Xiaoxiang Black Tech — 0.1.0

The first stones of the framework. The six sections at the top always say where things stand: what is new, what changed, what was fixed, what is in but not finished, what you may run into, and what was caught before you could.

🆕 New

🧭 Side settings, and machines that push on their own

Every machine now has a faces panel in its window, opened by the die-shaped button beside the redstone button. It shows the six faces twice - items on the left, energy on the right - and a click on a face moves it round: takes in, gives out, closed. A machine only offers what it actually does, so an Unwinder's energy faces go between giving and closed and never pretend to take, and a Spirit Grinder's item faces can be set to take ores in, hand the grind out, or stay shut. Hover over any face and it says so in words. Every machine starts exactly as it always worked - stones in at the top, energy out of the rest, and so on - so old machines and old worlds carry on as before, and the Energy Relays keep their own rule and have no panel.

A face set to give items pushes on its own: every few ticks the Condenser, the Spirit Grinder and the Electric Spirit Furnace hand what they made to the chest, hopper or machine on that side, a stack at a time, without a hopper underneath. A face set to give energy pushes energy the way the Sun Gatherer always has. Nothing is ever pushed back into a face that gives, and a machine held by redstone pushes nothing at all.

⚡ Energy Relays

Three new grades of relay - Low, Mid and High - carry Forge Energy between your machines. Feed one through any face and it hands the energy on to whatever takes energy beside it, through every face but the one it came in by. Energy never goes back the way it came, so two relays side by side never bounce the same energy between them, and a long line of relays carries its full rate from one end to the other. A Low relay moves 3,200 FE a tick, a Mid 51,200 and a High 409,600. Nothing can draw energy back out of a relay: it only pushes. Eight Low relays come from one craft, and eight of a grade plus one Refined Gold or High spirit stone make eight of the next.

🔥 Electric Spirit Furnace

The Electric Spirit Furnace smelts anything a furnace smelts, every furnace recipe from every mod, on Forge Energy instead of fuel - twice as fast as a furnace, 4,000 FE an item spread evenly over the smelt. Items go in at the top, what it made comes out of the bottom, energy comes in through the four sides. It never pays for a tick unless the output has room, so nothing is lost. The coil in its mouth glows white-hot and it roars while it works.

🔴 Redstone control on every machine

Every machine's window now has a redstone button: the machine works whatever the signal, only while it has a signal, or only while it has none. A machine held by redstone stops completely - no work, no energy in or out, its face dark, its hum quiet - and its window says it is held. A generator held keeps its fuel; a relay held is a break in the line, so a lever on a relay switches a whole power line. Machines placed before this work as they always did.

🏗️ A workshop to build, and the Black Tech Codex

Black Tech now has its own building set: Machine Casings (plain, vented and riveted), Machine Panels (plain, lined, and the Qi Circuit Panel, whose jade lines glow in the dark with a pulse of qi running along them), each with its stairs and slab. Add Black Glass that shows no inner faces between panes, Machine Frames you can see straight through, and Catwalk Gratings that sit low or high like a slab and join into one floor. Last come sixteen Qi Lamps, one for every dye, each at the brightest light there is and lit by day and by night. All thirty-seven sit together in the Black Tech tab. The casing family turns into one another on a stonecutter, one for one, and any lamp takes a new dye.

With Patchouli installed, a book, an iron ingot and a Low-grade spirit stone make the Black Tech Codex. It has three chapters (Currents, Machines, Building Blocks), seventeen entries and eighty-five pages, in English and Spanish, with twenty drawn plates. Every figure in it is the one the machines are built with: stores, rates, buffers, what each stone burns for, and what a Fortune III grind gives. Without Patchouli the book is simply not there, and nothing complains.

🎶 Black Tech finds its voice

The machines are no longer silent. An Unwinder spins up, whirs and spins down; a Condenser charges, hums and powers down; a Sun Gatherer wakes with the light, shimmers through the day and dims at dusk; and the Spirit Grinder, the Spirit Stone Generator and the Qi Batteries are heard for as long as their fronts glow - the grinder starts, grinds and stops, the generator ignites, thrums and sputters out, a battery wakes, hums while charge moves through it and rests. A machine is heard up to sixteen blocks away, quieter as you walk off, and only the nearest dozen at once. When its store is full it rings a soft chime, once - a battery when it is charged, the generator when it can hold no more, the grinder when its output cannot take another grind - and rings again only after something has drawn it down by a quarter. Every sound has its subtitle in English and Spanish.

You can see it as well as hear it: while a machine works its face comes alive - the Unwinder's coil turns, motes of qi run down the Condenser's funnel into a filling stone, rays sweep around the Sun Gatherer's golden disc - and settles a second after the work stops. All six windows now share one look: dark iron with jade trim and the machine's own face in the corner, bars that fill in jade for spiritual energy, ember for Forge Energy, gold for a stone on the fire and steel for an ore half ground, and a lamp that breathes while the machine works and stays dark while it waits. The Spirit Grinder's output sits under its ore, rimmed in ember, with a jade arrow between them. Each window clicks as it opens and as it closes.

And there are four records of the mod's own, each close to three minutes long: Circuit Dawn, Qi Current, Black Sun and Cold Fusion. Look for them in dungeon, mineshaft and ancient city chests, or press one from four Cold Iron around redstone, lapis lazuli, refined gold or packed ice. They play in any jukebox, a hopper feeds them in like any other record, and they fade with distance: full beside the jukebox, gone sixty-four blocks away.

⚡ The currents

Five units, and the rates between them. Qi is the cultivation mod's own measure, what a cultivator gathers and what a spirit stone holds. Immortal Chi is what an Immortal Spirit Stone holds, the grade above Supreme: one is a thousand qi. Spiritual Energy (SE) is the current Black Tech's own machines run on, qi condensed into something a wire can carry, one for one. Forge Energy (FE) is what every other machine mod runs on: one SE unwinds into a hundred FE, and it takes a million FE to condense one SE back - ten thousand times what unwinding one gives. Power alone is a slow road to spiritual machinery, never a free one. Immortal Spiritual Energy (ISE) is the current above SE: one Immortal Chi condenses into one ISE, and a fully condensed Immortal Spirit Stone holds a hundred thousand ISE; the Immortal Transformer and the Immortal Spirit Stone come with Realm Expansion's leveled stones. All six rates are settings, each one for one or a round figure ending in a zero, with a warning beside the one pair that must stay apart.

🧱 The Black Tech Casing

The frame every machine is built on: blackened Xuan Iron, riveted, with one jade seam. Four Xuan Iron at the corners, four Low-grade Spirit Stones at the edges, an iron block in the middle - two casings. As hard as an iron block, mined with any pickaxe, and in its own creative tab.

🔌 The Unwinder: spirit stones in, Forge Energy out (work in progress)

The first transformer. Drop spirit stones in at the top - through its window, or from a hopper above - and each is taken whole, as its store has room, at its own worth: a Low stone of ten qi is ten SE, a Supreme stone ten thousand. Each tick ten SE unwind into a thousand FE, and the FE is handed out through the sides and the bottom to whatever takes power there - any mod's cable or machine, up to two thousand FE a tick. A stone is never taken when only part of it would fit, so nothing is lost. Its store holds a hundred thousand SE and it keeps a hundred thousand FE ready; all of it is settings. A right-click opens its window; sneak and right-click with an empty hand and it tells you what it holds instead. A casing wound with redstone between four Xuan Iron, braced with two Mid stones.

🧊 The Condenser: Forge Energy in, spirit stones out (work in progress)

The second transformer, and the slow road back. Power comes in through the sides and the top from any mod's cable, a hundred thousand FE a tick at most, into a buffer of ten million; each tick as many whole SE as the buffer pays for are condensed into its store - a million FE each, as the rates say - and the remainder waits. Once the store holds a stone's worth, a stone crystallises into the tray at the bottom: Low stones as it ships, Mid, High or Supreme by a setting, or none to keep the SE for the machines that will read it. A hopper under it takes the stones; so does its window, or a sneaking right-click with an empty hand. Ten million FE for one Low stone, which unwinds into a thousand: a loop through both machines keeps a ten-thousandth, and nothing more. A casing lined with lapis between four Xuan Iron, braced with two Mid stones.

🪟 Windows for the transformers

Right-click either transformer and its window opens. The Unwinder's shows its stone slot, and its SE store and its FE buffer as two bars with the figures written on them, under a line that says what it is doing: unwinding so many SE a tick into so many FE, or idle. The Condenser's shows its FE buffer, its SE store and the tray its stones crystallise into, with its own line: condensing, with the price of one SE; crystallising, with how far the next stone is; or idle. Shift-click moves stones into the Unwinder and out of either, as in any chest. The bars round up, so a store with anything in it never looks empty, and the figures stay right however far the settings are raised. The old way is still there while sneaking: a sneaking right-click with an empty hand says what the machine holds on the action bar, and empties the Condenser's tray into your hand. In English and in Spanish.

☀️ The Sun Gatherer

Sunlight into Forge Energy. Set it where nothing stands over it and it reads the sun exactly as a daylight detector does: twenty FE a tick at noon in a clear sky, less as the sun climbs and sinks, nothing at night - a clear day comes to about two hundred thousand FE. Rain leaves it three tenths of what the sun would give. In the Sky Realm of Xiaoxiang Realm Expansion, with nothing above the islands, it gathers half again as much. Its energy goes out through the sides and the bottom into any mod's cable or machine, up to two thousand FE a tick, and it keeps a hundred thousand ready. Right-click it for its window: the FE bar, and a line that says what it is doing - gathering so much a tick, night, no sky above, or full. A sneaking right-click with an empty hand says the same on the action bar. Every number of it is a setting. A casing under a daylight detector between two Golden Chrysanthemums, with Refined Gold at its sides, on two Xuan Iron and a Mid stone.

⚙️ Spirit Grinder, Spirit Stone Generator and Qi Batteries

The Spirit Grinder takes ores in at the top and hands out what it grinds at the bottom, running on Forge Energy fed into any of its four sides. A spirit stone ore grinds exactly as a Fortune III pickaxe breaks it - one to four stones, a little over two on average - and never better, however the settings are written. Any other ore with a raw form, from the game or from another mod, grinds into two of that raw material.

The Spirit Stone Generator burns spirit stones into Forge Energy and pushes it into whatever touches its sides and bottom. A Low stone is worth 800 FE - four fifths of what the Unwinder makes of the same stone - and each grade above it ten times the one below. With Realm Expansion installed, its spirit stone blocks burn too, each for ten stones of its grade.

Qi Batteries come in Low, Mid and High grades, holding 1.6, 6.4 and 25.6 million FE. They take energy on five faces and give it only from the front, so two batteries set face to face never pass the same charge back and forth. Break one and it keeps its charge, shown on the item as a bar and in its tooltip.

🔧 Changed and rebalanced

🐉 The currents, repriced - and the immortal current above them

Spirit stones are scarcer power now. One Spiritual Energy unwinds into a hundred Forge Energy instead of a thousand, so a Low stone is worth 1,000 FE, a Supreme stone 1,000,000, and the Unwinder turns its ten SE a tick into 1,000 FE. The road back is as steep as ever: a million FE condense into a single SE, ten thousand times what unwinding one gives, so a loop of the two machines keeps one SE in every ten thousand. The Spirit Stone Generator follows the same scale - a Low stone burns for 800 FE, four fifths of what the Unwinder makes of it - and the Unwinder now hands out up to 2,000 FE a tick from a buffer of 100,000, so a buffer that filled while its takers were full drains again.

Immortal Chi is worth a thousand qi now, and it has a current of its own: Immortal Spiritual Energy (ISE), condensed from Immortal Chi one for one, as qi becomes SE. A fully condensed Immortal Spirit Stone holds 100,000 ISE. The Immortal Transformer and the Immortal Spirit Stone come with Realm Expansion's leveled stones; the Codex's Currents chapter already explains the new current, and its two rates sit in the settings beside the other four. Every rate is one for one or a round figure ending in a zero, so it divides cleanly into halves, tenths and hundredths.

🏷️ A new mark

Black Tech's mark on the mods list now matches its sister mods': the same dark jade disc in a gold ring, three gold letters across the middle over a thin gold rule - XBT - with XIAO BLACK TECH in small letters under the rule, and behind them a chip with its lanes running out to the ring, the way current leaves a core.

🐛 Fixed

Nothing yet.

🚧 Being worked on

🏭 The machines (work in progress)

The machines of the tech mods you already run, remade to run on spiritual energy: the same jobs, their own faces, their own recipes out of the cultivation world's materials. The two transformers between the currents are in, with their windows, and the first machine of the spacefaring family, the Sun Gatherer; the Immortal Transformer, on Immortal Spiritual Energy, comes with the Immortal Spirit Stone; then the rest of the families one at a time, each with its window. Rockets, spiritual rockets that climb faster, and spiritual boats that cross the void sideways on spiritual energy alone.

⚠️ Known problems

Nothing known. If anything misbehaves, a report with the game's log from that run helps.

🛡️ Headed off

🪟 Stones that came back after a reload

Taking part of a stack out of a transformer's window, or topping one up with a shift-click, changed the stones where they lay without telling the machine, so a machine that was doing nothing else was never saved with the change. Quit and come back, and the stones were in the machine again - and in your inventory too. Settled before the windows went out: whatever a window does to a machine's slot is saved with the machine, the way a hopper's work is.

🧊 A tray that filled past its size

A shift-click of spirit stones from your inventory topped up the Condenser's tray whenever the tray already held the same grade - a tray that takes nothing from anyone, and that could then hold more stones than its setting allows. Settled before the windows went out: a shift-click puts nothing on the tray, and takes stones off it as before.

⚙️ A stone setting that could stop the game

A word in the Condenser's stone setting that could not be read as a name - one with a space in it, say - crashed the game the first time the Condenser ran. Settled: the setting takes low, mid, high, supreme or none, any other word goes back to low when the settings load, with a line in the log saying so, and a Condenser that cannot find its stone simply stands idle.