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:
| Stage | Name | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rooted | grass + dirt, permanently breathable, vibrant neon terraformed biome, sparse plants |
| 2 | Hydrated | basins below the machine's water table fill with real water — costs glacite via a Hydration Module |
| 3 | Living | the biome settles into a natural per-planet palette (meadow / savanna / tundra) with grown trees, rain or snow, and starter herds of the planet's livestock |
Obtaining
Craft (shaped):
N D N
D O D
N B NN = 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 (higher tiers / more power = faster).
-
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.
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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).
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Cosmetic drift: settled land keeps sprouting sparse ground cover on its own — pure garnish,
budgeted and toggleable (
terraformDriftEnabled). -
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 (configurable, defaults to Nerospace ores).
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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 (no forced chunk-loading by default).
-
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
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ID:
nerospace:terraformer· Tool: pickaxe, iron tier · Drops: itself -
Companions: Hydration Module (glacite intake, must touch),
Terraform Monitor (stage readout + comparator)
-
Config:
terraformWaterEnabled,terraformWaterMaxDepth,terraformDriftEnabled,terraformDriftPerSecond,terraformFaunaEnabled,terraformPlantsEnabled,terraformResourcesEnabled,terraformResourceOres,terraformMaxColumnsPerTick, …