Compact Machines — Guide

Getting Started

Two items are all you need:

1. Craft a Compact Machine of the size you want. Each machine is built from a room template (see Room Templates & Sizes) - the template decides how big the room inside will be. If no templates are available on your world yet, an operator can enable the built-in set with one command (see below).
2. Craft the Personal Shrinking Device (PSD). This handheld device is your door into every room.
3. Place the machine block anywhere in the world. Its distinctive black-and-white casing with a green core marks the entrance.
4. Use the PSD on the placed machine - you are shrunk and teleported inside, into a sealed room made of machine walls, ready to build in.
5. Build anything inside - machines, farms, storage, even more Compact Machines.
6. Use the PSD on a room wall to step back outside, right where the machine block sits.

Room Templates & Sizes

Every machine is created from a room template that defines the interior size of its room. The built-in template set covers the full range:

Templates are loaded per world as data. On a fresh world where no templates exist yet, an operator can enable the built-in set with:

/compactmachines enable_basic_templates

Restart note: after enabling, the game reports "Enabled basic templates, restart game to sync changes" - room templates are read when the world loads, so restart (or reconnect to) the world once for the machines and their recipes to appear. The command only shows up while no templates are loaded, so you cannot enable the pack twice.

Modpack makers can also ship their own template data for fully custom room sizes, colors and floors.

Entering & Leaving Rooms

The Personal Shrinking Device (PSD) handles all movement in and out of rooms:

• Entering. Use the PSD on a placed Compact Machine block. You are shrunk down and teleported into that machine's room.
• Leaving. Inside a room, use the PSD on one of the machine walls. You step back out next to the machine block in the outside world.
• Nesting. Rooms can contain more Compact Machines - enter them the same way, and leave level by level.

Rooms are sealed: the walls are unbreakable from the inside, and out-of-bounds movement is controlled by game rules (see Commands & Game Rules), so survival players cannot escape a room except through the PSD.

Room Persistence

Rooms are fully persistent:

• Everything built inside a room is saved with the world. Leave, save, quit, restart - re-enter and every block, item and machine is still exactly where you left it.
• Rooms survive their machine block. Breaking a bound machine block does not delete the room - the block keeps its binding, and admins can re-attach blocks to rooms at any time with unbind/rebind.
• Each room has a stable room code, the mod's address for that room in every command (tp, give existing, rebind).
• Rooms work identically in multiplayer: they are stored server-side, multiple players can be inside rooms at once, and the rooms find player lookup shows who is where.

Dyeing Machines

Machine blocks can be dyed to keep multiple rooms apart at a glance:

• Use any vanilla dye directly on a placed Compact Machine block to tint its casing with that color.
• Both fresh (unbound) machines and machines already bound to a room can be dyed.
• Built-in templates also carry a default color of their own, so different sizes are distinguishable out of the box.

Combined with room codes, coloring makes a wall of identical machine blocks readable: dye by purpose (power, farms, storage) or by owner.