Thinking through energy transition with Mekanism
A major theme of the Gaia’s Riddle SMP is energy transition and sustainability. We are running the SMP on our custom solar powered server after all. Vanilla Minecraft has no energy system as such. Yes, redstone has always figured as a kind of energy source… perhaps like electricity or magnetism. In vanilla we use redstone to “power” things like pistons and other contraptions such as they are (and we all know you can use redstone to create logic gates and build working computers in Minecraft).
The modding community took this further however and long ago developed working energy systems for the game (see for instance – https://gist.github.com/DeflatedPickle/403e1eb0bb0bed7f2509142e63630726/). The history of the evolution of these systems is a story in itself but long story short, energy is now a standard aspect of the modded game especially for any mod involving technology.
When considering technology mods for GR we felt we wanted players to be able to explore different ways of producing energy that would reflect somewhat on their climate impact. We settled on the Mekanism and Mekanism generators mods (by bradyaidanc – https://modrinth.com/mod/mekanism). The mod allows players to build everything from coal fired generators, to wind turbines to solar panels to fusion reactors. These will generate a form of electricity called Forge Energy (FE) which can be used to power a variety of tools which affect the game including teleporters, fabrication machines, and a quarrying machine (the digital miner). We kind of felt that aesthetically and functionally, Mekanism is an ideal solarpunk mod. Now remember that the cornerstone of Minecraft is mining… you have a little hand pick that you use to mine key ores (iron, gold, redstone, coal, diamonds etc…) used to make progressively more complex items useful for playing the game. Mining by hand is labour intensive and time consuming so it makes sense that modders would add automatic drills and quarrying machines.
The Mekanism digital miner effortlessly extracts all the materials from a specified target area and dumps into a chest at the cost of FE. The player can generate FE at various levels with the different sources. Coal generators require fuel which must be extracted at huge rates to maintain the power for the miner, solar panels provide renewable power without extraction but at low levels and only when there is sun in the game. This necessitates the manufacture of batteries for storage which can be costly in terms of materials. The fusion reactor takes a long time to build but provides basically unlimited power at low cost once it has been made.
When pondering real world climate impacts of energy generation all of this is already interesting. Unlike the numerous ways we can represent the idea of solar power in Minecraft (using vanilla daylight detectors as de facto solar panels in making eco-conscious buildings for example) mods like Mekanism add working systems that intimate and allegorize real-world relationships as well as some real-world values.
The pinnacle of Mekanism’s game progression is the fusion reactor. It’s a super fun challenge to work towards building this generator which in principle will solve all problems related to energy use in the game… you never have to worry about having enough energy again. More often than not, the way the mod is designed, the fusion reactor represents the apotheosis of energy production in terms of imagining a world with limitless power far beyond what is actually needed to play the game. Mekanism fusion is not about the energy we need so much as the power that we desire. In this sense, playing through Mekanism in modded Minecraft becomes an allegory for thinking about need and desire in real world energy transition.
For GR we want to lean into this even more. To do this we are in effect modding the mod… or rather configuring it to work in relation or in contrast to other mods we have in the pack as well as the experience of the solar data from our Sunblock server. We started thinking that Mekanism power generation is too obvious a solution to energy problems in our game. We want players to think more seriously about solar and wind power but also about the labour and materials required to produce this kind of energy at scale. Essentially, we want to confront the players with this choice between what they may need and what they may desire, and we want to do this at both the individual level and for the community of players on the SMP.
To do this we must balance the choices a bit more and lean into the allegory. Many modded players already perceive the digital miner in Mekanism as being OP (over-powered). Once you have enough energy you can just run the miner (without even being in-game) and have it mine only the blocks you want (just “diamonds” for instance). At this point, you are in de facto creative mode save for the fact that you have to move the miner around and wait a bit for the ores to appear.
With the existing config file we can increase the energy cost of the digital miner in a way that prompts the player to think more about the infrastructure investment they might make in terms of building large solar or wind farms, or fission or fusion reactors as well as all the logistics with battery storage and cables for transmission. The idea is not to suggest that building nuclear reactors is a bad idea relative to solar farms but rather to allow the player to appreciate the infrastructural investments and impacts that these solutions imply. Another idea we have is to gate some key components in the recipes for Mekanism technologies behind villager trading so that the only way to build the digital miner for instance is to spend several stacks of emeralds. In this case, if the player wants to build the digital miner they will first need to establish a reliable source of emeralds from villager trade or looting and in this way our reflection turns on the relative capital investments of different energy solutions.
Still another idea is to add configs in the Pollution of the Realms mod for the digital miner. This mod already has a mechanic for the release of carbon and sulfur blocks into the atmosphere from combustion related machines and furnaces. What if the digital miner was a heavy polluter as we imagine it might be should such a thing really exist. How would that affect the choices players make on which energy source to build?
Finally, there is no reason to hard code these ideas. What if we invite players to try to imagine what the reality of a digital miner might be like? The mod suggests a fantastic smart device that somehow scans the earth for minerals and then surgically removes them will no ill effects. Players could choose a more plausible scenario however by not using ore filters and basically using the machine to strip mine huge gaping holes in the landscape, removing hundreds of stacks of stone and dirt for a handful of diamonds or osmium. By putting this choice in the players hands rather than the designer it arguably becomes more meaningful… and the game takes on a deeper sense of role play.