Power & the NeroPower Split (retired)
The decision — 2026-07-31
NeroPower will not ship as a separate mod. The planned split is retired, and NeroPower's entire intended feature set — extra generators, grid buffering, load management and wireless transfer — is absorbed into NeroTech.
Those features are live now: see Power Generation for the Wind Turbine, Geothermal Generator, Bio Generator, Battery Bank, Grid Controller and Wireless Power Node, and Tier-1 Machines for the Nero Generator and Solar Array that came before them.
Why this is better for players
One mod, one power network, nothing to reason about across a mod boundary. You install NeroTech and you have the whole power story — generation, storage, load shedding and transfer — balanced against the same heat and pollution systems that the rest of the mod uses. A separate NeroPower would have meant a second download, a second config file, a version-compatibility pair to keep straight, and a permanent seam through the middle of a system that players experience as one thing. The upside it offered was tidier source layout — a developer benefit, paid for by everyone else.
What this means going forward
- Power generation stays in NeroTech, permanently. Later power features land here.
- Generation still talks only to Neroland Core's energy surface (
NeroEnergyStorage/EnergyBuffer,EnergyConversions, theEnergyLookupseam) and to Corec:tags. That was originally there to keep an extraction cheap; it is kept because it is simply the right coupling — it is what makes NE bridge to Forge Energy and interoperate across the ecosystem. - The criteria table below no longer gates anything.
Archived: the split criteria (historical)
Archived. Everything from here down is preserved for context only. It records how the split decision was evaluated between 2026-06-28 and 2026-07-10, before the 2026-07-31 decision to retire the split. It no longer governs anything.
The standing rule at the time was that power stayed inside NeroTech until power gained enough depth to justify its own mod, with the trigger being ≥3 of the six criteria below holding.
Re-check — 2026-06-28 (end of Phase 3 Stage 6)
| # | Trigger | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reactors are multiblocks with assembly validation | ❌ Not met | Fusion Reactor is a single block. |
| 2 | A real heat/cooling subsystem beyond a single scalar (active coolant loops) | ❌ Not met | Heat is one per-machine scalar with passive + adjacency cooling. |
| 3 | Grid simulation (transmission loss, per-line capacity, load balancing) | ❌ Not met | Energy is push-to-neighbour via Core EnergyLookup; no grid model. |
| 4 | Fuel cycles with tiers / breeding / waste | ❌ Not met | Single-tier fuel via the nerotech:fusion_fuels tag; no breeding/waste. |
| 5 | An overload/failure model worth balancing independently | ⚠️ Partial | The Fusion Reactor has a single admin-disableable meltdown threshold — not a standalone model. |
| 6 | Planet-based generation efficiency with its own config surface | ⚠️ Partial | One deferred Core-config fallback (solarDimensionMultipliers); minimal. |
Outcome at the time: 0 fully met (2 partial) → fewer than 3; power stayed in NeroTech.
Re-check — 2026-07-10 (0.1.0-beta.1: fusion multiblock landed)
| # | Trigger | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reactors are multiblocks with assembly validation | ✅ Met | The Fusion Reactor is a validated 3³/5³/7³ shell multiblock, inert until formed. |
| 2 | A real heat/cooling subsystem beyond a single scalar (active coolant loops) | ⚠️ Partial | The full thermal model adds conduction + per-location ambient + cached coolant adjacency — but no active coolant loops yet. |
| 3 | Grid simulation (transmission loss, per-line capacity, load balancing) | ❌ Not met | Energy is still push-to-neighbour via Core EnergyLookup; no grid model. |
| 4 | Fuel cycles with tiers / breeding / waste | ✅ Met | Three fuel tiers (Fusion → Plasma → Stellar Cell) via datapack tags, size-gated per shell. |
| 5 | An overload/failure model worth balancing independently | ✅ Met | Size-scaled meltdown (blast 4/6/8), containment breach on a broken burning shell, overdrive-preset interaction. |
| 6 | Planet-based generation efficiency with its own config surface | ⚠️ Partial | Nerospace planet traits now drive solar/ambient with a config fallback — a real surface, but a thin one. |
Outcome at the time: 3 fully met (+2 partial) → the threshold was crossed and an extraction was considered warranted but deferred past 0.1.0-beta. That deferred extraction is what the 2026-07-31 decision above cancels.