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Atomic Age

A nuclear production chain for Sandustry: smelt sand into silicon, make acid, leach uranium out of redsand, enrich it, press it into pellets and burn them in a reactor. Built on the game's official Sandkit API — no third-party loader.

Part of uolkx's mods. This page is generated from the mod's own recipe tables, so it cannot drift from what the machines do.

The chain, end to end

Nothing reacts by accident

There are no contact reactions in this mod, deliberately. Sandkit's contact recipes have no probability and no conditions — a water + sulphur rule would fire on every touching pair of cells, everywhere on the map, every tick. Water is not rare in Sandustry: lakes, flooded shafts, rain, Lumlings. One spilled load of sulphur near a shore would become an unstoppable acid front.

So mixing only happens inside a machine you deliberately fed. Sulphur dropped in a lake is just sulphur in a lake. The bonus: a machine can do what a contact recipe cannot — real ratios, an energy cost and a buffer.

Recipes

Smelter

Vanilla machine. Melts what lies on top of it, fuelled by heat from a Thermal Buffer or lava.

Smelter products are deliberately lighter than their feedstock (silicon 130 against sand 150, sulphur 45 against cinder 50). The Smelter replaces material in place, so a heavier product would sit on the machine's face and jam it — the next load could never reach the heat.

Where the feedstock comes from

Sand is everywhere. Oil is found in the world and is the good route to sulphur. Cinder is not lying around: it is dug out of Scoria rock — and Scoria is renewable, which is the point. Drop snow from a Snowmaker onto lava and the lava sets into Scoria, cascading up to twenty cells at a time; mine that and you get Cinder. So sulphur never runs out, it is just slow: water → Snowmaker → snow → lava → Scoria → Cinder → Smelter, at 35% per piece against oil's 70%.

Chemical Vat

Open-topped 4×4 vessel. Drop ingredients in from above, it holds them until a full set is present, then drops the product out of the bottom for 40 energy.

Centrifuge

Splits yellowcake. Deterministic — no dice rolls, so a uranium line can be sized on paper. Costs 400 energy per run.

Synthesizer

The vanilla Synthesizer (Aurixite Crystallizer) is the fuel press. It fills all sixteen cells of its area with one element, then converts the batch for ~800 energy.

The reactor

A Reactor Core burns fuel pellets into heat, and heat is measured in the same units as grid energy — so a core rated 3000/s can feed turbine sections worth 3000 energy per second.

Layout

       ^^^^        ^  fuel dropped in from above
  ~~~ #CC# ~~~     #  core, C throat
  ~~~ #CC# ~~~     ~  water, up to 3 cells out on either side
  ~~~ #### ~~~
  ~~~ wwww ~~~     w  spent fuel drops here, into water if that is what is below

Turbine Sections attach to the core and to each other, so a bank of them counts as long as each touches the core or another section. Every section moves up to 1000 heat per second into the grid; the core's output is the ceiling, so extra sections are never wasted, they just idle.

Two ways to take the power out

The steam route is capacity-limited on purpose: one vanilla steam particle carries 10 energy, so a full-output core would need hundreds of particles per second. That is the load turbine sections exist to avoid.

It cannot break

The core burns fuel only as fast as its heat can leave. One pellet is therefore worth 180 000 energy in every mode — a full turbine bank spends it in 60s, a bare steam vent takes far longer and wastes nothing. No turbines and no water is simply an idle reactor, not a ruined one. Above 6 000 heat output tapers off; at 12 000 it stops entirely until things cool down.

A reactor running flat out sits at zero heat — everything it makes leaves immediately. That is working correctly, not stalling. Watch the tooltip line (4 turbines: 3000/s) and your battery charge instead.

Elements

All 13 are registered at once, including the ones only later phases produce: element type ids are handed out in registration order and stored as numbers in the save, so inserting one later would turn stored yellowcake into something else. None of them occur in the world naturally — every one is a machine product.

Machines hold what you feed them

A machine takes at most 2 batches' worth of any one ingredient and leaves the rest lying in its cavity, where you can take it back with the grabber. Demolish a machine and it hands back everything it was holding. Hover any machine with the grabber to see its contents, the recipe it is closest to, and what it is short of.

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