It looked like a perfect planet. Plans to make a colony ship started that day. But now that we’ve arrived, it’s clear that things are not as they first appeared. A seething, teeming purple biomass covers the surface, spewing forth malign alien entities that cruelly murdered the initial scouts. We aren’t sure if the scans were wrong or if Space Command was just lying to us, but this is not the paradise we were promised.
We’re sending you down to the surface as our last attempt before giving up and taking the Jaded and her colonists back to Homeworld. We’ve got little to offer you besides a glass bioshelter to keep the aliens out. We’re only willing to invest so much more into what will probably be a failed expedition. But if you’re resourceful and lucky, perhaps we can find a way to make this colony work after all.
Blightfall is a modpack for Minecraft that combines exploration, technology, and magic. Unlike most other modpacks, Blightfall is constructed and crafted around an intricate plot that only gets deeper and deeper as you play. Much of Blightfall's gameplay revolves around and expands upon concepts from Thaumcraft, so tropes from there apply here. You play as a member of a colonizing ship's crew, and are sent down to the surface of an alien world in an attempt to turn it into a flourishing colony. Nearly all of the planet is covered in a visceral purplish biomass that renders it almost uninhabitable. As you adventure and explore, you will come across many different structures and uncover the mystery behind the Blight and what it did to this world.
Blightfall is one of the main modpacks included in the Technic Launcher. Its web page can be found here.
Blightfall provides examples of the following tropes:
- Accidental Discovery: Wanting to make a journal for experiments with the planet's unusual energy field, The Paranormalist instructs you to build a bookshelf and tap it with a wand. This instead creates the Thaumonomicon, an in-universe textbook for Thaumcraft.
- Looking for an End Portal can lead you to Archmage Xillith's hideout in the Last Millennium. Since end materials are available in eerie biomes, there's no real reason to go looking for the End.
- Aerith and Bob: Near the Spires scouting point was a deployment point for one of the doomed Jaded scout teams. According to their tombstones, their names were James and Zank.
- Alien Kudzu: The eponymous Blight, otherwise known as Taint. It takes over mobs and even damages you if you touch it.
- After the End: The planet is covered in a deadly Alien Kudzu. It's your job to clean it up.
- All There in the Manual: The backstory behind the Jaded's initial attempts at colonization are elaborated upon here.
- Better the Devil You Know: So you've just purified an entire location? Don't Celebrate Just Yet: with the influence of taint removed, normal hostile mobs can spawn. That being said, they are much easier to deal with than the tainted creatures.
- Big Book Of Everything: Thaumcraft's Thaumonomicon and Botania's Lexica Botania.
- Notably, the Lexica Botania can only be found among loot chests, and must be translated before you can read it.
- Body Horror: The Taint can infest living creatures. It is not pretty.
- Boring, but Practical: Food-wise, emergency rations are this. They cost a small amount of reputation to buy from the supplier, they restore about two and a half bars of hunger, and best of all, they are unaffected by the diminishing returns mechanic that affects all other food.
- Putting cake on the floor in block form lets you eat it without diminishing returns.
- For transport, Boats. Taint does not spread across water, and there aren't any aquatic enemies. In addition, travelling by water means you won't have to deal with taint poison you normally have to deal with if you were travelling on ground.
- Farming barley. The Colonist will repeatedly buy 4 stacks of bread for 9 reputation, making it the easiest way to grind for the Supplier. (Why barley over wheat? Barley has one less growth stage, so it matures faster.)
- Using a water tower covered in hydroangeas to generate mana for Botania, since Blightfall predates the three-day lifespan. Other flowers are faster or more efficient, but hydroangeas are very easy to mass-produce from the very start, and because of their mechanics, it's possible to make them quite compact.
- Boss in Mook Clothing: Some of the unique mobs are this. These include the Tainted Arcanist, Tainted Botanist, and the Tainted Thaumaturge.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: The Paranormalist, despite being so eccentric the rest of the crew only barely tolerates him, is able to decipher the secrets of Thaumcraft and Botania as soon as you send him samples of each magic system.
- Commonplace Rare: "Tech metals", such as copper, tin, and lead, are rarer than diamonds! Thankfully, if you turn in each type of tech ore, the crew on the Jaded can point you towards some spots where they are plentiful.
- Materials gained by defeating hostile mobs are harder to come by than usual thanks to most of the map being tainted. You'll need to find spawners to reliably stock up on rotten flesh and bones, and gunpowder will remain scarce until you start getting large areas cleaned.
- The only way to get Tinker's Construct bacon (not Minecraft pork chops, which are also called "bacon" by players) is by using a tool with parts made from "pig iron" alloy (blood, emeralds, and iron).
- You cannot make floral fertilizer from two dyes and two bonemeal, so to get Botania's mystical flowers, you either have to search the world with the Paranormalist's guidance (the intended method) or make a Jaded Amaranthus (which still requires searching the world for the lime, green, and purple petals, and a source of mana to create a rune of spring).
- Cool Starship: The Jaded. While you don't initially get to look outside, you can explore around the interior.
- Dark Is Not Evil: The Dark One. Despite being an ethereal, creepy, and powerful blood mage, they actively help the player cleanse the world by teaching them the basics of Blood Magic.
- An excessively-warped player. Despite suffering from magical insanity and having delved into forbidden realms of magic, you remain resolute in your goal to purify the world.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Played with. While dying in Blightfall is even less of a loss resource-wise than in Minecraft (You will respawn with your entire inventory and experience), it replaces this loss with a loss in your reputation with the Jaded crew. Your first three deaths can be forgiven, but after that, it's not so easy.
- Determined Homesteader: This is the basis for the game. The entire first phase revolves around the relatively mundane task of creating a sustainable farm within your biodome while all the creepy crawlies are lurking outside the glass.
- Didn't See That Coming: "Known Unknowns" variant: The teaser website has the planet scan, which spells out the lack of known plants, animals, and undead, and the excess of an unidentified biomass. So Homeworld and the Jaded crew had evidence that something was there, but they didn't expect it to be as hostile or adaptive as the Taint turned out to be.
- Diminishing Returns for Balance: The more of a certain type of food you eat, the less hunger it refills. Thankfully, there are many, many different food options and emergency rations are exempt from the mechanic entirely.
- Easter Egg: There are several little secrets hidden throughout the map.
- Underground at the Eerie Island, you can find a pocket containing a chest filled with saplings, a Tainted Horiculturist, as well as a sign reading: "Agricultural time capsule. To be opened when the world is healed."
- The one stronghold in the map is instead a portal to Last Millenium. Inside, you can find Archmage Xillith, as well as several items that can help you clean the taint.
- The modpack's creator revealed a Sequel Hook during a player's stream: The gold pile beneath the Black Marketeer's house contains a purchase receipt. He sold the Taint to a weapons company on Homeworld. The sequel was never completed.
- Eldritch Location: The Eerie Island, located south of the continent, is host to some very, very strange phenomena. This includes a high concentration of Sinister nodes, ender stone deposits underground, the Evil Tower of Ominousness in the center of the island, and your character being contacted by The Dark One upon discovering it.
- Equipment-Based Progression: A good metric as to how strong your equipment is, is the material's mining level:
- Soft non-metal (Anything that can be mined by hand)
- Hard non-metal (Stone of various types)
- Soft metal (Copper ore)
- Hard metal (Iron ore)
- Diamond (Diamond ore, what did you expect?)
- Supra-diamond (Obsidian)
- Alien (The harder alien metals, such as Astral Silver)
- Extreme (Void Metal)
- Epic
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Since the tainted land itself damages you, we can add the ground itself trying to kill you.
- Fantasy Gun Control: Averted. Guns from the Custom NPCs mod are craftable, as are bullets. Meaning that you can supplement spell-casting with a gun if you choose, though the bullets requiring gunpowder makes them rather hard to stock up on. Some of the enemies you encounter are Taint-corrupted Jaded scouts, who have their own machine guns.
- Fantastic Science: Upon first uncovering the very basics of Thaumaturgy, one of the Jaded's crew, Dr. Sprouse, devotes himself exclusively to studying the mystical phenomena present around the planet.
- Fantasy Metals: One of the draws of the new planet is that it has a whole variety of previously undiscovered metal minerals. Of the usual suspects, Mithril, Orichalcum, and Adamantine are represented, but the Metallurgy 4 mod adds many, many more, and all of them can be alloyed in some way. Most of the Geologist's quests are to find these new minerals and send samples to him for study. All of the Black Marketeer's quests are about finding buyers for them on Homeworld.
- Fire Purifies: Ignis essentia can be piped into the Dawn Machine to amplify the purifying effect it has.
- Floating Continent: There are three floating islands within the world map. One of these is the Floating City, which contains a massive Info Dump on the backstory for the world.
- Functional Magic: Blightfall includes three main varieties:
- Thaumaturgy, from Thaumcraft.
- Botanical magic, from Botania.
- Blood Magic, from, well, Blood Magic.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: Considering that Minecraft by itself doesn't have much in the way of story, Blightfall builds its story around gameplay mechanics present within both the base game and included mods. This is most prominently seen with the mod Thaumcraft, with the Taint coming straight out of said mod, and the majority of magic being built around Thaumcraft's progression.
- Game Over: Reaching low enough levels of reputation with the Jaded crew will result in them abandoning the mission, rendering the main story unbeatable. You can still explore your world, however.
- Godzilla Threshold: The war with the Dark One drove Archmage Xillith to unleash a fast-acting Taint superweapon.
- A dead NPC named Thyr0rk is found on the flying island near Eerie Island. Judging by his journal, he was trying to escape the spreading Taint by entering the Eldritch Dimension. Since his body is noticeably Taint-free, it's likely he was killed by something from the latter.
- Gone Horribly Right: The Taint was originally made to turn the tide of a war. It worked too well and ended up covering the whole planet.
- Gotta Catch 'Em All: Unlike in Botania, the different colors of mystical flowers required for Botany are only found in specific places, and floral fertilizer only makes the color of the flowers that went into it. While some colors are in easy to find places, others border on Guide Dang It!. Thankfully, if you do certain sidequests, you can get the coordinates of each color.
- Interface Spoiler: The Dark One's reputation meter and quest book page are visible from the start.
- Lethal Lava Land: The Volcano, which obviously has lava nearby, but also has various nether materials available throughout. Once cleansed, it allegedly can even spawn Blazes and Ghasts.
- Loophole Abuse: To enforce using Tinkers Construct tools, building Minecraft-style tools from wood, stone, iron, gold, or diamonds in a crafting table is banned by government mandate in-universe. One of the Instructor's quest chains is to make a similar pick by using unregulated materials in the crafting table, and one of the Dark One's quests is to make a diamond sword by using an alchemist's set, with the explanation that your government only regulates doing so with the crafting table.
- Magitek: With enough study, thaumaturgy can be used to enhance the Matter-Energy storage system from Applied Energistics.
- Much of thaumaturgy results in the creation of magical machines which comes to a head with the Dawn Machine, a Totem of Dawn infused with the power of gears and gizmos, allowing it to perform extra purification with RF power and essentia.
- One of the Paranormalist's quests says that although the planet's natives were masters of thaumaturgy, they didn't have much in the way of automation, something at which Homeworld's technology excels.
- Mundane Utility: Due to the planet's atmosphere disabling standard dynamos, the only way to generate power is through Yellorium fission. This results in using a miniature nuclear reactor to power your oven.
- On the magical side, one can use golems to do many things, from guarding a location, to moving items from one spot to another.
- No Fair Cheating: "Breaking or placing blocks on board the Jaded is prohibited. Violators will be looked at sternly and accused of cheating." The Jaded uses blocks made of precious resources such as diamonds, which would provide a rather unfair advantage if you scavenged them.
- Place of Power: Aura nodes are concentrated areas of magic, which can be drawn from.
- Sidequest: Lots are available. These range from fetch quests, to going to certain coordinates, to defeating a certain amount of different monster types. These are important, since they can give you reputation as well as resources required for progression.
- Series Goal: The main goal of the modpack is to completely clean the continent of taint.
- Shout-Out: The sole stronghold in the map has been converted into a portal to the Last Millenium.
- Technicolor Magic: Purple is heavily associated with thaumaturgy.
- These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The aptly-named forbidden knowledge, which revolves around evil magical phenomena though further study delves into things beyond even the evil we know. Delving too far in forbidden knowledge will result in the main character becoming Warped.
- Too Dumb to Live: Chopping down the Silverwood trees that the biodomes are built around is a really bad idea.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Archmage Xillith misses cake dearly after centuries of hiding in the Last Millennium with only his Ring of Nutrition to sustain him. You can give him one, and he will thank you with daily packages of random essentia and shards.
- Underwater Base: Drop Pod Omega's starting location is completely underwater. It is generally meant to be the hardest thanks to the small amount of farmland and it being a hassle to get in and out. However, there is a Mineshaft available from the base, and a treehouse in a Greatwood tree is pretty close, and has some great stuff for the early game, including a Tool Forge for Tinker's Construct tools.
- Unequal Rites: Judging by their respective entries in the Thaumonimicon, Thaumaturgists tend to look down on Botanists and are generally wary of Blood Mages.
- Unobtanium: The planet was almost abandoned due to scans showing up very little amounts of tech metals, with the mission only continuing due to the insane amount of alien metals waiting to be exploited.
- We Need a Distraction: Upon finding your first Botania flower, several quests will open up where Dr. Sprouse will request several items that they can use to get into the Xenobiologist's lab. Some of the quests, such as asking for some slimes in buckets, imply this.
- Wham Episode: The Floating City is filled with massive revelations for the backstory of the world, with one thing in particular: The Taint was a magically-engineered corruption designed to turn the tide of a war. It worked.
- The Last Milennium, where you meet the man who was presumed dead and inadverdently caused the taint: Archmage Xillith.
- Wham Line: "I am Archmage Xillith, and I was the one who destroyed the world."
- World-Healing Wave: A fully-powered Dawn Machine will purify the Blight in this manner.
- Wrong Context Magic: Homeworld has vanilla Minecraft-style enchanting. The Tainted planet has Thaumcraft (with Thaumic Tinkering), Botania, and Blood Magic. The Jaded crew have no clue what to make of this stuff, and consider the Paranormalist a loony for trying to study it.
