Storm Veil Power Distribution

Power that goes where you build it. In vanilla Eco, machines share power by standing near each other: a windmill reaches 30 blocks, and anything further away needs its own generator. Storm Veil Power Distribution adds two blocks that carry power as far as you are willing to build:

• Mechanical Gear Block - a chain of them joins the mechanical power of every machine it touches. Put the windmill on the hilltop and run a gear chain down to the sawmill in the valley.
• Power Cable - a run of it joins the electric power of every machine it touches. One generator hall can feed a workshop across town.

There is no loss with distance and no limit on how much a line carries.

How to use it

1. Craft the blocks.
   • Mechanical Gear Block: Basic Engineering 1 at the Carpentry Table - 1 Wooden Gear + 1 Hewn Log each.
   • Power Cable: Mechanics 3 at the Machinist Table - 2 Copper Wiring + 1 Iron Pipe each.
2. Lay a line from the generator to the machine. Place the blocks like pipes, by hand or in runs. The line has to touch both: its end block must sit beside a block the machine actually stands in, on any of the six sides.
3. Check the machine's status. Within a couple of seconds both ends read "Gear chain: shares power with ..." (or "Power cable: ...") and they are on one power grid. A line can branch and can touch any number of machines; all of them share.
4. To disconnect, take a block out. Within a couple of seconds the two halves are separate again.

Good to know:

• Through walls. Like a pipe, either block can be placed into a wall block. The wall stays a wall, so the room stays sealed, and the line runs through it. Hammer the wall block to take the line back out.
• Not beside a pipe port. A gear block or cable can't be placed in the cell next to a machine's pipe port, and one that ends up there is taken out and handed back. Bring the line to another side of the machine.
• The two don't mix. A gear chain ignores electric machines, a cable ignores mechanical ones, and the two blocks don't connect to each other.
• Transmission Poles still work as they always have, and a cable touching a pole joins it.

How they look

Along a run a gear block is a timber shaft with an iron gear, and a cable is three insulated cables in iron clamps. At every corner, branch and end sits a hub - an open timber gear frame, or an iron junction box - that reaches all six faces, so it meets whatever you build it against.

Make lines matter (optional)

Out of the box nothing about vanilla changes. Servers that want power lines to be a real part of building a town can shorten how far machines share power on their own, in Mods/UserCode/StormVeilGears/StormVeilGearsConfig.cfg (created on first boot):

• MechanicalReach / ElectricReach: how close two machines must stand to share power without a line, in blocks. 1 means only machines right next to each other; everything else needs gear blocks or cable. 0 (the default) leaves vanilla alone.
• KeepRange: objects that keep their vanilla range. The Transmission Pole is listed by default, so pole to pole stays 30 blocks while a pole's reach to an ordinary machine drops from 25 blocks to about 15.

Restart the server after editing. Setting a reach back to 0 and restarting undoes it completely - nothing is saved in the world. Turning this on in a running world cuts existing workshops off from generators they were only reaching by distance, so warn your players first.

Power use, for laws

Four new values a law can read, each the average draw in watts over the last hour:

• Mechanical Power Used By Citizen and Electric Power Used By Citizen (under Citizens)
• Mechanical Power Used On Deed and Electric Power Used On Deed (under Deeds)

Only machines that were actually running and powered are counted, and a machine owned by a title or group is shared between its members. Because it is an hourly average, a tax or cap on an hourly timer can't be dodged by switching machines off for the moment the law runs. After a server restart the average builds back up over the next hour.

Built to last

The mod doesn't replace any game file. It watches the lines every couple of seconds and tells the game's own power system which machines belong together, so it survives game updates and doesn't clash with mods that add machines - their machines join lines like any other. Remove the mod and every machine goes back to vanilla power sharing.

Admin commands

• /svgears: every gear chain and power cable that joins machines.
• /svpower: every citizen's and deed's average power use over the last hour.
• /svgearstest x,y,z: a self-test in open air (try a high y); the result goes to the server log.

Installation

Extract the zip into your server's Mods/ folder, so the files end up in Mods/UserCode/StormVeilGears/. Players don't install anything - the server sends them the models and icons. No other mods required.

Made by Storm Veil Gaming. Bugs and suggestions welcome in the comments. Support @ buymeacoffee.com/StormVeilGaming