Ground Burst

0.5.0 — 2026-11-01 A volley launcher sunk into the ground, a laser to call missiles onto a target, and chips made the hard way: every advanced, military and quantum circuit now waits on a real silicon chain.

Vertical Launch Battery

Vertical Launch Battery, a very late-game launcher sunk into the ground: sixteen cells in two modules (4 wide, 6 deep, with a walkway and its fire-control console in front and launch control cabinets behind), each cell a Strike Cell with its hatch over five Missile Canisters: six blocks deep, as long as a Medium missile. Load a Light or Medium missile into each cell (conventional warheads; no cruise missiles), by hand or through its Item Port.

Aim, arm and fire it from a Launch Computer, the Launch Control Station or a Laser Designator. After a 10 s countdown it ripples its whole load out, a cell every quarter of a second: each hatch swings open, the missile's motor lights at the foot of its cell, its blast roars up the module's uptake, and the missile climbs straight out.

Each missile goes to its own point of the battery's spread round the target: all on the point, a line, a ring or a grid, up to 48 blocks apart, set on its screen. 20,000 FE a missile; it holds enough for two full volleys.

Laser Designator

Laser Designator: hold use and it goes to your eye: the view zooms in, and its sight shows a reticle, the range and the coordinates of the spot (and the creature, if it is on one). A thin red beam and a pulsing spot that everyone sees all the way to the spot: faint by day, bright at night. It reaches as far as you can see (your view distance, up to 1,024 blocks).

Laser Guidance Unit, a new guidance part: missiles built with it are the ones a designator commands.

Use the designator on a Launch Control Station to join its network: the station's map shows its spot while you lase, and the new Laser button aims the picked launchers at it.

It commands one of the network's laser-guided launchers at a time: the first, or scroll while zoomed to pick the next (the hotbar stays put while you do); it remembers the pick.

Left-click while lasing: if the picked launcher is not armed, it is aimed at the spot and armed; if it is armed, it launches, and its missile follows your laser all the way in, wherever you point it: onto a moving target, or another one.

Sneak and left-click to disarm the picked launcher (it stays aimed where it was).

Zoomed in, every armed launcher of your network shows where it is aimed: a glowing sphere centred on the point you clicked.

It runs on a 40,000 FE charge (a hundred seconds of lasing; a Battery Charger fills it). Smoke or gas in the way breaks the beam, and an EMP knocks it out for a while.

Silicon and chips: a harder circuit chain

Fluorite Ore: purple and green cubes in the Overworld (Y −24 to 72). Crush it and dissolve the dust in sulfuric acid for hydrofluoric acid. Silicon from quartz and coal in the Arc Furnace, purified in the Chemical Plant: with hydrogen chloride (from hydrogen and chlorine) into trichlorosilane, then with hydrogen into polysilicon.

Hydrogen from the Electrolytic Separator, a new Proton Exchange Membrane in its new membrane slot (with the slot empty it makes deuterium as before); argon drawn from the air by the new Argon Molecular Sieve in the Cryogenic Condenser.

Crystal Puller, a new two-block machine: polysilicon melted in a quartz crucible under argon grows a silicon boule in a minute; watch the crystal rise in its sight glass while the melt glows in its viewport.

A Diamond Wire Saw in the Industrial Press's die slot saws a boule into eight silicon wafers.

Sapphire for military-grade chips: Alumina from clay and sulfuric acid in the Chemical Plant, grown into a Sapphire Boule in the Crystal Puller in a Tungsten Crucible, sawn into six Sapphire Wafers.

Clean Room, a new multiblock (3 wide, 2 deep, 2 high, with the new Clean Room Panel and Fan Filter Unit): prints Microchips from a wafer, red phosphorus and a plastic sheet with photoresist and hydrofluoric acid; Rad-Hard Microchips from two sapphire wafers, red phosphorus and a Ceramic Package with trichlorosilane as well (silicon-on-sapphire); and Quantum Chips from a sapphire wafer, stabilised exotic matter and a ceramic package with argon. Its windows look into a bay lit yellow, where the tools work while it runs.

The Cryogenic Condenser takes a basic circuit now instead of an advanced one.

Hydrogen chloride is a toxic gas; trichlorosilane and hydrofluoric acid burn like acids.

Advanced circuits are now built round two microchips, military circuits round two rad-hard microchips (with two gold wire and their diamond) and quantum circuits round two quantum chips (in place of their stabilised exotic matter): every advanced, military and quantum machine, part and weapon waits on the chip chain. Basic circuits are as they were.

Assemblers

Every assembler (the Assembly Bench, the four missile assemblers, the ICBM Assembly Hall and the Special Weapons Assembler) has an Auto Assemble button: while it is on, the next job starts by itself once the parts are in and the finished one has been taken out.

The structures' Item Ports show on the side of the deck as well as on top, so pipes can feed one face and empty the other.

Pipes and cables can now stand on top of the missile assemblers' Item and Energy Ports, and on the ICBM Assembly Hall's and the Special Weapons Assembler's Item Port, without breaking the structure.

Launchers

Every launcher has an Item Port now: the Launch Silo, the Launch Complex and the Missile Silo beside their Energy Port, the Cruise Missile Launcher behind its Energy Port. Pipes and hoppers load missiles through it straight into the launch slot, so a launcher reloads itself after each launch. It takes only missiles that launcher can fire, and nothing comes out of it. Launchers you built before still work as they are; put an Item Port in that spot to automate them.

Changes

A lightning rod in a Storm ICBM's storm still takes its strikes safely (no blast, crater or fire), but each strike's EMP pulse now goes out from the rod.