DEADHOUR

This project is part of DEADHOUR.

Ragex's Nuclear Tech Mod

Ragex's Nuclear Tech Mod (RTM) is a major realism-focused rework and expansion of HBM's Nuclear Tech Mod for Minecraft Forge 1.7.10.

NTM already has one of the largest industrial sandboxes in Minecraft: reactors, refineries, chemical plants, power stations, missiles, rockets, factories, and enormous production chains.

RTM focuses on making that sandbox run better, progress better, and make more sense to operate.

Legacy NTM systems often rely on arbitrary power values, extreme processing rates, inconsistent recipes, or complex-looking machinery with surprisingly simple mechanics underneath. RTM keeps the content players recognize while rebuilding the systems connecting it.

Built for Bigger Factories

Performance is one of RTM's largest changes over base NTM.

Many NTM machines were built around ordinary TileEntity tick loops, repeatedly checking recipes, inventories, connections, and synchronization even when nothing useful had changed.

RTM replaces much of that behavior with a shared machine runtime built around scheduled work, event-driven updates, cached state, persistent network membership, and bounded compatibility checks.

186 of 205 concrete machine-tree TileEntities now use scheduled, event-driven, or coarse runtime strategies instead of the old default execution path.

Power and fluid networks have received similar work to reduce repeated topology rebuilding, unnecessary allocations, and redundant synchronization.

There is no made-up universal TPS improvement attached to this work. The goal is simpler: NTM encourages enormous industrial bases, so RTM is being engineered to handle enormous industrial bases better.

Industrial Progression With Better Balance

RTM shifts progression away from arbitrary recipe gates and toward industrial capability.

Instead of every machine living on its own balance island, power demand increasingly reflects what the equipment is actually doing.

For example:

• Electric Furnace: 0.5 kW → 8 kW
• Industrial Fabrication: 1 kW/lane → 52 kW total
• Mining Laser: 100 kW → 500 kW
• Large Arc Furnace: old 10–1,250 kW tiers → 500–3,500 kW

That gives power generation an actual progression curve.

A small workshop can run from small generators. Heavy manufacturing cannot. Expanding an industrial plant can now require expanding the power station behind it instead of connecting everything to the same disproportionately powerful early generator.

The same philosophy applies to recipes: progression should ask whether your industry can actually produce something, not whether you have encountered the next arbitrary crafting ingredient.

Power & Heat That Work Together

HBM already had boilers, steam engines, turbines, condensers, burners, heat exchangers, and multiple steam grades.

The problem was that many operated through independent conversion ratios rather than one coherent thermal system.

RTM connects them through explicit heat, useful work, steam state, cooling, and waste-heat accounting.

A turbine cannot extract electricity and simply forget the remaining energy. Condensers have heat to reject. Gas turbines separate electrical output from recoverable exhaust heat. Heat-recovery equipment therefore has an actual reason to exist.

Even early generation has been rescaled around the loads it needs to support: the Starter Stirling produces 10 kW, the Heavy Stirling 40 kW, and a basic early boiler/steam-engine plant supplies roughly 13.17 kW net.

Different power systems increasingly represent different engineering choices rather than differently shaped generator blocks.

Oil Refining Reworked From the Numbers Up

HBM already had a large petroleum chain. RTM's improvement is what happens underneath it.

Some stock processing rates were enormous:

• Oil Well: roughly 720 L/min
• Pumpjack: roughly 1,920 L/min
• Atmospheric Refinery: roughly 120,000 L/min
• Fractionation: roughly 12,000 L/min

RTM brings those to bounded industrial rates of 6, 24, 24, and 12 L/min respectively.

But this is not simply slowing the machines down.

The missing costs and material flows were added with the new scale.

Crude heating consumes process heat. Separation requires heat and electrical auxiliaries. Vacuum processing requires work. Hydrotreating consumes hydrogen. Cracking, reforming, and coking pay their own thermal costs and produce accounted coproducts.

Material and chemical energy are conserved instead of fluids appearing, disappearing, or gaining value because an old percentage recipe said so.

The existing refinery machinery now behaves much more like one refinery instead of a row of unrelated fluid converters.

Chemistry & Manufacturing With Fewer Shortcuts

NTM's industrial depth is inconsistent: one material may require an elaborate processing chain while another bypasses similar infrastructure through a convenience recipe.

RTM is gradually consolidating those processes around the machinery that already exists.

High-temperature processes increasingly need appropriate heat. Separation machinery owns separation. Hydrogen, electrical work, cooling, and specialized fabrication have actual roles where they matter.

The same rule applies in reverse: realism is not an excuse for pointless inconvenience.

Upgrading to better industrial equipment should generally make production better, not send the player backward to a slower primitive machine because an old recipe happened to live there.

Reactors With More Meaningful Failure States

RTM is expanding NTM's reactors so differences between designs create differences in operation.

The reworked Magnox reactor is one of the clearest examples.

It now distinguishes core and primary-system heat and tracks all 24 fuel-channel temperatures, CO2 inventory, pressure, decay heat, rod movement, cladding damage, contamination, and reactor protection.

A SCRAM takes roughly five seconds for full rod insertion instead of instantly erasing the reactor's thermal state.

After shutdown, decay heat continues. Losing coolant reduces heat transfer. A blocked steam system limits heat removal. Damaged cladding can contaminate the primary circuit, and releasing contaminated CO2 can then contaminate the environment.

Fuel damage, overheating, radioactive leakage, and mechanical pressure rupture are separate failure paths rather than different flavors of one generic meltdown.

The goal is for different reactor designs to be something you learn to operate, not just different structures feeding the same heat bar.

Nuclear Weapons Where Detonation Conditions Matter

HBM's nuclear weapons were already spectacular. RTM makes their environment matter.

Detonations can now distinguish between surface, air, underground, underwater, and vacuum conditions.

A clear airburst does not excavate the same crater as a surface detonation.

An underground weapon must actually breach the surface before producing atmospheric flash, mushroom-cloud, and fallout effects there. A contained underground shot instead produces underground excavation and seismic effects.

A vacuum detonation likewise no longer behaves as though it occurred inside Earth's atmosphere.

The weapons remain recognizably HBM. There are simply more rules determining what all that destructive energy actually does.

Space as the Payoff to Industrial Progression

NTM already had rockets, satellites, orbital stations, and other worlds.

RTM is making them more connected to everything required to reach them.

Spaceflight increasingly draws on the fuels, advanced materials, manufacturing capability, power infrastructure, and environmental protection developed throughout the rest of progression.

Planetary information and hazards are clearer, station propulsion has been rebalanced around actual spacecraft hardware rather than simple nozzle costs, and celestial presentation has been improved with features such as planetary rings and sky-brightness-based star visibility.

Space becomes a culmination of your industrial base rather than a mostly separate crafting branch.

Better Costs for Building the Factory

NTM gives players enough machinery to construct entire industrial cities, but some ordinary construction materials were priced more like machines than building components.

RTM separates those roles more deliberately.

Common steel walls, beams, grates, concrete, and similar structural blocks are produced in useful construction batches—commonly 16 at a time, with thin structural sheets reaching 32.

Reactors, pressure equipment, refinery machinery, and launch infrastructure remain expensive because their components actually perform specialized jobs.

The factory building should be affordable. The equipment inside it should be the investment.

NTM, Reworked Rather Than Replaced

RTM still has what makes Nuclear Tech Mod distinctive:

giant factories, complicated production chains, radiation, reactors, missiles, spaceflight, and nuclear weapons capable of permanently changing the world.

What changes is the logic underneath them.

Better performance for large factories. Less arbitrary balancing. More meaningful power infrastructure. More coherent industrial processing. Deeper reactor behavior. And progression built around what your industry can actually do.

RTM is not about making NTM complicated for the sake of being complicated.

It is about taking systems that were already ambitious and giving them the mechanics, balance, and infrastructure they deserved.

Ragex's Nuclear Tech Mod is developed for Minecraft Forge 1.7.10, with ongoing compatibility work for the modern 1.7.10 ecosystem including Angelica and maintained NEI/GTNH-derived tooling.