Neo Vitae

Your first act as a Vitaemancer is to construct an Ara Vitae. Place it on flat stone where you can reach every side. With no Essentia Vitae of its own, the altar draws blood from any nearby who carry no Blood Orb, refining it into EV. It never kills; it takes only what it needs.

Asks for: Ara Vitae

Lay a diamond upon the bare altar and let the EV transfigure it into your first Novicius Orb of Vitae. Bind it to yourself by right-clicking with it in hand. From then on you offer your own blood at will: right-click the bound orb. Near an altar the blood flows into the basin; away from one it is stored in the orb to carry and pour in later.

Asks for: Novicius Orb of Vitae

A slate is nothing until the altar makes it something. Transmute smooth stone into Tabula Rasa on the Ara Vitae. It is the substrate for almost every sigil you will ever scribe.

Asks for: Tabula Rasa

Eight runes laid around the altar make it Tier I. Begin with Blank Runes, then inscribe them with purpose: capacity, speed, sacrifice. While at Tier I you may hold an Orb in your off-hand and kill creatures to harvest EV straight into your Anima, sparing your own veins.

Asks for: Blank Rune

The Novicius Orb runs dry too fast. The Discipulus Orb of Vitae holds more and draws faster, befitting a hand that no longer trembles at the cut.

Asks for: Discipulus Orb of Vitae

Eight runes made a ring. Tier II wants 24 of them, and four two-block pillars standing four blocks out on every side, each capped with Blood Stained Glass. Any solid block serves for the pillars. Raise it and the Ara Vitae can forge the Veneficus Orb of Vitae.

Asks for: Blank Rune

Twenty-four runes and four pillars capped in Blood Stained Glass raise the altar to Tier II, where it can craft the Veneficus Orb of Vitae. At Tier II the altar stops being a tool and becomes an engine.

Asks for: Veneficus Orb of Vitae

A ritual needs a heart. Lay a Master Ritual Stone at the center, mark the lesser stones around it with the Ritual Diviner, and ignite the working with a Weak Activation Crystal. From the Well of Suffering to Overgrowth to the Endless Quarry, the circle does the labor you would otherwise bleed for. The Ritual Configurator lets you define the range and area a ritual works in.

Asks for: Weak Activation Crystal, Master Ritual Stone, Ritual Diviner

Perform Breaching the Edge of Demon Realm and you tear a one-time wound in the veil, building an Antechamber on the far side. Step through. Bring keys, or the means to find them.

Bind an iron piece on a Binding array with a charged gem and the metal wakes up. Sentient Armour starts humble: a hundred points of room to grow, and a long memory. The chestplate banks what you do: blows taken, miles walked, blocks broken.

Asks for: Sentient Plate

The Tabula Vitae is your first alchemical bench. With an Orb of Vitae placed inside, it draws EV from your Anima to brew Arcane Scribe Tools, sigil reagents, early anointments, and 2x ore processing recipes. Build it; the rest of the craft opens from here.

Asks for: Tabula Vitae

Brew Cutting Fluid in the Tabula Vitae, dissolve an ore into 2 dust, then smelt it to an ingot. Blood multiplies more than power, it multiplies wealth. Brew a measure of Cutting Fluid in your Tabula Vitae, then dissolve an ore within it. The slab grinds the metal free of its stone into dust, two for every ore you offer; smelt that to a finished ingot.

Asks for: Basic Cutting Fluid

Strange fruit grows in the Antechamber. Weak Tau is a seed of the demon realm's vitality. Carry it home and cultivate it. Cultivated and saturated, Weak Tau ripens into Strong Tau: dense enough to refine. To grow this you must allow it to grow with animals walking on it. They will be damaged over time and each time there is a chance the Tau will becomes saturated and will evolve into Strong Tau.

Asks for: Strong Tau, Weak Tau

Tau alone is potential. The Athanor refines it, pressing Tau Oil and saturating fruit into the shards a higher altar demands. Build the furnace of the patient alchemist.

Asks for: Athanor

Run an ore block through the full Athanor chain to ingots; and use Corrupted Dust with Ore Fragments in the Tabula Vitae to double them into Ore Gravel. If you fully max out the spiritus and processing cycle of corrupted dust you can take ore to ingot at over 8x the output of normal smelting!

Asks for: Corrupted Dust, Iron Gravel

Saturated Tau, worked through the Athanor, condenses into a Weak Blood Shard. It crowns the Tier III pillars and gates everything beyond, alongside stronger anointments and potion catalysts.

Asks for: Polished Bloodstone, Weak Blood Shard

Enchantments are woven things, and what is woven can be unpicked. Load the Athanor with a stack of plain Books and a single enchanted item such as armour, a tool, or even an Enchanted Book and the crucible lifts one enchantment at a time onto a fresh book, drawing it cleanly off the item. Salvage a wasted enchant, or peel a prize apart to reforge it as you please.

Asks for: Enchanted Book, Sanguine Reverter

If altar construction starts to drag, the potioncrafting system opens at Tier I. Brew Alchemy Flasks or tip Amethyst Throwing Daggers with dozens of effects. A Vitaemancer with a well-stocked flask belt is never truly in danger!

Asks for: Alchemy Flask

A flask is a held effect; a Tipped Throwing Dagger is that effect delivered to someone else's throat.

Asks for: Tipped Throwing Dagger

Not everything must die slowly. Throwing Daggers are your early ranged weapon and the seed of the Spiritus economy. A creature wounded by a dagger sheds Raw Spiritus when it dies; keep what falls.

Asks for: Spiritus Essence, Throwing Dagger

The Hellfire Forge is fueled by Spiritus, the residue you tear from creatures wounded by your daggers. From it come Spiritus Gems, Sentient Tools, explosive charges, and more. It will be hungry.

Asks for: Hellfire Forge, Petty Spiritus Gem

The spike trap will provide blood to the altar when it damages entities within 8 blocks of an Ara Vitae. Craft one to begin gathering blood passively. You'll need some way to provide enemies such as a mob spawner or other means. A Vortex Array on top is a perfect way to gather the mobs and a collection array nearby can grab the drops.

Asks for: Spike Trap

At the heart of every Vitaemancer's workings is a leyline of magical routing nodes. These act as the piping and transmission controls for fluids, items and even energy. It all starts with a master routing node which controls the entire network. Create some routing nodes and an input/output node then start your network by first placing the master routing node and the other nodes will connect to it as you place them.

Asks for: Input Routing Node, Output Routing Node, Routing Conduit

Forge a Master Routing Node Core to widen the veins of your network. It will allow more items/liquid/energy to be carried with every transmission, and a Speed Core to quicken frequency of transmissions. Seat them within the Master Routing Node, and stack as many as your ambition demands. A network so driven will move oceans in moments.

Asks for: Routing Stack Upgrade, Routing Speed Upgrade

While nodes autoconnect when placed, if you want to manually reconnect nodes to a different master routing node you can use the node router tool.

Asks for: Node Router

A Sentient Sword harvests Spiritus far more efficiently than a thrown dagger, and grows stronger the more will you feed it. An optional but potent early investment.

Asks for: Sentient Sword

Fifty-two runes, pillars crowned in Blood Stained Glass and corners of Bloodstone Brick, raise the altar to Tier III. Here you forge the Magus Orb of Vitae, and the Ritual Diviner [Dusk].

Asks for: Magus Orb of Vitae, Ritual Diviner [Tenebrae]

The Highway to Hell ritual tears open a permanent gate to the Endless Realm. Come armed and armored; the realm does not suffer the unprepared. As you progress you will see a message about a rift opening or creatures stirring in the depth. This means new door types will begin to be available like the mines entrance. Make sure to select those keys when opening whenever available.

Asks for: Standard Dungeon Key

With the Dusk Diviner, the Ritual of Sentient Evolution raises your armour's cap from 100 to 300 points. The Sentient Extraction ritual strips upgrades into Tomes you can bank in a Training Bracelet.

Burn Spiritus in the Vas Maleficum and the air of the chunk grows thick with will. Read it with the Spiritus Aura Gauge.

Asks for: Spiritus Crucible

Tau Oil is a refining reagent. It upgrades your Athanor's Cutting Fluid from Basic to Intermediate, and it is the base for the extended and greater anointments that keep your blades and bows potent far longer. It also lets you make Spiritus Catalysts which can coax Spiritus Crystals into growing.

Asks for: Tau Oil

Crystal Catalyst can accelerate the growth of a similarly aspected crystal cluster. So if you use a raw calayst on a raw crystal it will grow substantially faster. If you use an aspected catalyst however it will change the type of the growing crystal into the new aspected type.

Asks for: Raw Crystal Catalyst

Something runs the Mines, and it does not clock out. The Foreman is a Daemonium Doloris swollen with authority: six hundred hearts of spite and a key no one else carries. Take the Mine Entrance Key from him.

Asks for: Mine Entrance Key

Mine the veins the Foreman guarded. Demonite is the only honest source of Hellforged metal, the capstone material for the ultimate altar tiers.

Asks for: Raw Demonite

Past a Spatial Distortion lies the entrance to the Mines. Mine Dungeon Keys open the way inward, toward the veins of Demonite. The Daemonium that haunt these halls are no reskinned villagers. Learn them by killing them.

Asks for: Mine Dungeon Key

A hundred runes and Hellforged Block set at the compass points raise the altar to Tier IV, home of the Dominus Orb of Vitae and the most destructive rites in all of Vitaemancy.

Asks for: Dominus Orb of Vitae, Hellforged Block

The ultimate Ara Vitae. Crystal Clusters crown its pillars; an immense ring of runes girds its foundation. Capacity and crafting power without equal, and the Divinus Orb of Vitae to wield it. You came asking what power costs. You know now: everything, paid a drop at a time, until the asking and the answering are the same act.

Asks for: Divinus Orb of Vitae, Crystal Cluster

Inscribe upgrades onto your shell with Upgrade Tomes. Right-click to add a level; sneak and use to add the maximum at once. Body Builder, Repair, Fierce Strike, Dwarven Might: build the body you need.

Asks for: Upgrade Tome

Hellforged parts will allow you to maximize your runes. Upgrading them with hellforged parts will double the value they previously provided to your altar.

Asks for: Hellforged Parts

Brew an Arcane Scribe Tool in the Tabula Vitae. Strike the ground with it and a circle of power awakens: the Alchemy Array. It accepts two offerings. Some combinations yield crafted objects, others invoke immediate effects upon the world.

Asks for: Arcane Scribe Tool

Your first sigil comes from the Alchemy Array. The Divination Sigil reads the well of Anima within you and the EV held in an altar before you. The Seer's Sigil reads an altar in detail: its progress, EV per tick, and charge reserve. Invaluable when building toward higher tiers. You cannot manage what you cannot measure.

Asks for: Divination Sigil, Seer's Sigil

Every Tabula Vitae reagent is a sigil waiting to happen. Water that never runs dry, lava on demand, a void that swallows fluids, haste, magnetism, hastened growth. Scribe the trades that suit you.

Asks for: Sigil of the Fast Miner, Sigil of the Green Grove, Lava Sigil, Sigil of Magnetism, Void Sigil, Water Sigil

Where spiritus runs thickest, the Crystallarium Maleficum seeds a cluster. This new cluster will grow over time by absorbing spiritus of it's type from the Aura. You can move the cluster off the Crystallarium once it forms to allow more to grow. The aura must be fully saturated with 100 of that type or the crystal will not grow!

Asks for: Crystallarium Maleficum, Raw Crystal Cluster

Crystals don't grow from nothing; they grow out of the Spiritus Aura, an invisible miasma measured per chunk, capped at 100 per Aspect. Fill a chunk's Aura by burning Spiritus in a Vas Maleficum (feed it a charged gem, loose Spiritus, or crystals of any Aspect). Read the local concentration with a Spiritus Aura Gauge (sneak for exact 0-100 numbers per Aspect).

Asks for: Spiritus Crystal

Raw will bends to purpose. With a catalyst and an Animus Mote drawn from a Daemonium Animaris, a Raw cluster becomes Ruina, Nihilum, Vindicta, or Invictus, each its own cruelty and each reshaping how your Sentient Tools behave.

Asks for: Spiritus Invictus Crystal, Spiritus Nihilum Crystal, Spiritus Ruina Crystal, Spiritus Vindicta Crystal

The Crystallum Fractura is ideal for automating will. It will double the speed that crystals of all types grow at and will automatically harvest them when grown. For each fully-grown crystal in range that it can afford it applies scaling Fortune based on the chunk's Raw Spiritus when harvesting.