Industrial Foregoing Souls

Overview

Industrial Foregoing Souls is a focused addon that adds exactly three new blocks: the Soul Laser Base, Soul Pipe, and Soul Surge. Together, these form a soul extraction and distribution network that can accelerate virtually any tile entity, block, or mob in the game. The system revolves around capturing a Warden and slowly draining its souls, then channeling that energy through pipes to accelerate target machines by 4 extra ticks per game tick.

The mod also adds an Echo Shard Laser Drill recipe, giving you a renewable source of Echo Shards since they are heavily used in the crafting recipes. You can browse all items and recipes this mod adds using the tabs on this page.

Prerequisites

This is an addon for Industrial Foregoing, so you need a functioning Industrial Foregoing setup before anything in this mod becomes useful. Specifically, you will need access to Plastic, an Advanced Machine Frame, and Diamond Gears from the base mod. You also need Echo Shards, which means venturing into the Deep Dark or Ancient Cities, though the mod does add a Laser Drill recipe for farming them once you have the infrastructure.

Most critically, you need a live Warden. The entire soul extraction system depends on having a Warden trapped near the Soul Laser Base. Industrial Foregoing's Stasis Chamber is ideal for this, as it can hold the Warden in place without triggering its attacks. Make sure you have a reliable way to transport or summon a Warden before starting this project.

The Soul Laser Base

The Soul Laser Base is the core block that extracts souls from a nearby Warden. It scans a 3x3x3 area centered around and below itself for any Warden entity. When it finds one (typically held in place by a Stasis Chamber), it runs a work cycle every 20 ticks (1 second). Each completed cycle deals 4 damage to the Warden and generates 2 souls, which are stored internally. The Soul Laser Base can store up to 1,350 souls at a time.

By default, the Soul Laser Base will stop extracting when the Warden's health gets critically low, keeping it alive indefinitely as a renewable soul source. This behavior can be changed in the config if you prefer to kill the Warden and replace it periodically. The machine requires no energy (its power storage is set to 0), making it entirely self-contained once a Warden is in place.

The Soul Laser Base accepts Efficiency augments from Industrial Foregoing, which reduce the time between operations. However, it specifically rejects Speed augments. It connects to the soul pipe network from its top face only.

Soul Pipes

Soul Pipes are the connective tissue of the soul network. They link Soul Laser Bases to Soul Surges, forming a network that distributes soul energy. Soul Pipes connect to any adjacent Soul Pipe, Soul Laser Base, or Soul Surge automatically when placed. They support all six directions and will visually update their connections in real time as you build.

The crafting recipe produces 8 pipes at a time, using Plastic, an Echo Shard, and Stone. Soul Pipes can be waterlogged, making them suitable for underwater builds. They also produce sculk soul particles when connected on both ends, giving a nice visual indicator that the network is active. The particle density can be adjusted in the client config (default 10% chance per tick).

The Soul Surge

The Soul Surge is the output block that actually accelerates machines. It is a directional block, meaning the face it points toward determines which block gets accelerated. When a Soul Surge has access to souls through the pipe network, it will consume 1 soul every 300 ticks (15 seconds) and provide continuous acceleration to its target during that time.

Tile Entity Acceleration

When pointed at a block with a tile entity (furnaces, IF machines, Mekanism machines, etc.), the Soul Surge fires the target's tick function 4 additional times per game tick. This effectively makes the machine process items roughly 5 times faster (1 normal tick + 4 bonus ticks). This works on virtually any machine from any mod, as long as the block isn't on the acceleration blacklist.

Block Acceleration (Random Ticks)

When pointed at a non-tile-entity block (like crops, Saplings, or Sugar Cane), the Soul Surge uses random tick acceleration instead. It has a 3% chance per tick to fire 4 extra random ticks on the target block. This makes it useful for speeding up crop growth, though it's less consistent than tile entity acceleration due to the random chance involved.

Entity Acceleration

If the Soul Surge is pointed at an empty block, it will scan for living entities in that space and tick them 4 extra times per game tick. This can be used to speed up mob growth (baby animals growing up faster), mob spawner cooldowns, or other entity-based mechanics. Entities tagged with the cant_accelerate entity tag are excluded.

Soul Network Architecture

All three blocks form a unified soul network when connected via Soul Pipes. The network automatically discovers all connected Soul Laser Bases and makes their stored souls available to every Soul Surge on the same network. When a Soul Surge needs a soul, it checks each connected Soul Laser Base until it finds one with available souls, then consumes one.

You can build multiple Soul Laser Bases on the same network to increase soul throughput, each with its own trapped Warden. This is especially useful if you're running many Soul Surges simultaneously, since each surge consumes 1 soul every 15 seconds. With a soul generation rate of 2 souls per second per Soul Laser Base (2 souls every 20 ticks), a single base can sustainably feed about 40 Soul Surges at once.

Soul Surges can also chain together. Multiple Soul Surges can be placed side-by-side facing the same direction, and they will automatically connect to each other without needing pipes between them. This makes it easy to stack multiple layers of acceleration on a single target, though each surge still consumes its own souls independently.

Echo Shard Farming

Since Echo Shards are required for crafting both Soul Pipes and Soul Surges, the mod adds an Echo Shard recipe to Industrial Foregoing's Laser Drill system. By using a Laser Drill with a Blue Lens (dye color index 11), you can generate Echo Shards from y-level -64 to 20 in the Deep Dark biome. This gives you a renewable supply of Echo Shards without needing to repeatedly raid Ancient Cities.

This is a natural synergy with the rest of the mod. You already need a Blue Lens for the Soul Laser Base, so you likely have the infrastructure to set up a Laser Drill for Echo Shards as well. You can even use a Soul Surge to accelerate the Laser Drill itself, creating a self-reinforcing loop.

Crafting Recipes

Soul Laser Base

The Soul Laser Base recipe uses a Sculk Catalyst in the top center, an Advanced Machine Frame in the middle, flanked by Plastic on the corners. The sides use two items from the Deep Dark, and the bottom row has Diamond Gears on the sides with a Recovery Compass in the center. This is the most expensive component in the system.

Soul Pipe

Soul Pipes are crafted 8 at a time from Stone surrounding two Plastic pieces and an Echo Shard. The recipe is relatively cheap, which is important since you'll need many pipes to connect your Soul Laser Bases to distant Soul Surges.

Soul Surge

The Soul Surge requires Echo Shards, Stone, Plastic, and a Piston. The Piston makes thematic sense as the Soul Surge "pushes" extra ticks into the target block. You'll want to craft several of these to accelerate your most important machines.

Acceleration Blacklists

Not every block can be accelerated. The mod provides two block tags for preventing acceleration. Adding a block to the industrialforegoingsouls:cant_accelerate tag will prevent Soul Surges from ticking it. There is also a forge:tick_acceleration_disallowed tag for cross-mod compatibility. If you find that a particular machine causes issues when accelerated (duplication bugs, crashes), you can add it to either tag in a datapack.

Similarly, entities can be excluded from acceleration using the industrialforegoingsouls:cant_accelerate entity tag. This is useful if accelerating certain mobs causes unintended behavior.

Configuration Options

Industrial Foregoing Souls exposes several config options that let you tune the soul system to your preferences. All of these are found in the industrialforegoing-souls config files.