The Ultimate How-To Guide for Blood Magic in Minecraft

Hello! I’m Javier, and today I’m going to teach you everything you need to know to get started with Blood Magic—one of the most powerful, rewarding, and deep magic mods in all of Minecraft.

This guide is filmed and written for Minecraft 1.20, but most versions of Blood Magic are extremely similar. If you’re playing on an older version and things look a bit different, just comment and let me know—I’m happy to make a separate guide.

Let’s begin.

Prefer a video Explanation? Click here -

1. Getting Started – Your First Steps Into Blood Magic

The Sanguine Book (Your Guidebook)

The first thing you’ll need is the Sanguine Scientium, Blood Magic’s official in-game guide.

Craft it with:

Book
Glass

This book contains categories, rituals, crafting, arrays, and everything else—but don’t worry, I’ll walk you through all the essentials right here.

2. Creating Your First Blood Altar & Sacrificial Knife

Blood Magic… well… uses blood. So we start with:

Sacrificial Knife
Blood Altar (Tier 1)

Place the Blood Altar down, hold your sacrificial knife, and right-click to add blood (LP – Life Essence) to the altar.

⚠️ Warning: This costs your health.

Keep filling the altar until it holds enough LP otherwise known as Life points.

3. Crafting Your First Blood Orb

Blood Orbs store LP in something called your Life Network.

For Tier 1, we’re making a:

Weak Blood Orb

Place a diamond in a Tier 1 altar (right click it in).
Ensure 2000 LP is stored
Wait until the transformation completes

Right-click the orb to bind it to yourself.

This creates your personal soul network that sigils and rituals will pull from automatically.

To fill your orb with LP, simply put it into the Blood Altar—your altar empties, and your orb charges.

4. Your First Slate – Blank Slate Crafting

Slates are progression items. For the first one:

Place Stone (not cobblestone) in your altar
Wait until it transforms into a Blank Slate
These are used in runes, tables, forges, sigils and more.

5. The Hellfire Forge – Unlocking Demon Will

To craft advanced items, you need Demon Will.

First, create a Soul Snare (string in a Tier 1 altar).

Find a mob (like a zombie), throw the soul snare at it until you see white particles, then kill it. It will drop Raw Demon Will.

Now craft a Hellfire Forge and begin creating:

Essential early items:

Petty Tartaric Gem (your Demon Will battery)
Sentient Sword
Sentient Scythe
Shaped Charges
Tartaric Gem Upgrades (Petty → Lesser → Common → Greater)

With a Sentient Sword equipped, every mob kill automatically stores Demon Will in your gem.

6. The Alchemy Table – Where the Mod Opens Up

Craft an Alchemy Table using blank slates.

This is where you begin making:

Arcane Ashes
Reagents
Sigils (tools powered by your Life Network)
Potions & salves
Slate-infused vials
Buffs for tools
Ingredient automation

You can also configure input/output sides for automation using pipes—super useful later.

First major craft: Arcane Ashes

Input the ingredients seen on the right into the blue circled slots on the left.

Then use ashes on the floor to create Alchemy Arrays.

7. Alchemy Arrays & Your First Sigils

Arrays allow you to craft or activate magical items by placing:

Arcane Ashes on the ground
One ingredient
A catalyst

Examples:

Spike array
Time/day arrays
Sigils

Early sigils you can craft:

Lava Sigil (place lava source blocks)
Water Sigil (infinite water source equivalent)
Air Sigil (dash mobility)
Divination Sigil (altar info)
Magnetism Sigil
Sigil of the Green Grove
Sigil of the Fast Miner

These draw LP from your Life Network.

8. Upgrading Your Altar – Tier 2, 3, 4 and 5

Progress in Blood Magic is largely based on upgrading your altar.

Tier 2 Altar

Build a ring of 9 Blank Runes under your altar.

Unlocks:

Apprentice Blood Orb
Reinforced Slates
Tier 2 Sigils

Rune Types: (Upgrades). - It’s worth noting some of these can only be used on higher tier altars.

Tier 3 Altar

A more complex multi-block with pillars and glowstone.

Unlocks:

Magician Blood Orb
Imbued Slates
Rituals
Rune of Capacity / Displacement

Rituals begin here—using:

Master Ritual Stone
Ritual Stones
Ritual Diviner
Inscription Tools

Your first ritual should be Hidden Realm, because…

9. The Hidden Realm & Rituals – Unlocking Tau Fruit

The Ritual of the Hidden Realm sends you to a dungeon dimension. (They’re build like altars, and can be visualised through the guidebook in game).

You can also use a Ritual Diviner on a master ritual stone & it will automatically craft the required shape for you, as long as you have the ingredients in your inventory.

Once you have made the Ritual of the Hidden Realm, and entered, you will find the following -

Iron keys
Dungeon doors
Tau Fruit ← you NEED this for later recipes

Plant Tau Fruit and let a mob stand on top of it as it grows.

It will transform into Saturated Tau, a vital mid-game crafting ingredient.

10. The Alchemical Reaction Chamber

This block lets you process materials using cells, water, and special reagents.

Important craft:

Weak Blood Shard

Made using:

Saturated Tau
Sanguine Reverter
Alchemical Reaction Chamber

These shards allow you to build Tier 4 Altars.

11. Tier 4 Altar – Bloodstone & High-Tier Sigils

Build the next altar level using:

Large Bloodstone Bricks
Saturated Tau
Weak Blood Shards

Unlocks:

Master Blood Orb
Demonic Slates
Telos Sigil (teleporting)
Suppression Sigil (fluid control)

Also unlocks Rune of Augmented Capacity and other powerful runes.

12. Entering the Demon Realm – Tier 5 Progression

Use the Ritual Diviner Dusk and activate the Pathway to the Endless Realm ritual.

Inside:

Navigate the dungeon
Use iron keys
Find the Foreman’s Key
Enter the mines
Collect Demonite Ore

Smelt Demonite into Hellforged Ingots, then craft Hellforged Blocks.

These are used for…

13. Tier 5 Altar – The Final Altar

Place four Hellforged Blocks at the corners of the structure.

This is the highest altar level and unlocks:

Aerial Slates
Double-strength runes using Hellforged Components
Peak Blood Magic

At this point, Blood Magic is effectively “completed,” but there are still advanced systems to use.

14. Incense Altar – Supercharging Self-Sacrifice

The Incense Altar massively boosts the amount of LP you generate when using your sacrificial knife.

Build tranquil paths around it to increase its Tranquility score.

A large, natural garden setup gives the best results.

15. Advanced Systems – XP Storage, Ore Processing, and More

Tome of Peritia

Stores XP safely—very handy for death-prone players.

Ore Processing

Blood Magic can generate:

2.5 ingots per raw ore (via ARC)
4.5 ingots per ore block
Or 2 dust with Alchemy → ARC methods

You can scale into full automation if you want.