Electrum Cable

alaindustrial:electrum_cable

Energy TransferHVImplementedtier-hvtransferenergy

Summary

⚠️ Electrical safety. The bare electrum HV cable deals 10 damage (the tier ladder runs LV 2 → MV 6 → HV 10, key) not only on direct contact but also within 0.5 blocks of the segment — but only while energy is actually moving through this exact bare segment. A disconnected line and retained buffer EU/FE are safe. Normal armor applies; water does not amplify the hit; a solid block between the cable and the player blocks the shock. Servers can turn the mechanic off in the config.

The Electrum Cable is the first wire on tier HV. The tier itself was never empty: the Teleporter Station has run on it since as the mod's only HV consumer — with nothing but a gold (MV) cable to feed it. The cable replaces an earlier concept — a "glass fibre EV cable" — same role as the ladder's most expensive, most efficient wire, but on an already-existing tier and with a more grounded in-mod material: the electrum alloy (gold + silver, already smelted by the Alloy Smelter since 0.1.67 but with zero consumers so far), finished with a pinch of diamond dust that gives the wire its reliability/low losses.

Electrum holds 512 EU/FE/packet — four times gold's 128 — and carries 192 EU/FE/tick in its segment buffer, also four times gold's 48. That is the same ×4 step every previous rung uses (copper→gold is also ×4 on both buffer and cap), so electrum is not a "cheat jump" but a natural continuation of the existing progression on the next, still-empty rung.

Unlike gold (whose wider buffer is paid for with higher loss), electrum breaks that trade-off: its loss is 0.005 per block, lower even than the cheapest tin cable (0.006). This is a deliberate exception — electrum is simply better on every axis, and the price is an expensive craft (rare alloy + diamond), not operating loss.

Where this already shows. The mod has no HV machines, generators or storage yet, but it does have an HV consumer: the Teleporter Station and its 500,000 EU/FE buffer. Over a gold cable (48 EU/FE/t) it fills in ~10,400 ticks ≈ 8.7 minutes; over electrum (192 EU/FE/t), in ~2,600 ticks ≈ 2.2 minutes. The caveat that makes the promise honest: the station is a storage sink, and a storage sink is never fed from other storage over a cable (battery boxes only discharge into a machine's deficit). The speed-up is real exactly to the extent that your generators together exceed 48 EU/FE/t — below that the wire is not the bottleneck. On the rest of the content (LV/MV) what helps is the wide 192 EU/FE/t buffer itself on dense lines. The damage can be removed outright without touching the line at all by the insulated set — leather armour dipped in slime: each worn piece cuts a quarter of the shock, a full set lets nothing through, and it spends durability doing so.

Energy

At full segment flow (192 EU/FE/tick) the cable delivers 183/174/150/117 EU/FE over 10/20/50/100 blocks respectively, and stays conductive even at 1000 blocks (minimum 1 EU/FE — the shared model invariant, . The half-distance (where exactly half the flow is lost) is about 138 blocks — twice as far as tin, with 24× the buffer.

The cable does not explode from overload: 512 EU/FE/packet is only a cap, and anything above it simply does not pass through.

Mixed networks. A network takes both its throughput cap and its loss from the strongest cable in it — the same rule that already applies to gold in a copper line. A single electrum segment in a gold line moves the whole network to 512 EU/FE/packet and to electrum's 0.005 loss.

Block Properties

A thin wire that connects to neighbouring blocks. Any tool breaks it, and shears are especially handy.

Connecting to half blocks

Like every other cable, electrum drops its horizontal sleeve toward a low neighbour (a solar panel, 8/16 tall, and any future half block) so the sleeve hugs the slab's side instead of floating above it. The behaviour is shared by all cables and is derived from the neighbour's shape, not its type.

Recipes

The ritual recipe: five electrum ingots — the four corners and the center — and four diamond dust at the edge midpoints yield 3 cables.

The price is deliberately steep, and that is a balance decision rather than flavour. A mixed network takes both its cap and its loss from the strongest segment present, so a cheap electrum cable would let one block lift a kilometre of copper to 0.005 loss. This wire is laid on key routes, not used to wire a whole base.

The insulated variant uses the shared recipe: six bare cables and three vulcanized rubber → 6 insulated.

Diamond dust is an existing item (macerator: 1 diamond → 2 dust). Electrum ingot is also an existing item (Alloy Smelter: gold + silver), currently with zero consumers in the game — this cable becomes its first sink.

Processing recipes: none.

Related

Gold Cable — the previous rung of the ladder, MV. Copper Cable — the universal LV cable. Tin Cable — cheap and nearly lossless, for solar farms. Insulated Electrum Cable — the rubber version: the same 192 EU/FE/t at half the loss and no shock.

Crafting

Shaped Crafting

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×3

Electrum Cable

Used in

Shaped Crafting

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×6

Insulated Electrum Cable