The problem

played a bunch of packs at this point and its the same story every time. energy is a real resource right up until it isnt. you get halfway through, finish a reactor or throw some automation together, and now theres more FE laying around than the pack could ever burn. and the second that happens you stop caring about it. no reason to scale production, no reason to touch mid tier generators or processors, you skip straight to whatever the biggest thing is because nothing is actually stopping you. and not "a little extra" either. millions of FE/t sitting there doing nothing for the rest of the run

meanwhile the other half of the game is going the other way. you still need bulk mats and the only real way to scale that is horizontal farms. fine early on. by late game its some absolute unit of a contraption tanking your FPS by itself and murdering TPS for everyone else on the server

you can gate all this behind a quest system sure, but thats a sledgehammer. drop ONE item into a craft that costs 50,000,000 FE with KubeJS and suddenly the mid tier stuff is worth building again. you're off the rush-the-biggest-generator script and actually looking at other routes. pack devs dont have a clean universal fix for either side of this. Matterium is that dial

What it actually is

its a primitive. no content, no opinions about your pack. four generators that each burn FE for one tier of matter, green orange purple and black, each one pricier than the last and all of it config editable. plus a recipe system for turning matter back into items, set up however you want or not at all

building the generators is normal machine crafting, recipe in block out. after that matter is a plain item. stacks and pipes like anything else, sits in an ME system no problem, and once its out of the generator the mod stops caring what you do with it. the exchange rate, the tier progression, what matter is actually worth spending on, thats all your call as the pack author

you dont have to use all four either. if one tier covers what you need then run that one and kill the rest through KubeJS

Two ways to spend matter

[ 1 ] Spending matter in the crafting grid

recipes run through a normal 3x3 and WHERE you put the matter is part of the recipe. two matter in the top left corner is a different recipe from two matter in the middle row. each recipe uses 1 to 9 matter, which works out to 226 layouts per tier and 904 across all four. you dont have to fill every slot, thats just the ceiling if you ever need it

[ 2 ] Or skip the grid entirely

wipe every recipe out of the config and matter still pulls its weight, because its just an item and anything that eats items can use it. that covers KubeJS/CraftTweaker recipes including other mods machines (couple ready made scripts ship in examples/kubejs/, copy them into kubejs/server_scripts/), quest rewards and gates through FTB Quests or Odyssey Quests or whatever your pack runs, a tiered pack currency built out of the four compressed energy levels, or just an ingredient in a Mekanism, Create or etc recipe you write yourself

Config

the shipped config is a demo, not a design statement. its there so the mod does something after you install it

costs live in config/matterium/matterium-common.toml, one block per tier:

[green]
    #FE cost of 1 unit of green matter.
    # Default: 1000000
    # Range: 1 ~ 2305843009213693951
    matterCostFE = 1000000

    #Internal energy buffer of the green generator 0 = auto (2 x matterCostFE)
    # Default: 0
    # Range: 0 ~ 4611686018427387903
    bufferCapacityFE = 0

    #Max FE the generator accepts per tick (pushed + pulled) 0 = unlimited
    # Default: 0
    # Range: 0 ~ 2305843009213693951
    maxReceiveFEPerTick = 0

what matter crafts into is its own file per tier, config/matterium/items/green.json. one entry per line, "item_id": [x] or "item_id": [x, y] - x is output count, y is matter cost and gets auto picked if you leave it off

{
  "minecraft:dirt": [40, 5],
  "create:andesite_alloy": [16],
  "ae2:certus_quartz_crystal": [8, 2]
}

you dont have to hand edit either file though. hold the item, run one command, done

/matterium add <color> <craft_output> [cost_matter]   # e.g. /matterium add green 3 4
/matterium rem <color>
/matterium reset <color> # wipes every item out of that tier

changes get written to config/matterium/items/<color>.json, apply with /reload

Found a bug or want to contribute?

open an issue or a PR on GitHub, ill get back to you as quick as i can