Mekanism: Better Antimatter

Mekanism lets you build an SPS, spend a fortune in polonium, and finally make antimatter - and then gives you almost nothing to do with it.

This mod starts there. Antimatter stops being the end of the tree and becomes the first rung of a new one: burn it for enormous power, condense it into exotic matter, fire a laser at the stars for strange matter, and end up dissolving matter into raw data and printing it back as anything you like.

Each stage powers the next, and every step is harder to handle safely than the last.

Annihilation power

The Annihilation Chamber is a single block: antimatter and water in, energy out. Enough to start with.

The Annihilation Reactor is the real thing - a multiblock from 3x3x3 up to 7x7x7 whose output grows faster than its fuel use, so a bigger reactor is genuinely better, not just bigger.

It runs hot. Sodium coolant carries the heat away as superheated sodium, which feeds straight into a Mekanism boiler and turbine for extra power. Let the temperature climb and the reactor throttles itself as a warning. Ignore that too, and containment fails.

Exotic matter

The Exotic Matter Condenser crushes antimatter and polonium together under enormous, sustained power until they condense into exotic matter. It eats far more power than it makes - build it beside a reactor.

Exotic matter unlocks everything after this, and has an immediate use too: the Exotic Crystallizer takes ore processing from 5x to 10x. It reads Mekanism's own recipes, so it works with every ore in your pack, modded ones included, with no setup.

Shooting the stars

The Stellar Collector is a giant laser that fires straight up, strikes a star, and draws inactive strange matter back down the beam.

Where you build it is the puzzle. It needs a clear view of the sky, only works at night, stops in rain and storms, and runs faster the higher you build - a third of full speed at sea level, full speed at Y 200. In the End, where it is always night, it runs at any hour.

Or skip the rules: a Captured Star inside the collector replaces the sky entirely - any dimension, any time, any weather, and faster, for triple the power.

Black holes

Strange matter comes down inert. Waking it takes a Black Hole Generator: a multiblock that holds a singularity and projects a 16-block field. Stand Containment Units in that field and the strange matter they hold slowly becomes active.

While its field is up, the generator is also a gravity well. Loose items anywhere in range are pulled in and stored for your pipes to collect, so one beside a quarry or mob farm doubles as a collector. It pulls items only - never you.

Matter into data, data into anything

The Matter Digitizer tears any item apart with active strange matter and stores what it was as raw data.

The Matter Decoder prints it back. Put one item in its pattern slot - it is only read, never used up - and it prints copies. Printing costs more data than digitizing gives back, so replication always costs you something. Error Correction Matrices inside the Decoder win some of that back, each one less than the last. Printing never becomes free.

Handle with care

None of this stays put if you let it out. Break a tank, break a pipe, or dump one on the floor, and it leaks - and the tank you pick up is empty.

Exotic matter lingers. Inside the zone, anything organic dissolves: trees and crops vanish, grass dies, and living things take damage that ordinary armour does nothing to stop. A small spill fades in minutes; a big one lasts over an hour, and logging out does not clear it.

Active strange matter is the one to fear. It turns the blocks it touches into more of itself, and those do the same, spreading through stone, walls and machines as far as the size of the spill allows. It hurts anything it touches and takes items left lying on it. Mine it to stop the spread - the Strange Matter Shards it drops are worth having. A few seconds later, what is left collapses into a crater.

Raw data has no idea what matter it should be, so it turns into whatever comes to hand: a scattering of random blocks where your machine used to be. Harmless. Embarrassing.

Staying alive

• Exotic Hazmat Suit - keeps exotic matter out, piece by piece; only a full set blocks all of it. Combine each piece with its Mekanism counterpart for a Composite Hazmat Suit that protects against radiation too.
• Exotic Shielding Unit - the same protection for a MekaSuit, one per piece.
• Exotic Geiger Counter and Exotic Dosimeter - how bad a spot is before you walk in, and how much got through. Both also come as MekaSuit modules that put the readings on your HUD.
• Containment Lining - line your Mekanism pipes, and a fully lined network releases nothing when broken, Mekanism's radioactive chemicals included.
• Radiation Scrubber and Exotic Scrubber - place one by a spill and it clears in minutes instead of hours. It works on all of Mekanism's radiation too. What they collect refines back into something useful in an Isotopic Centrifuge, at a quarter of the volume.

Gear and upgrades

• Antimatter Reactor Unit - a MekaSuit module that adds an antimatter tank and keeps the suit charged.
• Antimatter Cell Unit - a Meka-Tool module that burns antimatter pellets from your inventory to recharge it.
• Antimatter Cell - a portable battery worth sixteen antimatter pellets. Burn pellets into it, then plug it into any machine.
• Antimatter Catalyst - right-click any Mekanism machine to halve its power draw for an hour.
• Strange Accelerant - right-click any Mekanism machine to double its speed for ten minutes, even beyond the speed-upgrade cap. Made from shards you mine out of a strange matter spread before it collapses.
• SPS Focusing Coil - halve the polonium your SPS needs, for an hour. Make it permanent with an Exotic Focusing Matrix, then fit a Strange Resonator on top to make the SPS twice as fast on the same power.
• Antimatter Charge - power it with redstone and it annihilates everything within six blocks. Nothing drops, nothing burns, and charges chain. The crater is left radioactive.

An advancement tab guides you through the whole chain, from your first antimatter pellet to printing matter from data.

Compatibility

Optional support for Jade (structure status when you look at a block), JEI (a description page for every block and item) and Athena (connected textures on multiblock casings). None is required, and the mod works the same without them.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.250 or newer
• Mekanism 10.7+ - required, this is an addon

Configuration

Every rate, cost, capacity and threshold is configurable - 113 values, including the reactor's throttle and meltdown temperatures, the collector's sky conditions, how expensive replication is, and how harsh, how far-reaching and how long-lasting each hazard is. Servers can also turn off the Antimatter Charge's block damage.

Status

Early, and honest about it. The textures are placeholders. The core chain - power, exotic matter, strange matter and replication - has been played through by hand. The hazards, protection and cleanup, and the newer gear and upgrades, have all been tested on a server but not yet in a real play session. Bug reports are genuinely useful right now.