Fulgorite Harvesting

Fulgora is littered with lightning glass, and there is holmium in every piece. This mod lets you farm it.

Lightning glass

You have been walking past them since you landed. Fulgurite: branching tubes of fused glass with holmium showing pink at every broken end, worth a hand-mine when one is in the way.

They are not a mineral. They are scars.

Where a bolt earths itself in Fulgora's mineral soil the current fuses the ground into glass and drags the scattered holmium into the melt with it. Natural fulgurite is rare because a natural strike spreads its charge wide and shallow. Left alone, the planet grows a handful of them a century.

The Fulgorans did not wait. They buried seed crystals — pre-formed, holmium-doped glass nuclei. A seed crystal is the most conductive thing for a hundred metres, so any charge passing through the soil follows its branches and lays down new lattice at the tips. Electrocrystalline accretion. Feed it current and it grows; starve it and it sits there for years.

To feed it they built a second kind of tower. The ionizer spires called the storm down. The fulgural towers caught it again — and stored nothing. Every joule went into the crystal bed underneath.

A fulgural tower is not a power plant. It is the exact opposite: a machine that burns lightning to make matter.

What it does

Bury a seed crystal. Ground lightning into it until it has grown. Pull it up and break the glass open for the holmium inside.

The Fulgural Tower does the burying and the pulling up by itself — it plants, tends and harvests a whole field of crystals the way an agricultural tower works a grove. What it adds is the lightning.

It outranks every attractor on the planet — rods, collectors, everything. Any bolt striking within twenty tiles goes to the tower, and the tower drives it into the ground the crystals are standing in. That is what makes them grow. Left alone they take ten hours.

One bolt advances every crystal in the field by the same step. Not the nearest, not one at random — all of them. A full field is therefore always worth more than a sparse one, and it takes sixty grounded bolts to bring a harvest in.

Fulgora's own night storm manages that in fifteen to twenty minutes. There is a faster way, and it is the obvious one.

The trade

A lightning bolt carries 1000 MJ. A lightning collector turns 400 of that into power. The tower keeps ten, and puts the rest into the ground.

That is the part of the price that never shows up in a recipe. Build a tower near your collector field and it will quietly eat the strikes your power network was counting on — so the towers want to stand somewhere else.

The rest of the price is ordinary: stone and holmium in every seed, and for the upper tiers a supply line reaching four other planets.

The crystals

Harvested fulgorite goes into a recycler, which cracks the glass open into holmium ore and stone. There is nothing else to do with it, and no other way to get at what is inside.

Three tiers, all planted and harvested identically, all taking the same sixty bolts. What changes is how much comes out of one plot:

A higher tier changes nothing about the field: same plots, same tower, same sixty bolts. Only the harvest gets bigger. What it costs you is what goes into the seed.

Vitric Seed — Fulgora alone

5 Stone · 1 Holmium plate · 20 Electrolyte → 1 seed

Silica out of the scrap heap, doped with holmium, drawn from an electrolyte bath. Everything in it is something Fulgora already throws away or already makes.

Doped Seed — the inner planets

1 Vitric Seed · 1 Actinide Frit · 1 Refractory Frit · 1 Filament Frit → 1 seed

A frit is a pre-fused batch of glass — the way dopants have always been added to a melt, because thrown in raw they simply separate out again. Each world fuses its own from what it has too much of:

Depleted uranium fused into the batch is the heavy dopant that keeps the lattice from tearing itself apart under a full strike. Tungsten carbide holds at 2870 °C and gives the crystal something to grow along where the channel is hottest. Chopped carbon fibre is the armature that tells the discharge where to branch.

Superlattice Seed — all five worlds

1 Doped Seed · 1 Cryogenic Frit · 2 Superconductor · 20 Electrolyte → 1 seed

Cryogenic Frit — Aquilo, Cryogenic plant: 4 Lithium plate · 50 Ammonia

Drawn cold, so the lattice orders itself instead of freezing in whatever shape it happened to reach.

Lithium costs a holmium plate per five — so Aquilo hands Fulgora back its own holmium, wrapped around some lithium, to make crystals that grow more holmium.

The frits ship at 1000 per rocket. One rocket is enough dopant for a very long time; the imports are flavour and logistics, not a bottleneck.

Quality

Plant a quality seed, harvest quality fulgorite, recycle it into quality holmium ore. The whole chain carries it through.

That is worth saying because the game does not do it for plants on its own — see Under the hood if you want to know why.

Growing crystals show their quality on a badge in alt mode, where the game puts every other quality marker.

Balance

Roughly speaking, a fulgorite field doubles to quadruples the holmium your scrap stream is already producing, depending on how far up the seed tiers you have gone.

You pay for it in three ways: stone and holmium go into every seed, imports from up to four planets go into the upper tiers, and every bolt a tower grounds is a bolt your power network does not get.

Numbers are Beta and will move.

Technologies

• Fulgorite Cultivation — after Agriculture, Lightning Collector, Electromagnetic and Production Science. Unlocks the tower, the Vitric Seed and Fulgorite Recycling.
• Doped Seeds — after Uranium Processing, Tungsten Carbide and Carbon Fibre. Unlocks the second tier and its three frits.
• Superlattice Seeds — after Cryogenic Science and Lithium Processing. Unlocks the third tier and the Cryogenic Frit.
• Fulgorite Recycling Productivity — infinite, +10 % per level. The same curve and cost as vanilla's Scrap Recycling Productivity.

Agriculture is there because the tower is built around an actual agricultural tower, and vanilla's recipe for one wants twenty spoilage. Nothing rots on Fulgora, so those come in from Gleba. The crane is Gleban technology; only the mast is local.

Building recipe

1 Agricultural tower · 1 Lightning rod · 20 Holmium plates · 20 Steel plates · 10 Processing units

Buildable and placeable on Fulgora only.

Recommended mods

These two and Fulgorite Harvesting are built to run together. None of them needs the others.

Storm Ionizer

Rebuilds the other kind of Fulgoran spire: a lightning collector that fires charges into the cloud deck and calls lightning down on demand, day or night.

It is the answer to the slowest part of this mod. Fulgora's natural storm brings a field in fifteen to twenty minutes; one ionizer parked next to a tower does it in about one. The tower pulls lightning from twenty tiles away and the ionizer scatters its bolts within twelve of itself, so the two simply work as soon as you put them near each other — no configuration, nothing to line up.

Worth knowing: an ionizer feeding a tower produces no power at all, because the tower takes every bolt. That is the intended way round.

EM Holmium Charging

A parallel holmium chain that never lets the metal enter a fluid. Ore is crushed to powder, loaded onto iron plates by ion exchange in an Electromagnetic plant, and thermally stripped in a Foundry — the iron cycles back and is never consumed.

It matters here for one specific reason. Vanilla holmium goes through Holmium Solution, and fluids cannot carry quality — so quality ore comes out as ordinary plates. Fulgorite Harvesting grows quality fulgorite and recycles it into quality ore, and without a solid-state route that quality dies at the next step. EM Holmium Charging is what carries it through to the plate.

All vanilla holmium recipes stay untouched; the solution path still works for everything that does not care about quality.

Under the hood

For the curious and for anyone writing a compatibility patch. Nothing here affects how the mod is played.

The tower is a reskinned agricultural tower. Vanilla's demands an atmospheric pressure Fulgora does not have, which is precisely why it cannot be built there; this one keys on the planet's magnetic field instead. Crane, planting, harvesting and every animation are vanilla's.

Lightning is caught by a second entity. An agricultural tower cannot also be a lightning attractor, so each tower gets an invisible attractor created inside it on build and destroyed with it. That entity is what appears in Fulgora's priority list above every collector, and it is why the tower can take a strike at all. It is invisible and cannot be selected, and it stays out of blueprints — the tower blueprints and copies normally, and each copy grows its own when it is built.

Its efficiency is one per cent rather than zero so that a strike still charges something: the trigger that reports a hit is documented to fire after the attractor has been charged, and nothing was going to be gained by finding out what it does with nothing to charge.

Two additive edits to vanilla data, and nothing else: a script trigger appended to the lightning prototype, and one entry appended to Fulgora's lightning priority rules. No vanilla recipe, entity or technology is modified.

Quality is bookkeeping, not a property. Plants cannot hold quality — the prototype simply has no room for it, and a rare seed grows a plant the engine considers ordinary. The mod records what was planted in each spot and stamps it back onto the harvest before the tower collects it.

UPS

No measured figure yet — this is Beta and nobody has run it on a large enough base to quote an honest number. What can be said is what the mod actually does.

Idle it costs nothing. There is no per-tick handler. Housekeeping runs once every ten minutes and does nothing else in between.

Per grounded bolt — once a second for a tower fed by an ionizer — a tower looks up its field and steps each crystal forward. Position and surface are cached at build time rather than read off the entity each time.

One honest caveat. The mod detects strikes by hooking the vanilla lightning prototype, which means every attractor hit anywhere on Fulgora raises a script event, including hits on your ordinary collectors. The handler rejects those after two comparisons, but the event itself is a cost this mod adds to a base that has lightning collectors in it.

Details worth knowing

• Crystals only grow in bare ground — Fulgoran dust, dunes, sand and rock. The ancients' floors are too shot through with dead technology, and were picked clean of holmium long ago.
• The tower accepts its own three seeds only — it is not a general-purpose agricultural tower.
• A bolt landing on a ripe crystal is wasted — it only advances what is still growing. Keep the harvest moving.
• Seeds stack to 50, five times the vanilla seed stack. A crystal is consumed for good, so a tower needs a permanent seed feed rather than a handful.
• Growth mounds tell you the tier at a glance. Each tier's mound is the same artwork as its seed icon, and it is visible in exactly the window where the crystal itself is still too small to identify.
• Crystals stand perfectly still. Vanilla plants sway in the wind; a crystal has no business doing that.
• Quality on the tower widens the area it pulls lightning from, the same way it does for a collector.

Compatibility

Requires Space Age and the Recycler. Modifies no vanilla recipe, entity or technology — see Under the hood for the two things it does add.

Beta

The mechanics are done and tested. The numbers are not.

AI

Mod concept & design by Morlot.
Implementation developed with the help of Claude (AI assistant by Anthropic).