Diagrams and the design table

A Diagram is a plan the crafting grid reads. It occupies a grid slot beside the material a recipe asks for; the material decides what the product is made of and the plan decides which member of a family it is. Most recipes list the plan as a tool, so it comes back out of the grid and one draft serves a whole world.

What that buys is room in the grid. A family of six shapes across three materials is eighteen grid patterns without plans, and patterns built on the same ingredients collide with each other. With a plan in the grid it is one pattern per part. Whether a given plan survives its use is a property of the recipe rather than of the plan, and the rule is below.

The Design Table

The table is the only source of diagrams in survival. It costs 2 candles and 4 planks and needs no metal and no tools; the recurring cost sits on each draft instead.

Right-click it to open the drafting window:

• two typed input slots, one for a drawing medium and one for parchment, which is vanilla paper. In practice the medium is charcoal: the slot takes charcoal, or an item whose code begins coal-, and vanilla's bituminous coal, lignite and anthracite are ore- items, so they are refused. Both slots refuse anything else.
• a picker listing every loaded diagram, sorted by code. A diagram contributed by another mod appears in it with no registration step.
• an info panel naming the selected diagram and describing what it builds.
• a take-only output slot, so a draft cannot be overwritten by hand.

One draft costs 1 medium and 1 parchment. There are no progression gates: every diagram is available from the first table, and the only cost is materials.

The table remembers the last diagram drafted and reopens on it.

Consumed or reusable

Whether a diagram survives its use is decided by how the recipe lists it, not by the diagram.

• A diagram for a plain block or item is listed as a tool. It is spent by durability, which makes it effectively reusable.
• A diagram for a multiblock structure core is listed as a plain ingredient and is consumed.

The rule that falls out is "structures consume the plan, parts do not".

Patterns

A Pattern is the casting line's equivalent, and it is carved from a diagram rather than replacing one: a diagram, a knife and 2 planks make a pattern, and the plank's wood is captured into the pattern's own variant. A pattern carries what to cast; the casting station reads it off the held stack and names no shape in its own code. See Molten metal and casting.

Eight pattern types ship: ingot mold, heavy plate, barrel, shell, wheel section, billets, blooms and slab.

The Machinist's Workbench

The Machinist's Workbench is the assembly station beside the drafting one, where a recipe may call for an ordered sequence of tool-held gestures rather than a single click. It is built and craftable apart from that interaction sequence.

What goes wrong

The recipe will not take the diagram. Check it is the right diagram for that material. The diagram picks the shape; the material still has to be what the recipe asks for.

A diagram came back damaged. That is the tool route working. It is spent by durability over many uses rather than consumed outright.

A diagram vanished. It was a structure core's plan, which is consumed by design.