Preston

Preston is a “compressed block” mod – that is, it provides means of compressing sets of 9 identical blocks into 1 “compressed block” recursively, as well as decompressing them back.

Where it differs from previous approaches, however, is in a few key areas:

• Preston allows you to compress any full-cuboid block in the game, not just a selection of them.
• Preston lets you set the amount of compression levels available. By default, there are sixteen (single, double, triple, …, sexdecuple), but you can set them all the way from just one (single) to one thousand (…, undemilluple, milluple)!
• Preston allows you to balance block compression by providing an RF/FE-powered machine, the Compressor, to faciliate this. The amount of RF/FE necessary scales with the compression level. (Optionally, you can configure it to allow crafting-based compression.)

Preston also includes mod compatibility with:

• Just Enough Items (0.2.0+)
• HWYLA (0.3.0+) – for properly supporting the Compressor’s energy storage
• BuildCraft (0.3.0+) – Minecraft Joules support
• CraftTweaker (0.3.1+) – mods.preston.Compressor.addRecipe(, energy_cost, ), mods.preston.CompressedBlocks.createStack(, ), mods.preston.CompressedBlocks.getMaximumCompressionLevel()
• BuildCraft (0.3.3+) – “Has Work” gate support

In addition, Preston includes an API for developers to be able to query, compress and decompress Compressed Blocks in their own machines, as well as define custom recipes for the Compressor.