Making Dust

Dust is the backbone of NeroTech's material economy: it doubles (or triples) your ore, feeds the Fabricator's components, and is the route to Starsteel and Void Crystal without leaving Earth. This page gathers every way to make it in one place.

There is no crafting-table recipe for any dust — it always comes out of a powered machine. You do not need dust to build your first machines: the Nero Coil and Circuit Board they use can be crafted from copper and gold ingots (see Standalone Progression).

Quick start: your first dust#

1. Machine Frame — 8 iron ingots in a ring (III / I I / III).

2. Ore Processor — craft it around the frame:

   I P I      I = Iron Ingot     P = Piston
   R F R      R = Redstone       F = Machine Frame
   I I I

3. Power — place a Nero Generator (burns coal, charcoal, etc.) or a Solar Array next to the Ore Processor. Their Nero Coils and Circuit Boards craft from ingots: Copper Ingot + Iron Ingot + Copper Ingot for a coil, Redstone + Gold Ingot + Redstone for a board. Generators push Nero Energy (NE) into adjacent machines automatically.

4. Process — put ore or raw metal in the input slot. Each operation gives 2 dust:

   Input	Output
   Iron Ore, Deepslate Iron Ore or Raw Iron	2 Iron Dust
   Copper Ore, Deepslate Copper Ore or Raw Copper	2 Copper Dust
   Gold Ore, Deepslate Gold Ore or Raw Gold	2 Gold Dust

5. Smelt — every Iron, Copper and Gold Dust smelts (200 ticks) or blasts (100 ticks) into its vanilla ingot, at vanilla XP. So 1 raw ore → 2 dust → 2 ingots: double yield.

The machine stalls cleanly when it runs out of power — no lost items. If nothing is happening, check the energy bar first.

Better yields#

Chemical Processor — 3 dust per raw metal#

Washes raw metal with oxygen for a third more dust. Each operation also burns chemicalProcessorGasPerOp (default 250 mB) of oxygen, which you make by splitting water in the Electrolyzer.

G B G      G = Glass
G F G      B = Circuit Board
G B G      F = Machine Frame

It only accepts raw metal, not ore blocks — mine with a non-Silk-Touch pickaxe (Fortune helps too). With an empty oxygen tank it reports Starved and uses no power. See Fluids & Gases for piping oxygen in.

Raw metal blocks — bulk processing#

Both the Ore Processor and the Advanced Ore Processor accept whole raw metal blocks:

A raw block is nine raw metal, so 18 dust matches the per-item rate in a ninth of the operations.

Advanced Ore Processor — bonus dust#

An Ore Processor surrounded by eight Starsteel Ingots. It adds advancedOreProcessorYieldBonus (default 1) extra dust to every operation: raw metal gives 3 dust instead of 2, and a raw block gives 19. Running raw metal one at a time therefore beats blocks here (27 dust per block's worth). See Advanced Tier.

Recycling: Dirty Filters#

The Scrubber fouls its Filter Cartridges into Dirty Filters. Put a Dirty Filter through the Ore Processor to recover 1 Iron Dust — the iron you spent making it.

Particle Accelerator: Starsteel, Void Crystal and transmutation#

The Particle Accelerator collides two items at speed. It is the standalone (no-Nerospace) way to get the two space-grade dusts, and it can turn one metal dust into another.

Bigger rings reach higher energies — see the accelerator page for ring sizes. Starsteel Dust and Void Crystal Dust smelt into Starsteel Ingots and Void Crystal through Neroland Core's recipes. With Nerospace installed, mining meteors and planet ores is the faster road to those materials; the accelerator is the slow route that needs no other mod.

Transmutation is two-for-one, so it is a way to use up surplus copper or iron, not a cheap source of gold.

What dust is used for#

• Ingots — smelt or blast back into vanilla ingots (the doubling loop above).
• Components — in the Fabricator, 1 Copper Dust → 2 Nero Coils and 1 Gold Dust → 2 Circuit Boards.
• Advanced tier — Starsteel and Void Crystal gate every advanced machine and the Fusion Cell.
• Other mods — the c:dusts/* tags let any mod that processes dust by tag accept NeroTech's.

For pack makers#

Every dust recipe is a datapack JSON, so you can add, replace or remove them:

{
  "type": "nerotech:ore_processing",
  "ingredient": ["minecraft:iron_ore", "minecraft:deepslate_iron_ore", "minecraft:raw_iron"],
  "result": { "id": "nerotech:iron_dust", "count": 2 }
}

See also#

• Tier-1 Machines
• Materials & Components
• Fluids & Gases
• Particle Accelerator
• Home