Iron Dust

alaindustrial:iron_dust

ComponentsImplementedcomponentmetalsores

Summary

The material forms are a family of intermediate items — dust, and later plate, billet and wire — that machines and recipes turn ores and ingots into. In the first phase you only meet dust: it's what the Macerator produces, and it's the trick behind "ore doubling" (an ore block or raw ore → 2 dust → 2 ingots). The second form is the plate: a flat blank pressed from an ingot. You hammer it by hand with the Forge Hammer (ingot + hammer → plate) before electricity, and later stamp them in bulk in the Compressor (ingot → plate, 260 EU/FE). Plates are the blank for the Machine Casing and future circuits; a spare plate can be recycled back into dust ×1 in the Macerator. The other forms (billet, wire) belong to the same family and are added later, as the machines that consume them appear. The forms hold no energy — they're just intermediates.

Mini-example: mine one iron ore, run it through the Macerator to get 2 iron dust, then smelt each dust in a furnace — that's 2 iron ingots from a single ore instead of the usual 1.

Energy

Uses no energy — these are plain crafting ingredients.

How it's used

Dust is the hub of the ore-processing chain: Metal dust (iron, copper, gold, and the mod's tin/silver/nickel/uranium) is smelted in a vanilla furnace, blast furnace or the mod's Electric Furnace back into an ingot. That closes the doubling loop: ore → 2 dust → 2 ingots. Non-metal dust (coal, diamond, emerald, lapis) is compressed back into the gem/item in the Compressor — not smelted. Same loop shape: ore → 2 dust → 2 items. There's no way to duplicate material. Macerating a finished ingot gives only 1 dust, so ingot → dust → ingot is net-zero (you only spend energy).

Inventory

Not applicable (items). Stack: 64.

Block Properties

Not applicable (items).

Processing rules

How much dust the Macerator gives depends on what you feed it:

The one special case is lapis: lapis ore gives ×6 dust. Vanilla lapis ore already drops 4–9, so a plain ×2 would make maceration pointless; 6 is a guaranteed yield above the average pickaxe drop, which is what justifies the energy cost.

Recipes

Getting dust: macerate ore or metal in the Macerator (see that page for the per-recipe energy cost). Metal dust → ingot: smelt or blast it (vanilla furnace / blast furnace), or use the mod's Electric Furnace. Non-metal dust → item: compress it in the Compressor.

Progression

Items with no tier of their own. The whole point of building your first energy network: dust is what turns the Macerator from a machine into an ore-doubler. The non-metal dusts give the same deal for coal and the gems.

Related

Macerator — produces dust (ore doubling). Electric Furnace — smelts metal dust back into ingots. Compressor — compresses non-metal dust back into gems/coal. Electronic Circuit — the other key early component.

Crafting

MacerationEnergy: 300 EU/FE

tag

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×2

Iron Dust

MacerationEnergy: 300 EU/FE

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Iron Dust

MacerationEnergy: 300 EU/FE

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Iron Dust

MacerationEnergy: 300 EU/FE

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×2

Iron Dust

Used in

Smelting (Furnace)

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Iron Ingot

Smelting (Electric Furnace)Energy: 200 EU/FE

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Iron Ingot

CompressingEnergy: 260 EU/FE

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Iron Ingot