Terraformer

The end-game machine: slowly converts a dead planet into livable, breathable, living land — in three visible stages.

Overview#

Place a Terraformer on a barren world, power it, and it advances an ever-expanding circular frontier outward from itself. With deeper terraforming the machine runs three frontiers, each trailing the last, so a long-running world is always a gradient — raw chemistry at the edge, a living ecosystem at the centre:

Obtaining#

Craft (shaped):

N D N
D O D
N B N

N = Nerosteel Ingot · D = Dirt · O = Oxygen Generator · B = Block of Nerosteel

How it works#

• Grid power: runs exclusively on piped energy — connect a Universal Pipe carrying FE. Its

  100,000 FE buffer drains as it works and accepts up to 2,000 FE/t (higher tiers / more power = faster). It converts at most 48 columns per tick (a fixed limit to protect server speed).

• Expanding frontiers: each work cycle it converts a ring of surface columns per stage, then grows

  that stage's radius — uncapped, but energy-throttled. Stage 1 keeps priority (breathable ground never waits); the trailing stages take smaller shares and always stay inside the stage ahead. Stage-2 columns cost 2× energy plus 1 hydration unit per water source; stage-3 columns cost 4× energy.

• Water (Hydrated): the water table sits one block below the machine's base. Basins under it fill

  flush with the ground; hills stay dry; chasms deeper than the cap are skipped. No glacite in the buffer = stage 2 stalls (the GUI says "Needs glacite"). On Glacira the lakes refreeze naturally.

• Life (Living): the mature biome turns on real weather (rain; snow accumulates on Glacira),

  sparse grown trees (oak/birch, acacia, spruce by planet), and seeds starter pairs of the planet's livestock (population-capped).

• Gravity: terraformed ground returns to normal, Earth-like gravity — so

  reclaiming a low-gravity moon makes the land you've converted feel like home (an explicit biome gravity tag, if a pack sets one, still wins).

• Cosmetic drift: settled land keeps sprouting sparse ground cover on its own — pure garnish,

  with a small fixed budget.

• Tiers: drop an upgrade into the upgrade slot — a Nerosteel Ingot → Tier 2, a **Cindrite →

  Tier 3**. Higher tiers convert more columns per cycle; Tier 3 also seeds a low rate of ore into the converted subsurface (Nerospace ores).

• Lazy / catch-up: columns in unloaded chunks are skipped and converted later when you explore into

  them — all stages replay on chunk load, so a terraformed planet finishes as you walk it. By default it does not force-load chunks. Set terraformerForceLoadEnabled = true to keep a small window of chunks loaded while it runs (costs server memory and speed).

• Old worlds: existing Terraformers keep working untouched — their land counts as stage 1 and the

  new stages simply sweep over it once you build the new blocks. No migration.

Details#

• ID: nerospace:terraformer · Tool: pickaxe, iron tier · Drops: itself

• Companions: Hydration Module (glacite intake, must touch),

  Terraform Monitor (stage readout + comparator)

• Config: only terraformerForceLoadEnabled (default false). Speed and energy also follow the

  global multipliers. See Configuration.

Every world terraforms its own way (2.0)#

The stages are the same everywhere (Rooted, Hydrated, Living) and the tiers keep their radius and energy, but what grows depends on the world: a lunar meadow on the Moon, red steppe and the first open water on Mars, savanna on Cindara, tundra on Glacira, a xertz garden on Greenxertz and a twilight grove on Nyxara. Outside the Nerospace worlds it works as it always did.

The Terraformer refuses on an orbital station (there is no ground) and on Nyxara outside the Twilight Band. A refusing Terraformer shows the reason in place of its stage radii and spends no energy.