Sunspire Engineering — rotation, steam and quarries for Paper

Sunspire Engineering is a Paper / Purpur plugin with kinetic machines inspired by Create and steam automation inspired by BuildCraft. Players join with a vanilla client: models, textures and GUI backgrounds are sent as a server resource pack, which the plugin hosts by itself.

Sunspire Engineering is an independent plugin. It is not affiliated with the Create or BuildCraft teams, and it does not contain any of their code or assets. Every model and texture was made from scratch.

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⚙️ Kinetics (Create-like)

• Rotation network: shafts, cogwheels and large cogwheels with real gear ratios, plus a gearbox. Cogwheels mesh with their neighbours and spin in opposite directions, and the animation is smooth.
• Sources: water wheel (flowing water, 8 RPM), windmill (faster the higher and freer it stands, up to 16 RPM), hand crank, and a steam engine next to a boiler (32 RPM, capacity 2048).
• Stress: every machine has an impact × RPM load. If the load exceeds the sources' capacity, the whole network stalls and smokes. Engineer's goggles show speed and load, and the wrench rotates or picks up parts.
• Machines:
  • mechanical press — ingots → sheets, on a depot or belt;
  • millstone;
  • mechanical saw — fells whole trees;
  • mechanical drill;
  • encased fan — bulk washing through water, bulk smelting through fire or lava;
  • mechanical mixer + basin — andesite alloy, brass;
  • conveyor belts that carry items and players.

🔥 Steam (BuildCraft-like)

• Steam boiler: water + fuel → steam. It pulls fuel from an adjacent chest and water from an adjacent source. Solid steam pipes connect by themselves. The valve and drive open doors and run a two-block steam lift.
• Steam quarry: a brass frame, a gantry and a drill strip a 5–17 block area (up to 33×33 with an upgrade) layer by layer down to bedrock. Loot goes into an adjacent chest or into item pipes. Upgrades: speed, fortune, silk touch, frame expander.
• Steam machines: crusher (ore → double raw), furnace, sawmill, press, harvester, pump.
• Item pipes with visible moving items, and extraction pipes that pull from chests.

📖 Progression and a JEI-like guide

• Learning trees. Recipes unlock step by step. A node opens when its parents have been in your inventory, and locked recipes can't be crafted.

• Two books:

  • Engineer's Journal — Create and BuildCraft sections;
  • Mechanic's Notes — kinetics only.

  Right-click opens the tree GUI with arrows between nodes.

• /eng search: a JEI-style browser with groups, chat search, "how to get" (LMB) and "used in" (RMB), and recipe views for the crafting grid and for every machine.

• Custom GUI backgrounds from the resource pack: andesite and brass for Create, copper and rivets for BuildCraft.

🌍 Languages

English, Русский, Français, Italiano, Español. Set language in config.yml, or use /eng lang <code>. All 440 strings live in plugins/SunspireEngineering/lang/*.yml and can be edited, then applied with /eng reload. Items already in players' inventories are renamed on join.

🧰 Commands and permissions

Command	Description
/eng	Open the guide (learning trees)
/eng search [query]	JEI-like recipe search
/eng give <player> <id> [amount]	Give an item (op)
/eng lang <ru/en/fr/it/es> · /eng reload	Change language / reload texts (op)
/eng demo <x> <z> · /eng stats	Build a kinetics demo stand / network stats (op)

Admin permission: sunspire.engineering.admin (op by default).

📦 Installation

1. Put SunspireEngineering.jar into plugins/ and start the server (Paper or Purpur 26.3, Java 25).
2. The resource pack is hosted on port 8767 (resource-pack section in config.yml). Open that port, or set public-url to your own hosting.
3. Craft the Engineer's Journal (book + copper ingot + piston) to unlock steam. Kinetics are open from the start.

Custom blocks are note-block states, and machines are display entities with barrier hitboxes. Data is stored in chunk PDC, so there are no extra files and no database.

Also part of the Sunspire server: with the SunspireCore plugin installed, the journal becomes a story item found in Nether caches, and the plugins share one resource pack.