Steam Nozzle

alaindustrial:steam_nozzle

NuclearImplementednuclearreactormultiblocksteamfluid-transportexhaust

Summary

The Steam Nozzle is the reactor's exhaust. Water boiled inside the reactor columns becomes steam, the steam piles up in the columns, and it has to go somewhere. The nozzle is that somewhere: it takes steam from a steam pipe (since steam travels only in steam pipes — a fluid pipe does not carry it), releases it into the block it faces, and the steam is gone. Nothing can ever be taken back out of it.

Why the exhaust is a block and not a rule. If steam simply evaporated inside the column the loop would be half a loop: the player would plumb water in and never think about cooling again. Steam that has to be piped back out turns cooling into a real circuit with two ends — and it gives the room its silhouette: pipes going in low, pipes coming out high, and something hissing at the end of them.

What it does

The tank is deliberately tiny — five ticks of flow. Its job is to smooth a line that briefly outran the nozzle, not to store anything: a large one would let a player park steam in it waiting for stage 5's turbine, and "steam that reaches a nozzle is gone" would stop being the truth the whole loop is balanced against.

The mouth is not published to pipes on purpose. Otherwise the exhaust line could be run into the very block the nozzle vents into, and it would quietly start feeding itself.

It needs open air in front of the mouth

Steam is released into the block the nozzle faces. If that block cannot be replaced (a wall, the ground, another machine), the nozzle stalls: its tank stays full, the line behind it backs up, the columns stop boiling and the reactor's temperature climbs.

There is no message about it and there will not be — a nozzle buried in a wall does nothing, exactly as a real one would. The consequence shows up where it matters instead: on the controller the steam bar turns amber from 90 % and its label reads "exhaust blocked", and the heat gauge rises.

How many nozzles you need

One nozzle vents 100 mB/t, one pipe carries 50 mB/t , and one reactor inlet also carries 50 mB/t. Steam is born 1:1 from the water boiled, and a room at the HV ceiling makes 250…273 mB of steam a tick (six columns in a 2×3 block — 250, a 12×12×12 hall — 273), so a reactor's full exhaust is six inlets out, six pipe runs and three nozzles. A reactor that gets its water back after a drought boils more for a while — up to 250 mB/t on top of that on a full gauge — and the surplus shrinks as the temperature falls. Per-layout figures are in

The pipe running into a nozzle has to push into it: set that pipe face to insert mode with a wrench, as with any other fluid consumer.

Block properties

Orientation comes from the face the player clicked: the mouth always points away from the surface the nozzle was pressed against. It can be hung from a ceiling or set into a floor just as well — the placement decides the direction, there is no separate rotation step.

The steam level is never synced to clients: the plume is spawned with on the server, which broadcasts it to everyone in range by itself. There would be nothing to show anyway — steam is invisible on the model.

The plume: a geyser, not a cloud

Before the nozzle let out CLOUD puffs. Now it is the vanilla geyser — the same particles the world's sulfur geysers use, by reference, nothing copied. A nozzle facing up throws a GEYSER_PLUME column (= 1, the lowest column) and GEYSER_BASE puffs at the mouth. Geyser particles can only rise, so a nozzle facing sideways or down throws no column: it breathes GEYSER_POOF puffs out of its mouth, and they drift up like steam from a side spigot.

Venting still happens every tick; only the picture is batched. The nozzle adds up what it released over = 4 ticks and draws one burst whose density is proportional to that sum: a trickle looks like a trickle, a full flow looks full. A geyser particle lives a second or more, and a burst every tick would pile into a white wall.

Sound

The event is ours, the files are vanilla: the mod's points at minecraft:block/potent_sulfur/geyser_continuous/eruption_active1…7 (6–13 s clips) and copies nothing. Our own event exists for the subtitle: vanilla's event for these clips has none, and a sound a deaf player cannot read is half a readout. The subtitle is «Steam Nozzle hisses» in every locale of the mod.

The clips are longer than the period, so a new one starts while the last still plays and the ear hears a steady hiss rather than a string of bursts. A nozzle whose line delivers in pulses flips between venting and idle every few ticks — so the hiss cannot start again sooner than 20 ticks after the last start. With nothing to vent, it is silent. The timing is not saved: after a world load the nozzle simply starts afresh.

Where to put it

A nozzle is not part of the shell. Placed inside the room it takes an interior cell (legal but pointless — the steam stays in the room); placed into a wall in place of a shell block it makes a breach and the room comes apart. Its place is outside, on the wall next to a reactor inlet, with the mouth pointing into open air.

Recipes

• Craft — ×2 at a time.

I I = iron ingot ×3
I P I P = fluid pipe ×1
C C = machine casing ×1

The recipe is deliberately cheap and asks for neither palladium nor shielding alloy: a nozzle hangs outside the sealed room, so it neither holds pressure nor shields anything. The expensive part of the circuit is the inlets, not the exhaust, and three nozzles must not cost as much as another wall.

Progression

• Tier: none (the block has no energy at all).
• Requires: a fluid pipe and a machine casing — ordinary fluid logistics, learned long before the reactor.
• Unlocks: a closed cooling circuit. Without an exhaust the steam tanks in the columns fill, boiling stops and there is no cooling.

Related

• Steam — the fluid itself: why it has no world form and cannot be bucketed.
• Reactor Column — where the steam is born and why it has to leave.
• Reactor Inlet — how steam gets out of a sealed room.
• Reactor Controller — where a stalled exhaust becomes visible.
• Fluid Pipe — does not carry steam: since a steam pipe takes it to the nozzle.

Crafting

Shaped Crafting

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×2

Steam Nozzle