Upgrades

Voluminous Energy offers an upgrade slot for certain machines that allow those machines (also known as Tile Entities or Block Entities) to operate faster. The upgrade slot appears as a green outlined slot with a green upward pointing arrow.

Quartz Multiplier

The Quartz Multiplier is the first upgrade added to Voluminous Energy. This upgrade allows you to speed up machines that have an upgrade slot, at the expense of increased power consumption.

# of QMs	Energy Multiplier	Processing Time Formula
1	2x	-45+originalProcessTime
2	4x	(-45*2)+originalProcessTime
3	8x	(-45*3)+originalProcessTime
4	16x	5 (fixed)

Generally speaking, despite the increased amount of power consumption, if your grid can supply the increased amount of instantaneous power, it usually overall uses less power to operate at the higher rates. However, if your grid cannot provide to satisfy the increased energy demands of using Quartz Multipliers, it may render the machine useless as it will never have enough power to complete the operation, and cause the machine to constantly restart.

Lore

The lore behind the Quartz Multipliers harkens back to the early days of computing. The Quartz oscillator module was responsible for setting the clock on systems that determined their operation speed. In the early days, one could swap out the Quartz oscillator to modify the operation speed of the computer system, effectively overclocking the system. Today, however, most computer systems use a Quartz oscillator that provides a 100 MHz "base clock", with individual components having a multiplier that amplifies the clock cycles (and thus most overclocking is done by modifying the multiplier rather than the base clock).

In Voluminous Energy, machines that allow upgrades use Quartz oscillators to regulate their operation speed. By applying more Quartz Multipliers, you are effectively overclocking the machine to operate faster.