106 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
106 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
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industrial processes
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### alloying ###
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In technic, alloying is a way of combining items to create other items,
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distinct from standard crafting. Alloying always uses inputs of exactly
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two distinct types, and produces a single output. Like cooking, which
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takes a single input, it is performed using a powered machine, known
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generically as an "alloy furnace". An alloy furnace always has two
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input slots, and it doesn't matter which way round the two ingredients
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are placed in the slots. Many alloying recipes require one or both
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slots to contain a stack of more than one of the ingredient item: the
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quantity required of each ingredient is part of the recipe.
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As with the furnaces used for cooking, there are multiple kinds of alloy
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furnace, powered in different ways. The most-used alloy furnaces are
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electrically powered. There is also an alloy furnace that is powered
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by directly burning fuel, just like the basic cooking furnace. Building
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almost any electrical machine, including the electrically-powered alloy
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furnaces, requires a machine casing component, one ingredient of which
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is brass, an alloy. It is therefore necessary to use the fuel-fired
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alloy furnace in the early part of the game, on the way to building
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electrical machinery.
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Alloying recipes are mainly concerned with metals. These recipes
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combine a base metal with some other element, most often another metal,
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to produce a new metal. This is discussed in the section on metal.
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There are also a few alloying recipes in which the base ingredient is
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non-metallic, such as the recipe for the silicon wafer.
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### grinding, extracting, and compressing ###
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Grinding, extracting, and compressing are three distinct, but very
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similar, ways of converting one item into another. They are all quite
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similar to the cooking found in the basic Minetest game. Each uses
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an input consisting of a single item type, and produces a single
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output. They are all performed using powered machines, respectively
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known generically as a "grinder", "extractor", and "compressor".
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Some compressing recipes require the input to be a stack of more than
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one of the input item: the quantity required is part of the recipe.
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Grinding and extracting recipes never require such a stacked input.
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There are multiple kinds of grinder, extractor, and compressor. Unlike
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cooking furnaces and alloy furnaces, there are none that directly burn
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fuel; they are all electrically powered.
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Grinding recipes always produce some kind of dust, loosely speaking,
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as output. The most important grinding recipes are concerned with metals:
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every metal lump or ingot can be ground into metal dust. Coal can also
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be ground into dust, and burning the dust as fuel produces much more
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energy than burning the original coal lump. There are a few other
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grinding recipes that make block types from the basic Minetest game
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more interconvertible: standard stone can be ground to standard sand,
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desert stone to desert sand, cobblestone to gravel, and gravel to dirt.
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Extracting is a miscellaneous category, used for a small group
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of processes that just don't fit nicely anywhere else. (Its name is
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notably vaguer than those of the other kinds of processing.) It is used
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for recipes that produce dye, mainly from flowers. (However, for those
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recipes using flowers, the basic Minetest game provides parallel crafting
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recipes that are easier to use and produce more dye, and those recipes
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are not suppressed by technic.) Its main use is to generate rubber from
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raw latex, which it does three times as efficiently as merely cooking
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the latex. Extracting was also formerly used for uranium enrichment for
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use as nuclear fuel, but this use has been superseded by a new enrichment
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system using the centrifuge.
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Compressing recipes are mainly used to produce a few relatively advanced
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artificial item types, such as the copper and carbon plates used in
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advanced machine recipes. There are also a couple of compressing recipes
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making natural block types more interconvertible.
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### centrifuging ###
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Centrifuging is another way of using a machine to convert items.
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Centrifuging takes an input of a single item type, and produces outputs
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of two distinct types. The input may be required to be a stack of
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more than one of the input item: the quantity required is part of
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the recipe. Centrifuging is only performed by a single machine type,
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the MV (electrically-powered) centrifuge.
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Currently, centrifuging recipes don't appear in the unified\_inventory
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craft guide, because unified\_inventory can't yet handle recipes with
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multiple outputs.
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Generally, centrifuging separates the input item into constituent
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substances, but it can only work when the input is reasonably fluid,
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and in marginal cases it is quite destructive to item structure.
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(In real life, centrifuges require their input to be mainly fluid, that
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is either liquid or gas. Few items in the game are described as liquid
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or gas, so the concept of the centrifuge is stretched a bit to apply to
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finely-divided solids.)
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The main use of centrifuging is in uranium enrichment, where it
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separates the isotopes of uranium dust that otherwise appears uniform.
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Enrichment is a necessary process before uranium can be used as nuclear
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fuel, and the radioactivity of uranium blocks is also affected by its
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isotopic composition.
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A secondary use of centrifuging is to separate the components of
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metal alloys. This can only be done using the dust form of the alloy.
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It recovers both components of binary metal/metal alloys. It can't
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recover the carbon from steel or cast iron.
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