Ad Astra Machines: Power, Plates, and Cryo Fuel

guide

Ad Astra runs on a compact set of processing machines. This guide explains what each does and how they connect into a working base.

Generating and moving power

Power starts at a coal generator and scales up with the solar panel, which is self-reliant and produces more per tick. Cables carry energy over distance — steel cables, and higher-throughput desh cables — while the energizer stores large amounts and can charge items directly. For portable power, the Etrionic Capacitor drops into a machine's energy slot.

Processing machines

The compressor makes plates from ingots and blocks — one ingot to one plate, one block to nine plates.
The Etrionic Blast Furnace has two modes, blasting and alloying, and makes Steel Ingot from iron and coal.
The Cryo Freezer turns ice into Cryo Fuel: Ice, Packed Ice, Blue Ice or an Ice Shard each freeze into cryo fuel. Cryo fuel is a better fuel that also damages anything placed inside it, like lava.

Fluids and utilities

Fluid pipes move liquids the way cables move energy, with insert and extract settings and a duct block for passing fluid safely through a sealed wall. Oxygen tanks store oxygen — or any fluid — in portable form. Round out a base with industrial lamps, available in sixteen colors and two sizes, and an oxygen sensor that emits a redstone signal when it detects oxygen.

The machine recipes in numbers

Ad Astra's processing machines each carry a small, learnable list:

Compressing — 10 recipes, ingots and blocks into plates
Cryo Freezing — 4, ice into Cryo Fuel
Nasa Workbench — 4, one per rocket tier
Oxygen Loading — 2, Refining — 1, Alloying — 1

Against those, crafting holds 317 recipes and stonecutting 130. Ad Astra's own machines stay narrow, but the mod also ships recipes for other mods' machines — Create crushing, cutting, milling and pressing, Mekanism crushing, enriching and sawing, Thermal's press, pulverizer and sawmill, Immersive Engineering's crusher and metal press, and Modern Industrialization's compressor, cutting machine and macerator. Those only work when the partner mod is installed.

Alloying is a single recipe

The whole alloying category is one entry: an Iron Ingot with Coal makes a Steel Ingot. Steel gates the first rocket, so that one recipe is the mod's real starting gate.

Cryo fuel yields differ enormously

The four cryo-freezing recipes are not equivalent. Taking plain Ice as one unit, Packed Ice returns twice as much, Blue Ice ten times, and an Ice Shard twenty-five times. Hauling shards instead of ice blocks changes a fuel run from several trips to one.

Version note

The builds are nearly identical — 317 crafting recipes against 316, with a single book recipe existing only on 1.20.1. The integration recipes differ more: Modern Industrialization's compressor, cutting machine and macerator, and Mekanism sawing, are present only on 1.21.1.