Occultism

Occultism is a Minecraft mod about summoning spirits from the Otherworld and putting them to work. You draw pentacles with chalk, offer items in Sacrificial Bowls and bind spirits into books, and those spirits then chop trees, crush ores, mine for you in another dimension or look after a huge storage system. It’s a magic mod, but a lot of it ends up feeling like tech.

The catch is that almost none of it is visible at the start. The Otherworld is hidden behind ordinary looking blocks, so the first job is always the same one, getting hold of Demon’s Dream Seeds and learning to see what’s really there. After that it’s a fairly steady climb through four tiers of spirits, the Foliot, Djinni, Afrit and Marid.

This guide follows that climb in the order you’ll actually need it, from the first seeds through Spirit Fire, chalk and your first ritual, then on to spirit jobs, mining automation, storage and familiars. It’s written for the 1.20.1 Forge version, which is still the most downloaded one, but the early game plays the same on 1.21.1.

Getting Started with Demon’s Dream

Everything in Occultism starts with Demon’s Dream Seeds. These have a small chance to drop when you break Grass or Tall Grass by hand, around one in fifty, so it’s worth clearing a big grassy patch rather than hunting around. Using Shears doesn’t work, as the seeds only drop when the grass is broken without them.

Plant the seeds on Farmland and they’ll grow into Demon’s Dream plants, which drop Demon’s Dream Fruit and more seeds when fully grown. The crop can be replanted by right-clicking it when it’s ripe, so you don’t have to break and replace it every time. It’s a good idea to get a small farm going early, as you’ll use a lot of fruit.

Your first craft should be the Dictionary of Spirits, which is made from a single Demon’s Dream Seed and a Book. It’s the mod’s in-game guidebook, and it shows the exact layout of every pentacle and ritual. You don’t strictly need it, but building the bigger pentacles without its preview is a lot more painful than it needs to be.

Dictionary of Spirits

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Eating a Demon’s Dream Fruit gives you the Third Eye effect for 15 seconds, but only about 70 percent of the time, and it always gives you Hunger as well. Nine fruit or nine seeds can be crafted into Demon’s Dream Essence, which gives a full minute of Third Eye every time, along with a random chance of some unpleasant side effects like Levitation or Nausea.

Demon's Dream Essence

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Essence is the one to carry around when you’re out looking for Otherworld blocks, since a minute is long enough to actually find and mine a few. The fruit is fine for a quick look, but the missed chance and the short timer mean you’ll end up eating a lot of them, and the Hunger adds up quickly.

What the Third Eye Does

The Third Eye is the whole point of the fruit. With it active you can see the Otherworld blocks that are hiding in the world, and more importantly you can mine them properly. Without it, those same blocks just drop the normal block they’re disguised as, so it’s easy to walk straight past them without ever realizing they were there.

Otherworld trees mostly grow in underground groves between Y 25 and 60, which look like small grassy caves. Iesnium Ore is only found in the Nether, and it needs a special pickaxe even with the Third Eye active, so that one comes a bit later. Silver Ore is a normal ore though, and it’s common in the Overworld.

How to Make Spirit Fire

Spirit Fire is the second thing you’ll need, and it’s how most of the mod’s basic materials get made. To light it, drop a Demon’s Dream Fruit on the ground, then use Flint and Steel or a Fire Charge on the block right next to it. Instead of normal fire you’ll get green Spirit Fire, and the fruit is used up.

Items thrown into Spirit Fire are turned into their Otherworld versions instead of burning. This is how you get most of the mod’s early items, and it’s also a handy way around the Third Eye, since Andesite thrown into the fire comes out as Otherstone and saves you hunting for the hidden stuff.

Otherworld Essence is the better version of Demon’s Dream Essence. It gives the same full minute of Third Eye but with Luck instead of the random bad effects, so once you’ve got Spirit Fire going there’s not much reason to eat the raw essence anymore.

Chalk, Candles and Sacrificial Bowls

Rituals are performed on pentacles, which are patterns drawn on the ground with chalk around a Golden Sacrificial Bowl. Chalk starts out as Impure White Chalk, made from three Burnt Otherstone and three Otherworld Ashes. Burnt Otherstone is just Otherstone smelted in a Furnace, and the ashes come from Otherworld Wood thrown into Spirit Fire.

Impure White Chalk

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Burnt Otherstone

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Impure Chalk has to be purified in Spirit Fire before it can be used. The other colors all start from Impure White Chalk too. Golden Chalk adds Gold Dust and Glowstone Dust, Purple Chalk adds End Stone Dust and two Obsidian Dust, and Red Chalk needs Afrit Essence and Blaze Powder, so that one has to wait until you can summon an Afrit.

The Sacrificial Bowl is made from five Otherstone, and the Golden Sacrificial Bowl is a Sacrificial Bowl surrounded by eight Gold Ingots. The golden one goes in the middle of the pentacle and starts the ritual, while the normal bowls hold the ingredients. You’ll want at least eight or so normal bowls, as some rituals take a lot of items.

Sacrificial Bowl

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Golden Sacrificial Bowl

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Pentacles also use Candles, and any vanilla Candle works. Occultism has its own White Candle made from String and Tallow, and Tallow drops when you kill Pigs, Cows, Sheep and other big animals with the Butcher Knife. That’s four Tallow per animal, which is plenty, so the knife is worth making early even if you use vanilla Candles.

Butcher Knife

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White Candle

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Skulls are the last thing some pentacles need. The Djinni and Afrit layouts use Skeleton Skulls, and the Afrit and Marid ones add Wither Skeleton Skulls, so it helps to start collecting them from the Nether Fortress early. They sit on the ground like any placed Skull, in the spots the Dictionary of Spirits shows.

How Rituals Work

Every ritual follows the same pattern. You build the right pentacle around the Golden Sacrificial Bowl, put the ingredients in Sacrificial Bowls within eight blocks of it, then right-click the Golden Bowl with the ritual’s activation item, which is usually a Book of Binding. The items get pulled out of the bowls one by one while the ritual runs.

Some rituals also need a sacrifice. When that’s the case, you have to kill the listed mob yourself within eight blocks of the Golden Bowl while the ritual is running, so a Chicken or a Cow in a small pen next to the pentacle is the easy way to do it. A mob killed by anything other than a player doesn’t count.

If a ritual won’t start, it’s nearly always the pentacle. The glyphs have to match the layout exactly, including the chalk color, and Candles and Skulls have to sit in the right spots. The Dictionary of Spirits can project the layout into the world, which makes it much easier to see which glyph is missing or in the wrong place.

The good news is that most of a pentacle can stay put once it’s built. Several rituals share the same pentacle, so you only have to swap the items in the bowls and the Book of Binding between runs, and a lot of players end up with a row of finished pentacles side by side for the rituals they use most.

Books of Binding and the Four Spirits

A Book of Binding is what calls a spirit, and there’s one for each of the four tiers. They’re all made from a Taboo Book, Purified Ink and an Awakened Feather, with four dyes deciding which spirit the book is for. White Dye makes a Foliot book, Green a Djinni book and Purple an Afrit book, while the Marid book needs two Orange and two Purple.

Book of Binding: Foliot

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You can also make a Book of Binding: Empty by throwing a Book and Quill into Spirit Fire and then add the dyes to that. After a summoning ritual the book becomes a bound book with the spirit’s name in it, and a bound Foliot or Djinni book can be combined with a tool to make a Book of Calling, which is how you control the spirit’s job.

The Foliot is where everyone starts, and the Summon Foliot pentacle only needs White Chalk and a few Candles, so it’s a good one to build first just to get used to how rituals work. A Djinni needs Purple Chalk, which means a trip to the End for End Stone, while the Afrit and Marid are proper late game spirits.

Spirit Jobs

Summoned spirits aren’t just decoration, they each take a job. The Foliot Lumberjack chops trees near where it’s summoned, replants the saplings and drops the logs in a Chest you choose, and the Foliot Transporter moves items between containers you mark with its Book of Calling. The Janitor picks up items lying on the ground, which is handy near a mob farm.

Book of Calling: Foliot Lumberjack

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Crushers are the job most people want early on. A crusher spirit takes raw ores and turns them into dust, and one Raw Iron already gives two Iron Dust before the spirit’s own bonus is added. The higher the spirit tier, the faster it works and the more dust it gives, so a Marid crusher is one of the best ore doublers in any mod.

The Djinni also has a Machine Operator job, which feeds and empties a furnace or other machine for you, and some Djinni and Afrit rituals change the time of day or the weather instead of summoning a worker. Those are one-off rituals, so the spirit just does its thing and leaves, which makes them a cheap way to skip the night.

Automating Mining with the Dimensional Mineshaft

The Dimensional Mineshaft is Occultism’s answer to automated mining. It’s made in a Djinni crafting ritual, and once it’s placed you put a miner spirit inside it. The spirit then mines in a pocket of the Otherworld and fills the Mineshaft’s inventory with blocks and ores, with no chunk loading or quarry setup, which is why it’s so popular in modpacks.

Miner spirits live in Magic Lamps. The first one, the Miner Foliot, is made from an Empty Magic Lamp, an Iesnium Pickaxe, Raw Iron and Gravel, and each better miner is made by upgrading the previous one in a higher ritual. That means you’ll need Iesnium before you can automate anything, so a trip to the Nether with an Infused Pickaxe comes first.

Iesnium Pickaxe

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Empty Magic Lamp

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The Miner Foliot is a bit disappointing on its own, as most of what it digs up is Stone, Andesite and other common blocks, with ores mixed in now and then. The Ore Miner Djinni is where it gets good, since it only mines ores. Every miner also wears out after a set number of operations, so you’ll need to replace it eventually.

The top tier Master Miner Marid is expensive, needing a Netherite Pickaxe, a Nether Star, a Totem of Undying and Dragon’s Breath on top of the Afrit miner, but it’s the only way to get Ancient Debris without digging for it. For most players the Djinni or Afrit miner is the sweet spot before that.

Dimensional Storage

Occultism’s storage system is built around the Dimensional Storage Actuator, which stores items in a pocket dimension and lets you search and craft from them like other storage mods. It’s crafted from a Dimensional Crystal Matrix and a Storage Actuator Base, both of which are ritual items, so you’ll need a Djinni before you can make it.

Dimensional Storage Actuator

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On its own the Actuator holds 128 slots, but each slot holds up to 1,024 of an item, even things that normally only stack to 16. Storage Stabilizers placed around it add more slots, and there are four tiers. A Tier 1 Stabilizer adds 256 slots and a Tier 4 adds 2,048, so a fully built setup holds an enormous amount.

The Storage Accessor lets you open the system from anywhere, and Stable Wormholes let you reach it from a second terminal. The Foliot Transporter can also feed items straight into it, which pairs nicely with a Dimensional Mineshaft so the ores go straight into storage without you having to empty anything by hand.

Familiars

Familiars are small companion spirits that follow you around and give a passive bonus. They’re summoned with Possession rituals using a Foliot, Djinni or Afrit Book of Binding, and most of them also need a sacrifice. A Familiar Ring can store one familiar and gives you its bonus while you wear it, so you don’t have a crowd of pets following you everywhere.

The Greedy familiar is usually the first one people get, as it only needs a Foliot ritual and a Zombie sacrifice. The Guardian is the one to aim for later though, since it saves you from dying by losing a limb each time, which makes it a sort of reusable Totem of Undying until it runs out of limbs.

Tips

Build a Demon’s Dream farm before anything else. Fruit gets used for Spirit Fire, Spirit Torches and the Third Eye, and nine of them make Demon’s Dream Essence, so running out halfway through setting up is a common early slowdown. A small patch of Farmland with water is plenty to keep up with it.

Throwing Andesite into Spirit Fire is much faster than looking for natural Otherstone. You’ll need a lot of it for bowls, Otherstone Pedestals and chalk, and a Foliot Otherstone Trader ritual can also swap Stone for Otherstone later on, which is worth doing once you’re building bigger pentacles.

Keep a small pen of Chickens and Cows next to your ritual area. A lot of rituals need a sacrifice partway through, and running off to find the right animal while the ritual is ticking along is an easy way to waste the ingredients. Having them close means you just step over and do it.