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Steam Power Chamber

steam_power_chamber

The Steam Power Chamber (ccpe:steam_power_chamber) attaches to an Engine Core and generates power from water + fuel — each chamber contributes 4096 SU. This is the "simple and stable" half of the engine system: closed-boiler self-regulation, a real steam-throttle consumption model, and residual-heat operation.

Placement

  • Right-click the chamber against any face of an engine core (it attaches to the face it is placed against), with a placement ghost previewing the attachment.
  • Fluid and steam chambers are mutually exclusive on one engine — the two types cannot be mixed.

How it works

  1. Fuel & water sources — place a Quick-Fill Fuel Vault (solid fuel) and/or a fluid tank with a burnable bucket fuel (e.g. lava), plus a water tank, near the engine. The controller auto-draws from any neighbouring storage via capability (zero internal cache).
  2. Ignite — with water and fuel available, the boiler starts burning.
  3. Warm-up — below 100°C the engine burns fuel but does not output stress (this is isWarmingUp()).
  4. Power — once T ≥ 100°C and throttle > 0, the engine outputs 4096 SU of stress per chamber.

Closed boiler — never overheats

  • The boiler self-regulates and pins at 155°C (saturation temperature) — independent of air pressure, environment or ram air, so the steam engine is altitude-proof.
  • There is no overheat, no mixture lever, no economy zone and no cooling duct requirement.
  • If the water runs out, the engine stops burning (dry-fire protection) and cools by Newton cooling.

Fuel

The steam engine uses only vanilla-form fuels (no datapack needed):

  • Fluid fuel first: bucket items with a vanilla furnace burn time > 0 (e.g. a lava bucket = 20000 ticks). The engine drains the fluid and converts it by burn time.
  • Solid fuel fallback: when no fluid fuel is available, the engine draws solid items with vanilla burnTime > 0 (e.g. coal = 1600 ticks) from a neighbouring Quick-Fill Fuel Vault.
  • Parallel burning: N chambers burn N fuels at once (one per chamber, all start and end together). A batch is drawn as N × K items (K = configurable batch multiplier, default 1.0); if the current vault has fewer than N×K, the engine switches to the next vault rather than splitting a stack.
  • Water: 1 mb/s per chamber × throttle, drawn in batches from neighbouring water tanks.

Real steam throttle — consumption ∝ throttle

  • Fuel, water and fluid all scale with the throttle: at 25% throttle the engine burns 1/4 the steam flow, so fuel lasts 4× longer.
  • Throttle 0 = stopped — nothing is drawn or burned.
  • The goggles fuel line shows the wall-clock time remaining: burnTicks / (throttle × 20) (e.g. "Coal x3 (1m 20s)") — so the countdown matches real time and stretches at low throttle. At throttle 0 the countdown is not shown (stopped).

Residual-heat operation

The engine keeps generating while the boiler is still hot even after the fuel runs out:

  • Running condition = throttle > 0 AND T ≥ 100°C AND water available (fuel is not required once the boiler is hot).
  • In the Nether the ambient temperature is fixed at 155°C, so with water alone the engine keeps working indefinitely.
  • When the fuel is exhausted but the boiler is still ≥ 100°C and water is available, it keeps working.
  • It stops only when the water runs out (dry-fire protection) or the boiler cools below 100°C.
  • Combustion countdown is independent of the fuel source: if you remove the fuel vault, already-drawn fuel keeps burning to the end.

Goggle display

Hover the chamber with goggles:

Engine Status
Status: Normal / Warming up / Stopped
Temperature: XX.X°C
Throttle: 50%
Fuel: Lava / Coal x3 (1m 20s) / None
  • Status — Normal / Warming up (gold) / Stopped.
  • Fuel — fluid fuel shows just its name (green); solid fuel shows "Name xN" (N = number of steam chambers, parallel burning) plus a wall-clock time in English brackets; with no reserve it shows red "None".