Potential Reactor¶

The Potential Reactor turns salvage and old gear into FE. Feed it recycling byproducts, or any rolled machine, part, or Battery Cell you no longer need, and it pays out power for the item's rarity, affixes, and remaining Refinement Potential. The stripped item that comes out goes on to the Component Recycler for its materials. See Power Chains for its place in your power supply.

It is a containment vessel with a viewport on the front. Fuel drops in through the hopper on the lid, burns as a glowing core between two electrodes, and its residue falls through the filter cage on the side into a glass bin.

Each Potential Reactor you craft rolls its own rarity and affixes. It does not have Machine Mastery.

Obtaining¶

Crafting¶

Ingredients	Crafting recipe
Redstone Dust + Fuel Chamber + Iron Casing + Machine Frame + Shielding + Furnace

Breaking¶

Mine it with a pickaxe to get it back. The dropped reactor keeps its rarity, affixes, and memory of recent gear burns. Items in its slots and installed Gear drop as separate items.

Usage¶

Generating power¶

Install a Reactor Chamber on the Gear tab, then put fuel in the input slot. The reactor processes one item at a time, adds the FE to its internal buffer, and pushes it out to adjacent blocks on its four sides, for example a Universal Cable. The reactor does not limit its own output, so the receiver or connector tier decides how much FE moves each tick. When the buffer is full, the reactor pauses so expensive fuel is never burned for nothing.

A redstone signal pauses the reactor.

It accepts two kinds of fuel:

Salvage fuel: recycling byproducts listed in the recipe table below. Each has a fixed FE value and needs a minimum Reactor Chamber stage.
Retired gear: any machine, machine part, or Battery Cell that still has something to pay for: rarity above Normal, at least one rolled prefix or suffix, or unspent Refinement Potential. Unique items are refused, and so are unidentified or already stripped items.

Recycling gear¶

Burning a rolled item pays FE for its rarity, affix tiers, and Refinement Potential. Plain base stats pay nothing on their own. The payout then scales with what the item was:

Stage: Stage 0 junk pays a quarter, Stage 4 gear pays 1.25×, and Stage 8 gear pays 2.25×.
Mastery: +1% for each Mastery level above 1.
Ascendancy: +200% for each Seal tier used on the machine, so a fully ascended machine is worth 7×.

These scales apply to the item's base value. The reactor's own stats then multiply every payout, salvage fuel included: energy generation, efficiency, and stability all raise the FE you recover, and processing speed makes each item finish sooner.

Repeats lose value. The reactor remembers the item types of its last 15 gear burns, and each earlier burn of the same type cuts the next payout by a quarter, down to 10%. Rotate through 16 or more different items to avoid the penalty. Salvage fuel recipes are not affected. The four bars beside the output icon on the Processing tab show the payout for the gear in the input slot; hover them for the percentage and the list of recent burns. With Jade, the reactor also shows the payout when you look at it. The memory stays with the reactor when you break and place it again.

The output is a single stripped copy of the item you burned. A stripped item cannot be placed, installed, refined, or charged, but the Component Recycler still recognizes it. A typical chain is:

Chest → Potential Reactor → Component Recycler → storage

Gear¶

Slot	Required	What it does
Reactor Chamber	Yes	Sets the reactor's stage, which gates salvage fuel, and adds FE generation and stability.
Recovery Filter	No	Returns residue from salvage fuel. Without one, residue is lost. Can also roll efficiency and speed.
Containment Lining	No	Raises stability, which increases the FE you recover.

Stage	Reactor Chamber	Recovery Filter	Containment Lining
1	Iron Reactor Chamber	Iron Recovery Filter	Iron Containment Lining
2	Copper Reactor Chamber	Copper Recovery Filter	Copper Containment Lining
3	Bronze Reactor Chamber	Bronze Recovery Filter	Bronze Containment Lining
4	Steel Reactor Chamber	Steel Recovery Filter	Steel Containment Lining

Reading the reactor¶

The installed Gear is visible on the block, in its material's colour:

Reactor Chamber: the two electrodes inside the vessel. With no chamber the vessel is empty.
Containment Lining: a sleeve lining the inside of the vessel, behind the electrodes.
Recovery Filter: the cartridge in the open cage on the side, on the residue path.

Through the viewport, the core shows what the reactor is doing:

Colour: violet on salvage fuel. Recycled gear burns in its rarity colour: white for Normal, aqua for Magic, and gold for Rare.
Size and brightness: follow the FE per tick of the current item, so high-value gear burns larger and brighter.
Steadiness: follows stability. Below 1.20 stability the core flickers, wanders, and arcs unevenly, and the relief valve on the lid vents smoke more often. Raise stability with a better Reactor Chamber or Containment Lining.
Banked: when the FE buffer or the residue slot is full, the item stays loaded and the core dims to a low glow until there is room.

The dial on the front shows stability, from red (low) to green (high). The sight glass on the side shows the FE buffer, and the glass bin fills as the residue slot fills. A stripped item fills the bin on its own, since it does not stack: take it out to start the next one.

Recovered residue is Scrap, which cannot be fed back in for more FE. The reactor also accepts Malformed Ingot from failed smelts and presses. It needs a Stage 4 (Steel) Reactor Chamber and pays 3,600 FE before stats. With a Recovery Filter, a malformed ingot of a known metal returns two matching nuggets, and an unknown one returns two Scrap.

Automation¶

Side	Behavior
Top	Inserts salvage fuel or gear to recycle.
Bottom	Extracts residue and stripped items.
Sides	Export FE to adjacent receivers. Do not accept FE.

Gear slots are installed by hand. The back of the reactor has a port plate sized for a Universal Connector, the tidiest place to attach one.