Canning Machine

alaindustrial:canning_machine

MachinesLVImplementedtier-lvprocessingfoodtinsurvival

Summary

The Canning Machine does not pack a product into a tin — it renders food down to food value and pours that value back out as identical rations. Whatever you feed it, the same item comes out, which means your whole larder collapses into a single stack.

Mini-example: load the leftovers of a harvest — carrots, bread, berries — add some empty cans and connect LV power. A dozen slots of odds and ends become one stack of rations.

Energy

Energy enters through five working faces. The front face is inert.

Processing

The machine works in two independent steps, and the difference matters.

1. Absorbing is free, instant and unconditional. The machine eats food from the top slot and

banks its food value inside — even with no cans loaded yet, no power, or a blocked output. You can feed it ahead of time: calories start banking right away, and pressing begins on its own as soon as the first empty can arrives.

1. Pressing is paid and timed. Once the bank covers one ration and a can, power and free output

room are all present, a 100-tick cycle runs for 200 EU/FE, one empty can is spent, and exactly one ration comes out.

The banked remainder is shown in the window as the "Calories" line and survives leaving the world. Breaking the machine, however, loses it: the cans and the food drop, the banked calories do not. Finish the ration you started before you take the machine apart.

Food value

A product's value is its nutrition plus its saturation. Rich food buys more rations, poor food fewer. One ration costs 12.0 of value.

Processing is always a loss: a ration costs 12.0 of value and carries 9.6. A fifth is spent — that is the price of convenience, and it is exactly what makes duplicating food impossible.

What the machine refuses

Hazardous food: raw chicken, rotten flesh, poisonous potato, pufferfish and spider eye. Processing would launder their risk away for free, which is not a fair trade. Its own ration. Otherwise the machine would grind its own output down, burning a can each pass. Anything that is not food, and food with no nutrition at all.

The filter holds on the window's slots and on the faces alike: a hopper or a pipe cannot push through what you could not place by hand.

Stews and honey are accepted, but their container is lost. A bowl or a bottle comes back only when you eat from it; the machine will not return one.

The ration

A ration fills the hunger bar like a steak but holds you three times worse: industrial food fills the stomach without feeding it for long. A full player cannot eat one, exactly like any ordinary food.

Side effects of the source food are not carried over: a canned golden apple gives nutrition only.

While it is being eaten, the can in your hand appears opened.

Inventory

Interface

Energy, two inputs, progress and the output. Below them sits the "Calories" line with the percentage banked towards the next ration.

Block properties

Sound

While running, the machine emits a light metallic clatter of tin cans on the line — the loop (pattern A, default 0.35). It falls silent when idle.

Recipes

The machine itself is built from tin plates around a casing. The empty can is a bench craft too:

G G — glass pane
T T → 8 empty cans
TTT T — tin plate

Progression

Tier LV. This machine gives tin its first mass consumer: a can is spent for good, so every meal eats metal again.

Who this machine is for

Not for a steak farm. With meat sorted, 64 cooked porkchops are already one slot and more calories than processing would return. That is by design.

For odds and ends, and for the road. A dozen slots of assorted food — berries, carrots, bread, harvest leftovers, mob drops — collapse into one or two slots of identical rations.

Related

Tin — what cans are made of. Compressor — makes the tin plates. Generator — a power source.

Crafting

Shaped Crafting

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Canning Machine