Grid Engineering

Grid Engineering is a Minecraft 1.21.1 NeoForge mod about building better power grids.

Instead of adding new machines or production chains, it focuses on the infrastructure between machines: wires, voltage tiers, amperage limits, transmission loss, transformers, controllers, and long-distance power delivery.

The mod is designed for players who want FE-compatible power systems to have more engineering depth without becoming as punishing or complex as GregTech. Machines still consume normal FE, but the grid itself uses its own internal long-based power calculations so very large late-game power values are not limited by FE's integer range.

Core Ideas

• Machines do not have voltage tiers.
• Wires and grid infrastructure do have voltage and amperage limits.
• Power is calculated from voltage and current.
• Long-distance transmission can lose power depending on the wire.
• Higher voltage is useful for moving large amounts of power efficiently.
• Grid design matters, but machines are not meant to explode from overvoltage.
• FE compatibility is handled at the boundary with other mods.

In short: Grid Engineering is not about protecting every machine from the wrong voltage. It is about designing an efficient power network.

Current Features

• Connected wire networks with side-based connections
• Multiple wire materials and wire thicknesses
• Bare and coated wire variants
• Voltage tiers from LV to CHV
• Configurable voltage scaling
• Amperage limits on wires
• Wire fires when a wire receives too much voltage or current
• Route-based transmission loss
• Power distribution using Power of Two Choices
• Network monitor item for inspecting live grid state
• Wire cutter for cutting wire connections and changing side modes
• Creative power block for testing FE input, output, buffer, and trash behavior
• Current regulator for limiting voltage and current output
• Grid Controller blocks for controller-based branch load distribution
• Laser transformers for long-distance power transmission
• Laser Transmission Anchor blocks for keeping laser links stable across chunks
• Jade integration for displaying useful grid information
• EMI and Mekanism included in the development runtime for compatibility testing

Voltage and Power

Grid Engineering models power as:

Power = Voltage × Current

Example:

65,536 V × 1 A = 65,536 FE/t
524,288 V × 2 A = 1,048,576 FE/t

Internally, the mod does not rely on FE's integer-sized energy values. It uses long-based internal power values and converts to FE only when interacting with external FE blocks.

Configuration

Voltage tiers can be scaled with:

[voltage]
baseVoltage = 65536
tierMultiplier = 8

For example, setting:

baseVoltage = 1000
tierMultiplier = 4

produces:

LV  = 1,000 V
MV  = 4,000 V
HV  = 16,000 V
SHV = 64,000 V
CHV = 256,000 V

Laser behavior and Grid Controller failure behavior also have their own config files.

Compatibility

Grid Engineering is intended to work with normal FE-based mods. External machines only see FE input and output; voltage and amperage are handled inside the Grid Engineering network.

The development environment currently includes Mekanism, EMI, and Jade for testing common modded-power interactions.

Development

• Minecraft: 1.21.1
• Mod loader: NeoForge
• Java: 21
• License: MIT