Most storage mods make items vanish into a network and reappear somewhere else. Wareworks does the opposite: you build a real high-bay warehouse, and a stacker crane drives through it, lifts its carriage, reaches into the rack and carries every single item by hand. How big you build, how fast you spin it and how well you lay it out decides how fast your warehouse is.
The machine is the feature.
Stacker Crane - A kinetic Create machine on rails. Its crane is fully animated: a chassis on bogies, a mast, a lift carriage, a telescopic arm and a grabber with the carried items on it. Travel, lift, arm and turning speed follow the RPM of your network, and it consumes stress like any other Create machine.
Warehouse Rail - The warehouse itself. Rails that touch connect, so a second run laid at right angles makes a corner the crane swings around, and a run leaving the middle of another makes a junction. Lay an L around your base, a comb of side aisles off one main run, or a ring. A wrench closes a rail you would rather keep out.
Warehouse Controller - The brain. It finds your storage locations, keeps track of what is stored where, reserves stock and plans every job for the whole network. It never moves an item itself - only the crane does.
Warehouse Interface - Place it in front of a chest, a barrel, a Create vault or storage from other mods, and that inventory becomes an addressed storage location such as A-03-07R. Anything with a standard item inventory works. Its filter decides what may go in, and its priority decides which racks fill first.
Warehouse Input - The way in: belts, funnels, chutes, hoppers or a Mechanical Arm.
Warehouse Output - The way out, and more than that: a port with three directions. It hands out what you request, takes in what the warehouse cannot store, or fetches from a machine of yours. See below.
Warehouse Terminal - A request station with a screen: the whole stock in a searchable grid, click an item, and watch the crane go and fetch it.
Warehouse Production Station - Holds patterns and feeds your own machines, so you can order things the warehouse does not have.
Warehouse Stock Keeper - Minimum, maximum and reserve per item. The warehouse keeps itself stocked.
Warehouse Home Point - "Wait here." The crane parks where you want it between jobs.
Every straight run of rails is an aisle with its own letter, and one controller letters the lot, so an address stays something you can read out loud: A-03-07R is aisle A, level 3, position 7, right side. Letters and positions are pinned to the rails, so extending an aisle never reshuffles addresses you have already written on a sign.
With junctions there is more than one way from A to B, so the warehouse measures routes in blocks driven plus quarter turns and the crane drives the cheapest one. Racks in corners and at junctions work: a rack belongs to the aisle its interface faces away from, and that is the whole rule.
One controller, one terminal, one stock list, one address space - for an L, a comb or a ring alike.
A wrench sets the direction, the amount value sets when (on a pulse, while powered, or unless powered), and in the accepting direction a rank decides the order:
| Direction | Typical use |
|---|---|
| Request on a pulse | Hand out on a button press |
| Request while powered | Keep a machine supplied, no clock needed |
| Accept, negative rank | Overflow: only what no rack will take, straight onto a belt to your shredder or back to the farm |
| Accept, positive rank | Divert: everything incoming leaves at once while the signal is on |
| Collect | The crane fetches from the inventory behind it, so a machine needs no return belt |
Brass means requesting, andesite accepting, copper collecting - you can see what a port does from across the aisle.
A Stock Keeper holds a list of items with three numbers each:
If a machine swallows a batch and gives nothing back, the warehouse stops making that item and says so on the station, until you have had a look and clicked resume.
Ask for a chest when the warehouse holds nothing but logs. At the moment you click, it works out the whole chain from your patterns - planks from logs at your saw, the chest from those planks at your crafter - and either creates every step at once or tells you the item that is really missing.
Every step is your machine doing the work, every intermediate travels through a real rack on the crane, and the terminal shows the chain as one line: click it for every step with its state and the rack address of the machine to walk to.
Wareworks never crafts anything itself. It delivers and collects.
There is no setup screen: your build is the configuration.
Works in singleplayer, multiplayer and on dedicated servers. English and German translations included.
This is an early alpha. Please back up your world and report anything odd.
