the works

the head is the tech tree: a headgate in a dam wall, a flume that carries the fall with real water running through it, a great wheel three blocks across that drinks it from two blocks up. and the barn wheel, seven blocks across on the side of a building, dyed any colour or wearing a banner's charge, turning slow on the water at its foot.

rotation as a second signal beside redstone. redstone carries one number; a shaft carries three -- speed, torque, and angle -- and the two systems have opposite hard problems: redstone sweats over timing and routes anywhere, the works routes with difficulty and gets timing free, because two cams on one shaft are in phase forever by construction. a treadle you stand on drives a shaft, a flywheel banks the turn and pays it back smoothly, a cam's sixteen-notch keyway decides which tick the trip hammer falls on, and the chisel under the hammer forges the gear blanks every machine after it is built from. nothing alive anywhere in the mechanism -- no crank goblin, no fuel, no suffering in any loop.

as of 1.1.0 the rotation routes. cogs mesh side by side and the ratio reads the pair -- equal wheels pass one to one, a small wheel driven by a great one spins double, the reverse halves, torque traded for speed with the product conserved. the bevel turns a line ninety degrees; the trundle, the lantern pinion the mod was nearly named after, turns the corner and doubles while it is at it. two pulleys and a leather belt leap a gap of up to eight blocks of clear air. and every device hop eats one speed, so a sprawling train visibly sags, hammers at its end land soft, and the craft is how small a wheel still drives the job.

the bridges run both ways: the take-off chases redstone strength into shaft speed, and the tell raises a wooden arm any comparator can read -- no gui, no gauge, no number anywhere in the mod. everything a machine knows it shows: an observer blinks with a cam's lobe, a comparator reads a keyway, and the state of every device is legible from across the yard. built to mix with redstone, never to replace it.

as of 1.5.0 the whole shop turns -- every half that was a still picture now moves with the line, and the sensing tier reads it. the governor turns speed into a shape: flyballs that fly out and a collar that climbs as a line runs hot, and a brake that settles at a small overage and hunts at a large one, a tick over, a tick under, a clack at each crossing, so a mistuned line is diagnosed by ear. the float trough reads its water as an angle; the ratchet tally clicks a notch a turn and parks at fifteen, the fourth notch chalked; the escapement hands back one steady beat, five seconds to eighty, and where the bellcote is home it pulls the rope. and the granary differential blends two hands into one steadier line, its needle leaning to whoever is winning -- the one thing on the shelf whose whole point is that two hands beat one.

as of 1.9.0 the works is a steading. every consumer is a container, so a hopper feeds the bench and a hopper drains it, and nobody stands at any of them. the conveyor carries: a canvas band on wooden rollers that rolls downhill for free and runs any pitch, flat, up a grade, straight up, when a pulley drives it; its far roller turns a shaft, so a belt extends itself by belt, cog, belt. the rake, the pick, the drag saw and the reaper are harvesters on the line, cams that sweep a row, strike a face, fell a trunk and cut a field, and every one of them reads what to take from a tag another mod fills. the kettle renders over a fire the bellows stokes, resin to pitch, galls to ink, fat to tallow, and pours sideways into whatever stands beside it; the curing trough makes concrete beside water; the nitre bed steeps muck under a roof toward gunpowder. the barn threshes sheaves to wheat and straw on the line, and the bin holds a stack-a-minute farm's worth of one thing and shows it on its face. and the head is the tech tree: a headgate in a dam wall reads its pond, a flume carries the head to a wheel and may never rise above the water it came from, and the great wheel drinks a head the ordinary wheel cannot. all of it bruegel, none of it detroit.