Love, Thy Name is Transmutation Tablet

Church Catacombs - Mostly Finished

I spent a moment of lull at work today brainstorming about the church, the catacombs, and the hidden nether portal. Struck by a moment of inspiration, I have an amazing plan in the works to make the secret nether portal area even more grand.

Secret Passage - Closed

But for that, I knew I'd need a lot of basalt, and so I went to the volcano to collect some. Even with another volcano close-by, I was still struck by a feeling of remorse as I began to peel away layers of the dark stone. These were the first volcanoes I had ever seen in this world, and I was starting to ruin them.

Secret Passage - Opened

I sat a while and thought about an easy way to get material. My original plan was to make a quarry to collect cobblestone for me, but even that was prohibitively expensive at the moment. That's when I remembered the transmutation tablet.


The Transmutation Tablet is part of the Equivalent Exchange mod. This mod is all about alchemy, and a major facet of it is this very tablet. Things you put into it are "learned" by it. Each item you place also has an "EMC" value. For instance, mossy cobblestone has an EMC of 128, whereas sand has a value of 1. With this tablet you can easily turn any vanilla Minecraft item (and quite a few mod-based items) into other things, as long as you can meet the requirements.

Upgraded Machine Shop

While playing on Wickydoo's SMP server in the past, this mod had a way of allowing people to grief, either on purpose or by accident. And with the tablet, it removed most urge for people to go out and actually search for things. They'd just borrow one from a friend, pop it in so the tablet would learn it, and then create it their own way. Me and Cadloas had a massive read farm that allowed us to quickly meet the EMC requirement of anything we needed to make, even things as expensive as diamonds.

I came to the decision to use a transmutation tablet grudgingly. I don't want to ruin the game for myself, so instead I'm going to use it for one thing and one thing only: turning decorative blocks into other decorative blocks. I have a silver chest nearly full with stacks of sand, totaling almost four thousand. Now I can turn that sand into things like cobblestone and basalt cobblestone, which I can then use to finish work on the church.

In order to make the tablet, though, I needed glowstone. After reading a bit about how nether portals work on the Minecraft wiki, I learned that if a second portal is placed within roughly one thousand blocks from the first one, they should lead to the same portal in the nether. Because of that, I built a temporary portal under the catacombs and collected a stack and a half of glowstone dust. Now I can finally build the MFSU I had originally planned to, and start collecting some serious energy.

Transmutation Tablet Interface

As some of you may be wondering, I decided against using the Technic Pack of mods. There were several reasons; for instance, there was no real way to select which mods I wanted to use and which I didn't. I was forced to use all of the mods that came with the Technic Pack if I wanted to use the provided launcher. The biggest reason, however, was just how system-intensive the mod pack was. While playing Minecraft with the Technic Pack, my Firefox browser lagged heavily and my instant messenger program slowed to a complete crawl.

This doesn't mean that I dislike the Technic Pack, it simply means that I'm unable to use it for various reasons. For now I'll continue playing my dated version of Minecraft and the mods I've been using.