted creatures include:

• Corrupted animals, for instance Tainted Sheep.
• Tainted Swarm
• Tainted Crawler

Containing Taint

Preventing Taint from spreading is vital, as otherwise your crops, farms and whole bases could end up corrupted as well—especially if you've accidentally settled down near such an area upon starting a new game, and don't have yet any means to contain it.

Containement trench

Taint cannot be contained by physical means, and merely destroying tainted blocks won't get rid of it: it will go on spreading nonetheless. Digging a trench around a tainted zone will contain it, but you must dig deep enough (probably to bedrock level).

[Yet to be checked in TC4. Source: TC4 thread on the MC forums.]

Silverwood Trees

Silverwood trees are a natural bulwark against the spreading of Taint. Planting saplings near a corrupted area (but far enough for them not to be tainted while growing!) will help containing it.

Keeping chunks from loading

Taint will not spread if it is located in an unloaded chunk. Another solution is thus to run away as far as possible from the corrupted area, until it isn't loaded anymore.

Configuration file

Taint is an intrinsic part of Thaumcraft 4's mechanics, and cannot be disabled. However, the mod's configuration file can be edited as to modify how fast Taint spreads, or prevent it from spreading at all. In the latter case, the features of a Tainted biome will remain contained within it, much like those of any other type of biome.

Trivia

• (13/10/2013) REI Minimap cannot render Tainted blocks, and crashes the game when trying.