Reactor Lamp

alaindustrial:reactor_lamp

NuclearImplementednuclearreactormultiblockshieldinglight

Summary

The Reactor Lamp is casing that glows. It came out of the most obvious problem of the first play session: a formed room is a sealed box without a single opening, and inside it is pitch black. Light has to be brought in somehow, and an ordinary torch will not do — a torch is not a shell block, so the cell it occupies reads to the scanner as a breach.

The lamp solves this the way multiblocks solve such things: it is a shell block and takes the place of any casing cell. The light appears only while formed, so a lit room is both lit and signalling "the build was accepted" at the same time.

One subtlety that makes the "The light" section worth reading in full: the block does not glow. The lamp block itself emits nothing; the light lives in the cell opposite it, inside the room. Not a drop of it reaches the outside.

Role in the shell

The scanner classifying the lamp as casing is not a shortcut in an enum but a balance decision. If the lamp counted as glass, every lamp would eat into the thirty percent reserved for windows, and the player would have to choose between seeing in and seeing inside. That is a false choice: lighting is not decoration but a precondition for working in the room at all.

The same line has a second effect: without explicitly naming the lamp as shell it would read as a foreign block, so every lamp set into a wall would break the room. One rule in the scanner answers both.

The light

The main thing about the lamp: the block itself emits nothing at all. Its is zero in every state. What glows is a cell inside the room, and the controller is what puts it there.

Why not simply a glowing block. The first version was exactly that: 15 while formed. The play session showed the obvious-in-hindsight problem — block light in Minecraft radiates in every direction, so a lamp set into a wall lights the countryside outside exactly as much as the room inside. A finished room glowed across the landscape. There is no "geometry that arranges it for free" here: the outer side of a wall is as much a neighbour as the inner one.

Moving the light source inside solves it without a lighting system of our own: minecraft:light is the vanilla invisible, walk-through block invented for exactly "there is light here and no visible source". All of the light is born inside the room and none of it reaches the outside, and what the player sees on the lamp's face is its texture, not emission.

Fifteen is the maximum, and it is not chosen "just in case": a room can be 12×12×12 inside and the lamp sits in its face, that is as far from the opposite corner as it gets. A lower level would leave dark corners in a large room, and a dark corner in Minecraft is not an aesthetic matter but mob spawns inside a sealed space you then cannot chase them out of.

Tying it to formed also keeps the signal honest. A lamp lit in a half-built wall would say the structure works when it does not. Here light means exactly one thing: the room is done.

A practical consequence for the builder: put lamps in faces, not in edges. In an edge a lamp stays a handsome wall block with not one lumen to its name, because it has nowhere to shine.

Energy

The lamp draws no EU/FE. That is deliberate: no power reaches the inside of a sealed room at all — the reactor inlet carries fluid from stage 3 onwards, but never EU/FE — so a lamp that needed current simply could not work. It is bound to the room's state rather than to a grid, which is the better contract anyway: the light in a reactor hall should not go out because a cable broke somewhere.

Block properties

The numbers match the rest of the shell: the lamp must not be the spot where the wall is easiest to open. It has three textures like every other shell block: unformed (with a bezel), a formed face (without one) and a formed edge (the bezel stays) — see "The seamless look".

Recipes

Craft — ×1 at a time.

I G I I = iron ingot ×4
G L G G = #c:glass_blocks/colorless ×3
I P I L = glowstone ×1
P = shielding plate ×1

The recipe reads as the lamp's construction: glowstone in the middle, glass around it, an iron body at the corners and a shielding plate at the base — a light fitting bolted to a wall of the same alloy. Exactly one plate is left in it: the lamp is a convenience, and paying palladium for it as if it were a piece of the mechanic would be wrong.

Progression

Tier: none (a passive block). Requires: shielding plates (the chain is described under casing), ordinary glass and glowstone — that is, a trip to the Nether, which the palladium demands anyway. Unlocks: nothing new — it is a convenience, not a step. A room without lamps forms exactly the same.

The glowstone is no accident: it and the palladium come from the same dimension, so the lamp adds not a single new expedition to the build.

Related

Reactor Casing — the base shell block; the room geometry and "The seamless look" are described there. Reactor Controller — the one that sets formed and therefore turns the light on. Reactor Glass — the other "transparent" shell block; unlike the lamp it is limited to a 30 % share. Airlock Door and the Reactor Button — how you get into a lit room and back out of it.

Crafting

Shaped Crafting

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Reactor Lamp