Video Game / Botania

Botania is a Minecraft Game Mod based upon the Forge API, made by the Portuguese modder Vasco "Vazkii" Lavos.

It is a magic mod commonly described as Magitek despite its core focus: magic from flowers, sometimes known as botanurgy or botanism. Botania is considered an unique mod in the Minecraft modding community due to its unique design, almost complete reliance on in-world interactions and near-absence of GUIs. Almost all the information needed to learn the mod is contained in the Lexica Botania, which provides the player with item documentation, tutorials, challenges and backstory. The only world generation addition, other than dungeon loot, is the 16 colors of Mystical Flowers, which can be harvested from the world and plucked for petals. While the petals can be ground down with a pestle and mortar to be used as dyes, which can help since some vanilla dyes are harder to source than others, the most important use for the petals is in the Petal Apothecary, where Mystical Flower petals can be arranged in water and combined with seeds, making new flowers for harvesting, gathering and using Mana.

The most basic flower is the Pure Daisy, the only functional flower that does not consume Mana - it slowly "purifies" stone and wood into Livingrock and Livingwood, two basic crafting materials for the mod. One of the most essential blocks is the Mana Spreader, made from Livingwood, any petal and gold. Mana is stored in Mana Pools, which can infuse items with Mana to create new ones, as well as provide Mana to functional flowers - flowers that use Mana to perform various functions - from heating furnaces and fertilizing plants to killing hostile mobs on sight and turning stone into ores. The mod also introduces three new metals - Manasteel, Terrasteel and Elementium. Manasteel is the simplest one to make - simply infuse iron with Mana in a pool. Terrasteel is far more difficult to obtain - it takes a Mana Diamond, a Mana Pearl, a Manasteel ingot and half a mana pool, but making at least one ingot is necessary to open a portal to Alfheim, the world of the elves. The link is too weak to allow transport of living beings, but items can go through, allowing for the trading of items between Minecrafters and Elves, for example two Manasteel for one Elementium. As the player transfers their Lexica Botania through the portal, many descriptions of advanced technology and secrets of the universe's history unfold in newly added pages.

As of 2023/05/28, the mod's most recent version is 1.19.2-439, available for Forge, Fabric and Quilt. More info and downloads can be found at http://botaniamod.net.

As it can be quickly spoiled by various means, non-Gaia tier Elven Knowledge is unmarked.

---

This game mod contains examples of:

• Anti-Frustration Features: Some items in the mod mainly serve to make things more convenient for the player. The Assembly Halo functions like a portable crafting table that can save some recipes, The Slime in a Bottle helps you find slime chunks, the Soulscribe kills Endermen in two hits for getting ender pearls more easily, and the Worldshaper's Sextant makes it easier to build circles, to name a few.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Mana - it is "an ethereal substance that can take on a somewhat physical form" (Lexica Botania excerpt) and powers almost every single item in the game. It can power various magical items such as staves and magical jewellery, infuse itself into items to create others, regenerate tools and armor made from the magical alloys and sustain a weak link between the Minecraft world and Alfheim.
• Blow You Away: The Daffomill uses mana to create wind to push entities.
• Boring, but Practical: The Endoflame is a somewhat early-game generating flower that uses combustible fuel to produce Mana. Thanks to the ubiquity, scalability, output and easy maintenance of tree farms in numerous mods including Botania itself, players of this mod, especially on large modpacks, will find themselves spamming Endoflames and supplying them charcoal whenever a larger task is to be done, such as bulk Terrasteel making, supplying automatic Botanical Breweries for Incense Sticks or unlocking the Terra Shatterer, sometimes even if a modpack makes automating stronger flowers easy. Their potential for abuse is even lampshaded by the Endoflames' Flavor Text, which says "Squirting Lag".
  • Endoflames are so popular due to a number of factors. They're easy to make - 2 brown petals, gray petal, red petal, that's it. They've got reasonable output, providing 2 Mana units per tick^{Mana units?} A Mana Pool holds 1 million Mana units, the lowest distinguishable amount of Mana – which is imposed by the code, as Mana is handled in integers through half of the fuel item's furnace burn time, so a charcoal piece burns for 40 seconds and makes 1600 Mana units. 8 Endoflames with Charcoal dropped in the middle every 5 seconds or so provide the maximum Mana throughput that a single basic Mana Spreader can handle, so it's easy to put 32 Endoflames down and rig them to a Mana Pool, providing 64 Mana units per tick and filling a whole Pool in just over 13 minutes while consuming a large but very manageable amount of charcoal (625 pieces).
• Cast from Calories: Performed by two generating flowers, of all things. The Gourmaryllis and Kekimurus can digest food and turn it into mana. The former takes any food a player can eat, with mana output quadratically proportional to hunger value and slightly increasing with diet variety, sharply decreasing if the same thing is fed over and over, while the latter eats cake specifically with much better efficiency than you'd get off similar ingredients from the Gourmaryllis.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: While not a rule, the colors of flowers frequently hint towards their uses. For example, the Daybloom is yellow and makes power from sunlight. The Nightshade is black-and-purple and generates power from moonlight. The Agricarnation is floral-green and fertilizes flowers.
• Color Motif: Combined with Rainbow Motif - the mod is based on the 16 colors of Mystical Flowers.
• Commonplace Rare: Elven Knowledge uses this as an explanation for why Elven Trade is possible. Though Elven Trade resources are more powerful, Elves value Minecraftian resources very much for aesthetic purposes and because they're at least equally important for magic^note as can be attested to by how necessary materials like manasteel and livingwood are to making even the most basic of mana equipment, but are outright nonexistent in Alfheim.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Very much the spirit of the entire mod. The most simple that it gets is using furnace fuel to power an Endoflame, and even with that, it takes more nuance than just "throw coal at it and hope for the best". Pretty much every other flower requires out-of-the-box thinking to use, much less automate. Botania even encourages this, as a section of the Lexica Botania is a checklist of things possible to do using just the mod, and many of the higher tier challenges will require understanding what each flower and apparatus can do.
• Disc-One Nuke: Downplayed by Terrasteel equipment. While not early-game as the manufacture takes a lot of Mana, as well as needing mana pearls and mana diamonds to make the terrasteel required, Terrasteel tools and armor are pre-Alfheim and very powerful - the Terra Shatterer is an Obsidian-tier pickaxe with broad mining (enabling 3x3 broad mining costs only half of what making the Shatterer costs in the first place), the Terra Truncator is a fast axe that can chop down whole trees and the Terra Blade is a sword with damage equivalent to a Diamond one and the ability to cast Sword Beams. Terrasteel armor is even more powerful - a full set gives a 20% Mana discount on rods and Baubles, boosted natural regeneration and passive Mana generation similarly to the Bands of Aura while providing Diamond-tier protection.
  • However, it is commonly advised to stave off making a full Terrasteel armor set until the Gaia Guardian II is to be fought, as Elementium is not only cheaper, but superior in multiple situations. As such, Terrasteel equipment is somewhat Awesome, but Impractical until Botania late-game, especially if a mod providing Diamond-tier powered armor without such a big resource cost is installed alongside this mod.
• Does Not Like Spam: Implied for the elves. If you teleport bread through the Alfheim portal, the portal will explode. This cannot be attributed to the elves having celiac disease, as nothing else, not even cake or raw wheat, inspires such a reaction.
• Easter Egg: They contain some of the most notable shout-outs in the game.
  • In the Miscellanous section, there is an entry called "Numerical Mana". In versions for Minecraft 1.12.2 and older, if the player clicks on it, the Annoying Dog absorbs the entry! Currently, the entry works normally but all its text says is "no".
  • Vazkii's player head can be crafted by combining sixteen pink mystical petals in an apothecary.
  • Vazkii has inserted this kind of detail in the configuration file, which most would consider the driest areas in mods. Modpack makers and savvy modded Minecraft players can spot this in the config next to a setting called "spreader.posShift".
  Do not ever touch this value if not asked to. Possible symptoms of doing so include your head turning backwards, the appearance of Titans near the walls or you being trapped in a game of Sword Art Online.
  • In the Lexica Botania, use your keyboard to type in the Konami Code. It used to play a snippet of "Before My Body is Dry", Ryuko's theme from Kill la Kill. Later on, somewhere in one of many versions of r1.8 it was replaced with a snippet of The Time Is Now, before finally settling on the chorus of Brain Power by NOMA, together with "lyrics" scrolling horizontally.
  • The single hardest-to-get easter egg in the whole mod is the Flügel Tiara's "The One" wings, a.k.a. Matrix wings. To unlock them, you need to give any such tiara a very specific name on an anvil. Only way to figure out said name on your own is to guess, even if you look at the game's code and try to use an off-the-shelf hash bruteforcer, as the name is hidden behind a hash made with a combination of SHA-256 and a custom text scrambler known in the code as dontRainbowTableMeOrMySonEverAgain, and the code checks whether the name's hash matches the stored one. This may have been once meant as a prize in a giveaway where the winner would get the code, but the giveaway never happened and the unlock requirements were cracked independently. For those willing to take hints, it's 30-ish characters long but it's a proper sentence in Japanese romaji, related to Vazkii's interests. For those unwilling to go through the trouble of guessing away at that, the required name is Kimi no Kokoro wa Kagayaiteru Kai?
• Elemental Crafting: Sort of. This mod introduces three new tool metals, Manasteel, Terrasteel and Elementium. They are used for different tiers of tools, but are very common crafting ingredients.
• Energy Bow: The elven Crystal Bow conjures arrows out of mana, allowing for theoretically infinite firing.
• Everything's Better with Rainbows: Appears in many later-game items, signifying their power. For example, the Spectrolus generates a very fair amount of Mana if provided with all 16 wool colors equally, in sequence, by metadata order, which is far from an easy task to fully automate, but can be supplied with nothing but a large herd of sheep. Its head looks like a rainbow-colored funnel. Additionally, the Gaia Spirits are used to make the mod's most powerful items and faintly glow the colors of the rainbow.
  • The Elven-tier item called the Rod of the Bifrost flashes the colors of the rainbow. In reference to the actual bridge Bifrost, it can make rainbow bridges across gaps. It can also turn Alfglass, Livingrock and Mana Pools into their animated rainbow versions.
• Fantastic Flora: The whole premise of the mod is about fantastical flowers with various magical effects.
• Flavor Text: Added to every flower's tooltips and almost every Lexica Botania entry, providing most of the mod's Shout-Outs.
• Gameplay Automation: As with a good chunk of Minecraft mods - Botania automation, however, rather than providing "magic blocks" like many tech mods tend to do, takes reasonable Redstone engineering skills and some ingenuity to use fully. For example, a Drum of the Gathering wired to a weighted pressure plate and a set of Hopperhocks can be used to make a milk farm, useful for providing cake to the Kekimurus, an Elven-tier flower that generates Mana from cake, while later-game, a Bore spreader lens, Hopperhocks, Rannuncarpi, optimally with a Warp lens (Elven tier) added to the Bore lens and Force Relays laid out, optionally sped up with an Agricarnation can be used to make an effective tree farm, where the wood can be sent to Endoflames to provide renewable power.
• Genius Bonus: Well and truly invoked in a late-game flower (being Gaia-tier, it's a spoiler). One of the flowers you can make using Gaia spirits is the Dandelifeon, a powerful generating flower acknowledged by Vazkii as a potential Game-Breaker. The flower's mechanics are based on Conway's Game of Life. Cells are represented by the very fragile Cell Blocks that only the flower can move once placed. Modified rules are used where cells have a set age based on idle time and parents' age. Cells that hit the 3x3 center die, making Mana - the older the cell, the bigger the payout. It's perfectly possible to find patterns on the Internet, but the flower is supposed to be practically restricted to players with the free time and knowledge to work their way around a cellular automaton problem.
• Great Big Book of Everything: Played with. The Lexica Botania is the most important part of the mod, providing info about how botanurgy works, how to get started and progress, how every block and item in the mod works, and many others.
  • The Lexica is not omniscient, but it describes every non-secret feature of the mod. It comes closer to this trope when it is given to the Elves to fill out via an Alfheim Portal, as then it describes almost every single thing Botania provides. Being hidden until a fair bit through the mod (Terrasteel is a prerequisite for the Portal), a lot of Elven Knowledge can be considered spoilers, including what makes this trope straighter in the Elven Tier - the Norse Mythology-inspired backstory, as described in detail by the entry Elven Lore – The Shattering.
• Hurricane of Puns: Many of the flower names consist of an actual flower name and a reference to the flower's purpose, e.g. the Rannuncarpus^note Ranunculus (buttercup genus) + carpus (wrist) uses items on blocks the way a player's hand would, the Hydroangea^note hydrangea + "hydro" generates Mana from water, the Narslimmus^note narcissus + slime needs to be placed in a slime chunk to generate Mana and the Orechid creates ores in its respective stone type if provided with lots of Mana.
• Interface Spoiler: Not by itself, but if Not/Just Enough Items or any such mod is installed, all later-game items can be seen and the flowers' purposes can be guessed, due to how the flowers are named. In some versions of Botania, even one-sentence summaries of the Lexica Botania entries can be seen via NEI.
• Mana: An uncommon variant - in Botania, Mana seems to be a physical substance to an extent. It can exist in liquid form, in which it is stored in Mana Pools and can be ingested as Mana in a Bottle, which provides highly randomized effects upon drinking. Mana is also implied to be in gaseous form when moving out of spreaders.
• Magical Accessory: The different belts, rods, amulets etc. Ostensibly called Baubles, which is not a botanurgist term, but rather a name originally taken from the prerequisite Baubles API made by Azanor, the creator of Thaumcraft — this name holds on as an Artifact Title, but "trinkets" is preferred and "curios" is equally valid since the abandonment of said API. Rings range from the simple Bands of Mana, which store Mana, to the Ring of Chordata, which boosts the Oxygen Meter and also improves the wearer's underwater speed and agility until taken off. Amulets are slightly less common, but a powerful one appears far into late-game - the Flügel Tiara. There are also the belts, such as the Sojourner's Sash.
• Mage Marksman: The Mana Blaster is essentially a Magitek gun. Normally, it functions like a portable mana spreader and does not deal damage, but you can add lenses to it to make it damage enemies, break blocks, or even cause explosions.
• Magitek: Despite Botania having all the looks of a magic mod, it's closer to a tech mod mechanically and provides functionality expected from tech mods, such as various forms of farming automation, wireless linking between inventories, or even remote requesting of items from distant inventories and requests for items to be crafted using the Corporea Index, similarly to mods like Applied Energistics 2.
  • Vazkii, the developer of Botania, has directly stated that Botania is a tech mod "themed around natural magic".
  • If any RF-based tech mod is installed, the Mana Fluxfield is unlocked. If a spreader is aimed at the Fluxfield, the block starts generating RF power, therefore providing a novel way to power other mods' machines.
• Meaningful Name: The peculiar flower names all allude to the flowers' purposes.
• Mirror Boss: The Gaia Guardian, who copies the summoner's skin, but highly darkened and with noise. Also a difficult boss needed to access the endgame.
• Norse Mythology: Draws upon this throughout the mod, most notably in Elven Lore - The Shattering, an Elven Knowledge entry that describes the backstory of the world and how the Minecraftian realm came to be split from the Elven realm. See the entry for World Sundering.
• Obvious Rule Patch: In earlier verisons, players tended to skip the Gameplay Automation aspect of Botania and instead spam Dayblooms and Nightshades, which generated power passively. In later versions, these flowers were nerfed to decay after a while, and eventually were removed completely.
  • The Gaia Guardian disables creative mode flight and confines you to a specfic area, making it harder to cheese in a modpack than most bosses are.
• Our Elves Are Different: Little information is given on the elves. They live in Alfheim, one of the realms of norse myth. According to the Lexicon entry Elven Lore – The Shattering, a massive event occurred many millenia before the game's events, where worlds completely separated and got imbued with Mana. They are implied to be creative and artistically skilled. Their world's unique items are notably pastel and rainbow in coloration, most notably the pink metal Elementium.
• Potion-Brewing Mechanic: The Botanical Brewery is a vast upgrade to the vanilla brewery, which makes reusable brews instead of potions. Needed are potion ingredients (for Brews with vanilla equivalents, mostly the same ingredients are used), Mana as a solvent to increase efficiency and a Managlass Vial or Alfglass Flask. Every brew made has multiple doses in the container - a Vial can store 4 doses and a Flask can store 6 doses. Its only relative limitations are that most effects are locked to Tier 2 potion equivalents and harming potions can't be made. However, the Botanical Brewery's Brews access to many effects not provided by potions, such as Absorption and Haste.
  • The Complex Brews entry details a special set of Brews. These have more varied ingredients and provide more complex effects. A comprehensive list of all the brews that the Lexica Botania describes: Brew of Overload^effect somewhat cheap, provides a set of buffs and a set of debuffs; cause for latter implied to be due to the drinker's body being overexerted, Brew of Crossed Souls, Brew of Feather Feet^effect complete Falling Damage immunity, Brew of Crimson Shade^effect makes hostile mobs spawn regardless of conditions such as light level in a 64-block radius, Brew of Vanity's Emptiness^effect opposite of the Brew of Crimson Shade: prevents hostile mob spawns in a 128-block radius, Brew of Marine Allure^effect modifies chances in fishing, decreasing junk chances and increasing treasure chances; in more recent versions, it instead doubles the tick rate of fishing, making them bite twice as often, Brew of Absolution^effect removes all potion effects on the player, similarly to Milk, including positive effects, so be careful, Brew of Sane Thought^effect provides Thaumcraft compatibility by applying the Warp Ward effect, requires Purifying Bath Salts from the mod.
• Power Crystal: Many items in the mod are based on two Mana-infused crystalline items, Mana Diamonds and Mana Pearls. This most notably includes the Mana Tablet, the basic portable Mana storage medium, Bands of Mana, which are Mana tablets worn as rings, and all items based on complex runes named after the Seven Deadly Sins.
• Reference Overdosed: As evidenced by the sheer amount of Shout-Outs, to the point where a majority of the Lexica Botania's entries has at least one each. The mod's creator is a self-admitted Otaku.
• Serial Escalation: One of the Terrasteel tools, the Terra Shatterer, is an upgradeable Obsidian-tier pickaxe. It features an AOE mode where it mines big amounts of terrain. At base level, this effect is unavailable and it needs to be unlocked by infusing Mana. There is a catch: there is a definite lot of Mana involved. The Terra Shatterer's AOE level is marked by a rank, starting at D for base level. Upgrading to Rank C (1x3 coverage) doesn't take a lot of Mana relative of how much was needed to produce the Terrasteel. Rank B (3x3 coverage), however, takes a whole Mana Pool to make. For every next rank, the cost increases tenfold, culminating at a thousand Mana Pools for Rank SS (9x9 coverage).
  • Can be pushed even one tier beyond that with the Ring of Thor, one of the Relics of Aesir available from the Gaia Guardian II, which increases a held Terra Shatterer's range tier by 1 and allows it to dig in three dimensions. If held with a Rank SS Terra Shatterer, this increases the area to 11x11x11.
• Situational Sword: One of the items in the mod is the Soulscribe, a dagger which can kill Endermen, and only Endermen, in two hits.
• Sprint Shoes: The Sojourner's Sash acts like this, giving the player a speed and jump boost, as well as step-assist while worn.
• Shout-Out: Numerous enough to have their own page.
• Summoning Ritual: Exactly one, in two flavors, needed for late-game: the two-tier Ritual of Gaia, the prerequisites for which involve Elven trade, a Nether star from the vanilla Optional Boss and a terrasteel ingot, the last of which gets consumed. Summoned is the Gaia Guardian, this mod's Final Boss, who looks like the summoner with a much darker skin. It can and will teleport, leaving behind Gaia Traps, gas clouds that inflict Blindness and fourth level Wither. It can also lift and drop the player to inflict large amounts of Falling Damage, as well as spawn gray Pixies to attack the player. It is frequently recommended that players summon the stronger Gaia Guardian II after their first Guardian kill, which is even faster and stronger, and this version's summoning takes 4 Gaia Spirits, but the upgraded boss drops 8 more Spirits and also drops the Relics.
• Take That!: The Flavor Text in the Mana Tablet's Lexica Botania entry says "Don't put it in your pocket, it might bend", referencing Bendgate, the scandal surrounding the iPhone 6 Plus hardware issue that made it bend when put into skinny jeans' back pockets or under pressure from sitting.
• Tech Tree: This mod has a visible "magic tree" without officially labelled tiers.
  • The first tier starts when the player starts putting flowers to use and goes towards making the first portion of Mana, which requires simple generating flora like Endoflames to produce, Mana Spreaders (requiring gold) to transfer and Mana Pools to store.
  • The second tier is when the player has access to basic Mana infusion thanks to a Mana Pool. This tier allows more variance in terms of available flowers. The first magical equipment is available here, as well as the first Mana storage.
  • The third tier starts when the Runic Altar is created, allowing the creation of runes. This is where branching is apparent, as many new parts of the mod become available: numerous Baubles, Terrasteel (usable both for Bauble/rod upgrades and and powerful pre-Elven tools and armor), the very useful Botanical Brewery and many more flowers.
  • The fourth tier is the Elven tier, which starts when the player creates a Portal To Alfheim and performs Elven Trade. This tier unlocks the next two Power Crystals, Pixie Dust and Dragonstone, as well as Elementium. This allows wonders such as using Sparks to combine and manage Mana in Pools, creating many more items like the Rod of the Bifrost, utilizing wireless inventory connection via Red String or complex item networks not unlike those of Applied Energistics 2 using the Corporea Index. By this point, as the items are only revealed by the Lexica Botania when filled with Elven Knowledge by trading, most things unlocked in the Elven tier are vaguely spoilers, though most modpacks already provide Interface Spoilers thanks to NEI.
  • The final tier, home to almost every Infinity +1 Sword in the mod, is the Gaia tier, unlocked by performing the Elven-tier Ritual of Gaia, slaying the Gaia Guardian and gathering Gaia Spirits. This unlocks items such as the Flügel Tiara, the elusive Shard of Laputa used to lift big amounts of landmass into the air, top-tier Mana Spreaders and the most powerful generating flower, the Dandelifeon which can fill whole Mana Pools in a short time, but needs a particularly brainy player to be used effectively. Even further down this road, performing the second-tier Ritual of Gaia lets you get the Relics, very powerful items that drop by chance from the Gaia Guardian II, such as the Pinkinator (a gun that turns Withers pink and makes their stars easily harvestable, in reference to Minecraft 2.0) and various rings named after Norse Mythology gods that give the player lots and lots of abilities.
• Video Game Flight: The Rod of the Skies comes close. If provided with a bit of Mana from a tablet, it can propel the player into the sky.
  • Later-game, the Flügel Tiara does this far more powerfully. It provides the player with 30 seconds of creative flight time, or permanent flight with triple mana usage after the first minute if the Eye of the Flügel is equipped, allows gliding in a way that would be later replicated by the Elytra in vanilla Minecraft and can recharge when the player is on the ground or gliding. In Minecraft, flight in Survival mode is somewhat disbalancing as discussed on the Game Breaker subpage for sandboxes, so end-game materials are needed - Gaia Spirits and Ender Air.
• World Sundering: Elven Lore – The Shattering details how the Nine Worlds of Norse Mythology were split from each other, starting with an earthquake induced by Thor shattering the Bifrost. This collapsed most of Nidavellir, left Jotunheim a Shattered World whose population was massacred to be never seen again, and sent Muspelheim falling into Midgard, killing off the population of the latter in a blaze of fire. Alfheim's Sylph emissary to Asgard saw the original event, and on her command the elven population of Midgard was evacuated in time, leaving behind enough mana to later rejuvenate Midgard into what is most likely the Minecraftian world, but not before Alfheim lost its connection to the other realms.