Monitor Core

alaindustrial:monitor_core

UtilityLVImplementedmonitoringdisplaylogisticsmultiblockutility

Summary

The Monitoring Wall is a warehouse dashboard: a row of panels by your base entrance showing how much of each item is in your chests, without opening any of them. It is three blocks and one item:

Monitor Core — the brain: it takes power from a cable, holds a rack of 10 cards, and hands the panels their numbers. Without a core the wall does nothing. The body is a dark block with amber eyes, framed edges and the card rack on its front: the core glows while it has power and goes dark without it, and every filled slot lights up cyan.
Smart Wire — a line that reads containers instead of carrying goods: run it from the core to chests, barrels, shulkers and the mod's own chests.
Monitor Panel — the screen. The body is a slim wall terminal: dark with no filter item, lit while one. Panels placed against each other and against the core join into one system, in any shape: a wall can turn a corner or wrap a pillar.
Capacity Card — fitted into the core, each card lets the wall track 6 different item types (up to 60 with a full rack of 10 cards).

Mini-example: fit a capacity card into the core, run a smart wire from the core to your ore chest, place a panel next to the core and right-click a diamond into it → the panel shows how many diamonds are in the wired chests.

How it works

One item type per panel. To watch more types, build more panels.
Once a second the core walks the wired containers once for the whole wall and hands out the numbers, so a big wall costs the server no more than a small one — it costs more only in energy.
Only top-level slots are counted; the system does not dig into shulkers inside chests — the same rule the Stock Display Frame keeps.
A double chest counts as one container.
A container whose loot has not been generated yet is not read at all: looking inside would unpack its loot table with no player in context and empty somebody else's chest for good.

Energy and capacity

Reinforced amethyst is what the system is built from. Four amethyst shards and a pinch of silver dust go into the Alloy Smelter; both the core and the capacity card are made of the result. The wall costs a running machine, not only materials.
With no capacity card the wall shows nothing. A bare rack means zero tracked types, and every filled panel burns the yellow x. A card is the price of the system, not an upgrade on top of a working one.
Upkeep: a base cost at the core plus a surcharge for every panel actually showing a number. An empty panel costs nothing.
Card capacity limits the number of types, not of panels: two panels watching the same item take one slot of capacity.
When capacity runs out, the same panels always go dark (the order is geometric and does not change across world reloads), never random ones.

What a panel shows

Mark	Meaning
A number	all is well: that much of the item sits in the wired chests
grey `?`	this part of the wall has no core — the wall was broken apart
red `!`	the core cannot pay for the wall
amber `x`	not enough card capacity

Number format: exact up to 10,000, then 12.3k and 1.2M. The text is legible from 24 blocks.

Above the number sits the item's icon, as in the inventory: blocks as a small 3D cube, flat items flat. A 3D model lies whole in front of the screen and never pokes out of the block face, and a model wider than an inventory slot is shrunk so it does not spill onto the neighbouring panel.

Interface

Only the core has a screen. Right-click the core to open it:

a rack of 10 slots for capacity cards — drag cards in and out, one per slot; a full rack refuses openly ("The rack is full") instead of swallowing the item;
four numbers — capacity (how many types are allowed and how many are actually tracked), filled slots, stored energy, and upkeep with the number of panels it powers;
a lamp with one line — "Wall is running", "Fit a capacity card" or "Not enough power".

The quick gesture still works: Shift + right-click the core with a card in hand seats it in a free slot without opening the screen. Hoppers and pipes follow the same rule — only cards go into the core, one per slot.

right-click a panel holding an item → the item becomes the filter;
right-click a panel empty-handed → the filter comes back.

Block properties

Block	Shape and collision	Strength	Tool
Monitor Core	full cube (a framed body with the card rack on its front), glows while powered	3.0 / 6.0	pickaxe
Monitor Panel	slim wall terminal: 4 pixels deep, not a whole cube	2.0 / 4.0	pickaxe
Smart Wire	slim 4×4×4 core plus an arm toward each connection	0.2 / 0.5	pickaxe

The core and the panel face the player when placed. Power enters the core through any face but the front — a cable never draws an arm across the screen the player is meant to read. Panels and the wire take no energy at all.

Recipes

What	Where	Made from
Reinforced Amethyst	Alloy Smelter, 1200 EU/FE	4 amethyst shards + silver dust
Monitor Core	crafting table	4 reinforced amethyst, 2 electrum plates, 2 advanced circuits, an energy crystal in the middle
Capacity Card	crafting table	reinforced amethyst in the middle, 4 silver plates, 3 redstone, an advanced circuit
Monitor Panel	crafting table	a Stock Display Frame in the middle, 4 glass, 4 silver plates, an electronic circuit
Smart Wire ×4	crafting table	gold ingot, copper cable, redstone (in a column)

What this is not: Applied Energistics

The system only ever looks. Items stay physically in the player's chests: they cannot be withdrawn remotely, cannot be inserted through the network, take no part in crafting and are never stored as a digital copy. A capacity card is the right to watch a few more types, never a place to keep one.

Limits of the current version

Exactly one core per system: a second core in the same connected wall stops it entirely.
The card has a single tier; a tier ladder and a second axis (wire reach) are open questions in.
Balance (upkeep, capacity, scan interval) is configurable and will be tuned from play.

Crafting

Shaped Crafting

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Monitor Core