Battery Banks

NeroPower adds three tiers of Battery Cell and a Battery Bank Controller that pools the cells around it into one big store. A cell on its own is a simple buffer, much like NeroTech's Battery Bank; next to a controller it becomes part of a bank with a single capacity, a single in/out limit and a switchable mode.

How it works#

Battery cells#

A cell accepts and gives energy on every face (the Storage preset — reconfigure faces with the Configurator as usual). Its model shows the stored charge in five steps from empty to full, so a wall of cells reads at a glance.

No sloshing. A cell never pushes energy into another storage block — another cell, a controller or a NeroTech Battery Bank — so a wall of half-full cells does not shuffle charge between itself all day. Pipes and machines that pull from a cell are still served normally.

The bank controller#

Place a Battery Bank Controller touching one or more cells. Once a second it walks face-to-face from the cells touching it through connected cells (within bankScanRadius blocks on each axis — 2 by default, a 5×5×5 region) and pools every cell it finds:

• Capacity = the sum of the member cells.
• In/out per tick = the smallest member's limit × the number of members, capped by bankMaxIoCap (64,000 NE/t by default). Mixing tiers therefore drags the whole bank down to the weakest cell's rate — keep a bank to one tier.
• Energy is spread across the members round-robin, so every cell charges and drains together.

The controller itself stores nothing; its GUI and NeroTech's Analytics Terminal show the pooled figures — cells pooled, stored / capacity, bank I/O and the current mode. Members are rediscovered from the world on every load; a bank straddling an unloaded chunk shrinks until it comes back (it never loads chunks itself). Breaking a member forces an immediate rescan.

Modes#

Sneak-right-click the controller with an empty hand to cycle the mode:

• Buffer (default) — pushes into every willing neighbour each tick, like any generator.
• Priority Source — only pushes into a neighbour whose own buffer is below bankPriorityThresholdPermille (30 % by default). The bank tops up machines that are running low and otherwise holds its charge, so a generator feeding the same machines does the everyday work and the bank covers the gaps.

Both modes govern only the controller's own push. Anything that pulls from the controller (a pipe, an input face) is served in either mode, and neither mode ever feeds another storage block.

Recipes#

Config keys#