What is Extreme Reactors?
Extreme Reactors is the official continuation of the classic Big Reactors, ported and maintained by ZeroNoRyouki for Forge and NeoForge. It adds fully customizable multiblock reactors and turbines: you choose the footprint, the number of fuel rods, and the coolant, and the structure's output follows from your design.
Reactors burn Yellorium (the mod's uranium) and produce either FE directly (passive mode) or superheated steam for turbines (active mode), which yields far more power per ingot of fuel.
Building Your First Reactor
A minimal working reactor is a 3x3x3 shell:
- Frame and walls from Reactor Casing (edges must be casing; faces can be Reactor Glass).
- One Fuel Rod in the center column with a Control Rod on top.
- A Reactor Controller on one wall, plus an Access Port (fuel in, waste out) and a Power Tap (energy out).
- Feed Yellorium ingots into the access port and switch the controller on.
Control rod insertion throttles the reaction: deeper insertion burns less fuel and makes less power. Burned fuel becomes Cyanite, which a Reprocessor turns into Blutonium for further use.
Tip: Interior coolant matters. Filling empty interior spaces with fluids or blocks like gelid cryotheum, water, or graphite changes efficiency dramatically; even a simple graphite-lined design noticeably beats an air-filled one.
Turbines and Active Cooling
Active-mode reactors trade internal power generation for steam production. Pipe the steam into a Turbine multiblock: a rotating shaft dressed with Turbine Rotor Blades and wrapped in coil metals (copper, gold, enderium and friends) that convert rotation into FE.
Design notes:
- Steam flow must match blade count; unbalanced turbines waste fuel or rip past optimal RPM.
- Coil material quality raises energy extracted per rotation.
- One large active reactor feeding several tuned turbines is the classic endgame layout, and it outproduces passive designs several times over.
Both structures report live stats (temperature, burn rate, RPM, output) in their controller GUIs, which makes iterating on designs painless.
Extreme Reactors FAQ
Where do I find Yellorium?
Yellorite ore generates underground in the overworld. Smelt it into Yellorium ingots for reactor fuel; some packs map other uranium ores into the same fuel.
Passive or active reactor: which is better?
Passive reactors are simpler and self-contained. Active reactors plus turbines cost more infrastructure and produce several times the power per unit of fuel, so most players start passive and rebuild active later.
What do I do with Cyanite?
Run it through the Reprocessor to make Blutonium, which serves as reactor fuel and crafting material. Waste management is part of a sustainable reactor loop.