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 — 22 non-spawner machines plus 3 vanilla bootstrap items, 25 lines total, priced 5–200 credits, sorted cheapest to most expensive.
• Spawner Depot — all 27 tech-gated spawners, 10–200 credits each. Each spawner is locked behind its matching researched tech.
• Bandit Quartermaster — 12 lines, including the 4 contraband spawners, 100–500 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).

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.

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
• Quarry dig progress
• Priority setting and Always-On flag
• Input/output facing

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 Energy tab and the chest-menu Base Core “ENERGY” page expose the same priority/Always-On controls.
• Conveyor belts also draw energy (1 point each) and freeze their belt animation when unpowered.

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 multiplier by level: ×3, ×2, ×2, ×1, ×1 ticks.
• Capacity — stock cap +16 per level.
• Efficiency — chance to not consume an ingredient: 5% / 10% / 15% / 20% / 25%.

Each track goes up to level 5, and the cost ladder per step is 2,000 → 8,000 → 30,000 → 100,000 credits. This is a deliberately large, separate cost track from the cheap machine purchase prices — don’t be alarmed by the jump. 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 most of the item’s market value, so a spawner is a steady material source rather than a money printer — sold at the Imperial Market, a level-1 spawner pays for itself in about two days. At level 1 the basic spawners drop every 15–40 seconds (stone, wood, sand and gravel every 15 s; animal and ore spawners every 25–40 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 speeds up the drop cadence while the per-drop fee stays about the same, with an upgrade-price discount at higher Base Core tiers. 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. 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 40 cr, upkeep 0.01 cr/tick. 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 GUI — blocked if you’re not on the owning team.
• Generators other than the Coal Generator have nothing to configure, so right-clicking them just shows a status chat line instead of a menu. The Quarry has no GUI at all — everything about it is set at placement.
• Crafter menus typically have MAIN / CRAFT (recipe pick) / STOCK (hand-feed) / UPGRADE / CONFIG (facing) tabs. Simpler machines (Grabber, Extractor, Conveyor) just have a facing/config menu.
• Auto-crafters only accept meta-free items in their stock slots — enchanted or named gear is refused outright, not silently stripped.

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.