Particle Accelerator

The Particle Accelerator is NeroTech's endgame build and its standalone route to space-grade dusts. It is not a multiblock: you lay Accelerator Guide Coils wherever you like, in whatever shape you like, and the Accelerator Controller fires a particle round the loop, winds it up to speed, and smashes it into a second particle.

The whole progression axis is ring geometry. Bigger rings hold faster particles; faster particles carry more collision energy; richer recipes demand more energy. There is no tier list of coils to craft — there is only how much room you are willing to give the beam.

Mechanic inspired by Oritech's particle accelerator. NeroTech's implementation is clean-room — no code or assets are shared.

Building a ring#

Three rules, and then you are done:

1. Every Accelerator Guide Coil sits at the same Y level as the Accelerator Controller.
2. The beam leaves the controller in the direction the controller faces, and marches in a straight line — one of the eight compass headings — until it hits a guide, up to acceleratorMaxGap (default 16) blocks away. Guides do not need to touch; the space between them can be anything.
3. Right-click a guide (empty hand, or with the Configurator) to cycle its bend: straight → 45° left → 45° right. The actionbar names the new setting.

Chain the bends so the beam comes back into the controller and you have a closed loop. Anything else is an open line and the particle would simply fly off the end — the controller says so.

Your first octagon#

Eight vertices, all bends set right, the controller facing east. Straight runs of 4 blocks alternate with diagonal runs of 3.

z=0    . . . C . . . G . . .      C = Accelerator Controller (facing east)
z=1    . . . . . . . . . . .      G = Accelerator Guide Coil (bend = right)
z=2    . . . . . . . . . . .      . = anything at all (the beam ignores it)
z=3    G . . . . . . . . . G
z=4    . . . . . . . . . . .      Footprint: 11 x 11
z=5    . . . . . . . . . . .      Guides needed: 7
z=6    . . . . . . . . . . .      Straight runs: 4 blocks
z=7    G . . . . . . . . . G      Diagonal runs: 3 steps (4.24 blocks)
z=8    . . . . . . . . . . .
z=9    . . . . . . . . . . .
z=10   . . . G . . . G . . .

Follow it round: east 4 → right → south-east 3 → right → south 4 → right → south-west 3 → right → west 4 → right → north-west 3 → right → north 4 → right → north-east 3 → back into the controller.

Nothing between the guides matters. Build the loop through your base, around a mountain, over a lake — the beam only cares about the guides it meets.

Reading the ring#

Once a controller closes a loop, every guide on it lights up: a cyan arrow appears on the coil's top face showing the direction the beam leaves that coil on, with the 45° kink of its bend drawn in. Walk the ring and you can read the beam's whole route off the floor.

A coil with no arrow is not part of any closed beam line — it was missed by the march, or the line it sits on never came home. That makes the arrows your first debugging tool: build the loop, look for the dark coil, fix the bend that points away from it. The arrows refresh whenever the controller re-traces (within about five seconds of a change, or instantly when something next to the controller changes), so a bend you have just cycled by hand may read stale for a moment.

The three rules the beam obeys#

Read together, those three are the whole game:

• Injection. The controller injects at the slowest speed the loop's longest stretch tolerates (the gap rule inverted), floored at acceleratorLaunchSpeed (default 10). Wide rings start fast.
• Top speed. The shortest stretch that ends in a bend caps the loop, at 20 × its length. Push past it and the particle crashes — a puff of smoke, a heat spike, and a lost particle.
• Losing power. Every guide passed costs acceleratorNePerGuide (default 50 NE) and adds acceleratorBoostPerGuide (default +2) to the speed. With an empty buffer the particle coasts and bleeds acceleratorDragPerGuide (default 0.5) per guide instead — coast long enough and it drops below the gap rule and fizzles on the long stretch.

The ring-size ladder#

Regular octagons, at the default config. "Runs" are the straight / diagonal stretches between guides.

Every one of them costs the same 7 guides. The only thing you are spending is space.

Running it#

• Slots: injection (left), collision target (middle), output (right), plus the usual four upgrade slots.
• Sides: items in/out and energy in on the standard PROCESSOR preset — see Side Config & the Configurator.
• Starting a run: automatic. With a closed loop, an item in the injection slot and NE in the buffer, the particle launches. There is no button.
• Colliding: put the partner item in the collision slot. Every lap the beam passes the controller it looks for a matching recipe and checks the current energy against the recipe's floor. Under it, the particles miss and the beam keeps lapping — just wait. Over it, both are consumed, the product lands in the output slot and the controller flashes.
• Readouts: the GUI shows beam speed (m/s), current collision energy (J), the guide count and whether the loop closes, and a status line naming exactly what went wrong.
• Heat: 3× the base per-guide heat of a Tier-1 processor, plus a spike on a crash — plan coolant (see Thermal System). Too hot and it refuses to inject.
• Pollution: emits at the normal per-operation rate; the Scrubber handles it.

You can watch the particle: it draws a streak of white sparks along the beam line, so a lap is visible from the ground.

Recipes#

Collision recipes (nerotech:collider)#

Datapack-driven like every NeroTech machine recipe — override or extend them file-by-file. Both inputs are consumed one at a time, and the pair is order-free (either item may be the injected one). min_energy is in the same joules the GUI reads.

Both dusts smelt into their material (Starsteel Ingot / Void Crystal) through Neroland Core's own blasting/smelting recipes, so the accelerator feeds straight into the advanced tier.

A datapack recipe looks like this:

{
  "type": "nerotech:collider",
  "input_a": "minecraft:netherite_scrap",
  "input_b": "nerotech:iron_dust",
  "min_energy": 3000,
  "result": { "id": "nerolandcore:starsteel_dust" }
}

Antimatter#

The accelerator is the only source of the Antimatter Cell, and it is the one recipe that demands a genuinely large ring — 12,000 J means a 29 × 29 loop. See Exotic Endgame for what the reactor does with it (and what it does to the reactor).

Transmutation#

Two of the recipes above turn one metal dust into another, two in for one out, paid for in the power and the real estate a run costs.

• Copper Dust ×2 → Iron Dust — turn a surplus of the cheap metal into the useful one.
• Iron Dust ×2 → Gold Dust — the classic transmutation, and the most expensive gold in the game.

Crafting#

Deliberately vanilla + NeroTech only — no Starsteel or Void Crystal anywhere, because the accelerator has to be buildable before you have any.

Accelerator Guide Coil ×2

C I C     C = Nero Coil
I F I     I = Iron Ingot
C I C     F = Machine Frame

Accelerator Controller ×1

B C B     B = Circuit Board
D F D     C = Nero Coil
B C B     D = Diamond, F = Machine Frame

Seven guides is four crafts, whatever size ring you build.

Balance#

The accelerator is the standalone / automation route, never the cheapest one:

• With Nerospace installed, mining meteors and planet ores is the faster source of Starsteel and Void Crystal by a wide margin. Keep mining.
• Without it, the accelerator is the only source — the advanced tier and the Fusion Reactor are reachable on Earth alone, at the cost of land and a power budget.
• Even where both exist, it earns its place as the fully automatable source: pipes in, pipes out.

Servers can retune the whole system from config: acceleratorMaxGap, acceleratorMaxGuides, acceleratorTickScale, acceleratorLaunchSpeed, acceleratorBoostPerGuide, acceleratorNePerGuide, acceleratorDragPerGuide, acceleratorMinGapAllowance, acceleratorGapPerSpeed, acceleratorBendSpeedBase and acceleratorEnergyScale.

Troubleshooting#

See also#

• Advanced Tier
• Exotic Endgame
• Fusion Reactor
• Materials & Components
• Thermal System
• Home