Crossing beams

Energy beam basics

A quick rundown on the energy beams first.

The game uses colored energy beams to power stuff instead of electricity. Around the moon are ancient crystal sites where Beam Emitters may be placed:

Crystals come in the primary colors:

The problem with beams, and the eventual subject of this post, is that they may not cross. If two beams intersect the longer one (that has travelled furthest from its emitter) is blocked:

Early in the game recipes require only primary color energy beams. However, as stuff gets more complex the secondary colors start to come into play. As you might expect those are created by combining primary colors using a Beam Combiner:

Powering stuff is simple; just check the recipe for the required beam colors and direct them over the crafting machine:

One of the main challenges of the game is to carefully consider the energy layout of the base. It's quite different from building a regular old electricity grid. The fact that beams may not cross is the biggest driver of this challenge.

Crossing beams

Having said that, let's talk about how to cross beams anyway :-) It needs a bit of thought but it's definitely intended that the player can make beams conform to any layout.

Just as the primary colors may be combined into secondary colors, the secondary colors can be split back into primaries using a Beam Separator:

So by chaining the combination and separation operations together and rotating entities, any two primary color beams may be crossed:

And that's it! There's a chain of beam mutations for pretty much any use case. Why not try out a main energy bus...