Create: Engine Engineer

Create: Engine Engineer

Note: Built with AI. Nearly all of the code, models, textures, sounds, Ponder scenes and docs were written by an AI (Claude) at my direction. I have played, tested and reworked almost all of it over many passes, and it ships with unit tests and in-world GameTests. It is still a young mod, so you may find rough edges or odd balance. Please report them on the issue tracker, and back up a world before adding the mod to it. Until 1.0, a new version may change how an existing engine behaves.

An addon for Create that lets you build working internal combustion engines out of individual parts and turn them into Create rotational force. Start with a crude single cylinder, finish with a boosted, precision-built V12.

Nothing here is a single "engine block". You place the crankshaft, the throws, the cylinders, heads, pistons, rods, camshafts and valves, and the layout you build decides whether the engine runs and how well. Cylinders fire in order and the crank animates with them.

Build an engine

• Inline, V, flat and rotary (Wankel) layouts, with coupled crankshafts for bigger engines
• Cam lobes that sit beside the cylinder block, so a V can run one camshaft in its valley and keep every head face free for pipes
• A Bank Builder that lays out a whole inline, V or flat bank in one click, and a Timing Tool that sets the firing order for you
• Torsional flex: a crank twists under load, so past eight throws on one unbroken crankshaft an engine's rating falls a little for each extra throw, to at most 35 percent. A V12 or flat twelve loses nothing. It only lowers the rating and never harms anything

Feed and tune it

• Air, fuel and exhaust plumbing with pipes, throttle bodies and fuel metering. Burns diesel, plant oil, gasoline and ethanol, with spark ignition where the fuel needs it
• A craftable fuel chain, all in Create basins: seeds to plant oil to diesel, sugar crops to ethanol, and biodiesel with glycerin on the side. The loop closes: glycerin goes into engine oil and coolant, and used oil is burned as fuel or recycled into oil or charcoal
• An Exhaust Heat Exchanger that turns engine exhaust into basin heat, so an engine can cook its own fuel
• Oil film and lubrication, starters, batteries and alternators, with Forge Energy output
• An oil sump that is the engine's service port: one block against the engine takes its oil, coolant and pilot fuel from any face, so the cylinder heads keep their faces for air and fuel
• Oil that goes off: set the sump's Oil Exchange dial and a running engine changes its own oil, pushing out Used Oil that you burn, refine, coke into charcoal or let go. An Oil Filter slows the ageing
• Engine temperature: a cold engine drags until it warms through, and a cooled one breathes better. Coolant, or just water, goes into the same sump, so there is no radiator to fit. Nothing ever overheats or wears out
• Dual-fuel pilot injection: pipe diesel into the sump's pilot tank and a compression engine with no spark plug lights gasoline or ethanol with a small pilot shot
• A forgiving early game: spark plug soot clears itself, goggles suggest fuel settings, and the Timing Tool can tune every injector in one click
• Governors and MAF sensors for the late game
• Other mods' fuels work too: anything tagged c:diesel, c:gasoline, c:ethanol or c:plantoil, or given an entry in the fuel data map

Make it powerful

• Turbochargers (stacked, twin, variable-geometry, with anti-lag), superchargers and intercoolers, with the sound to match: a turbo whistle that climbs with the wheel, a blow-off flutter when redstone dumps the boost, anti-lag crackle, and a supercharger whine that rises with its shaft
• Precision cylinders, heads, pistons and injectors
• Flywheels that matter: a rough engine is rated for less, and rotating mass smooths it out
• A 13-gear transmission with an Auto mode that shifts to suit the engine, and a Dynamometer that draws an engine's torque and power curves
• A Black Box flight recorder that keeps ten minutes of an engine's speed, load and warmth and says why it stalled
• An exhaust note made up from the engine's speed and firing order, so a V-twin lopes, a six hums and a dead cylinder limps

Learn it

Every part has Engineer's Goggles diagnostics and a Ponder scene. Advancements reward actually using what you build, grouped into tracks (builder, power, tuning, driveline, fuel, service) that each end in a capstone, with a Chief Engineer advancement for finishing them all.

Recommended: raise Create's RPM limit

Create caps rotation at 256 RPM by default, and engines hit that ceiling. Raise it: in serverconfig/create-server.toml under [kinetics], set maxRotationSpeed to 1024 or higher. The engine simulation is built to stay cheap at speed, and its torque rating follows the limit you set.

For modpack makers

The server config (serverconfig/create_engines-server.toml) has [balance] multipliers and [features] switches, so a pack can rebalance without code. Turning a feature off never removes blocks; they stop doing that job. The client config thins out engine sound and particles on a big engine. Fuel properties are a datapack data map (data_maps/fluid/fuel.json), so other mods' fluids can be made into fuels.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1, NeoForge 21.1.219 or newer
• Create 6.0.10 (all of its own requirements, Flywheel and Ponder, come with it)
• Required on both the client and the server

Links

• Source and issue tracker
• Design notes, how the simulation works