Power

A computer runs on stored power. Nothing in the mod ticks once a second per device to count it, so a big build costs the server almost nothing: power is settled lazily, when someone looks.

Units

Power is counted in whole units, and one unit a tick is shown as one watt. What is stored is shown in watt-hours. Every draw, load and charge you see in a screen or tooltip goes through the same two conversions, so the unit’s name is one change in the mod. (The names may change; the numbers will stay as they are.)

The yardstick is a running computer: a tier 1 CPU running plus one terminal, 110 W. Batteries are rated in days of it.

What draws power

A higher CPU tier draws more while it runs and less while it waits, as real chips with deeper idle states do. A computer that is mostly waiting for a key, as mcos is at its prompt, costs the waiting rate, not the running one.

What stores it

Batteries sit in the case’s battery bays. By default, a full tier 1 runs a computer for ten Minecraft days, a full tier 2 for twenty and also recharges itself while the computer isn’t running anything (two seconds of rest charge one second of running), and a tier 3 never runs out. These are defaults that a server’s configuration can change.

Bus-powered devices

Cards and cabled devices are powered like a USB device is: a device has power while at least one running computer has it on its bus, and goes dark when the last one lets go. What it used is a debt, settled lazily: every 20 ticks, or at an event such as a power-on or a hot-plug. The first computer to look pays the whole debt, and any other computer owes only what’s new. Which computer pays a shared device is a race, and doesn’t matter.

Work costs power too. A Disk Station’s format, clone or install is paid from the bus’s power while a running computer supplies it, and from its battery otherwise.

What you see

The case’s view has meters for the load and the stored power. A broken case is a power cut. An unloaded chunk only freezes a computer: see Persistence.