Machines
Mechanical power, like in an old mill. You make power with a water wheel, windmill or engine, carry it along shafts and cogs, and use it to run machines.
Power
- Water wheels work in rivers, the sea or spring water.
- Windmills turn with the wind, and a bad storm can break them.
- Ember engines burn fuel, or lava.
- Steam engines are the strongest: a boiler over a fire, kept full of water, with engines against it. Twice as strong over lava.
Each source has a limit. If you connect more machines than it can handle, the weakest part of the line breaks.
Shafts and cogs
Shafts carry power in a line, gearboxes turn corners, and cogs and large cogs change the speed. Clutches, gearshifts and governors let you control a line with wiring. A flywheel keeps a line turning for a while after the power stops.
When you place a part you see a preview of where it will go, and it lines itself up with the parts next to it.
Machines and automation
Millstones grind, saws cut, bellows heat the kiln and fans blow. Belts move items along, and chutes and funnels get items in and out of chests and machines.
For automation there are depots, mechanical arms (you tell them where to pick up and where to put down), mechanical crafters that work together on recipes up to 3x3, deployers that use the item they're holding on the block in front, and dispensers that fire an item whenever they get a signal.
Moving structures
Anything built on a bearing or a mechanical piston moves with it, and you can stand on it while it does. You choose what's attached using the glue brush.
Drills and saws on a moving structure break whatever they run into, and the blocks go into chests on the structure. Put that on a rope pulley and it lowers itself as it digs, which is how you make a quarry. There are harvesters and ploughs for farming too.
Tinker's Glass
Every machine part has a little animated scene that shows what it does and how it connects. Hold W over a part in your inventory to open it.
Wiring
Machines use the same wiring as doors and lamps. Signals don't get weaker over distance.
Wires
Cable along the ground, conduit that carries four separate signals, and wire you can string between posts.
Logic
AND, OR, NOT and XOR gates, delays, extenders, latches, and observers that send a pulse when a block changes.
Inputs and outputs
Levers, buttons, pressure plates, daylight and weather sensors. Doors, lamps, bells, pistons, cannons and a string of lights.
