Harmonics and Dissonance

Harmonics and Dissonance

Cables have one real virtue: you can look at a wire and know where the power goes. Veskorius removed the wire, so it owes you a replacement. That replacement is colour.

Bands

Every source broadcasts on a harmonic band, and every machine is tuned to one. By default there are 3 bands (harmonics.bandCount).

A machine running on a band that matches its source is attuned. A machine running inside a field of a different band is detuned — and here is the design decision that matters:

A detuned machine still works.

It does not stop, it does not error, it does not need to be fixed before you can play. It costs 1.5× the Osc (detuneOscMultiplier) and it dirties the field. You will notice because its glow flickers between two colours.

This is deliberate. Bands are an optimisation layer, not a lock. A player who never engages with them plays a slightly more expensive game; a player who does gets to decide which half of their base runs during a shortage.

Dissonance

Every tick a detuned machine runs, it adds 1 dissonance to the field (dissonancePerDetunedTick). Fields hold 2000 (dissonanceCapacity) and shed 1 per second on their own (dissonanceDecayPerSecond).

So a little detuning cleans itself up. Sustained detuning does not.

Past 75% capacity (dissonanceUnstableThreshold), the field becomes unstable — and you can see it coming, because the dome greys out as dissonance rises. That grey is your only warning and it is meant to be enough.

Discharge

An unstable field eventually discharges: 6 damage in a radius of 6, releasing half its accumulated dissonance, with a 5-second cooldown before it can happen again.

It is survivable. It is also entirely avoidable, and it never happens without the dome having gone grey first.

If discharge is not the game you want, harmonics.discharge.enabled = false turns it off and leaves the rest of the system intact.

Maintenance: the Damping Array

The Damping Array (T3) purges dissonance from a field: range 16, one cycle every 5 seconds. What it consumes to do so is a datapack recipe (veskorius:damping) — the damping agents are not hardcoded.

Between decay, damping, and simply tuning your machines correctly, a field is never a maintenance treadmill. It is a thing that misbehaves if you ignore it for a long time.

Turning the whole system off

harmonics.enabled = false removes bands, detuning, dissonance, and discharge in one switch. Machines then run on any field at base cost. Everything else in the mod — fields, tiers, the Rift — is unaffected.

See Configuration for the full list with defaults.