Fermenter
alaindustrial:fermenter
Summary
The Fermenter is an LV machine that turns organic waste into fuel. Organic matter, water and EU/FE go in; biofuel comes out into its own tank and biomass into the result slot. This is the mod's first fuel that is farmed rather than pumped out of the ground: a garden bed and a henhouse take the place of an oil lake.
Of the two outputs only one is guaranteed. Biofuel is always brewed; biomass comes on a recipe roll. That is deliberate: the fluid is what fermentation inevitably yields, the solid residue is what sometimes survives the process.
Mini-example: the garden drone hauls the harvest into a chest, a hopper drops it into the fermenter, a bucket of water sits in the fill slot, a cable from a solar panel runs into the side. Fifteen seconds later the first millilitres of biofuel are in the right-hand tank.
Energy
The fermenter only consumes EU/FE. Energy is accepted on every face except the front (the one the model looks along) — the mod's ordinary machine contract.
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Role | consumer with a buffer |
| Internal buffer | 800 EU/FE |
| Max input | 32 EU/FE/t (LV) |
| Max output | n/a (gives none) |
| Consumption | 2 EU/FE/t |
| Cost per operation | 600 EU/FE |
The fermenter does have an upgrade panel: overclockers work on it by the general rule — duration down, EU/FE/t up, energy per operation up.
Fluid
Two tanks of ten buckets each — an input and an output, and they cannot be confused.
| Tank | Volume | What it takes | Outside access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Water (input) | 10 000 mB | source water only (minecraft:water) | fill only, from any face |
| Biofuel (output) | 10 000 mB | filled by the machine itself only | extract only, from the bottom face only |
The asymmetry of the faces reads without tooltips and makes the mistake impossible: a single run of pipe cannot accidentally pour water into the output tank. A probing request with no face (Jade, WTHIT, a foreign pipe) answers with the water tank — that is the machine's "own" fluid.
Water is not part of the recipe but a fixed cost of the machine: 100 mB per batch , the same for all three feedstock tiers. Water that has reached the tank cannot be pumped back out — it is feedstock, not storage.
Processing
The recipe type is. One batch: 300 ticks (15 s) and 600 EU/FE, no matter what the machine is fed. Only how much feedstock is eaten and how much comes out changes.
| Feedstock tier | Tag | Eats | Biofuel | Biomass chance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poor | 4 items | 20 mB | 6 % | |
| Common | 2 items | 60 mB | 20 % | |
| Rich | 1 item | 150 mB | 50 % |
Poor — garden litter: seeds, grass and ferns, leaves, saplings, flowers, vines and moss, sugar cane, bamboo, cactus, mushrooms, rotten flesh, poisonous potatoes, spider eyes. Common — the ordinary harvest and yard produce: wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot, pumpkin, melon slices, apples, berries, cocoa beans, nether wart, bread, eggs, raw meat and fish, leather, feathers. Rich — whatever has already been processed or compressed: golden carrots, golden apples, cooked meat and fish, baked potatoes, cake, pumpkin pie, cookies, soups, honey and honeycomb, hay bales, dried kelp blocks, sugar.
The cost per operation is the same for all of them — that is a mod invariant: one recipe family has exactly one price. The player steers not the speed but what goes into the slot: four tufts of grass give 20 mB and one biomass every sixteen batches, a single golden carrot gives 150 mB and biomass every other run.
The tier is read from the item's tag in the slot, not from the recipe. The reason lies in how the mod's recipes are built: no family accepts items and a fluid at once, or produces both kinds of output together. So the fluid side of the operation belongs to the machine (the config) and the item side to the recipe (the JSON). The galvanic bath already works the same way: its water, too, is a cost of the machine.
What stops the fermenter. The whole price has to be on hand every tick, not just at the start: pull the feedstock out or drain the water mid-batch and the work halts rather than finishing "on credit". On a loss of power, an empty water tank, a full biofuel tank or an occupied output slot the progress freezes and resumes from the same point; but if the slot ends up holding an item no recipe covers, the progress resets to zero. Nothing is destroyed in the process.
Inventory
Six machine slots plus the four slots of the upgrade panel.
| Slot | Takes | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Organic matter (0) | anything covered by | up to a stack |
| Water fill (1) | a full bucket/capsule of water | 1 |
| return (2) | the emptied container — filled by the machine only | up to a stack |
| Biofuel draw (3) | an empty bucket/capsule | 1 |
| output (4) | the filled container — filled by the machine only | up to a stack |
| Biomass (5) | the result — placed by the machine only | up to a stack |
The container exchange is free and outside the recipe: the bucket of water from slot 1 goes into the tank and drops empty into slot 2, an empty container from slot 3 is filled with biofuel and moves to slot 4. Hoppers and pipes may put things into slots 0, 1 and 3 and take from 2, 4 and 5; nothing can be put into the output slots from outside.
Interface
A screen with two fluid gauges — one per tank: water on the left, biofuel on the right, the progress arrow between them, and the energy bar at the right edge. Both gauges are drawn with the texture of the fluid itself, so the water in the left tank looks like water and the biofuel in the right one looks like biofuel. Under the gauges is a status line that names the reason for any standstill:
| Status | When |
|---|---|
| Ready / fermenting | a batch is running, or everything for one is there |
| No organic matter | the feedstock slot is empty or holds less than the batch asks for |
| No water | the tank holds less than 100 mB |
| Nothing here ferments | there is an item in the slot, but no fermenting recipe accepts it |
| Biofuel tank full | the next batch would not fit |
| Output blocked | the biomass slot will not take the result |
Block Properties
A full cube with a front face: the machine turns to face the player when placed and glows during a batch (a separate "lit" model).
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Shape | full 16³ cube (occluder) |
| Hardness | 3.0 |
| Blast resistance | 6.0 |
| Sound material | metal |
| Tool | pickaxe |
| Keeps its contents when broken | no — the tanks, the inventory and the progress live in the block, not in the item |
Sound
Silent. The machine hums in this mod are original, each one its own; the fermenter shipped without a loop of its own rather than with somebody else's voice. Adding one later is a sound file plus the interface wiring, with no changes to the block itself.
Recipes
The top row is two iron plates with a bucket between them; the middle is two copper plates around a machine casing; the bottom is two more iron plates with an electronic circuit between them.
The bucket in the middle of the top row is the very "barrel" the machine is named for; the circuit at the bottom is the mandatory entry ticket into LV machinery.
The fermenting recipes are (one per tier, all three with energy: 600).
Progression
Tier: LV. Built right after the first machines: the casing, the circuit and the plates are all already on hand by then. The start of the organic chain: fermenter → biofuel → distillation column → nutrient solution → sprinkler. The farm feeds the fermenter, and the fermenter hands the farm back an acceleration two distillations later — the loop closes on itself. It sits well next to the garden drone station: that one hauls the harvest in, this one ferments it.
Related
Biofuel — the fluid output, always. Biomass — the solid output, on a roll. Distillation Column — the second cracking pass: biofuel → nutrient solution. Sprinkler — the end of the chain, the consumer of the solution. Garden Drone Station — the supplier of organic matter. Pump — feeds the fermenter water from the nearest body of water.
Crafting
Shaped Crafting
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Fermenter