Charging Station

alaindustrial:charge_pad

Energy StorageLVImplementedtier-lvstorageenergycharge-pad

Summary

The Charging Station is a flat plate, a quarter of a block tall, that you simply stand on. While you're on it, it charges everything you're carrying at once: tools in your hotbar and backpack, whatever is in your offhand, and your worn gear too — the Energy Pack, the Jetpack, a set of Fluxweave armour.

Mini-example: you come back from the mine with a half-empty drill and a low jetpack — step onto the plate by your base entrance, get on with sorting your chests, and your gear tops itself up while you do. Not a single click needed.

Charging never asks you to open a window: step on and it runs. The station does have a screen, but it is optional — a reference panel for whoever wants the numbers, not a condition for the plate to work. Ignore it and the only thing you lose is the numbers: the plate behaves identically with the screen open and closed.

Energy

The station is a capacitor, not a machine. Its buffer is sized for a visit rather than for "one operation": it fills slowly while nobody is around and empties fast into whoever turns up. That is the only way 128 EU/FE/t is ever reached — the grid does not deliver anywhere near that much:

The 128 EU/FE/t input is a ceiling, not a promise. It exists so the station doesn't cap a player who has built good infrastructure: the thicker the supply, the faster its reserve comes back. Fed from copper, the station takes noticeably longer to refill after a big visit than it does from gold.

Every item is still limited to its own charge rate (32 EU/FE/t for all of the mod's portable gear), so 128 EU/FE/t is the station's total output shared across everything at once, not the speed of any single item.

How long it takes. Don't be fooled by the 128: the pace is limited not only by the station but by how fast each item can take charge — 32 EU/FE/t. So 128 EU/FE/t is only ever reached with four items charging at once; a single item always draws its own 32 EU/FE/t no matter how much the station offers.

Everything charges at once. The station splits its output between every item that needs charge rather than serving them in turn: a full set of armour fills together instead of two pieces at a time. The more you are carrying, the slower each piece goes — the station's total rate does not change with their number.

Charge arrives in batches. The station credits you not every tick but four times a second, handing over what accrued in between. The speed is unchanged — the same amount per second — but the charge bar updates less often. This is for the game's sake: every credit rewrites the item and re-sends the slot to your client, and at twenty credits a second that read as a stuttering inventory. The first credit lands the moment you step onto the plate, so there is no delay at the start.

Which means the time by the biggest thing in your loadout, not by the size of the station's buffer.

The Battery is the one powered item that stacks, and its charge is held per battery. A stack shares the same 32 EU/FE/t between all of them — 2 EU/FE per battery per tick — so a full stack of 16 takes about 50 seconds, not three.

A completely flat loadout — pouch, Energy Pack, drill, chainsaw, shovel, hoe, saber, electromagnet, jetpack and four pieces of Fluxweave — comes to 167,000 EU/FE. The first 20,000 come out of the banked buffer, after which the pace drops to whatever the grid supplies, so charging the lot from empty is a matter of minutes rather than seconds.

The Diamond-Tipped drill is not a line of its own in that total: it replaces the plain drill in your hands and shares its 10,000 EU/FE buffer. Batteries sit outside the loadout too — how many you carry is up to you, and a full stack would add another 32,000 EU/FE on its own.

The point of the station isn't to beat a charge slot for speed — it's that it does everything at once, with no clicks at all: your gear fills itself while you sort out your haul.

All six faces accept energy; the station never gives any back to the network.

Interface

The station has two independent feedback channels: the indicator under your feet is the primary one, for play on the move, and the screen is the secondary one, for whoever wants exact numbers.

Indicator

A four-state indicator: four lamps at the corners of the plate and a coil ring at its centre, mirrored by a lit strip along its edge so the state reads both from above and from across the room.

Red and green are deliberately distinct: they are different problems with different fixes. Green means "you're ready"; red means "the station has nothing to give, go build generation".

Sparks lift off the plate while it is charging.

Click

The station clicks like a metal pressure plate: once when you step on, once when you step off. It is an acknowledgement — the sound tells you the plate registered you even when you are facing the other way and can see neither lamps nor sparks.

The click sounds once per visit, not once per tick: sprinting along a row of stations gets you one click from each, not a burst. A spectator drifting through the plate clicks nothing at all — they do not charge either.

Screen

The screen opens on right-click, including while you are standing on the plate. Stepping on does not open it: a window popping up on every step would get in the way of walking, and the whole point of the station is that you can step on it and get on with your business.

There are no slots on the screen — there is nothing to put into the station, it charges what is on you. It shows four values:

The screen shows what the station is doing right now, not what is in the viewer's own pockets: if one player stands on the plate and another opens the screen, the second sees the station's work with the first. With nobody on the plate, the three lower rows show a dash — the station is delivering nothing, so there is nothing to report.

"Time left" is measured against the gear of whoever stands on the plate rather than the station's own buffer: what the player wants to know is when they can leave. It is derived from the current delivery rate, so on a thin supply line it honestly grows — the station gives out exactly as much as it manages to take in.

Behaviour

The station spends energy only when a transfer actually happens. A station with no visitor, or one whose visitor is already full, spends nothing; left alone, it goes to sleep.

It does refill like any other consumer, including while nobody is standing on it — that is the whole point of the reserve it banks ahead of time. But it queues for energy behind working machines: furnaces and macerators on the same network are always served first, so adding a station will not slow them down.

A spectator drifting through the block is charged nothing and costs nothing.

What the station cannot charge

Other mods' items while they are worn. Item energy on both loaders is addressed by inventory slot index, and worn armour from another mod has no such index. All of Ala Industrial's own portable gear charges fully, and foreign items sitting in ordinary inventory slots charge normally too.

In creative mode the station still physically spends its reserve, exactly as a machine charges an item in its slot. That is not a bug.

Block properties

Shape: a 16×4×16 plate — the bottom quarter of the block (0 to 4 in height). It has full collision: you stand on it rather than walk through it, and it is low enough that you step over the station instead of jumping onto it. The highlight outline matches exactly what you walk on.

The block does not occlude its neighbours — without that, the faces of blocks around the plate would be culled as if a full cube stood there.

It has no orientation: the station is symmetrical, there is nothing to rotate, and a cable connects to any face.

Placed and broken with a pickaxe; hardness 3.0, blast resistance 6.0, metal sound. Breaking it does not preserve the EU/FE buffer — the station loses what it had banked, like any machine in the mod.

Sound

While charging, the station gives off a soft transformer hum — the loop (pattern C keyed off the charging state, the quietest stationary loop in the mod: 0.18 — the player stands ON the block, the source is right at their feet. Standing on it full (green indicator) or with an empty buffer keeps it silent. The step-on / step-off clicks remain vanilla.

Crafting

The copper cables on top are the charging coil, the battery at the centre sets the buffer, and the circuit runs the distribution.

Crafting

Shaped Crafting

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Charging Station