technic/manual.md

Minetest technic modpack user manual
====================================

The technic modpack extends the Minetest game with many new elements,
mainly constructable machines and tools.  It is a large modpack, and
tends to dominate gameplay when it is used.  This manual describes how
to use the technic modpack, mainly from a player's perspective.

The technic modpack depends on some other modpacks:

*   the basic Minetest game
*   mesecons, which supports the construction of logic systems based on
    signalling elements
*   pipeworks, which supports the automation of item transport
*   moreores, which provides some additional ore types

This manual doesn't explain how to use these other modpacks, which ought
to (but actually don't) have their own manuals.

Recipes for constructable items in technic are generally not guessable,
and are also not specifically documented here.  You should use a
craft guide mod to look up the recipes in-game.  For the best possible
guidance, use the unified_inventory mod, with which technic registers
its specialised recipe types.

ore
---

The technic mod makes extensive use of not just the default ores but also
some that are added by mods.  You will need to mine for all the ore types
in the course of the game.  Each ore type is found at a specific range of
elevations, and while the ranges mostly overlap, some have non-overlapping
ranges, so you will ultimately need to mine at more than one elevation
to find all the ores.  Also, because one of the best elevations to mine
at is very deep, you will be unable to mine there early in the game.

Elevation is measured in meters, relative to a reference plane that
is not quite sea level.  (The standard sea level is at an elevation
of about +1.4.)  Positive elevations are above the reference plane and
negative elevations below.  Because elevations are always described this
way round, greater numbers when higher, we avoid the word "depth".

The ores that matter in technic are coal, iron, copper, tin, zinc,
chromium, uranium, silver, gold, mithril, mese, and diamond.

Coal is part of the basic Minetest game.  It is found from elevation
+64 downwards, so is available right on the surface at the start of
the game, but it is far less abundant above elevation 0 than below.
It is initially used as a fuel, driving important machines in the early
part of the game.  It becomes less important as a fuel once most of your
machines are electrically powered, but burning fuel remains a way to
generate electrical power.  Coal is also used, usually in dust form, as
an ingredient in alloying recipes, wherever elemental carbon is required.

Iron is part of the basic Minetest game.  It is found from elevation
+2 downwards, and its abundance increases in stages as one descends,
reaching its maximum from elevation -64 downwards.  It is a common metal,
used frequently as a structural component.  In technic, unlike the basic
game, iron is used in multiple forms, mainly alloys based on iron and
including carbon (coal).

Copper is part of the basic Minetest game (having migrated there from
moreores).  It is found from elevation -16 downwards, but is more abundant
from elevation -64 downwards.  It is a common metal, used either on its
own for its electrical conductivity, or as the base component of alloys.
Although common, it is very heavily used, and most of the time it will
be the material that most limits your activity.

Tin is supplied by the moreores mod.  It is found from elevation +8
downwards, with no elevation-dependent variations in abundance beyond
that point.  It is a common metal.  Its main use in pure form is as a
component of electrical batteries.  Apart from that its main purpose is
as the secondary ingredient in bronze (the base being copper), but bronze
is itself little used.  Its abundance is well in excess of its usage,
so you will usually have a surplus of it.

Zinc is supplied by technic.  It is found from elevation +2 downwards,
with no elevation-dependent variations in abundance beyond that point.
It is a common metal.  Its main use is as the secondary ingredient
in brass (the base being copper), but brass is itself little used.
Its abundance is well in excess of its usage, so you will usually have
a surplus of it.

Chromium is supplied by technic.  It is found from elevation -100
downwards, with no elevation-dependent variations in abundance beyond
that point.  It is a moderately common metal.  Its main use is as the
secondary ingredient in stainless steel (the base being iron).

Uranium is supplied by technic.  It is found only from elevation -80 down
to -300; using it therefore requires one to mine above elevation -300 even
though deeper mining is otherwise more productive.  It is a moderately
common metal, useful only for reasons related to radioactivity: it forms
the fuel for nuclear reactors, and is also one of the best radiation
shielding materials available.  It is not difficult to find enough uranium
ore to satisfy these uses.  Beware that the ore is slightly radioactive:
it will slightly harm you if you stand as close as possible to it.
It is safe when more than a meter away or when mined.

Silver is supplied by the moreores mod.  It is found from elevation -2
downwards, with no elevation-dependent variations in abundance beyond
that point.  It is a semi-precious metal.  It is little used, being most
notably used in electrical items due to its conductivity, being the best
conductor of all the pure elements.

Gold is part of the basic Minetest game (having migrated there from
moreores).  It is found from elevation -64 downwards, but is more
abundant from elevation -256 downwards.  It is a precious metal.  It is
little used, being most notably used in electrical items due to its
combination of good conductivity (third best of all the pure elements)
and corrosion resistance.

Mithril is supplied by the moreores mod.  It is found from elevation
-512 downwards, the deepest ceiling of any minable substance, with
no elevation-dependent variations in abundance beyond that point.
It is a rare precious metal, and unlike all the other metals described
here it is entirely fictional, being derived from J. R. R. Tolkien's
Middle-Earth setting.  It is little used.

Mese is part of the basic Minetest game.  It is found from elevation
-64 downwards.  The ore is more abundant from elevation -256 downwards,
and from elevation -1024 downwards there are also occasional blocks of
solid mese (each yielding as much mese as nine blocks of ore).  It is a
precious gemstone, and unlike diamond it is entirely fictional.  It is
used in many recipes, though mainly not in large quantities, wherever
some magical quality needs to be imparted.

Diamond is part of the basic Minetest game (having migrated there from
technic).  It is found from elevation -128 downwards, but is more abundant
from elevation -256 downwards.  It is a precious gemstone.  It is used
moderately, mainly for reasons connected to its extreme hardness.

rock
----

In addition to the ores, there are multiple kinds of rock that need to be
mined in their own right, rather than for minerals.  The rock types that
matter in technic are standard stone, desert stone, marble, and granite.

Standard stone is part of the basic Minetest game.  It is extremely
common.  As in the basic game, when dug it yields cobblestone, which can
be cooked to turn it back into standard stone.  Cobblestone is used in
recipes only for some relatively primitive machines.  Standard stone is
used in a couple of machine recipes.  These rock types gain additional
significance with technic because the grinder can be used to turn them
into dirt and sand.  This, especially when combined with an automated
cobblestone generator, can be an easier way to acquire sand than
collecting it where it occurs naturally.

Desert stone is part of the basic Minetest game.  It is found specifically
in desert biomes, and only from elevation +2 upwards.  Although it is
easily accessible, therefore, its quantity is ultimately quite limited.
It is used in a few recipes.

Marble is supplied by technic.  It is found in dense clusters from
elevation -50 downwards.  It has mainly decorative use, but also appears
in one machine recipe.

Granite is supplied by technic.  It is found in dense clusters from
elevation -150 downwards.  It is much harder to dig than standard stone,
so impedes mining when it is encountered.  It has mainly decorative use,
but also appears in a couple of machine recipes.

alloying
--------

In technic, alloying is a way of combining items to create other items,
distinct from standard crafting.  Alloying always uses inputs of exactly
two distinct types, and produces a single output.  Like cooking, which
takes a single input, it is performed using a powered machine, known
generically as an "alloy furnace".  An alloy furnace always has two
input slots, and it doesn't matter which way round the two ingredients
are placed in the slots.  Many alloying recipes require one or both
slots to contain a stack of more than one of the ingredient item: the
quantity required of each ingredient is part of the recipe.

As with the furnaces used for cooking, there are multiple kinds of alloy
furnace, powered in different ways.  The most-used alloy furnaces are
electrically powered.  There is also an alloy furnace that is powered
by directly burning fuel, just like the basic cooking furnace.  Building
almost any electrical machine, including the electrically-powered alloy
furnaces, requires a machine casing component, one ingredient of which
is brass, an alloy.  It is therefore necessary to use the fuel-fired
alloy furnace in the early part of the game, on the way to building
electrical machinery.

Alloying recipes are mainly concerned with metals.  These recipes
combine a base metal with some other element, most often another metal,
to produce a new metal.  This is discussed in the section on metal.
There are also a few alloying recipes in which the base ingredient is
non-metallic, such as the recipe for the silicon wafer.

grinding, extracting, and compressing
-------------------------------------

Grinding, extracting, and compressing are three distinct, but very
similar, ways of converting one item into another.  They are all quite
similar to the cooking found in the basic Minetest game.  Each uses
an input consisting of a single item type, and produces a single
output.  They are all performed using powered machines, respectively
known generically as a "grinder", "extractor", and "compressor".
Some compressing recipes require the input to be a stack of more than
one of the input item: the quantity required is part of the recipe.
Grinding and extracting recipes never require such a stacked input.

There are multiple kinds of grinder, extractor, and compressor.  Unlike
cooking furnaces and alloy furnaces, there are none that directly burn
fuel; they are all electrically powered.

Grinding recipes always produce some kind of dust, loosely speaking,
as output.  The most important grinding recipes are concerned with metals:
every metal lump or ingot can be ground into metal dust.  Coal can also
be ground into dust, and burning the dust as fuel produces much more
energy than burning the original coal lump.  There are a few other
grinding recipes that make block types from the basic Minetest game
more interconvertible: standard stone can be ground to standard sand,
desert stone to desert sand, cobblestone to gravel, and gravel to dirt.

Extracting is a miscellaneous category, used for a small group
of processes that just don't fit nicely anywhere else.  (Its name is
notably vaguer than those of the other kinds of processing.)  It is used
for recipes that produce dye, mainly from flowers.  (However, for those
recipes using flowers, the basic Minetest game provides parallel crafting
recipes that are easier to use and produce more dye, and those recipes
are not suppressed by technic.)  Its main use is to generate rubber from
raw latex, which it does three times as efficiently as merely cooking
the latex.  Extracting was also formerly used for uranium enrichment for
use as nuclear fuel, but this use has been superseded by a new enrichment
system using the centrifuge.

Compressing recipes are mainly used to produce a few relatively advanced
artificial item types, such as the copper and carbon plates used in
advanced machine recipes.  There are also a couple of compressing recipes
making natural block types more interconvertible.

centrifuging
------------

Centrifuging is another way of using a machine to convert items.
Centrifuging takes an input of a single item type, and produces outputs
of two distinct types.  The input may be required to be a stack of
more than one of the input item: the quantity required is part of
the recipe.  Centrifuging is only performed by a single machine type,
the MV (electrically-powered) centrifuge.

Currently, centrifuging recipes don't appear in the unified_inventory
craft guide, because unified_inventory can't yet handle recipes with
multiple outputs.

Generally, centrifuging separates the input item into constituent
substances, but it can only work when the input is reasonably fluid,
and in marginal cases it is quite destructive to item structure.
(In real life, centrifuges require their input to be mainly fluid, that
is either liquid or gas.  Few items in the game are described as liquid
or gas, so the concept of the centrifuge is stretched a bit to apply to
finely-divided solids.)

The main use of centrifuging is in uranium enrichment, where it
separates the isotopes of uranium dust that otherwise appears uniform.
Enrichment is a necessary process before uranium can be used as nuclear
fuel, and the radioactivity of uranium blocks is also affected by its
isotopic composition.

A secondary use of centrifuging is to separate the components of
metal alloys.  This can only be done using the dust form of the alloy.
It recovers both components of binary metal/metal alloys.  It can't
recover the carbon from steel or cast iron.

metal
-----

Many of the substances important in technic are metals, and there is
a common pattern in how metals are handled.  Generally, each metal can
exist in five forms: ore, lump, dust, ingot, and block.  With a couple of
tricky exceptions in mods outside technic, metals are only *used* in dust,
ingot, and block forms.  Metals can be readily converted between these
three forms, but can't be converted from them back to ore or lump forms.

As in the basic Minetest game, a "lump" of metal is acquired directly by
digging ore, and will then be processed into some other form for use.
A lump is thus more akin to ore than to refined metal.  (In real life,
metal ore rarely yields lumps ("nuggets") of pure metal directly.
More often the desired metal is chemically bound into the rock as an
oxide or some other compound, and the ore must be chemically processed
to yield pure metal.)

Not all metals occur directly as ore.  Generally, elemental metals (those
consisting of a single chemical element) occur as ore, and alloys (those
consisting of a mixture of multiple elements) do not.  In fact, if the
fictional mithril is taken to be elemental, this pattern is currently
followed perfectly.  (It is not clear in the Middle-Earth setting whether
mithril is elemental or an alloy.)  This might change in the future:
in real life some alloys do occur as ore, and some elemental metals
rarely occur naturally outside such alloys.  Metals that do not occur
as ore also lack the "lump" form.

The basic Minetest game offers a single way to refine metals: cook a lump
in a furnace to produce an ingot.  With technic this refinement method
still exists, but is rarely used outside the early part of the game,
because technic offers a more efficient method once some machines have
been built.  The grinder, available only in electrically-powered forms,
can grind a metal lump into two piles of metal dust.  Each dust pile
can then be cooked into an ingot, yielding two ingots from one lump.
This doubling of material value means that you should only cook a lump
directly when you have no choice, mainly early in the game when you
haven't yet built a grinder.

An ingot can also be ground back to (one pile of) dust.  Thus it is always
possible to convert metal between ingot and dust forms, at the expense
of some energy consumption.  Nine ingots of a metal can be crafted into
a block, which can be used for building.  The block can also be crafted
back to nine ingots.  Thus it is possible to freely convert metal between
ingot and block forms, which is convenient to store the metal compactly.
Every metal has dust, ingot, and block forms.

Alloying recipes in which a metal is the base ingredient, to produce a
metal alloy, always come in two forms, using the metal either as dust
or as an ingot.  If the secondary ingredient is also a metal, it must
be supplied in the same form as the base ingredient.  The output alloy
is also returned in the same form.  For example, brass can be produced
by alloying two copper ingots with one zinc ingot to make three brass
ingots, or by alloying two piles of copper dust with one pile of zinc
dust to make three piles of brass dust.  The two ways of alloying produce
equivalent results.

iron and its alloys
-------------------

Iron forms several important alloys.  In real-life history, iron was the
second metal to be used as the base component of deliberately-constructed
alloys (the first was copper), and it was the first metal whose working
required processes of any metallurgical sophistication.  The game
mechanics around iron broadly imitate the historical progression of
processes around it, rather than the less-varied modern processes.

The two-component alloying system of iron with carbon is of huge
importance, both in the game and in real life.  The basic Minetest game
doesn't distinguish between these pure iron and these alloys at all,
but technic introduces a distinction based on the carbon content, and
renames some items of the basic game accordingly.

The iron/carbon spectrum is represented in the game by three metal
substances: wrought iron, carbon steel, and cast iron.  Wrought iron
has low carbon content (less than 0.25%), resists shattering, and
is easily welded, but is relatively soft and susceptible to rusting.
In real-life history it was used for rails, gates, chains, wire, pipes,
fasteners, and other purposes.  Cast iron has high carbon content
(2.1% to 4%), is especially hard, and resists corrosion, but is
relatively brittle, and difficult to work.  Historically it was used
to build large structures such as bridges, and for cannons, cookware,
and engine cylinders.  Carbon steel has medium carbon content (0.25%
to 2.1%), and intermediate properties: moderately hard and also tough,
somewhat resistant to corrosion.  In real life it is now used for most
of the purposes previously satisfied by wrought iron and many of those
of cast iron, but has historically been especially important for its
use in swords, armour, skyscrapers, large bridges, and machines.

In real-life history, the first form of iron to be refined was
wrought iron, which is nearly pure iron, having low carbon content.
It was produced from ore by a low-temperature furnace process (the
"bloomery") in which the ore/iron remains solid and impurities (slag)
are progressively removed by hammering ("working", hence "wrought").
This began in the middle East, around 1800 BCE.

Historically, the next forms of iron to be refined were those of high
carbon content.  This was the result of the development of a more
sophisticated kind of furnace, the blast furnace, capable of reaching
higher temperatures.  The real advantage of the blast furnace is that it
melts the metal, allowing it to be cast straight into a shape supplied by
a mould, rather than having to be gradually beaten into the desired shape.
A side effect of the blast furnace is that carbon from the furnace's fuel
is unavoidably incorporated into the metal.  Normally iron is processed
twice through the blast furnace: once producing "pig iron", which has
very high carbon content and lots of impurities but lower melting point,
casting it into rough ingots, then remelting the pig iron and casting it
into the final moulds.  The result is called "cast iron".  Pig iron was
first produced in China around 1200 BCE, and cast iron later in the 5th
century BCE.  Incidentally, the Chinese did not have the bloomery process,
so this was their first iron refining process, and, unlike the rest of
the world, their first wrought iron was made from pig iron rather than
directly from ore.

Carbon steel, with intermediate carbon content, was developed much later,
in Europe in the 17th century CE.  It required a more sophisticated
process, because the blast furnace made it extremely difficult to achieve
a controlled carbon content.  Tweaks of the blast furnace would sometimes
produce an intermediate carbon content by luck, but the first processes to
reliably produce steel were based on removing almost all the carbon from
pig iron and then explicitly mixing a controlled amount of carbon back in.

In the game, the bloomery process is represented by ordinary cooking
or grinding of an iron lump.  The lump represents unprocessed ore,
and is identified only as "iron", not specifically as wrought iron.
This standard refining process produces dust or an ingot which is
specifically identified as wrought iron.  Thus the standard refining
process produces the (nearly) pure metal.

Cast iron is trickier.  You might expect from the real-life notes above
that cooking an iron lump (representing ore) would produce pig iron that
can then be cooked again to produce cast iron.  This is kind of the case,
but not exactly, because as already noted cooking an iron lump produces
wrought iron.  The game doesn't distinguish between low-temperature
and high-temperature cooking processes: the same furnace is used not
just to cast all kinds of metal but also to cook food.  So there is no
distinction between cooking processes to produce distinct wrought iron
and pig iron.  But repeated cooking *is* available as a game mechanic,
and is indeed used to produce cast iron: re-cooking a wrought iron ingot
produces a cast iron ingot.  So pig iron isn't represented in the game as
a distinct item; instead wrought iron stands in for pig iron in addition
to its realistic uses as wrought iron.

Carbon steel is produced by a more regular in-game process: alloying
wrought iron with coal dust (which is essentially carbon).  This bears
a fair resemblance to the historical development of carbon steel.
This alloying recipe is relatively time-consuming for the amount of
material processed, when compared against other alloying recipes, and
carbon steel is heavily used, so it is wise to alloy it in advance,
when you're not waiting for it.

There are additional recipes that permit all three of these types of iron
to be converted into each other.  Alloying carbon steel again with coal
dust produces cast iron, with its higher carbon content.  Cooking carbon
steel or cast iron produces wrought iron, in an abbreviated form of the
bloomery process.

There's one more iron alloy in the game: stainless steel.  It is managed
in a completely regular manner, created by alloying carbon steel with
chromium.

rubber
------

Rubber is a biologically-derived material that has industrial uses due
to its electrical resistivity and its impermeability.  In technic, it
is used in a few recipes, and it must be acquired by tapping rubber trees.

If you have the moretrees mod installed, the rubber trees you need
are those defined by that mod.  If not, technic supplies a copy of the
moretrees rubber tree.

Extracting rubber requires a specific tool, a tree tap.  Using the tree
tap (by left-clicking) on a rubber tree trunk block extracts a lump of
raw latex from the trunk.  Each trunk block can be repeatedly tapped for
latex, at intervals of several minutes; its appearance changes to show
whether it is currently ripe for tapping.  Each tree has several trunk
blocks, so several latex lumps can be extracted from a tree in one visit.

Raw latex isn't used directly.  It must be vulcanized to produce finished
rubber.  This can be performed by simply cooking the latex, with each
latex lump producing one lump of rubber.  If you have an extractor,
however, the latex is better processed there: each latex lump will
produce three lumps of rubber.

electrical power
----------------

Most machines in technic are electrically powered.  To operate them it is
necessary to construct an electrical power network.  The network links
together power generators and power-consuming machines, connecting them
using power cables.

There are three tiers of electrical networking: low voltage (LV),
medium voltage (MV), and high voltage (HV).  Each network must operate
at a single voltage, and most electrical items are specific to a single
voltage.  Generally, the machines of higher tiers are more powerful,
but consume more energy and are more expensive to build, than machines
of lower tiers.  It is normal to build networks of all three tiers,
in ascending order as one progresses through the game, but it is not
strictly necessary to do this.  Building HV equipment requires some parts
that can only be manufactured using electrical machines, either LV or MV,
so it is not possible to build an HV network first, but it is possible
to skip either LV or MV on the way to HV.

Each voltage has its own cable type, with distinctive insulation.  Cable
segments connect to each other and to compatible machines automatically.
Incompatible electrical items don't connect.  All non-cable electrical
items must be connected via cable: they don't connect directly to each
other.  Most electrical items can connect to cables in any direction,
but there are a couple of important exceptions noted below.

To be useful, an electrical network must connect at least one power
generator to at least one power-consuming machine.  In addition to these
items, the network must have a "switching station" in order to operate:
no energy will flow without one.  Unlike most electrical items, the
switching station is not voltage-specific: the same item will manage
a network of any tier.  However, also unlike most electrical items,
it is picky about the direction in which it is connected to the cable:
the cable must be directly below the switching station.  Due to a bug,
the switching station will visually appear to connect to cables on other
sides, but those connections don't do anything.

Hovering over a network's switching station will show the aggregate energy
supply and demand, which is useful for troubleshooting.  Electrical energy
is measured in "EU", and power (energy flow) in EU per second (EU/s).
Energy is shifted around a network instantaneously once per second.

In a simple network with only generators and consumers, if total
demand exceeds total supply then no energy will flow, the machines
will do nothing, and the generators' output will be lost.  To handle
this situation, it is recommended to add a battery box to the network.
A battery box will store generated energy, and when enough has been
stored to run the consumers for one second it will deliver it to the
consumers, letting them run part-time.  It also stores spare energy
when supply exceeds demand, to let consumers run full-time when their
demand occasionally peaks above the supply.  More battery boxes can
be added to cope with larger periods of mismatched supply and demand,
such as those resulting from using solar generators (which only produce
energy in the daytime).

When there are electrical networks of multiple tiers, it can be appealing
to generate energy on one tier and transfer it to another.  The most
direct way to do this is with the "supply converter", which can be
directly wired into two networks.  It is another tier-independent item,
and also particular about the direction of cable connections: it must
have the cable of one network directly above, and the cable of another
network directly below.  The supply converter demands 10000 EU/s from
the network above, and when this network gives it power it supplies 9000
EU/s to the network below.  Thus it is only 90% efficient, unlike most of
the electrical system which is 100% efficient in moving energy around.
To transfer more than 10000 EU/s between networks, connect multiple
supply converters in parallel.

subjects missing from this manual
---------------------------------

This manual needs to be extended with sections on:

*   the miscellaneous powered machine types
*   how machines interact with tubes
*   the generator types
*   the mining tools
*   radioactivity
*   frames
*   templates
*   chests