Geiger Counter
alaindustrial:geiger_counter
Summary
The Geiger Counter is a pocket instrument that needs no power. It produces nothing and affects nothing: it is heard. Before it, radiation in this mod was invisible — the effect is applied with no icon and no particles, and a player next to a rack of fuel rods died in a second and a half without ever getting a warning.
The instrument works from any inventory slot. Craft it, drop it in your bag, forget it. This is an alarm, not a measuring procedure: you do not hold it, you do not take it out, there is nothing to press.
Sound is the only channel. No HUD panel, no action-bar line, no reading in the tooltip. That is why subtitles, when enabled, show "Geiger counter clicks" — it is the only thing that tells a player whose sound this is.
What the clicks mean
The instrument has two distinct signals, and they are told apart by ear.
Ore in the rock — a lower tone, and the clicks quicken as you close in. This means "there is a vein nearby, dig here". The grade comes from the DISTANCE to the nearest ore, not from an attenuated field: the field halves within a block and a half, so a field-based grade collapsed onto its lowest rung two blocks from a vein — the player was standing on the ore and hearing one click every two seconds. The bands are a quarter, a half and the whole radius: 0–4 blocks, 4–8 and 8–16. Uranium ore, while it is still in the wall, contributes no dose at all: the rock counts as its own shielding. For this signal line of sight is deliberately not checked — it would be pointless otherwise, since ore is always behind stone. For uranium to start hurting you it has to be mined and carried: in your inventory it becomes ordinary radioactive_low.
Danger — the normal tone, and the rate climbs with the scale. This is the real field: rods, uranium in your pockets, contaminated soil, chests of fuel. The top ore grade is quieter than the first danger grade, so "rich vein" can never be mistaken for "it is dangerous here", however close to the ore the player stands.
The clicks are stochastic, not a metronome: the step sets the chance of a click per tick, and the pitch drifts slightly. A steady repeat stops registering as an alarm within a minute — a lesson already learned on the reactor siren.
The scale
| Field per sweep | Clicks per second | What that is in the world |
|---|---|---|
| ore in the rock | 0.8 / 1.6 / 2.8 | safe — no dose accumulates at all |
| below 1, otherwise | silence | no dose accumulates |
| 1–20 | 3 | the far edge of a zone; a chest from 12–15 blocks |
| 20–100 | 8 | uranium in a pocket (24); a chest from 3–5 blocks |
| 100–400 | 15 | a chest at arm's length; a reactor from 3 blocks |
| above 400 | 20, a solid roar | a rack at close range — the needle is pinned |
The instrument does not wear out — it goes off scale. Above 400 it stops telling levels apart and simply roars. A cheap instrument does not lie, it saturates, and that is exactly what makes a dosimeter worth building.
The instrument has its own radius, deliberately wider than the hazard's: 16 blocks against the 6 that radiation actually reaches. Beyond six the dose is exactly zero, so everything the counter says out there is pure warning — a chest of fuel is heard from fifteen blocks and starts hurting at six. A counter that only hears as far as radiation reaches warns about nothing: the first version did exactly that, and three blocks from a chest, already taking damage, it clicked once a second.
Strength halves within 1.5 blocks, so direction is audible on its own: two steps to the side change the rate immediately. The instrument deliberately has no pointer, no arrows and no source highlighting.
The lamp
A green light burns on the case while the instrument hears no danger, and a red one when it does. Ore does not light it: that signal means "safe, dig here", and red has to go on meaning danger or it has nothing left to say. It is the one reading this instrument offers that does not have to be listened to.
What the instrument measures
The field before the suit, not after it. The counter reports what is around you, not what reaches your body. Otherwise a worn shielding suit would zero the reading — it stops carried sources completely — and silence would come to mean "you are covered" instead of "there is nothing here". How much got through the suit is the dosimeter's question, not this instrument's.
Readings are taken by the same sweep as the dose (once per, a second) and spent tick by tick: the sweep sets the step, each tick rolls a click against it. A counter put into a chest therefore goes quiet within a second rather than instantly.
Several counters sound like one — the search stops at the first one found. A counter inside a shulker box or a pouch stays silent: an instrument buried in a bag is not on duty.
The instrument reads in creative and spectator too; only the dose is skipped. A counter that went dead in creative would be dead exactly where it is first picked up.
Recipe
Five tin ingots, an electronic circuit and a glass pane: the pane on top is the tube's window, the tin is the case. The recipe unlocks when the player first picks up raw uranium — which is exactly when the instrument has work to do.
The middle tier is a deliberate choice: ore is nearly harmless (its ceiling is 20 % of the scale, 22 minutes to the dangerous band), and a reactor arrives later than circuits.
Settings
| Key | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 16 | how far the counter hears; wider than radiation reaches | |
| 16 | how far ore in the rock is heard; 0 disables the ore scan | |
| 1 | field at which the counter starts clicking | |
| 20 | switch to a noticeable rattle | |
| 100 | switch to a dense rattle | |
| 400 | off scale | |
| 60 | click loudness; 0 silences it and sends no packets |
The ore radius is a reach, not a dose: ore in a wall is never added to a dose anywhere. Raising means hearing a vein sooner and from further away, and nothing else.
Related
Nuclear power — an overview of the branch and of radiation. Shielding suit — what cuts the dose; it does not affect the reading.
Crafting
Shaped Crafting
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Geiger Counter