Gasworks is an industry mod inspired by Immersive Engineering and created with an abiding dislike for "magic block" single-block mods such as Mekanism, Industrial Foregoing, and Thermal Expansion. Its technology base is broadly themed around the late Victorian era, though not in a 'Steampunk' sense; while steam does play a large role in the mod it is not the sole motive force.
Centered around the eponymous technology of the late-Victorian coal gasworks, Gasworks is an industry mod heavily inspired by realistic technology with a Minecraft twist. Machines are big and bulky, IO is not as simple as hooking a fake pneumatic tube up to the side of your Ore Meatifier 3000, and progression is based around the level of precision available to the player, rather than increasingly fake or expensive materials.
Rather than try to fit in parallel to Minecraft's technology tree (or lack thereof), Gasworks does modify the Vanilla game, and fairly significantly compared to most mods; while it's no GregTech or TerraFirmaCraft, expect the time spent building infrastructure in the early game to be longer than the time it takes to craft four furnaces and three chests. Many of these tweaks can be disabled, but several progression-critical tweaks cannot be disabled, be aware of this! Gasworks is not a mod for the casual player looking to multiply their ores for cheap or to automate all of their farming with ten white cubes.
Gasworks makes no guarantees of compatibility or effective features outside of mods it directly supports. While its design is modular and does try to keep Vanilla systems extant to minimize the amount of dev time necessary to be compatible, there are several tweaks Gasworks makes that irrevocably change the Vanilla game and will impact other mods. These include, but are not limited to:
- Most modded furnaces will not function as catch-all furnaces anymore; this is intentional. Use different heat source to cook your food than to fire your pottery.
- All Vanilla-system tools will be marked as 'decorative' and have around 10 uses in total. Use a well-constructed tool and it'll be a better experience than Vanilla.
- Many enchantments that simply increase stats (Protection, Efficiency, Unbreaking) will not work. Stat increases for levels are boring and give the wrong incentives, use a tool or upgrade it for those.