Reactor Button

alaindustrial:reactor_button

NuclearImplementednuclearreactorshieldingredstoneautomation

Summary

The Reactor Button is the smallest block in the set and the only one without which the room becomes a trap. The airlock door opens on a redstone pulse alone: outside, anything can send one; inside, there is nothing to send it with — a sealed room by design has neither openings nor wires leading out. So the source of the pulse has to stand inside, and it has to be made of the same material as the walls.

The button is a real vanilla ButtonBlock, not a look-alike: the press, the pressed shape, the redstone pulse and the auto-release are exactly those of any button in the game. Only the material, the sound family and the press duration are ours. The player does not have to relearn how a button works.

How it differs from a vanilla button

BlockSetType.IRON was chosen because the button is metal, and it happens to carry exactly the behaviour wanted here: a hand can press it, an arrow cannot. For a button that governs a seal the second half matters more than it sounds — a stray skeleton arrow opening the airlock of a reactor hall is not a funny detail but a hole at the one narrow point of the whole build.

The press duration matches the vanilla stone button and is half of (40 ticks). That is not a coincidence: the door catches a rising edge rather than a held signal, so the pulse only has to be long enough to arrive reliably, even when the button is wired through a run of redstone dust.

Where to put it

That is the key distinction of the whole set: six blocks make up the shell, and the button hangs on it. Inside the room it goes on the casing next to the doorway; outside, wherever is convenient. It spends no cell, so the same wall can be both sealed and fitted with a button.

There is no rule that a button must be present, and none is planned. A room without one forms — but a player can already walk in, shut the door behind them and have no way to open it, and that is entirely their own decision.

Energy

The button runs on redstone, like the door it controls. EU/FE here would be an unnecessary dependency: the control that opens the exit must not depend on whether the room has power.

Block properties

Hardness and blast resistance are deliberately not the shell's 5.0 / 30.0 even though the material is the same. The button must not outlive the explosion that took the wall: a surviving button on the site of a blown-out wall is debris pretending to be a working control. Let it go with whatever it was attached to.

The button has no flag — exactly like vanilla's buttons. That is not an oversight: a button's occlusion shape is its own little overlay, it covers nobody's face, and it has no collision at all, so it does not affect light either.

Recipes

Craft — shapeless, ×2 at a time.

1 shielding plate + 1 stone button → 2 reactor buttons

The recipe is trivial on purpose. The button is a convenience item, not a progression milestone, and making the player assemble it out of rare parts would put an obstacle where an obstacle is pointless: without one they cannot use the room they have already built.

The stone button in the recipe is not filler but a way of not reinventing a mechanic: the player takes the button they already know and dresses it in shielding alloy.

Progression

Tier: none. Requires: one shielding plate (the chain is described under casing) and a stone button. Unlocks: the ability to leave a closed room — that is, the ability to use it at all.

Related

Reactor Airlock Door — what the button exists for; the "pulse, not a held signal" contract is described there. Reactor Casing — the material chain and the full composition of the shell. Reactor Controller — the one that tells a shell block from a foreign one; to it, the button is a foreign block. Thermal Centrifuge — the mod's other redstone-controlled block, with the opposite contract: there the signal must be held.

Crafting

Shapeless Crafting

stone

▶

×2

Reactor Button