NauTec 2

NauTec 2 is an underwater tech mod for NeoForge, rebuilt from the original NauTec ModJam entry into a mod of its own. It keeps the mod ID nautec. Nautec moves progression off the land and onto the ocean floor. Powered by aquatic laser beams you aim by line of sight, resources are grown from bacteria colonies, and the endgame is rebuilding your own body part by part with ancient atlantean technology.

Minecraft 26.1.2, NeoForge 26.1.2.95, Java 25.

Aquatic Power

Power in Nautec is a beams, not cables. An Aquatic Catalyst fed prismarine fires a laser out of its opposite face, and that beam carries Aquatic Power (AP) to whatever it hits. Relays, Laser Junctions and Long Distance Lasers redirect and split it, so laying out a base is a question of sightlines and angles rather than of running cables behind a wall.

Beams carry a second value alongside power: purity. Shooting a beam through a Prismarine Crystal raises its purity, and higher tiers of processing refuse to run below a threshold. Recipes state the purity they need, so a working setup has to deliver both enough AP and clean enough AP.

Item transformation happens in the open beam. Drop an item into a laser of sufficient purity and it becomes something else, no machine block involved.

Machines

Dozens of custom machines and blocks cover processing and logistics:

• Aquatic Catalyst, Prismarine Laser Relay, Laser Junction and Long Distance Laser for generating and routing beams
• Prismarine Crystal for raising purity
• Mixer, Mutator, Incubator and Bacterial Analyzer for fluid and bacteria work
• Energy Converter, which accepts Forge Energy and feeds it into a beam as AP, and Charger for equipment
• Fishing Station, Oil Barrel, Crate and Anchor for gathering and storage
• Bio Reactor, Deep Sea Drain and Augmentation Station as multiblocks

The Deep Sea Drain pulls salt water from the ocean around it. The Bio Reactor runs up to three bacteria colonies at once, with power cost scaling per colony and output speed set by each colony's size and production rate.

Bacteria

Bacteria are the mod's biological resource line. Forty-six species exist by default with others enabled depending on what mods are installed. Each is an instance with its own size, growth rate, production rate, lifespan and mutation resistance rather than a fixed template. You collect them in Petri Dishes and Vials, read their stats with a Bacterial Analyzer, push them toward better numbers in a Mutator, grow them in an Incubator, and put finished colonies to work in a Bio Reactor to produce materials. Every stat has a configurable cap.

Fluids

Salt water, Etching Acid, Electrolyte Algae Serum and oil, mixed and processed on the way to Aquarine Steel, Atlantic Gold and the rest of the material line.

Augments

Almost 2 dozen augments fit across nine body slots (head, eyes, body, lung, heart, and each arm and leg). Applying one is done by standing in a built Augmentation Station with a Robot Arm and the augment part loaded into each extension, and enough power behind it. B opens your active augment screen.

They range from utility to outright overpowered. Drowned Lung and Dolphin Fin for staying under, Step Up, Leap, Magnet and Ender Magnet for movement and pickup, Guardian Eye and the trident launchers for combat, Bonus Hearts and Eldritch Heart for survivability, and Creative Flight at the top end. Three are built from deep-sea creature drops: Abyssal Eyes (night vision, but only below a configured depth), Photophore Skin (lights up living things around you underwater, through terrain) and Vent Carapace (armor, knockback resistance, and half burn duration).

The ocean

Four biomes are added to the overworld's ocean layout without replacing any vanilla ocean entirely:

Biome	What it is
Abyssal Trench	Deepest and coldest water, near-black fog, far more Drowned
Bioluminescent Grove	Clear teal water with glow squid, kelp and sea pickles
Hydrothermal Vents	Murky warm water over basalt and magma
Prismarine Reef	Bright shallow water at the drop-off, coral and tropical fish

All four count as oceans, so salt water collection, the Deep Sea Drain, Crystal Geodes, ocean ruins and shipwrecks all work in them. Injection is configurable, and packs on a custom overworld preset can add their preset to injectableWorldPresets.

They come with six plants (Deep Kelp, Luminescent Algae, Prismarine Frond, Vent Tubeworm, Abyssal Coral, Glow Polyp), four creatures (Silt Skipper, Lantern Jelly, Vent Crawler, Abyssal Maw) and Budding Prismarine, which grows buds and clusters the way Budding Amethyst does and makes Prismarine Crystal Shards renewable.

Fishing

Lucky fishing zones drift into open water near you, marked by glow particles, and only form where every block in radius is genuinely open water. Fishing one adds a roll on the zone's loot table on top of your normal catch. Zones can hook live creatures as well as items, controlled by the nautec:catch_as_entity loot function, so a pack can make anything catchable.

The Prismatic Fishing Rod adds a catch minigame, picked at random from three: strike as the marker crosses the green, strike on three marks in order, or hold through the green and release. Winning adds a treasure roll. Missing gives you the ordinary catch, so it is never a punishment for ignoring it.

Loot lives in nautec:gameplay/lucky_fishing_zone and its catch and treasure sub-tables, which vary by biome and are meant to be overridden.

Tools and gear

Aquarine Steel tools and armour that gain their real stats once powered, a Diving Suit, Neptune's Trident, a Wrench, Batteries, a Grafting Tool, and the Prism Monocle for reading beam purity and block state in the world.

Vehicles

The Abyssal Submersible is a two seat crewed vehicle: place it on water, right-click to board, hold right mouse to steer with the mouse, A/D for the rudder, W/S for the throttle. It runs on stored power, charges in a Charger, and keeps its crew breathing while it is sealed and powered.

Compatibility

GeckoLib is a required dependency; it animates the submersible.

JEI for recipes, Jade for in-world block info, Curios for equipment slots, and Durability Display. The in-game guide is built on GuideMe, an optional dependency, and is the intended starting point: craft the NauTec Guide and work forward from Laser Power. With GuideMe installed, holding its guide key over any NauTec item jumps to that item's page.

Configuration

Gameplay values are synchronized from the server in nautec-common.toml; biome injection and skyblock settings are in nautec-worldgen.toml. Most numbers are able to be tweaked in the config files, including laser range, per-machine power draw and speed, bacteria stat caps, drain capacity and rate, augment tuning (Abyssal Eyes depth, Photophore Skin radius, Guardian augment damage), biome injection, the full lucky fishing zone set (interval, spacing, per-chunk cap, lifetime, radius), submarine tuning (power capacity, idle/movement/oxygen draw, thrust, top speed, third person camera distance), and Wave Jet tuning (thrust, top speed, power draw, spotlight range, brightness and power draw). The submarine's power HUD position is client config, repositionable in game with Ctrl+H.

For pack developers

Most of the mod's content is data-driven and safe to override from a datapack.

Recipes. Nine custom types, all plain JSON in data/<namespace>/recipe/:

Type	Machine
nautec:aquatic_catalyst_channeling	Aquatic Catalyst fuel and beam output
nautec:item_transformation	Items transformed in an open beam
nautec:item_etching	Etching Acid processing
nautec:mixing	Mixer, fluid plus items
nautec:augmentation	Augmentation Station
nautec:bacteria_mutation	Mutator
nautec:bacteria_incubation	Incubator
nautec:pressure_forging	Pressure Forge
nautec:resonance_crafting	Resonance Chamber

Transformation recipes carry a purity float, which is the minimum beam purity the recipe will accept. Setting it gates a recipe behind crystal infrastructure rather than behind a material cost:

{
  "type": "nautec:item_transformation",
  "duration": 100,
  "ingredient": { "ingredient": "nautec:aquarine_steel_compound" },
  "purity": 0.0,
  "result": { "id": "nautec:aquarine_steel_ingot" }
}

Fishing loot. Override nautec:gameplay/lucky_fishing_zone and its catch and treasure sub-tables to change what zones produce. Two custom loot entries are available anywhere loot is written:

• nautec:catch_as_entity, a function that turns a rolled item into a live creature released at the bobber. This is what makes fish catchable as mobs, and it works for anything you point it at.
• nautec:in_lucky_fishing_zone, a condition for restricting entries to zone catches.

Bacteria sources. The nautec:bacteria_obtaining data map maps a block to the bacteria it can yield, with an optional biome tag and a chance:

{
  "values": {
    "minecraft:stone": {
      "bacteria": "nautec:cyanobacteria",
      "biome": "minecraft:is_ocean",
      "chance": 0.4
    }
  }
}

Adding an entry is how you make a new block a bacteria source without touching code.

Tags. Item tags cover the repair materials for each armour and tool set (repairs_aquarine_tools, repairs_aquarine_armor, repairs_diving_suit, repairs_prismarine_armor) plus aquarine_steel, aquatic_catalyst and corals. Each new biome has its own tag (abyssal, bioluminescent, reef, vents), so pack content can target one biome family without hardcoding biome ids.

Worldgen. Biome injection is on by default and can be turned off with enableBiomeInjection. A pack running a custom overworld preset needs to add that preset to injectableWorldPresets for the biomes to appear.

Skyblock packs. NauTec expects oceans, so in a void world progression stops at the first step. The [skyblock] section of nautec-worldgen.toml holds opt-in settings for that. Every option is off by default and each one works on its own:

Option	What it does
luckyZonesAnyBiome	Lucky fishing zones appear on any open water, not only in oceans and rivers. A player-built pool works, and a bigger pool gets more zones.
skyblockFishingLoot	Zone catches count as ocean catches in any biome, and zone loot gains Prismarine Sand, Prismarine Shards and the Heart of the Sea. Together with luckyZonesAnyBiome this is the early source of prismarine, salt and salvage parts.
graftingAnyBiome	The Grafting Tool ignores the biome in nautec:bacteria_obtaining. The block and the chance still apply.
prismarineSandMixing	Mixer: 4 sand, 1 Prismarine Crystal Shard and 1000 mB Salt Water make 2 Prismarine Sand.
buddingPrismarineMixing	Mixer: 1 Prismarine Bricks, 4 Prismarine Crystals, 2 Prismarine Crystal Shards and 1000 mB Salt Water make 1 Budding Prismarine.
fuelCellResonance	Laser Crafting Matrix at purity 2.5: 4 Prismarine Crystal Shards make a Resonant Shard, and a Dormant Crystal Seed becomes a Prismarine Crystal Seed for the Crystal Cradle. Without a crystal, only a Bacterial Fuel Cell burning a colony with full mutation resistance reaches 2.5.
eldritchHeartMixing	Mixer: a Heart of the Sea, 2 Resonant Shards, 4 Prismarine Crystal Shards and 1000 mB EAS make an Eldritch Heart.

These options are in a common config rather than nautec-common.toml because recipe conditions are checked when a world's datapacks load, which is before per-world server configs are read. Recipe options take effect on the next world load or /reload. Datapacks can check the same options with the nautec:skyblock_option recipe condition or loot condition:

"neoforge:conditions": [
  { "type": "nautec:skyblock_option", "option": "prismarineSandMixing" }
]

The skyblock recipes are plain JSON under data/nautec/recipe/skyblock/, so a datapack can rebalance them by overriding the file.

Two other settings matter in a void world. Set drainRequiresOcean = false in nautec-common.toml so the Deep Sea Drain and Tidal Rotor work outside ocean biomes. The Abyssal Pressure Forge needs Y 0 or lower with 8 water source blocks above it, and its recipes ask for Y -20 and Y -40, so players build down into the void. pressureForgeDepth and each recipe's minDepth are the values to change for a shallower dimension.

A pack can also give out a crystal geode, alongside the Fuel Cell route or in place of it. /place template nautec:stone_crystal_geode (or nautec:deepslate_crystal_geode) places the 20 by 18 by 20 geode with a natural Prismarine Crystal that works as soon as it is placed. /place structure does not work in a void, because geodes only generate under terrain below sea level.

Some exploration content stays out of reach in a skyblock world by design: NauTec's four ocean biomes with their plants, mobs and drops, so the Abyssal Eyes, Photophore Skin and Vent Carapace augments and the Stealth and Armour modules; the Guardian Eye and Dolphin Fin augments and the Impulse Laser Module, unless the pack supplies those mobs; structures, Research Logs and wild Gateways; and the biome-specific fishing loot. Vanilla items NauTec uses, such as Nether Stars, Echo Shards and Phantom Membranes, are up to the pack.

Guide book. The in-game guide is a GuideMe guide (nautec:guide). Its pages are Markdown files under assets/nautec/guides/nautec/guide/, so a resource pack can add or replace pages.

Release readiness tracks implementation status and release gates. Manual testing lists behavior that needs client and multiplayer verification.

Credits and license

Nautec began as Porting Dead Mods' entry in the CurseForge 2024 Modjam, created by Thepigcat76, Leclowndu93150, Ktpatient, Reclipse and Iglee42. The original upstream MIT notice is preserved in LICENSE. It is now maintained and continued to be developed by Saereth and BreakinBlocks. Current development is licensed under both PolyForm Shield 1.0.0 and PolyForm Perimeter 1.0.0; compliance with both is required. See LICENSE.md.