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Description
Taint is a form of magical corruption that spreads throughout the land and affects terrain, plants, animals and monsters.
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 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. Once you set foot in a Tainted place, not only does the world around you turn purple: the sky does too.
Nodes within those places often have the Tainted attribute; they are partly what causes the biome to spread.
Effects of Taint
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 Spore Stalks 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.
Tainted areas are riddled with Fibrous Taint, Tainted Grass (some blocks even turn to Tainted Soil) and Tainted Plants and trees, whose wood becomes Crusted Taint.
Tainted creatures
Taint causes damage, in the form of Flux Taint, to every mob and player. When a mob dies in a corrupted area, it might become Tainted, and its behaviour is affected accordingly: normally docile creatures like pigs, cows and chickens will become aggressive and attack all uncorrupted life forms, including villagers and players. Tainted creatures include:
- Corrupted animals, for instance Tainted Sheep.
- Tainted Swarm
- Tainted Crawler
- Tainted Creeper
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.(Voxelmap works fine)