Steam Engine

A Steam Engine only stays put against a Fluid Tank: place it on one face of the tank, which then becomes a boiler. One tank can carry several engines on its different faces, as long as the boiler is strong enough for all of them.

The engine drives nothing on its own: place a shaft in front of its piston rod, perpendicular to the engine. That shaft becomes the engine's output and carries rotation to the rest of the network like any other shaft. The direction of rotation is set on the engine's value panel.

To reach level 1, you need three things at once: 4 tank blocks (one level per four blocks), 10 mB of water per tick, i.e. 200 mB per second, brought in by a Mechanical Pump, and a heat source under the boiler, usually a fed Blaze Burner. One level is enough for an engine to run at full efficiency: 64 RPM and 16,384 SU, the same as 64 water wheels.

Every Blaze Burner placed under the boiler adds heat: a fed burner gives 1 level, a burner superheated with a Blaze Cake gives 2. An unlit burner, lava, a campfire or magma only give passive heat, which is very weak: barely an eighth of one engine's power.

The boiler level is the lowest of the three: heat, water and size. A huge boiler with a single burner stays at level 1, and so do ten burners under four tanks. The maximum is level 18 (72 tank blocks, 180 mB of water per tick). Look at the boiler through Engineer's Goggles: the game shows all three gauges and tells you which one is holding it back.

Each level runs one engine at full power, so a level 8 boiler drives eight engines at 64 RPM. With more engines than levels, the power is shared: efficiency drops, and so do each engine's speed (48, 32, then 16 RPM) and capacity.