Thermal Foundation: Metals, Alloys, and the Thermal Series
Thermal Foundation is the base of the long-running Thermal Series, providing the materials that the rest of the series builds on. This guide covers what it adds.
The foundation of a series
The Thermal Series is a modular set of mods, and Thermal Foundation is its cornerstone — it supplies the metals, alloys and fluids that Thermal Expansion and the other modules use. The series pioneered many modded conventions, and its energy system grew from Redstone Flux, the ancestor of Forge Energy.
Metals and alloys
Thermal Foundation adds a family of ores and metals beyond vanilla, along with alloys made by combining them. These materials — ingots, gears, plates and their blocks — are the crafting base for the machines and devices in the wider series, so gathering and processing them is the first step into Thermal.
Where it leads
On its own, Thermal Foundation is a materials-and-resources mod: new metals, alloys, fluids and building blocks that enhance a vanilla+ world. Paired with the rest of the Thermal Series, those materials become the input for a full tech progression of machines, energy and automation. Start by mining the new ores and smelting the alloys, then expand into the series' machinery.
Ten processing categories, and the Press is the biggest
Thermal Foundation's 269 recipes are distributed like this:
- Press — 72 recipes
- Crafting — 71
- Smelter — 28
- Blasting, Pulverizer and Smelting — 24 each
- Smelter Recycle — 16
- Numismatic Fuel — 8
- Sawmill and Tree Extractor — 1 each
The Press being the largest category is the surprise. It is a shaping machine rather than a processing one — gears, plates and coins — and at 72 recipes it handles more of the mod than the pulverizer and smelter combined.
Three routes to the same ingot
Pulverizer (24), Smelting (24) and Blasting (24) carry identical counts, which means every ore in the mod can go down any of the three paths. The pulverizer is the one that doubles; the furnace and blast furnace are the fallbacks when you have not built one yet.
Recycling is built in
16 Smelter Recycle recipes turn finished gear back into material. That is a small list but it covers the metals that matter, so an upgrade path does not strand the tier you left behind.
Numismatic fuel
Eight recipes define what the Numismatic Dynamo will burn. It is worth reading that short list early — the dynamo is one of the series' most efficient generators, and it only accepts what is on it.
The single-recipe machines
Sawmill and Tree Extractor have one recipe each. They are hooks for the rest of the Thermal series rather than content in their own right — the wider recipe lists arrive with the mods that build on this one.
Version
This line is 11.0.6 on 1.20.1, with no 1.21.1 release.