Beamed Power

Beamed power moves energy across the map without a cable: a Beam Transmitter aims a straight, line-of-sight beam at a Beam Receiver, optionally bouncing through Beam Relays on the way. Distance costs a little, anything solid in the way stops the beam outright, and standing in one hurts. An Orbital Receiver is the special case that can be beamed to from another dimension.

How it works#

The blocks#

Every endpoint has a GUI with the shared NeroTech machine tabs plus a beam readout: linked or not, distance, whole-beam loss, energy moved on the last pass and a status line (Transmitting, Beam blocked, Target out of range, Target full, and so on).

Linking with the Configurator#

Use NeroTech's Configurator in configure mode:

1. Click the transmitter (or a relay) — it becomes your pending source for 30 seconds.
2. Click the receiver, orbital receiver or relay it should aim at. The link is made.

Clicking a linked transmitter or relay with nothing pending unlinks it. A relay can be both a target (of the transmitter before it) and a source (aimed at the next endpoint), so chains are just repeated pairs of clicks.

Linking is checked on the player holding the wrench: you must be allowed to interact with both endpoints (spawn protection counts), both must be loaded, and endpoints further apart than beamRange are refused. Only the player who made a link — or an operator — can unlink or re-aim it, so nobody can quietly re-aim your transmitter. The linking player's UUID is the one thing NeroPower stores about players. It stays on the server (world save only, never sent to clients); see Privacy.

Passes, loss and line of sight#

A transmitter fires a pass every beamCheckIntervalTicks (5 ticks — four times a second). Each pass:

• re-checks that the target still exists and is a beam endpoint (a broken or replaced target drops the link; an unloaded one just skips the pass — chunks are never force-loaded);
• checks range (128 blocks by default) and line of sight — every block cell between the two endpoints must be air or another beam endpoint. One solid block, water included, blocks the beam until it is removed;
• offers up to beamTransferPerPass NE (2,000 by default) from its buffer. What arrives is sent × (1 − loss ⁄ 1000)^distance: at the default 3 ‰ per block, about 68 % survives 128 blocks. The transmitter is only charged for what the target actually kept;
• deals beamDamage (half a heart) to every living creature standing in the beam.

Relays forward what lands on them in the same pass, up to beamMaxHops deep (8), and a pass never visits the same endpoint twice — a chain that loops back on itself reports Relay chain loops or is too deep and stops. Whatever a relay cannot forward sits in its small buffer (8,000 NE) and goes out on its next own pass.

Turn transmissionEnabled off and every beam goes dark while the blocks stay in place.

Cross-dimension beams#

With beamCrossDimension=true, a transmitter may target an Orbital Receiver that sits in a dimension tagged as space (neroland:space/dimensions, which Nerospace orbits carry). An orbital hop ignores distance and line of sight and instead pays the flat beamOrbitalHopLossPermille (30 % — 70 % delivered). Only orbital receivers accept cross-dimension beams, only in space dimensions, and the target chunk must already be loaded. In its own dimension an Orbital Receiver behaves exactly like a Beam Receiver.

Recipes#

Machine Frame, Nero Coil and Circuit Board are NeroTech intermediates.

Config keys#