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Jobs and Research

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Jobs and research

What a colony does all day, and how it gets better at it.

Job stations

Four station blocks ship with the mod:

Block Shipped job Needs research
nerocolonies:farm_station nerocolonies:farm — 1 wheat seed → 2 wheat, 200 ticks, 1 colonist —
nerocolonies:hydroponics_station nerocolonies:hydroponics — 1 wheat seed → 3 carrots, 240 ticks, 1 colonist nerocolonies:life_support/hydroponics
nerocolonies:refinery_station nerocolonies:refine — 1 raw iron → 1 iron ingot, 300 ticks, 2 colonists nerocolonies:industry/refining
nerocolonies:fabricator_station nerocolonies:fabricate — 1 iron ingot + 2 redstone → 1 repeater, 400 ticks, 2 colonists, exports nerocolonies:industry/fabrication

A station holds no recipe and no inventory of its own. It has two upgrade slots, an energy buffer, and nothing else. Its recipe comes from the datapack job definitions that name its block id, so one block-entity type serves every station block, and a datapack can add a job to an existing station — or point a job at some other mod's block entirely — with no code at all. See Content format.

Its inputs come from colony storage and its outputs go back there (or into the export buffer), so there is no per-station inventory to fill, clog or lose.

Power comes in on every face and modules come in through the item channel; nothing ever leaves a station.

Property Value
Energy buffer 20,000
Maximum energy transfer 500 per tick
Energy per completed craft 120, reduced by EFFICIENCY modules
Upgrade slots 2

Production runs on the colony tick, not on the block

A station does not run its own recipe. Each tick it files itself with the colony's job board (every 40 ticks) and re-resolves which claim it stands in (every 200 ticks) — and the colony's cycle drives every station it owns, inside the one colonyTickBudgetMs watchdog.

The alternative — N block entities each ticking their own recipe — would put a colony's whole production cost outside the budget that exists to bound it, and would make "twenty stations" a server problem rather than a design choice. What a station itself does per tick is a countdown and, occasionally, a map write.

The job board is session state. Nothing about it is persisted: a station's real existence is its block, a registration that stops being refreshed expires on its own, and a reloaded world rebuilds the board from the stations that re-register. A station standing on unclaimed ground has no colony and does nothing — that is not an error, it is a station somebody has not finished building around.

Throughput

Each cycle, every active station advances by:

progress += elapsed ticks
          x jobBaseRateMultiplier   // server-wide scalar, default 1.0
          x morale multiplier       // moraleMinMultiplier..1.0 from colony morale
          x workers                 // assigned colonists (1 for an unstaffed job)
          x speed multiplier        // SPEED modules on the station
          x power factor;           // 1.0 powered, 0.35 unpowered

When progress reaches the job's ticks value a craft completes, up to eight crafts per station per cycle so a backlog cannot spike a tick. Unspent progress is never banked past one cycle: a station blocked for an hour does not fire an hour of output the instant it is unblocked.

Unpowered is slow, not stopped. A station with too little energy for a craft still works, at 0.35x. That is the same graceful-failure rule the rest of the mod follows: a colony whose cable was cut gets visibly slower rather than stopping dead for a reason the player cannot see.

A craft is all or nothing. Destination room is checked first, then the inputs are consumed, then the outputs are placed. Checking room first is what keeps a full colony from quietly eating its own inputs, and the all-or-nothing input consumption is what stops a job that has two of its three inputs from destroying them every cycle.

A station is reported as blocked when it is short of inputs, has nowhere to put its output, needs colonists it does not have, or sits below its job's own morale_floor.

Job slots

Only a limited number of stations work at once: jobSlotsPerColony (default 4) plus whatever research adds. Allocation is first-fit in a stable position order, so which stations hold the slots does not churn between ticks. Stations that miss out hold their progress and simply do not advance.

Outposts get their own separate small budget of outpostJobSlots (default 1) each, which is what stops an outpost being a way to buy more colony throughput than research allows.

When morale is below moraleWorkStopThreshold no slots are allocated at all. The colony's fast exit skips production entirely, and the board still updates each station's state so a player who opens one is told why it is idle rather than left looking at a silent machine.

Staffing

Colonists are handed to the active stations first-fit, in the same stable order. A colonist assigned to a station walks to it; a colonist left over has its assignment cleared, so a colonist whose station was broken stops walking to a hole in the ground.

A job with colonists: 0 is fully automated and runs on one notional worker. A job that asks for hands and has none does nothing and reports itself blocked.

Outpost stations are staffed on paper from the parent's roster, capped at outpostColonistCap. An outpost may be half a kilometre from its colony, and marching colonists across that gap every cycle would be a pathfinding bill with nothing to show for it. A remote work site being staffed nominally is the honest simplification.

Where the goods live

There is exactly one working stock per colony, reached through several blocks: the colony beacon exposes it as a standard item capability, and every colony depot (nerocolonies:colony_depot) placed inside the claim is another window onto the same goods. Adding a depot therefore adds access, not capacity.

Capacity comes from CAPACITY upgrade modules in the beacon: 18 slots base, plus 9 per module, up to 54. Slots past the current gate refuse insertion but still read and extract, so removing a module strands nothing — it just stops anything new going in until the overflow has been drawn down.

Job outputs go to the working stock unless the job is flagged export or the station's own export switch is on, in which case they go to the export buffer — see Exports & outposts. The job's flag says what a recipe is for; the station's switch says what this colony is doing with it today.

The research station

nerocolonies:research_station is where a colony spends goods and power to unlock a node.

It stores nothing: no inventory, no modules, no per-station state. A node's cost is paid out of colony storage and the unlock is written to the colony record. Two research stations in one colony are two doors onto the same research programme, not two programmes — the same rule the colony depot follows, and for the same reason: the colony is the unit, not the block.

Property Value
Energy buffer 100,000
Maximum energy transfer 2,000 per tick
Energy per unlock 5,000
Upgrade slots 0

Power is a hard requirement here rather than a rate penalty. Research is a discrete event, so there is nothing to slow down: it either happens or it waits for the buffer to fill.

Everything is checked server-side. The client sends "unlock this node" and nothing more; existence, prerequisites, duplicate unlocks, power and affordability are all decided from the server's own copy of the content and the colony's own storage. Order matters — everything that can refuse an unlock is checked before anything is spent, so a refused unlock costs nothing at all. The possible outcomes are: unlocked, already unlocked, unknown node, prerequisites missing, not enough power, cannot afford.

The research screen shows affordability without the client ever being sent the colony's inventory: the server computes which nodes are available and payable and ships that as a list of ids.

Research is colony-local

An unlocked node lives on the colony record, not on a player. It is therefore not personal data, it is shared by everyone with access to the colony, and dissolving the colony discards it. There is deliberately no per-player research: a colony is a place, and its technology belongs to the place.

What is stored is a set of node ids and nothing else. Everything downstream derives its numbers on demand from the currently loaded definitions, so a datapack that re-tunes a node takes effect on /reload with no migration, and a node that disappears from a pack simply stops contributing rather than leaving a stale bonus baked into a saved world.

The research graph

A node has a presentational branch, a title, a list of prerequisites, a cost paid from colony storage, and a list of effects. The real graph is the prerequisite list; branch only groups nodes in the research screen.

The shipped tree:

habitation/shelter ─┬─ habitation/pressurised_modules ── habitation/residential_blocks
                    ├─ industry/refining ─┬─ industry/fabrication
                    │                     └─ trade/manifest
                    └─ life_support/recyclers ── life_support/hydroponics
Node Cost Effects
habitation/shelter 4 iron ingots +2 morale, +1 job slot
habitation/pressurised_modules 8 iron ingots, 4 glass habitat module housing, +2 morale
habitation/residential_blocks 16 iron ingots, 8 copper ingots habitat block housing, +3 morale
industry/refining 8 iron ingots the refine job, +1 job slot
industry/fabrication 12 iron ingots, 8 redstone the fabricate job, +1 job slot
life_support/recyclers 6 copper ingots oxygen burn x 0.85
life_support/hydroponics 8 copper ingots, 8 glass the hydroponics job, oxygen burn x 0.9, +2 morale
trade/manifest 6 gold ingots the refined-metals and fabricated-goods exports

The effect types

Type Field What it does
nerocolonies:housing_tier tier makes a housing tier countable in this colony
nerocolonies:job_unlock job makes a job assignable in this colony
nerocolonies:job_slots amount adds simultaneously worked job slots
nerocolonies:oxygen_efficiency multiplier multiplies life-support oxygen burn; below 1.0 is an improvement, and multipliers compound
nerocolonies:export_unlock export makes an export entry sellable from this colony
nerocolonies:morale_bonus amount a flat addition to the morale target; may be negative

A job, housing tier or export entry that names a research prerequisite is available once that node is unlocked or once any unlocked node carries a matching unlock effect. Content that names no prerequisite is always available.

Full field-by-field schemas are in Content format.

See also

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