Voltium
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Thirteen power plant stages from a coal generator to zero-point energy, plus cables and storage.
Reinay97 | Voltium
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Voltium
From a coal fire to the vacuum itself.
Voltium is a power plant mod for Minecraft: thirteen stages of generators, from a coal generator on a stone floor to a tower that draws energy from the zero point. Most stages are large multiblocks you build yourself and watch at work, and every one of them delivers Forge Energy to anything that takes it - including machines from other mods. Cables and storage in five tiers each carry the power from where it is made to where it is used.
It is made for expert packs: every power plant is gated behind chips, and the better the plant, the finer the chip. That is why Chip Foundry is required.
The stages
| Stage | Plant | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2 | Coal Generator, Steam Plant | A generator for any furnace fuel; a hollow 3x3x3 boiler with a steam turbine. |
| 3 | Wind Turbine, Water Wheel | A nacelle on a mast under open sky; a wheel in flowing water. |
| 4 | Gas Well, Gas Turbine | Endless natural gas that depends on the chunk; a long turbine that spins up and coasts down. |
| 5 | Geothermal Plant | A tower over a borehole - the deeper the pipe ends, the hotter it gets. |
| 6 | Solar Tower | A receiver tower ringed by mirrors that turn to face it, with salt tanks that store heat for the night. |
| 7 | Fission Reactor | A hall with fuel cells and control rods in any pattern you design. Too hot and it scrams. |
| 8 | Fast Breeder | Burns breeder rods and makes new fuel rods for the reactor from spent ones. |
| 9 | Fusion Ring | A flat ring with a plasma channel you can watch through glass. Needs a huge start current and deuterium. |
| 10 | Orbital Solar | A receiving dish and power satellites that you launch. Works day and night, in any weather. |
| 11 | Antimatter Ring | A magnet ring that fills a trap, with a violet sphere growing at its core. |
| 12 | Black Hole | A cage of more than forty blocks per side, with a black hole at its heart that feeds on the items you throw in. |
| 13 | Zero-Point Energy | A tall resonator tower you tune by hand while a tesseract spins above its roof. |
The numbers grow with the stages: a coal generator makes 200 FE/t, the largest fission hall about 120,000 FE/t, the largest fusion ring 2,000,000 FE/t, a full black hole up to 120,000,000 FE/t and the highest zero-point tower 500,000,000 FE/t. All of it is adjustable in the config.
Big machines you can read
- Build help. Sneak and right-click a controller (or any block of the structure) with the wrench and the chat tells you what is missing and where, while red particles mark the block for ten seconds. The same line shows in the menu.
- Gentle failures. Nothing explodes and no block breaks. A reactor that overheats scrams and loses its fuel; a breeder that cannot keep cool simply runs throttled; a fusion plasma that runs out of deuterium goes out.
- Every stage looks like what it does. Mirrors turn to the sun, rotors spin with the wind, fuel cells glow, plasma circles in its channel, the black hole carries an accretion disc and jets.
- Statuses with advice. Every menu has a status line, and its tooltip tells you what to do about it.
Cables
Five cable tiers, each bare or insulated (the superconductor is always insulated):
| Cable | Carries (per network) |
|---|---|
| Copper | 2,000 FE/t |
| Medium voltage | 32,000 FE/t |
| High voltage | 512,000 FE/t |
| Superconductor | 8,000,000 FE/t - with liquid nitrogen |
| Field conductor | unlimited - but its field costs a little power |
Cables of one network share power evenly between all consumers and lose nothing. Bare cable hurts anything that touches it while power flows; insulated cable does not. Tiers never connect to each other, and cables do not connect to the cables of other mods - machines of every mod still attach to any cable directly.
The superconductor needs cryo stations with liquid nitrogen, made by the air separator from power. If the nitrogen runs out, the network falls back to 512,000 FE/t.
The wrench clamps a cable side off and on, and (sneaking) picks a cable up again.
Storage
Five tiers too - copper, medium voltage, high voltage, superconductor, field. Storage cells, inputs and outputs that touch form one storage in any shape, up to 4,096 blocks. Capacity and throughput add up block by block, from 1 million FE per copper cell to 64 billion per field cell. A cell you take down keeps its share of the energy in the item.
Chip Foundry
Voltium and Chip Foundry belong together. The control blocks of the plants need logic chips, the connections and the mirrors need sheet metal, plugs and heat sinks. The higher the stage, the finer the node: the solar tower, geothermal plant and reactor need a 1 µm chip, the breeder and the fusion ring 180 nm, orbital solar and antimatter 45 nm, the black hole and zero-point energy 7 nm. Chip Foundry 0.2.0 or newer is required.
In the game
- Jade (optional): cables show tier, flow and limit, plants and connections show status and current output, and the big buffers show in full.
- Patchouli (optional): the Voltium Handbook in English and German, with build plans, power figures, the meaning of every status and the recipes. Crafted from a book and a copper cable, also in the creative tab.
- Pipes, cables and hoppers of other mods work through the usual interfaces.
- Advancements for the stages and cables, English and German.
For pack makers and servers
All values live in the config: output, buffers, tanks, efficiencies, wind and mast limits, gas per chunk, cable limits
and damage, storage size and more. Cable blocks of other mods can be shut out with the config or the block tag
voltium:foreign_cables.
Voltium is made for Minecraft 1.21.1 on NeoForge 21.1.238 or newer, and for multiplayer: it works in singleplayer and on dedicated servers. It is part of the modpack Margin Call.
A note on how this was made
This mod was built with substantial help from AI. I gave the direction; the design, the code, the textures and this text were written by an AI assistant. I would rather say that plainly than have you wonder.
Discord
Questions, bug reports, ideas, or just want to show what you built? Join the Discord - that is where I answer fastest, and where the next version gets shaped.
Voltium Team
