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Fission Reactor
The Fission Reactor is NeroPower's mid-game generator: a hollow cube of Fission Casing with a Fission Core set into one wall, burning Fuel Rods that age as they burn. It is the first machine that walks the failure ladder, so it rewards an operator who watches the heat and punishes one who does not. The core block on its own is inert — nothing happens until you build it a shell.
Two sizes are valid — 3×3×3 and 5×5×5 (outer dimensions):
- Build a hollow cube of Fission Casing.
- Set the Fission Core into the centre of one vertical wall, facing outward. It replaces that casing position and counts as part of the shell.
- Leave the interior empty or filled only with Control Rod Assemblies — any other block (including fluids) unforms the reactor.
The core re-checks its shell every two seconds and whenever a neighbouring block changes (the larger size is tried first). It never loads chunks to do so: if part of the shell sits in an unloaded chunk the reactor simply reads as unformed until the area is back. The GUI shows the shell size once it forms; breaking any casing block unforms it and the core goes dark.
The core has four rod slots, but only shell size − 1 of them are usable: two in a 3×3×3 shell,
all four in a 5×5×5. Locked slots refuse everything. Only fresh Fuel Rods go in; a slot can
be pulled by hoppers or pipes only once its rod is spent.
Every loaded rod carries its burn-up (0–100 %) as item data, and every running tick advances all loaded rods together. Output follows a curve over burn-up rather than a flat number:
| Burn-up | Output (of nominal) | Heat factor |
|---|---|---|
| 0 % (fresh) | 120 % | 140 % |
| 20 % | 100 % | 120 % |
| 60 % | 80 % | 100 % |
| 100 % (spent) | 30 % | 50 % |
Between the knots the curve is linear. A fresh rod over-performs and runs hottest; a nearly spent rod limps along. At 100 % the rod turns into a Spent Fuel Rod in its slot, ready for reprocessing. The work bar in the GUI is the average burn-up of the loaded rods.
At the default rate a rod lasts about 104 minutes on the Balanced preset. Overdrive and Speed modules burn rods faster (and make more power while they do).
Every Control Rod Assembly you place inside the shell scales output and heat by
1 − (assemblies × 15 %), down to a floor of 15 %. They are the operator's throttle: a 3×3×3
shell holds one, a 5×5×5 up to 27. Fewer assemblies means more power and more heat.
Poison builds only while the core runs hot: it is producing, there is no failure-ladder
penalty, every usable slot is loaded, and the effective control-rod factor is above
fissionPoisonRodThresholdPermille (90 % by default). A core with no Control Rod Assembly runs at
100 %, so it builds poison at fissionPoisonPerTick (2) per tick. Once poison reaches
fissionPoisonStallPermille (90 %) the core stalls: no output, no burn-up, status Xenon pit.
It only restarts once the poison has decayed 30 points (300 ‰) below the line, so a core hovering
at the threshold cannot flicker on and off.
In every other case poison decays at fissionPoisonDecayPerTick (3) per tick: idle, stalled,
part-loaded, derated by the failure ladder, or control-rodded at or below the threshold. With the
defaults a single Control Rod Assembly (factor 85 %) is enough, and so is a SCRAM (15 %), so a core
with at least one control rod, or with one slot left empty, runs steadily without ever stalling.
The poison level is shown in the GUI.
The reactor pushes heat into NeroTech's thermal model exactly like a NeroTech machine: coolant blocks, Radiators and Coolant Pumps next to the shell all help, and a Stirling Generator parked against it will draw heat and pay you for it.
Heat drives the failure ladder. At FAILURE the shell explodes with a
radius of shell size + 2 (5 or 7 blocks, before the server cap) and — if the server enables it —
leaves a scorch zone that hurts living creatures for a few real days.
The NeroLink companion app offers a SCRAM action, and an acknowledge alarm action that clears the alarm state. For 60 seconds after a SCRAM the core behaves as if every control rod were fully inserted (the 15 % floor), whatever is actually inside the shell, so output and heat drop and the ladder can climb back down.
Who may use them: if the reactor has a recorded owner (only when the server turned on NeroTech's per-player attribution), only that owner, from anywhere. A reactor with no recorded owner (the default) accepts them from any player who is online, in the reactor's dimension, within 128 blocks of it, and allowed by the server's protection rules to use that block. The server checks this itself on every request.
- Energy leaves every face (Generator preset).
- Fuel Rods are accepted on every face; faces set to output in the Side Config tab let pipes pull spent rods only.
- The reactor is never load-shed by NeroTech's throttling.
| Item | Recipe |
|---|---|
| Uranium Pellet | 4 Glowstone Dust + 1 Iron Ingot (shapeless), or 2 Reprocessed Pellets |
| Uranium Pellet ×2 | 1 Raw Uranium — anything tagged #c:raw_materials/uranium (shapeless) |
| Fuel Rod | 3 Uranium Pellets in a row between two Iron Ingots |
| Control Rod | Iron Ingot, Redstone, Iron Ingot in a column |
| Control Rod Assembly | Control Rod, Iron Ingot, Control Rod in a row |
| Fission Casing (×4) | 8 Iron Ingots around a NeroTech Machine Frame |
| Fission Core | Iron Blocks in the corners, Circuit Boards top and bottom, Nero Coils on the sides, a Machine Frame in the middle |
| Reprocessed Pellet | a Spent Fuel Rod in NeroTech's Chemical Processor |
| Reprocessed Pellet ×2 | a Fuel Rod (fresh or partially burnt) in the Chemical Processor |
Spent Fuel Rods are never crafted — they come out of the reactor.
Uranium source. No mod in the Neroland ecosystem adds uranium ore yet. NeroPower declares the
#c:raw_materials/uranium tag (empty), so the raw-uranium recipe starts working as soon as another
mod you install puts its raw uranium in that common tag. Until then the glowstone recipe is the
fallback and the raw-uranium recipe simply cannot be crafted.
Reprocessing yields. A spent rod gives 1 Reprocessed Pellet. Pulling a rod early and reprocessing it gives 2, whatever its burn-up, since the recipe cannot read how burnt the rod is. That is more than a spent rod gives, but it is still a loss. Two Reprocessed Pellets make one Uranium Pellet, so the 2 pellets from an early rod are worth 1 Uranium Pellet, against the 3 that went into it.
All in config/neropower.properties; see Configuration for the full list.
| Key | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
fissionNePerRod |
120 | Nominal NE/tick per fresh rod at 100 % of the curve |
fissionHeatPerRodPerTick |
6 | Heat per rod per tick at 100 % heat factor |
fissionBurnupPerTick |
8 | Burn-up per tick (permille ×1000) |
fissionBurnupCurve |
0=1200,200=1000,600=800,1000=300 |
The output curve knots |
fissionControlRodPermille |
150 | Reduction per Control Rod Assembly |
fissionPoisonPerTick |
2 | Poison gained per tick while the core runs hot |
fissionPoisonRodThresholdPermille |
900 | Poison builds only above this control-rod factor |
fissionPoisonDecayPerTick |
3 | Poison shed per tick otherwise |
fissionPoisonStallPermille |
900 | Poison level that stalls the core |
fissionScorchEnabled |
false | Leave a scorch zone on failure |
fissionScorchDays |
3 | Real days a scorch zone lasts |
fissionScorchRadius |
6 | Half-edge of the scorch cube |