NeroTech

The big push from alpha to the first beta: every machine gets a real visual identity, the Fusion Reactor becomes a scalable multiblock, heat becomes a full thermal model, pollution gets its mitigation tech, every GUI gains analytics, presets and side-config tooling — and the tech tree grows four whole tiers: a free-form Particle Accelerator, a fluid & gas chain, a six-block power tier, automation QoL and an exotic endgame. NeroTech is standalone-first: every machine, including the endgame, is reachable with NeroTech + Neroland Core alone, and pairing with other Neroland mods accelerates progression rather than unlocking it.

Added

Particle Accelerator

• A free-form endgame build and NeroTech's standalone route to space-grade materials: no multiblock, no fixed footprint. Lay Accelerator Guide Coils at the Accelerator Controller's own Y level in any shape; right-click each (empty hand or Configurator) to cycle its bend straight / 45° left / 45° right. The controller ray-marches its facing up to acceleratorMaxGap blocks per hop, follows the bends, and a line that returns to itself is a closed loop. A virtual particle (server-side, no entity, drawn as an END_ROD streak) is injected from the first slot and boosted at every guide it passes.
• Ring geometry is the progression axis, via three unit-tested rules: the gap rule (a stretch too long for the current speed loses the particle; inverted, it sets the injection speed), the bend rule (a 45° turn survives at most acceleratorBendSpeedBase × the run-up before it — the shortest bend stretch caps the loop), and collision energy E = 0.5·v²·acceleratorEnergyScale. Put a second item in the collision slot and every lap through the controller attempts the collision.
• Collision recipes (nerotech:collider, datapack-driven) take two order-free ingredients plus a min_energy floor — an energy requirement is really a minimum ring size: 800 J / 1,500 J for the dust transmutations (a starter octagon), 3,000 J for Starsteel Dust (Netherite Scrap + Iron Dust) and Void Crystal Dust (Echo Shard + Amethyst Shard), 12,000 J for the Antimatter Cell (two Stellar Cells — a ~29×29 ring). Both blocks craft from vanilla + Tier-1 materials only, so the advanced tier (Fusion Reactor included) is reachable on Earth alone.
• The ring reads itself back: after every trace the controller writes each guide's outgoing beam direction into a display-only heading blockstate, lighting the coil's top with one of 24 directional arrows (3 bends × 8 compass headings). An unlit coil is not part of a closed loop — the first debugging tool for a ring that will not close. Ships with a two-input JEI page, Tech Guide steps, advancements and the Particle Accelerator wiki page. Mechanic inspired by Oritech's particle accelerator; clean-room implementation.

Scalable Fusion Reactor multiblock

• The Fusion Reactor is now a multiblock: a hollow 3×3×3, 5×5×5 or 7×7×7 shell of the new Fusion Casing and Fusion Containment Glass, controller set into one wall, strictly empty interior. Inert until formed — a spinning plasma torus telegraphs a live core.
• Four fuel tiers, all datapack tags: Fusion Cell (any shell) → Plasma Cell (Starsteel, 5×5×5+) → Stellar Cell (Void Crystal + Starsteel, 7×7×7) → Antimatter Cell (see the exotic endgame below; the 7×7×7 alone contains it). Per-tier burn times (fusionFuelTier1BurnTicks..Tier4) and per-size output multipliers (1× / 4× / 12×, fusionSizeOutputPermille) are config.
• Scaled risk: bigger shells run hotter and melt down harder (blast radius 4/6/8; fusionReactorMeltdownEnabled still stalls instead when off). Breaking the shell mid-burn is a containment breach: the charge is lost and a pollution burst vents into the region.

Power tier (the feature set once planned for a separate NeroPower mod — see Changed)

• Wind Turbine — fuel-free, day and night: windTurbineNePerTick (default 25) scaled by an altitude curve (0.5× at y≤80 rising to 2× at y≥200) and windDimensionMultipliers; needs sky access above. An airless Nerospace planet gives zero — no atmosphere, no wind.
• Geothermal Generator — counts lava/magma in the 3×3 directly beneath (0–9) for geothermalNePerTickPerSource (default 8) each. Perfectly steady, runs hot, no pollution.
• Bio Generator — burns the new datapack-overridable #nerotech:bio_fuels item tag (seeded with dried kelp blocks; NeroAgriculture and packs add crops with no code change) at bioGeneratorNePerBurnTick (default 48) — 20% above the Nero Generator at half the pollution.
• Battery Bank — a single-block batteryBankCapacity (default 1,000,000) NE buffer with every-face I/O and auto-eject, FE interop included.
• Grid Controller — passive brownout protection: rescans gridControllerRadius every 100 ticks; below gridShedThresholdPermille it drops non-generator machines to Eco until fill recovers past gridRestorePermille (hysteresis, so a grid at the line never flaps). It throttles demand, never supply.
• Wireless Power Node — pair two with the Configurator (crouch-use each end): up to wirelessNodeTransferPerTick (default 200) NE every 5 ticks across wirelessNodeRange (default 32) blocks, lossless, never chunk-loading, self-unlinking on break.

Fluid & gas chain

• Neroland Core's fluid/gas substrate is now live, with NeroTech's first gases (nerotech:hydrogen, nerotech:oxygen). Electrolyzer splits stored water 2:1 (bucket or Core fluid capability in — no item slots) and hands both gases to adjacent gas blocks; Gas Turbine burns gas (turbineGasBurn config map) into NE with mild heat and zero pollution — clean power, not free power (electrolysis is a net energy sink by design); Chemical Processor washes raw ore with oxygen for 3 dust versus the Ore Processor's 2 (nerotech:chemical_processing recipes). Every tank is on Core's shared nerolandcore:fluid / nerolandcore:gas capabilities, so Core's tanks and any mod on those surfaces interoperate.
• Coolant loop — active cooling as two blocks: the Radiator (passive, worth four natural coolant blocks, never melts) and the Coolant Pump (spends NE per thermal-exchange interval to pull heat out of every adjacent machine, scaled by Radiators within 3 blocks in a line). All scans event-driven and cached.

Full thermal model

• Machines conduct heat to adjacent machines and relax toward a local ambient derived from dimension (thermalAmbientByDimension — the Nether runs hot) plus a biome flavour term. Coolant blocks (water, ice, snow, Radiators) are cached alongside the neighbour links — no per-tick scanning anywhere. Six tuning keys (thermalConductivityPermille .. thermalBiomeScale).

Pollution mitigation tech

• Scrubber — cleans its own pollution region at full rate plus the 8 neighbours at a fraction; consumes Filter Cartridges that foul into Dirty Filters (reprocess for an iron refund).
• Remediator — heavy-duty slotless area cleaner: no consumables, steep NE cost, Starsteel-tier.
• Regional pollution publishes threshold events through Core 1.7.0 (pollutionEventThreshold) — dormant until a listener mod (NeroEvents) exists.

Automation & QoL

• Conveyor Belt — the only NeroTech block with no block entity: a flat directional plate that nudges item entities along its facing (~0.15 blocks/tick, capped). No power, no GUI — lines and corners form naturally. Crafts 6 from Iron Dust + Nero Coils + Redstone.
• Robotic Arm — once a second moves up to roboticArmStackPerMove items from the container behind it into the one in front, for roboticArmNePerMove NE per item, through the standard hopper-style container surface (side configs and sidedness honoured on every loader). A GUI-only filter slot restricts it to one item type.
• Auto Crafter recipe preview + grid lock — the output well shows a server-matched ghost of the current grid, and a Lock toggle snapshots the grid as per-slot templates enforced through the GUI and pipes/hoppers, so automation can never scramble the recipe.
• Configurator wrench — click a machine face to cycle its side mode, sneak-click to read the layout, and copy/paste: copying captures side config and overclock preset, and pasting is cross-type — each copied channel applies wherever the target declares it. Also pairs Wireless Power Nodes and sets accelerator coil bends.

Exotic endgame

• Antimatter Cell — tier-4 fusion fuel, made only by the accelerator (no crafting recipe). Burns fusionFuelTier4BurnTicks (default 28,800 — twice a Stellar Cell) with a flat +2 heat-rate surcharge: the strongest generator in NeroTech and the likeliest to melt down.
• Singularity Vault — bulk storage for one item type up to singularityVaultCapacity (default 1,000,000), held as a virtual store. Automation sees a two-slot facade (input drained in, output kept stocked); by hand right-click deposits, crouch-right-click withdraws; a comparator reads the fill. Crafted around an Antimatter Cell. Empty it before you break it — the stored bulk does not drop.
• Accelerator transmutation — lossy collider recipes: Copper Dust ×2 → Iron Dust (800 J), Iron Dust ×2 → Gold Dust (1,500 J). Transmuted gold is the most expensive gold in the game.

Production analytics

• Every machine GUI gains an Analytics tab: a status line naming the limiting cause, live heat/ energy/pollution/efficiency readouts, and 60-second heat and energy sparklines.
• New Analytics Terminal — a passive console scanning analyticsTerminalRadius (default 16): counts by status, the hottest machine, the 10 nearest with their causes, and a rolling five-minute power-history sparkline of net stored-NE change across the watched machines.

Overclock presets

• Every processing machine and generator gets Eco / Balanced / Overdrive (−25% speed & −50% energy/heat/pollution ↔ +50% & +100%). Presets stack with upgrade modules and persist — an overdriven reactor courts its own meltdown threshold.

Tech Guide

• New Tech Guide pedestal (and hand-held datapad): a guided tour of 8 chapters / 22 steps — First Power → Processing → Consequences → Mitigation → Automation → Analytics → Fusion → Exotic Matter — driven entirely by advancements. A loaded pedestal projects your next step as a hologram.

Recipes & progression

• Machine processing runs on real datapack recipe types (nerotech:ore_processing, fabricating, advanced_fabricating, chemical_processing, collider) — packs add, replace or remove recipes as plain JSON.
• The dust economy closes: Iron/Gold/Copper Dust smelt and blast into ingots at vanilla times/XP, and machines beat the workbench — the Fabricator returns 2 Circuit Boards / Nero Coils per dust versus crafting's 1, and a Machine Frame costs 1 iron in the machine versus 8 by hand. Fusion Cells are machine-exclusive (Advanced Fabricator only). Raw metal blocks bulk-process into 18 dust. Iron Dust gains real sinks (Conveyor Belts, Robotic Arms).
• Just Enough Items support — a shared JEI plugin with pages for every machine recipe type and each machine as a crafting station (the client opts into recipe sync; recipe definitions only).
• A connected advancement tree grows with every tier, including Charge Reserve, Contained Annihilation and Room for Everything.

NeroLink companion-app integration

• NeroTech registers a full link module with Core's link API, so the NeroLink companion app auto-serves a NeroTech section: pollution (your own attributed total, only when attribution is on and you have not opted out), guide (your Tech Guide progress) and a public wiki section rendering these wiki pages in-app. All personal data is own-data-only, UUID-scoped (POPIA/GDPR).
• Actions: set_pollution_attribution (your own privacy opt-out, wired into the shared data-erasure hook) and set_machine_preset (remote preset; server re-checks online + ownership).
• Live events/alerts: a WARN alert when your attributed pollution crosses the threshold; a CRITICAL alert + world meltdown broadcast on a reactor meltdown or containment breach.

A complete visual identity

• Every machine re-modelled and re-textured in a 32× teal/plasma art language with animated block-entity renderers: spinning turbine, sun-tracking solar deck, crusher drums, fabricator arms, the fusion torus, Auto Crafter hologram + press, live-tinted sorter ports, fouling scrubber cartridge, remediator boom, shimmering terminal. Machine glow shifts cyan → orange/red as heat climbs. Client-only renderAnimationsEnabled turns it all off for low-end machines.
• /nerotech gallery (creative/OP) builds a running showcase of the entire mod — every block on a display grid plus live exhibits: a colliding accelerator octagon, the gas chain, a coolant loop on a 5×5×5 reactor, the full power park with a linked wireless pair, and an automation lane with moving items and a stocked vault. gallery clear removes it. Records nothing about the player.

Optional Nerospace planet interop

• With Nerospace installed, solar output, wind and thermal ambient automatically follow planet traits (airless boosts solar and kills wind; hot/cold planets shift ambient). Resolved by pure reflection at runtime — Nerospace is never a build or load requirement; without it the per-dimension config keys apply and NeroTech remains fully standalone.

Quality of life

• NeroTech items carry Core's coloured inventory highlights: upgrade modules (green), the Configurator (violet), fuels and filters (teal). The Solar Array tooltip explains its niche versus Nerospace's tiered Solar Panels.

Changed

• Neroland Core 1.7.0 or newer is required (was 1.3.x in the alpha). Update Core first — older versions refuse to load with this release.
• Standalone-first progression, by design — no progression gate ever locks a NeroTech machine; pacing comes from recipes and materials (the accelerator's energy floors, the Starsteel tier). NeroTech still opens Core's industrial_power milestone on first machine placement for other Neroland mods to read — a milestone, never a lock.
• The NeroPower split is retired — NeroPower will not ship as a separate mod; its planned feature set is the power tier above. One mod, one power network. Generation still talks only to Core's energy surface. Power & the NeroPower Split records the decision, with the old criteria archived.
• Machine recipes moved from in-code tables to datapack JSON; behaviour is unchanged out of the box, but packs overriding the alpha's fixed tables should switch to recipe files.
• Side configuration is synced to clients (the Item Sorter shows its port modes in-world) and machine GUIs open reliably from any distance and angle.
• Unit tests run on all six loader×version cells, and loader capability registration is generic — a new machine is wired everywhere by adding it to one list. NeroTech builds from a bare clone (Core resolves from GitHub Packages; no sibling repos needed).

Fixed

• Machine blocks now drop themselves when mined — all machines were missing from minecraft:mineable/pickaxe, so no tool counted as correct and they dropped nothing.
• GUI gauges now show live values — the base machine menu never registered its container data, so energy/heat/progress gauges silently read zeros. Latent since the first alpha.
• Machine models no longer black out the faces of adjacent blocks (non-cube shapes are correctly non-occluding).

Migration notes (from 0.0.1-alpha.x)

• Fusion Reactors placed in the alpha become inert until a valid casing shell is built around them (nothing is deleted). A 3×3×3 shell brings an existing reactor back online.
• Requires Neroland Core >= 1.7.0 (breaking floor bump — see Changed).
• Nerospace is optional — only needed for planet-trait modifiers, and no longer referenced at build time at all.
• Energized Power interop (optional, tag-based) is unchanged.
• Telemetry is unchanged: anonymous, opt-out (telemetryEnabled=false), never any personal data.