Fuel

Fuel

A pack draws from its own internal buffer, which it tops up from the fuel slot in the pack's fuel tab.

One unit is about one second of one basic effect. That is the whole scale — the screen shows you running time rather than unit counts, because "4 hours 20 minutes" answers the question you actually have and "15 600 units" does not.

What burns

Item	Units	Roughly
Iron Ingot	300	5 minutes
Gold Ingot	900	15 minutes
Emerald	1 800	30 minutes
Diamond	3 600	1 hour
Netherite Ingot	28 800	8 hours

Those durations assume one basic effect kept to yourself. A level II effect shared with allies burns four times faster. See Effects for the arithmetic.

Other items can be added by a datapack.

How refuelling works

The pack consumes one item at a time, and only while it is actually short. It will not burn most of a netherite ingot to cover a three-unit gap.

It also refuses fuel its buffer cannot hold whole. A tier I pack holds 1 200 units, so it cannot accept a netherite ingot at all — the ingot stays in the slot untouched rather than being swallowed for a fraction of its value. This is what gives the Capacity augment and the higher tiers a real purpose.

Pack	Buffer	Holds
Beacon Pack I	1 200	20 minutes
Beacon Pack II	3 600	1 hour
Beacon Pack III / themed	10 800	3 hours
Beacon Pack IV	36 000	10 hours

A Capacity augment multiplies these by 2, 3 or 4.

Running dry

When the buffer empties, the pack switches itself off, plays the beacon deactivation sound and says so in the action bar. It does not stop silently — effects ending with no explanation reads as a bug, not as a mechanic.

Because the pack is now off, it will not drain again until you switch it back on.

Turning fuel off entirely

A server can set require_fuel = false, which makes packs run forever once crafted.

This removes fuel from the game rather than leaving it inert: no fuel slot, no gauge, no runtime figures anywhere in the screen. A gauge that never moves and a slot that accepts nothing are worse than no gauge and no slot.