Macerator
alaindustrial:macerator
Summary
The Macerator is the early-game ore-doubling machine. Feed it ore or metal and it grinds the stuff into dust — and a mined ore block gives you two dusts instead of one, which is the whole point of building one. It's the first machine worth running a cable for.
Mini-example: drop an iron ore block (or the raw drop) in, let it spin, and out come two iron dusts. Smelt those and one vein has just paid out two ingots instead of one.
| Input type | Example | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Ore block | iron ore (regular + deepslate) | ×2 dust |
| Raw ore | the raw drop from the ore | ×2 dust |
| Ingot | a finished ingot | ×1 dust |
Doubling is granted for both an ore block and the raw ore: the macerator doubles whatever you feed it. The ingot stays ×1 (net-zero, otherwise you could loop "ingot → dust → ingot" for free doubling). This is the first machine worth building an energy network for.
Energy
The Macerator only consumes EU/FE and holds a little buffer so it keeps grinding smoothly even when the supply is uneven.
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Internal buffer | 800 EU/FE |
| Max input | 32 EU/FE/t (LV) |
| Consumption | 2 EU/FE/t while working |
An LV machine — it draws up to 32 EU/FE per tick. If the network has more energy, the surplus just isn't taken; nothing explodes.
Energy comes in on the five working faces. The front face (the one the machine "looks" toward) is inert — cables don't connect there and hoppers don't work through it.
Processing
Each grind takes 150 ticks (~7.5 s) and pulls EU/FE from the buffer. The finished dust doesn't pop into a chest by itself — pick it up by hand or with a hopper.
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Duration | 150 ticks (~7.5 s) |
| Cost per operation | 300 EU/FE |
| Auto-output | no |
Inventory
One input slot, one output slot. You can't push anything into the output — it holds only the result.
| Slot | Takes | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Input | items the Macerator can grind | 1 |
| Output | the result only (insertion blocked) | 1 |
Interface
One screen shows the energy buffer, the progress arrow, the input slot and the output slot.
The status line under the slots explains why the machine stands idle: "Not enough material", "No matching recipe", "Output is blocked", "No energy". An empty machine gets no line at all — an empty slot speaks for itself. The energy line does not appear the moment the buffer runs dry, but only once it has stayed empty for a while: a machine that barely has enough power runs one tick on, one tick off, and a caption blinking along with it would lie about a stall.
Block Properties
An ordinary solid block, softer than stone. Any pickaxe breaks it, but it does NOT keep its charge when broken.
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Tool | pickaxe |
| Keeps charge on break | no |
Recipes
The Macerator itself is crafted at a workbench: a piece of flint on top, cobblestone along the sides and bottom corners, an Electronic Circuit in the centre, and a Silver Ingot at the bottom-centre.
What it grinds, and what you get back:
Ore block and raw ore → 2 dust. Doubling is granted for both inputs — this is the macerator's main payoff: two ingots from one vein instead of one, whether you mined the block or the raw drop. Finished ingot → 1 dust. Net-zero, so doubling cannot be looped ("ingot → dust → ingot").
| Input | Output | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Ore block (iron, copper, gold, tin, silver, nickel, uranium, palladium, sulfur — regular + deepslate where applicable) | ×2 dust | the doubling payoff — two ingots from one vein |
| Raw ore (the raw drop from the ore) | ×2 dust | the second doubled form — macerate both the block and the raw |
| Finished ingot | ×1 dust | an intermediate form, ×1 (otherwise doubling would loop) |
| Plate (8 metals, except tempered iron) | ×1 dust | recycling a bad plate back into dust, ×1 |
The same scheme covers non-metal dusts (coal, diamond, emerald, lapis): ore → ×2 dust, the pure item → ×1. One exception worth knowing: lapis ore → 6 dust (vanilla lapis ore already drops 4–9, so a plain ×2 would have made grinding pointless).
Beyond metals: organics and stone
The macerator grinds ordinary vanilla items too, and gives more than crafting by hand:
| Input | By hand | In the macerator | Why bother |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bone | 3 bone meal | 4 | a third more meal from the same bone |
| Bone block | 9 bone meal | 9 | no gain in quantity — its value is as an automated step in a line (see below) |
| Cobblestone | — | 1 sand | renewable sand — glass and concrete without strip-mining a desert |
| Sandstone | no reverse recipe | 4 sand | take sandstone apart, which vanilla cannot |
| Basalt | no recipe | 1 gravel | renewable gravel — completes the chain down to flint |
| Blackstone | no recipe | 1 cobblestone | cobblestone right there in the Nether, no hauling |
| Andesite / diorite / granite | no recipe | 1 gravel (each) | a sink for the stone that piles up by the stack with nowhere to go |
| Blaze rod | 2 powder | 3 | half again as much powder for brewing |
| Sugar cane | 1 sugar | 2 | twice the sugar |
| Wool (any colour) | no recipe | 4 string | wool back into string |
All twelve cost the standard 300 EU/FE. The one that changes how you play is cobblestone → sand: any cobble farm becomes a glass and concrete supply.
Stone: why five recipes for gravel and cobblestone
The five stone recipes came from a player suggestion on Discord, and they close a hole that had been there from the start: gravel appeared in none of the macerator's outputs, even though the mod already had a consumer for it — the Extractor turns gravel into flint. The chain broke at its first link: there was no way to produce gravel by machine, only to dig it.
Now it closes end to end: basalt → gravel → flint, without swinging a pickaxe once. And flint is what the macerator itself is crafted from.
Andesite, diorite and granite are here as a sink rather than a profit: every mining trip brings them back by the stack and they have almost no uses. Blackstone gives cobblestone because vanilla already treats it as a cobblestone stand-in for furnace and stone-tool recipes — in the Nether that saves you hauling stone along.
Why this doesn't break the balance. Neither gravel nor cobblestone has a vanilla recipe that compresses it back into the input, so the "macerate, then craft it back" loop is impossible here — the same invariant the bone block, sandstone and wool sit on. The cheapest loophole runs through andesite, which is craftable from cobblestone: vanilla gives 2 cobblestone + 2 quartz → 2 diorite, then 1 diorite + 1 cobblestone → 2 andesite, so 4 cobblestone + 2 quartz → 4 gravel. That works out to 1 cobblestone + 0.5 quartz per gravel — more expensive than the existing cobblestone → sand (1:1), so the new path never becomes the dominant strategy.
Basalt, the headline input, is not cheap either: unlike cobblestone it does not form from lava meeting water. A basalt generator needs lava, blue ice and soul soil — that is, a trip to the Nether.
Progression
Tier: LV. The starter grinder and the reason to build your first energy network. It doesn't evolve into anything in v0.1 — an MV-grade grinder is a separate future block. Needs power from an LV source, e.g. a Generator.
Related
Generator — the typical power source for this machine. Electric Furnace — smelts the dust back into ingots. Compressor — closes the loop for non-metal dusts (coal, diamond…). Electronic Circuit — the component it's built from.
Crafting
Shaped Crafting
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Macerator