Home/Upgrades/Overclocker Chip I

Overclocker Chip I

alaindustrial:overclocker_chip_i

UpgradesImplementedupgradeoverclockerspeedenergychip

Summary

The Overclocker is an upgrade item that goes into its own arm of a machine's upgrade panel (the top one, marked with a double-arrow hint). There are three tiers — I, II and III — and they are three separate items rather than a stack of one, so exactly one overclocker works in a machine.

Each tier cuts the operation to 80 % of the previous length and doubles the EU/FE drawn per tick. The two multipliers are deliberately asymmetric: 0.8 × 2.0 = 1.6, so every tier raises the energy spent per operation by 60 %. Speed is bought with energy, never given away.

Example: an unmodified macerator grinds ore in 150 ticks for 300 EU/FE. With tier III it finishes in 77 ticks — nearly twice as fast — but burns 1232 EU/FE, four times as much. A copper cable can no longer feed it; you need gold.

Energy

The chip itself neither stores nor consumes energy — it changes the draw of the machine holding it.

Tier	Ticks (macerator)	EU/FE/tick	Speed-up	EU/FE per operation
—	150	2	1.00×	300
I	120	4	1.25×	480
II	96	8	1.56×	768
III	77	16	1.95×	1232

Inventory

Not applicable (item). Goes into the panel's overclocker arm — one per machine. Hoppers and pipes cannot see the upgrade panel.

Block properties

Not applicable (item). Stack: 64 in a normal inventory, 1 in an upgrade slot.

How it works

While the chip sits in the panel, the machine runs faster and eats more. Hover the panel's gear tab and the tooltip shows the installed tier and how far speed and draw have moved.

Which tier a machine will run depends on its voltage. A machine cannot draw more than its tier allows: LV carries 32 EU/FE/tick, MV 128. So the limit is derived, not fixed:

Machines	Base draw	Tier	Limit	Draw at the limit
Sawmill, electric furnace, extractor, compressor, macerator, polymerizer, distillation column, vulcanizer, galvanic bath	2 EU/FE/t	LV	III	16 EU/FE/t
Alloy smelter, incubator	8 EU/FE/t	LV	II	32 EU/FE/t
Assembler	12 EU/FE/t	MV	III	96 EU/FE/t

A tier above the limit still sits in the slot but acts as the limit — the machine could never take in that much energy per tick.

Overclocking hits the wiring before it hits the tier. A copper cable carries 12 EU/FE/tick, so on an ordinary LV machine the first two tiers run on starter copper while the third already needs a gold cable (48 EU/FE/tick). That is not a bug: speed is bought with a network upgrade too.

What it does not do: change recipes, touch odds (including the incubator's), shorten the distillation column's warm-up, or work in generators and the condenser — output and banking are governed differently there.

Progression

An upgrade with no tier of its own.
Tier I is built on the empty chip; each next tier from the previous one.
The real gate is an energy clot of the matching tier, and those come only from the Energy Condenser, out of grid surplus. An overclocker cannot be bought with ore: your power plant pays for it.