Materials and Recipes

Materials and Recipes

QuantaWorks has no fixed list of metals. It reads the materials of your modpack from the common c: item tags and makes its recipes for every one of them – the tin, nickel, silver or lead of whatever mods you have.

How materials are found

• Tags: an item in c:<form>/<material> is that form of that material, e.g. c:ingots/tin, c:dusts/tin, c:ores/tin. The forms are ore, raw metal, raw block, storage block, ingot, nugget, dust, plate, rod, gear, wire and gem. Old tags such as c:tin_ingots fill forms the modern tags leave empty (server option legacyMaterialTags).
• Material files in data packs add what tags cannot say: a by-product, a melting point, a colour, the preferred item (see For Mod Developers). QuantaWorks brings them for the common metals.
• Ambiguous items – an item tagged as two materials or two forms – are left out of every derived recipe and reported, so a wrong tag in one mod cannot make nonsense recipes.

Which item a machine makes

When several mods make the same form (three mods with a tin ingot), machines produce one of them: the preferred item of the material file, otherwise the first namespace in the server option preferredNamespaces (default minecraft, quantavolt, quantaworks), otherwise the smallest item id. Every one of them is accepted as input.

Where recipes come from

For the same input the first source wins:

1. recipe files of data packs,
2. recipes other mods register through the QuantaWorks API,
3. the game's own recipes (the Induction Furnace imports every smelting recipe of every mod),
4. derived recipes from templates – one per material that has both forms (ore → 2 dust, ingot → plate …),
5. fallback recipes that turn finished parts back into dust (server option fallbackRecipes).

The full list is on Machine Recipes; JEI shows them in the game.

Material units and the balance check

Every form has a size in material units (MU): nugget 10, ingot, dust, raw metal and plate 90, rod and wire 45, gear 360, block 810, ore 180. After every data reload QuantaWorks checks all recipes together for loops that create material from nothing (for example a data pack recipe that grinds one ingot into two dust, which smelt back into two ingots). A derived recipe in such a loop is switched off; an explicit one is reported (and switched off with the server option strictBalance). Only ore and raw metal may give more than they are worth – that is the point of grinding them.

/quantaworks materials (operators) shows a summary, /quantaworks materials show <material> one material, and /quantaworks materials report writes everything – materials, forms, recipes, ambiguous items, switched-off loops – to quantaworks/materials-report.txt in the server directory (in singleplayer: the game directory).

Chances

Chances in recipes are paid out by count, not by a random roll: a 10 % by-product comes every tenth run, exactly.