Reactor Glass

alaindustrial:reactor_glass

NuclearImplementednuclearreactormultiblockshieldingglass

Summary

Reactor Glass is casing you can see through. To the room scanner it is wall in the full sense: a glass cell is sealed, and a window of any reasonable size does not stop the room forming — as long as glass stays under 30 % of the shell.

Vanilla glass will not do — the scanner reads it as a breach, like any foreign block. That is not pedantry for its own sake: a glass wall on a reactor has to be the same shielding alloy, or the "window" would become a cheap way to build the room out of whatever is at hand.

Role in the shell

Field	Value
Counts as wall	yes, on a par with casing
Where it may go	any cell of any face: walls, floor, ceiling, edges, corners
How many	at most = 30 % of the shell's cells
Above that	status `TOO_MUCH_GLASS` — "Too much glass — weak structure"

Unlike the door (at least one required) and the controller (exactly one, vertical wall only), glass is not tied to any particular cell: its single restriction is a share.

The glass cap

Field	Value
Config key
Default	30 (percent)
What is counted	glass cells against all shell cells, floor and ceiling included
The test	`glass × 100 > percent × shell cells` — integer, no floating point
When it runs	last: after the seal, the second controller, the door and the doorway
What the controller shows	status `TOO_MUCH_GLASS` and the position of the first glass cell of the walk

The integers are not pedantry: comparing scaled integers gives the same answer on both sides of an exact share, whereas glass / shell > 0.30 in double would behave differently in mathematically identical rooms. Overflow is impossible by construction — a shell holds at most 1016 cells.

A practical yardstick on the smallest room (98 shell cells): 30 % is 29 panes, a little more than one solid 5×5 face. One wall can be all glass with a couple of windows to spare; two solid glass faces are already over the line.

The position the controller points at is not the "guilty" cell — there is none, the share is guilty — but the first glass cell in perimeter-walk order. It is there so the smoke in the world leads the player to the glazed part of the shell instead of leaving them to guess where it is.

Why the cap exists at all. Glass is half the palladium of casing (see "Balance"), and without a limit the optimal strategy would be a glass box: cheaper, prettier, and you can see inside. The cap gives the choice its meaning back — a window stays a window rather than a cheaper way to build the room.

Energy

Field	Value
Role	none
Buffer (EU/FE)	0
Max input / output (EU/FE/tick)	n/a

Block properties

A full cube, but not an occluder — otherwise the glass would cull its neighbours' faces like a solid block and there would be nothing to look at through it. Hardness and blast resistance are the casing's: a window is not the shell's weak spot.

Field	Value
Shape	full cube 16³,, translucent (`force_translucent` in the model)
Hardness	5.0
Blast resistance	30.0
Tool	pickaxe (required for drops)
Sound	glass
Blockstates	`formed`, `edge` — cosmetic: a face of a formed shell loses its bezel, an edge keeps it
Shared faces	culled between adjacent glass blocks

Sound is the only thing that separates glass from casing by feel: it is placed and broken with a glassy ring rather than a metal clang. Light passes through it.

Culling shared faces matters most for the glass: without it a 5×5 window would draw a grid of interior panes like a stack of separate cubes, and the "a formed room is one surface" effect would break at the first window. Vanilla glass does exactly the same thing.

Recipes

Craft — ×8 at a time.

G G G G = #c:glass_blocks/colorless ×8
G S G S = shielding plate ×1
G G G

The number that matters here is one shielding plate for eight blocks — 0.125 of a plate per block. For casing it is 0.25 per block: glass is exactly half the palladium. That is precisely why it has a share cap and casing does not.

Progression

Tier: none (a passive block). Requires: shielding plates (that is, palladium and tempered iron) and ordinary colourless glass. Unlocks: nothing new — it is an alternative to casing, not a step beyond it.

Reactor Casing — the base shell block; the room geometry is described there. Reactor Controller — the one that counts glass as wall and measures its share. Reactor Lamp — a glowing shell block; it does not count towards the glass cap even though glass appears in its recipe. Incubator — the mod's precedent for "glass as part of a structure".