Guide 4: Mekanism — Dirt to Jetpack

Mekanism is the pack’s “hard tech” path: GUIs, cables, and exponential payoffs. Where Create is charming wooden machinery, Mekanism is an industrial complex that ends with you flying around in a powered exosuit. It’s deep but very linear — here’s the ladder.

The gateway: Metallurgic Infuser

Everything starts with the Metallurgic Infuser (cheap ingredients — JEI it; the osmium ore you’ve been mining past all week is Mekanism’s metal). The infuser combines materials with an “infusion” (redstone, carbon, diamond…) to make alloys:

  • Infused Alloy (iron + redstone) → basic machines and Universal Cables
  • Steel (iron + enriched carbon, two steps) → the structural backbone of everything
  • Higher alloys (Reinforced with diamond, Atomic with refined obsidian) gate later tiers

Early machines worth building immediately

  1. Enrichment Chamber — the ore multiplier: ore blocks yield double dust, raw ore converts at 3 raw → 4 dust. It also makes “enriched” infusions that stretch your redstone/carbon 8×. Build this first.
  2. Energized Smelter — electric furnace for your dusts.
  3. Crusher — grinding and recycling.
  4. Heat Generator — burnable-fuel starter power. Surround it with lava for passive trickle. You’ll outgrow it within a session — Wind Turbines (place them high) and eventually Solar/Advanced Solar are the low-effort mid-game power. (Or feed Mekanism from Create via Crafts & Additions alternators if you built Guide 3 first.)
  5. Energy Cubes for storage, Universal Cables to wire it all. Mekanism cables auto-convert power with basically everything (Forge Energy), so one power room can drive your whole base.

The famous ore factory (2× → 5×)

Mekanism’s signature is multiplying every ore you mine. Each tier adds a preprocessing machine in front of the chain:

  • 2×: Enrichment Chamber. Trivial, do it day one.
  • 3×: Purification Chamber (needs oxygen from an Electrolytic Separator splitting water) → clumps → Crusher → dirty dust → Enrichment Chamber.
  • 4×: add a Chemical Injection Chamber (needs hydrogen chloride from a Chemical Infuser).
  • 5×: the full chemical plant — Chemical Dissolution Chamber and friends, gated behind late materials.

Advice for a server with this many mods: 3× is the sweet spot for effort vs. reward; push 4×/5× only when you actually run short of resources. Pipe everything with Logistical Transporters and it runs hands-free.

The toys (why you’re doing all this)

  • Digital Miner — the single best machine in the mod: a programmable remote miner. Set a filter (“all ores”), a radius, power it, and it teleports ore into its buffer without you swinging a pickaxe. Respect any agreed server mining etiquette — it can chew a chunk fast.
  • Jetpack — hydrogen-fueled flight (fill from your Electrolytic Separator). The armored version exists for combat. This changes how you play the game.
  • Free Runners — no fall damage, auto step-up. Wear them forever.
  • Atomic Disassembler — one tool that’s a pick, axe, shovel, and weed-whacker with adjustable speed.
  • Fusion-tier endgame: the MekaSuit and Meka-Tool — modular powered armor (flight, auto-feeding, damage absorption) that is effectively creative-mode-lite. Gated behind a long chain (fission reactor, polonium, antimatter). A worthy server megaproject, not a weekend task.

Playing nice with the rest of the pack

  • Mekanism power (Joules) converts automatically to/from everything else — don’t stress about units.
  • Create ↔ Mekanism: alternators/motors from Create Crafts & Additions bridge rotation and electricity both directions.
  • Mekanism’s Configurator (shift-right-click) rotates machines and sets per-side input/output — the “why isn’t my cable connecting” fix is almost always side config.
  • Every machine accepts speed/energy upgrades in its upgrade tab — a fully upgraded machine runs several times faster, at higher power draw.

Starter goals

  • Metallurgic Infuser + infused alloy + steel
  • Enrichment Chamber (2× ore) and Energized Smelter
  • Stable power wall: wind turbines + energy cube
  • 3× ore factory with auto-piping
  • Digital Miner
  • Jetpack + Free Runners
  • (Long game) MekaSuit

Sources & further reading

  • Official Mekanism wiki (by the mod’s author) — THE reference: exact machine recipes, the full 2×–5× ore-processing diagrams, and fission/fusion guides for the endgame
  • Mekanism on CurseForge — official page; Generators/Additions/Tools modules are separate pages by the same team
  • In-game: every Mekanism machine’s GUI has side-configuration and upgrade tabs — hover them; half the mod’s documentation is in its tooltips