StillWorking

SteelWorks is an industrial simulation mod — not magic, not fantasy.

No free energy. No teleporting. No "place and forget". Every machine burns fuel, draws power, and has to earn its place on your factory floor. If you like watching a coal generator spin up, cables light up, and a battery bank slowly fill — this is the mod for you.

🔩 Automation (Beta 0.5)

• Transport Pipes — cheap iron-tier pipes that auto-connect to machines, storage crates, vanilla chests and each other. They pull items out, move them along, and push them in — like a real conveyor belt. Craft 4 per recipe from glass + iron.
• Pipe Filters — right-click a pipe with the Wrench to open its filter GUI: Any / Whitelist / Blacklist with one button. Split ores from junk, forever.
• The Wrench — the mechanic's tool: cycle every machine face's I/O mode (Disabled → Input → Output → In/Out), rotate machines, and pick machines up with their contents and energy intact.
• Machine Side-Config — every face has its own mode, and pipes only insert into input slots and extract from output slots. Production lines can't mix up in and out.
• Storage Crate Auto-Eject — set a face to Output and the crate pushes its contents into neighboring pipes and inventories. The perfect end (or start) of a line.
• The goal: a fully automated chest → pipe → crusher → pipe → crate ore line with zero player interaction. Verified by automated tests.

⚡ Power & Energy

• Coal Generator — burns coal into FE (30 FE/t, ~40s per coal) — and Uranium Fuel Cells for 400s of continuous power
• Nuclear Reactor — burns fuel cells for 4× the FE. The core heats up… and an uncooled reactor melts down and explodes
• Cooling Towers — place next to the reactor to pull heat out. Two towers and it runs forever, safe and sound
• Copper Cable (256 FE/t), Steel Cable (1024 FE/t) and Titanium Cable (4096 FE/t) — auto-connect to machines, with real transfer limits
• Storage Battery (40,000 FE) and Storage Battery MK2 (200,000 FE) — 8-phase charge faces you can read from across the room
• Machines draw only what they need — no phantom drains, batteries keep their reserves

☢️ Nuclear Safety

• Meltdown — max heat + no cooling = a meltdown timer ticks up. The GUI warns you: CAUTION - MELTDOWN xx%
• Explosions — when the timer runs out, the reactor blasts the area, destroys itself, and scatters Radiation Fire
• Radiation — hot reactors radiate living things (green, damaging over time). Radiation Fire does the same
• Sand — right-click the flames with sand to smother them. It consumes the sand. A shovel and a sand stack are mandatory reactor-adjacent equipment

🏭 Machines That Do Real Work

• Crusher — feed it raw iron or gold, get 2x dust out. Ore doubling, done right
• Electric Furnace — smelts on FE, faster than vanilla
• Alloy Mixer — Iron + Coal = Steel, Titanium + Iron = Titanium Alloy
• Nuclear Reactor — the endgame generator: feed it fuel cells, watch the core heat up, and keep it cool — or don't
• Plus factory furniture: Storage Crate, Energy Monitor, Control Panel, Maintenance Hatch

🔩 Real Survival Progression

Everything is craftable. Everything is wireable. No deadlocks, no blocks you can't make — just mine, smelt, alloy, and build up.

Copper → Steel → Titanium Alloy (Alloy Mixer) → high-voltage cables. Uranium → Fuel Cells → reactor power → Cooling Towers for safe reactor power. Nothing is a dead end.

⛏️ New Ores

Copper, Titanium and Uranium generate in the world at balanced heights and rarities.

📖 The Manual

A craftable in-game instruction book with illustrated pages — reworked for Beta 0.5 with 23 pages organized by category (Getting Started · Power & Energy · Machines · Automation · Nuclear & Safety · Reference · Classified). Its text lives in assets/steelworks/manual/manual.txt, so you can edit the manual yourself — and it updates live while you play.

🎨 The Polish

• Original 32×32 industrial textures — every machine has its own distinct skin — plus sound design and GUIs, every pixel hand-made
• JEI & EMI support — every machine recipe shows up with FE/t and processing time
• Config-driven balance (steelworks-common.toml) — tune every number without touching code
• 26 automated game tests behind every machine, on both loaders
• 28 advancements — a full progression tree from Machine Age to Critical Mass

🛠️ Made by One Developer

SteelWorks is built entirely by a single person — every texture, every sound, every line of code. That means two things:

1. It's cohesive. One vision, one art style, nothing bolted on. Every block belongs to the same factory.
2. Your feedback actually shapes it. Feature requests go straight into the next beta. If something's missing or broken, tell me — it might be fixed in next week's build.

Beta 0.5 — "Automation": transport pipes, pipe filters, the wrench, machine side-config, and crate auto-eject. Your machines can finally feed themselves. The factory is alive.

SteelWorks: engineering is the point.