Another three and a half weeks, another short update post.
I’ve been hard at work over the last weeks, but not with developing for GT6, but rather university assignments and procrastination. An assignment that would be due this week was delayed though, which is why I continued working on GT6 for the last couple of days.
The second part of the reactor overhaul got merged into the GT6 repo, adding breeder rods and the new durability/efficiency system to the testing version of the mod. You’ll have to wait for Bear to test it though, and wait a little longer till my next PR gets merged into GT6 and that gets tested, because that contains a fix of a new issue I discovered today, the geiger counter not working with the 1x1 reactor.
So what exactly have I been working on the last couple of days?
Moderators are finally finished and they work like I described previously, with one simple change to better balance them: Moderated fuel rods consume double the durability. This makes them more useful in a new special way, but reactors less efficient for power production.
Depleted fuel rods have gotten new byproducts, being 1/6 of a dust of a better nuclear fuel. So quickly burning through your fuel can be a good option in some cases. While this isn’t realistic, because realistic would mostly be nuclear waste, this is fun and allows getting all nuclear fuels with just GT6 alone. It’s a bit inspired by NuclearCraft, the “progession” of fuels goes so: (Th232 or Co60) -> U238 -> U235 -> Pu244 -> Pu241 -> Pu243 -> Am245 -> Am241 -> Nq528 -> Nq522 -> Cyanite -> Yellorium -> Blutonium -> Ludicrite -> Th232. The fuels only obtainable by breeding U233 and Pu239 aren’t obtainable by this, but produce Pu243 and Am241, which skip quite a few steps.
Plenty of new coolants have also been added: Semiheavy, heavy and tritiated water, molten sodium and tin, Carbon Dioxide and Helium. All these have effects I described in the previous update post.
A small surprise feature, the reactor has been made automateable. I felt this was needed with the addition of breeding and the new byproducts. Rods can be inserted and extracted from the top and button sides. However, automation is everything but easy, as the reactor (or at least the rods you want to access) need to be turned off to be able to access the slots. Combined with the space limitations, you need to be quite clever and use a lot of universal extenders to properly use the feature. And robot arms if you want to properly automate the 2x2 reactor.
What’s left to do is only additional content in form of new coolants. Molten salt and thorium fluoride are still planned. I also want to add a coolant especially designed for subcritical reactors and neutron absorbers, as I feel they have been left a bit abandoned when compared to reflectors and moderators. Nothing too crazy, just higher base outputs and much lower factors. Will probably be molten lead, if no one comes up with a better idea. If it stays lead, it’ll also prevent any radiation of nearby entities, but consume trice as much durability to balance the constant output, unmatched safety and easy setup. Though this durability hit could also be seen as a positive to some.