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SteelWorks is an industrial simulation mod — not magic, not fantasy.

No free energy. No teleporting. No "place and forget". Every machine burns fuel, draws power, and has to earn its place on your factory floor. If you like watching a coal generator spin up, cables light up, and a battery bank slowly fill — this is the mod for you.

💧 Fluids & Steam (Beta 0.7)

The factory's first fluid loop — and your reactor's waste heat just became a power plant.

• Fluid Pipes — move water and steam between machines at 100 mB/t, auto-connecting to tanks, boilers, turbines and cooling towers
• Fluid Tank — 16,000 mB storage with a live liquid-level GUI
• Fluid Pump — pulls water straight out of lakes and oceans. No buckets required
• Steam Boiler — burns any fuel to turn water into steam
• Steam Turbine — spins steam into FE. Boiler + Turbine match the Coal Generator's total energy per fuel — the payoff is banking and burst power, not free energy
• Cooling Tower Rework — water-fed towers cool the reactor at full rate and convert removed heat into steam. A two-tower setup feeds the turbine ~45 FE/t of recovered power. Run them dry and cooling drops to a third

⚡ High Voltage (Beta 0.6)

Your factory has a grid now, not just a wire.

• MV Transformer (LV ⇄ MV) and HV Transformer (MV ⇄ HV) — step power between voltage tiers with the Wrench. 2% conversion cost, big buffers that smooth bursts
• Cable Energy Loss — every cable hop bleeds FE: Copper 1.5%, Steel 0.5%, Titanium 0.15% per block. Long LV runs lose ~14% over 10 blocks; HV keeps ~98.5%. Distance matters now
• HV Generator — burns the same fuels 10× faster for 300 FE/t with identical total FE per fuel. One Copper cable can't empty it — climb the voltage ladder
• Energy Monitor — reads live FE/t flow: the face lights and GUI show what's actually moving through your grid

🔩 Automation (Beta 0.5)

• Transport Pipes — auto-connect to machines, storage crates, vanilla chests and each other. They pull items out, move them along, and push them in — like a real conveyor belt
• Pipe Filters — Any / Whitelist / Blacklist with one button. Split ores from junk, forever
• The Wrench — the mechanic's tool: cycle every machine face's I/O mode, rotate machines, and pick machines up with their contents and energy intact
• Machine Side-Config — every face has its own mode; pipes only insert into inputs and extract from outputs
• Storage Crate Auto-Eject — set a face to Output and the crate pushes into neighboring pipes and inventories
• The goal: a fully automated chest → pipe → crusher → pipe → crate ore line with zero player interaction

⚡ Power & Energy

• Coal Generator — 30 FE/t, ~40s per coal — and Uranium Fuel Cells for 400s of continuous power
• Nuclear Reactor — burns fuel cells for 4× the FE. The core heats up… and an uncooled reactor melts down and explodes
• Cooling Towers — pull heat out of the reactor — and feed them water to turn that heat into steam for your turbine
• Copper Cable (LV, 256 FE/t), Steel Cable (MV, 1024 FE/t), Titanium Cable (HV, 4096 FE/t) — real transfer limits and per-hop energy loss
• Storage Battery (40,000 FE) and Storage Battery MK2 (200,000 FE) — 8-phase charge faces you can read from across the room
• Machines draw only what they need — no phantom drains, batteries keep their reserves

☢️ Nuclear Safety

• Meltdown — max heat + no cooling = a meltdown timer ticks up. The GUI warns you: CAUTION - MELTDOWN xx%
• Explosions — when the timer runs out, the reactor blasts the area, destroys itself, and scatters Radiation Fire
• Radiation — hot reactors radiate living things (green, damaging over time). Radiation Fire does the same
• Sand — right-click the flames with sand to smother them. A shovel and a sand stack are mandatory reactor-adjacent equipment

🏭 Machines That Do Real Work

• Crusher — raw iron or gold in, 2x dust out. Ore doubling, done right
• Electric Furnace — smelts on FE, faster than vanilla
• Alloy Mixer — Iron + Coal = Steel, Titanium + Iron = Titanium Alloy
• Nuclear Reactor — the endgame generator: feed it fuel cells, watch the core heat up, and keep it cool — or don't
• Plus factory furniture: Storage Crate, Energy Monitor, Control Panel, Maintenance Hatch

🔩 Real Survival Progression

Everything is craftable. Everything is wireable. No deadlocks, no blocks you can't make — just mine, smelt, alloy, and build up.

Copper → Steel → Titanium Alloy (Alloy Mixer) → high-voltage cables. Uranium → Fuel Cells → reactor power → water-fed Cooling Towers for safe, profitable reactor power. Nothing is a dead end.

⛏️ New Ores

Copper, Titanium and Uranium generate in the world at balanced heights and rarities.

📖 The Manual

A craftable in-game instruction book with illustrated pages — v7, organized by category (Getting Started · Power & Energy · High Voltage · Fluids & Steam · Machines · Automation · Nuclear & Safety · Reference · Classified). Its text lives in assets/steelworks/manual/manual.txt, so you can edit the manual yourself — and it updates live while you play.

🎨 The Polish

• Original 32×32 industrial textures — every machine has its own distinct skin — plus sound design and GUIs, every pixel hand-made
• JEI & EMI support — every machine and fluid recipe shows up with FE/t and processing time
• Config-driven balance (steelworks-common.toml) — tune every number without touching code
• 38 automated game tests behind every machine and fluid loop, on both loaders
• 32 advancements — a full progression tree from Machine Age to Unlimited Power

🛠️ Made by One Developer

SteelWorks is built entirely by a single person — every texture, every sound, every line of code. That means two things:

1. It's cohesive. One vision, one art style, nothing bolted on. Every block belongs to the same factory.
2. Your feedback actually shapes it. Feature requests go straight into the next beta. If something's missing or broken, tell me — it might be fixed in next week's build.