Energy Condenser
alaindustrial:energy_condenser
Summary
The Energy Condenser is an open frame with an energy crystal floating and turning inside. It catches the power that would otherwise be lost: when the generators make more than the machines eat, the surplus normally just vanishes. The condenser banks it instead, and hands the bank back as a single item — an energy clot.
It cannot get in your factory's way. The grid serves it last, and it cannot pull a single unit out of a battery box. Place it on day one if you like — it will simply sit quiet until there is a surplus.
Example: at noon your solar panels make more than two machines need. That difference used to go nowhere; now a crystal lights up inside the condenser after a few minutes, with a tier-I clot in the slot.
Energy
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Intake | 128 EU/FE/tick |
| Output | none — energy goes in, but never comes back out as energy |
| Bank | up to 4,000,000 EU/FE |
| Powered faces | top and bottom only |
The narrow intake is deliberate: a condenser standing closer to a generator than a machine would otherwise intercept the flow. Faster banking is not "give this one block a thicker cable" — it is a second condenser.
Inventory
One slot, output only. Nothing can be put in; the clot is taken by hand or pipe — but only through the side faces, since top and bottom belong to the cable. A hopper cannot reach the clot: it only pulls downwards, and the vertical faces belong to power.
Block properties
An open frame, a full block wide and tall and half a block deep; cable connects only on top and bottom. It glows while the bank holds a charge. Mined with a pickaxe, drops itself.
Sound
While the condenser packs the grid's surplus into a clot, it gives off a soft harmonic ring — the loop (pattern A on lit, default 0.35; . Take the clot out or starve the grid and it falls silent.
How it works
The bank grows continuously — no modes, no switches. The output slot always shows **the clot you would
| Banked | In the slot |
|---|---|
| under 250,000 | empty, too early |
| from 250,000 | a tier-I clot |
| from 1,000,000 | a tier-II clot |
| from 4,000,000 | a tier-III clot |
Taking it spends the whole bank. Take it at 950,000 and you get tier I — the 700,000 above that tier's price burns with it. Wait a little longer and the same slot would have handed you tier II. That is the decision: greed against patience. To make it an informed one, the screen prints the current tier and how far the next one still is.
The crystal inside the frame is exactly the clot the block would hand over right now: tier I is a narrow cell, tier II wraps a shell around it, tier III adds halves that breathe apart and back together. Below tier I there is no crystal at all, just as there is no item in the slot. That way the tier reads from across the room without opening the screen.
The condenser has no upgrade panel. An overclocker in it would turn "sips the surplus" into a pump on the grid — exactly what this mechanic avoids.
Progression
The only source of energy clots, and therefore of every machine overclocker. Worth placing once you have some surplus generation: on a starved grid it banks nothing, and the empty frame says so honestly. Time to a clot shrinks with more condensers and thicker cable, not with an upgrade to the block.
Related
Overclocker — what the clots are for. Battery Box — storage for running the factory; the condenser is no rival to it and cannot drain it.
Crafting
Shaped Crafting
▶
Energy Condenser