AUTOMATION & MACHINES

Automation lets your team build unattended base machinery: custom machines (built on reskinned vanilla blocks) that sit inside your claimed territory and run on their own, pulling power from a shared team energy bus and/or spending small amounts of credits to produce resources, craft items, or move goods along conveyor belts. Once you’ve set up a chain, it keeps working while you’re off doing something else.

Machines tick on their own schedule — the main automation tick runs every 5 seconds, while item movement (conveyors, extractors, grabbers) runs on a faster transport tick every 2 seconds.

Getting machines

There are a few ways to get your hands on a machine:

• Engineering Merchant — 24 non-spawner machines (the Packer included) plus the Repair Kit and 2 vanilla bootstrap items (Hopper, Piston), 27 lines total, priced 0.05–100 credits, sorted cheapest to most expensive.
• Spawner Depot — all 27 tech-gated spawners, 10–400 credits each. Each spawner is locked behind its matching researched tech.
• Bandit Quartermaster — 10 lines, including the 4 contraband spawners at 100–125 credits. These are gated by faction reputation instead of tech.
• Crafted directly — the Fabricator can build a Grabber, Extractor, Upgraded Extractor, or Auto-Smelter straight from resources.

Every machine needs a researched tech to place, except the Conveyor (free from the start, no tech needed) and the 4 contraband spawners (reputation-gated instead).

• Company offices — each company sells its licensed machines once your rank with it allows: Alloy Furnace, Casting Mill, Rolling Mill, Wire Drawer and Tube Mill (Mining), Precision Lathe, Forge Press, Cell Assembler and Circuit Printer (Arms), Food Processor, Canning Line, Bioreactor and Lab Synthesizer (Biotech), Kiln, Prefab Press, Joinery and Fitting Assembler (Colonial). They need no research. They are the only way to make Fine and Masterwork company goods, and their licence climbs five levels paid with team credits plus company goods. See Companies.

The Packer

The Packer (5 cr, no research) packs company goods and the vanilla goods the companies order into Packs, Boxes or Pallets, or unpacks them. Pick its mode in its Craft page, feed it by hand or by belt, and it sends the result out of its output side. It also packs iron ingots, wheat, redstone and melon slices, whose 3×3 in the crafting grid makes their vanilla block.

Placing machines

• You must place machines inside your team’s claimed chunks, and your team needs a Base Core.
• Each Base Core tier caps how many machine blocks you can have: T1 = 8, T2 = 16, T3 = 32, T4 = 64, T5 = 128.
• Spawners have their own per-chunk cap by core tier: T1 = 10, T2 = 12, T3 = 14, T4 = 16, T5 = 20.
• Only one Quarry is allowed per team.
• A Quarry can’t be placed in a chunk that a Quarry (any team’s) has already dug out.

Breaking a machine

Breaking a machine drops a custom item you can re-place later. It keeps:

• Spawner upgrade level
• Crafter upgrade tracks (Speed / Capacity / Efficiency)

It loses (resets on re-placement):

• Fuel and water buffers
• Priority setting and Always-On flag
• Input/output facing

Quarry dig progress stays with the chunk, not the item. Place a Quarry back in a half-dug chunk and it picks up at the layer where the last one stopped.

Anything physically in transit at the moment of breaking — belt buffers, a crafter’s stock, its output buffer — drops on the ground instead of vanishing.

The energy system

Every team shares one energy bus. Generators feed power into it; most other machines draw power out.

• Supply is capped by your Base Core level — think of it as an intake ceiling.
• If total demand outruns supply, machines get shed (paused, shown as “brown-out”) starting with the lowest-priority machines first.
• Priority is a dial from 1–5 set per machine: 1 is the most protected (shed last), 5 is shed first. Left-click a machine to cycle its priority (1 → 5 → 1). Requires Officer rank or above.
• Always On is a toggle (right-click, Officer+) available only on the Water Reservoir and Repair Station. It sorts those machines to the very back of the shed order — but it is not a hard exemption. If the whole base runs out of power, even Always-On machines go dark.
• Both the cursor-GUI Power tab and the chest-menu Base Core “Power” tab expose the same priority/Always-On controls.
• Conveyor belts also draw energy (1 point each) and freeze their belt animation when unpowered.
• Credits are only charged while a machine works: a spawner pays per drop, a crafter per craft, the Coal Generator per charcoal, and the Quarry and Crop Harvester only on a tick where they actually dig or harvest. An idle machine costs nothing, and the Repair Station, Water Reservoir, belts and movers never cost credits at all. The item tooltip, the machine’s menu and the PDA show each fee and the most it can cost per hour.

1. Generators

Five machines produce power for your base.

2. Processors & Crafters

Ten machines run one unified auto-crafting design: each keeps a stock of input materials and an output buffer, crafts continuously while stocked, and pushes finished goods toward a chosen face (belt or container). If the output can’t go anywhere, the machine backs up rather than losing items — only true overflow drops on the ground. You can feed them by hand through their Stock menu or automatically by belt.

Two of them use a free-form 3×3 crafting grid (any valid vanilla recipe works, and ingredients are returned if you cancel); the rest use a locked preset recipe you pick from a menu.

Free-form grid crafters

Preset-recipe crafters

Fabricator recipes (the most versatile crafter):

Compact Deepslate is the go-to use for a Quarry’s deepslate spoil — Compacted Deepslate is used in defense building.

Upgrade tracks

Any of the 10 crafters above can be upgraded along three separate tracks:

• Speed — craft time by level: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ticks.
• Capacity — stock cap +16 per level.
• Efficiency — chance to not consume an ingredient: 5% / 10% / 15% / 20% / 25%. It never refunds a container the output is carried in (a Water Generator never hands its bucket back) or an ingredient the output can be crafted back into (iron ingots going into an iron block).

Each track goes up to level 5, and the cost ladder per step is 5 → 10 → 50 → 100 credits (L1→L2, L2→L3, L3→L4, L4→L5). A higher Base Core tier discounts every step. The same ladder is charged separately on each of the three tracks, so fully maxing one crafter costs 495 credits before the discount. Upgrades survive breaking and re-placing the machine.

3. Spawners

Spawners are passive resource producers — 31 in total (27 tech-unlocked, 4 contraband). Each spawner counts down a timer; when it hits zero, it charges your team’s treasury a per-drop fee and ejects one unit of output toward its facing (belt, container, or the ground if nothing’s connected). The fee is a modest running cost, about 15–30% of the item’s market value (0.001 cr a drop on the cheapest outputs), so a spawner is slow, steady income — sold at the Imperial Market, a level-1 spawner pays for itself in about three days. At level 1 the basic spawners drop every 25–40 seconds (stone, wood, sand, gravel and string every 25 s; animal and ore spawners every 30–40 s); the spawner’s menu shows the exact interval. If your team can’t afford the fee, the spawner pauses with a “no funds” status.

Each spawner can be individually upgraded through 5 levels. Every level shortens the drop interval at the same per-drop fee, so every upgrade raises what the spawner earns, and the upgrade button shows the next level’s interval and fee. Upgrades are priced so a spawner bought straight up to level 5 pays for itself in about seven days, and a higher Base Core tier discounts every upgrade. Per-chunk spawner caps (from the Base Core tier table above) apply when placing them.

Tech-gated spawners (Spawner Depot)

Handy pairings to know:

• The Chicken, Cow, and Pig spawners share one tech node (machinery.spawner_animal).
• The Coal Spawner is the only source of fuel for both the Coal Generator and the Water Boiling Engine.
• Sheep and String spawners are meant to feed the Cloth Making Machine.

Contraband spawners (Bandit Quartermaster)

No tech gate — instead these require a minimum faction reputation with the bandits.

Contraband spawners drop 2–5× slower than a tech spawner of the same tier (Gunpowder every 80 s, Blaze Rod and Ender Pearl every 2 min, Breeze Rod every 3 min at level 1), and their fee is set so they pay for themselves at about the same pace, about three days at level 1. You’re paying for access to a rare resource, not for faster income.

There is no Ancient Debris / Netherite spawner — Netherite only comes from the Volcano Heart world feature, never from automation.

4. Item transport — conveyors & movers

Four machines move goods around for you. All four are free to run — they only cost energy, no credits.

A typical chain: Spawner → Conveyor → Chest → Extractor → Conveyor → Grabber (merge) → Conveyor → Auto-Crafter → Chest — fully unattended once it’s set up.

5. Storage & utility machines

Quarry spoil table

The Quarry has no fortune/luck bonus — yields below are fixed, not rolled, for predictable output.

Feed the Cobbled Deepslate spoil into a Fabricator’s Compact Deepslate recipe for Compacted Deepslate, used in defense building.

6. Crop Harvester

The newest machine in the catalog — genuine passive farm automation.

• Tier 2, tech machinery.crop_harvester, energy -6, cost 20 cr, upkeep 0.001 cr per tick it harvests (an idle harvester costs nothing). Base block: Composter. Sold by the Engineering Merchant.
• Works only within its own chunk, like the Quarry. Each tick it scans an 8-block vertical band across the chunk and harvests up to 4 mature crops per tick.
• Harvesting resets a crop to age 0 in place — a free automatic replant. Nothing is broken or destroyed.
• Yield goes out its output face (belt or container), or drops on the ground if nothing’s connected.
• Yields are fixed 1:1 per harvest — not randomized, matching the Quarry’s no-luck design.

Any crop not on this list is left standing untouched — plant a field of one of these five inside the harvester’s chunk and it will keep itself running indefinitely.

Using and managing machines

• Right-click a machine (not sneaking) to open its menu. Only the owning team can. With the server resource pack loaded it opens as the full-screen menu, otherwise as a chest menu; both do the same things.
• /automation list shows every machine your team owns and what each one is doing.
• Generators other than the Coal Generator and the Water Boiling Engine have nothing to configure, so right-clicking them just shows a status chat line instead of a menu. The Quarry and the Crop Harvester have no menu at all: everything about them is set at placement. On the full-screen menu, fuel goes in with the Load fuel button, which takes every fuel stack you carry that fits.
• Crafter menus have Overview / Recipe / Stock / Upgrade / Output sections. On the full-screen menu, a free-form crafter’s recipe is a 3×3 you fill from the materials you are carrying (nothing leaves your inventory), and Stock lists what you carry, with a Deposit all matching button. Simpler machines (Grabber, Extractor, Conveyor) just have a side picker.
• Auto-crafters only accept meta-free items in their stock — enchanted or named gear is refused outright, not silently stripped.
• Breaking a machine closes any menu still open on it, and anything you had put in its slots comes back to you.

Quick reference: what needs what

• No tech required: Conveyor.
• Reputation-gated, not tech: the 4 contraband spawners (Gunpowder, Blaze Rod, Ender Pearl, Breeze Rod).
• Everything else needs its matching researched tech before you can place it.