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. Plates exist for nine pure metals and for all five alloys of the Alloy Smelter — bronze, invar, cupronickel, electrum and shielding alloy.

The third form is the reinforced plate: the upgraded tier of rolled stock, and only the alloys have it — all five of them. Two ordinary plates compress into one reinforced plate — with the same hammer on the crafting grid, or in the same Compressor (2 plates → 1, 260 EU/FE). It eats twice the metal, so it is meant for late, heavy recipes. Shielding alloy adds a third input to those two plates: depleted uranium — and it is the one reinforced plate with no machine route at all: the hammer on the crafting grid is the only way. Its compressing recipe declared two ingredients against the Compressor's single input slot, so it never matched and was removed. 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 is smelted back into an ingot. That closes the doubling loop: ore → 2 dust → 2 ingots. Exactly where it melts depends on the metal:

The blast furnace smelts dust for no metal at all — it only works with ore and raw material.

• 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 it in a vanilla furnace or the Iron Furnace (uranium and palladium dust excepted), or in the mod's Electric Furnace — that one melts any of them. The blast furnace does not take dust.
• 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

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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