Guide: Schrabidium Creation

From HBM's Nuclear Tech Wiki

Schrabidium is a highly radioactive and dangerous element that can be used for incredibly powerful nuclear fuels or for the production of powerful tools and weaponry. Because of this, it is quite difficult to obtain in large quantities, either requiring highly labor intensive and low yielding processes that take simple resources or incredibly expensive late game processes that require advanced and expensive machines and/or huge amounts of power to perform.

Nuclear Detonation

When a nuclear explosive of any kind is set off within a large radius around a piece of uranium ore, it will have a small chance to be converted into a piece of pure schrabidium ore with any not converted being scorched and rendered unusable for further conversion. In baby mode, scorched ore can be washed for reuse.

Any nuclear explosion works to convert uranium ore into schrabidium but due to the fact that a more powerful nuke is likely to destroy ore placed nearby, it is usually better to go with a low yield nuclear explosive or even just a dirty bomb. A "dirty bomb" can be achieved by destroying a nuclear waste barrel with any kind of explosive, though usually something like a time bomb is best due to its built in timer, small blast radius, and low cost. To make this process safer, the nuclear waste barrel and time bomb assembly can be fully enclosed inside of a shell of concrete which the blast will be unable to penetrate. Fallout will still fall around the area and it will still leak radiation, but it will not destroy any blocks and the nuclear waste that oozes out of the destroyed barrel will be fully contained.

Pros

  • Inexpensive/common materials.
  • Very little setup outside of placing the blocks.

Cons

  • Completely impossible to automate.
  • Obtaining large amounts of uranium ore takes either a high level of technology or a significant investment of manual labor.
  • Extremely low conversion rate.
  • Exposes surrounding area to radiation and drops fallout in a small radius.

Schrabidium Transmutation Device

A single block machine that converts uranium into a schraranium ingot which can then be further processed to yield various nuclear materials, including a decent quantity of schrabidium. This output can be increased by crystallizing the schraranium ingots and then centrifuging them to yield one more nugget of schrabidium. Visible light SILEX can also be used to gain a larger yield of schrabidium from ingots or crystals of schraranium. Requires a capacitor to be placed in the upper left hand slot of the machine in order to operate which can either be redcoil capacitor (cheap but needs manual charging) or a euphemium capacitor (expensive, far into progression, but infinite) and will consume 5MHE for each ingot of uranium that is consumed. Requires a single nugget of schrabidium in the form of a bar of magnetized tungsten to construct meaning that some other form of schrabidium production must be used before it can be constructed.

Uranium ingots in a fully functional schrabidium transmutation device.
Uranium ingots in a fully functional schrabidium transmutation device.

Pros

  • Completely contained within a single block.
  • Requires nothing but power some manual intervention, and uranium to operate.
  • Can be automated to a degree even soon after being obtained.

Cons

  • Slow.
  • Requires manual recharging to operate.
  • Needs schrabidium to be constructed in the first place.
  • Requires additional processing steps to go from schraranium to schrabidium.
  • Not a 1:1 ratio between uranium ingots to schrabidium ingots

Cyclotron

Bombarding ionized particles in a cyclotron with plutonium dust results in the production of a single nugget of schrabidium with a small antimatter byproduct, as is the case for all cyclotron recipes. Requires at minimum for a fusion reactor to have ran once in the world in order for ionized particles to be obtained and requires a significant amount of power to run. No components necessary to this process require schrabidium, meaning that this in addition to nuclear detonation are the two primary methods of obtaining an initial quantity of schrabidium to craft into a schrabidium transmutator.

Ionized particles in a cyclotron being bombarded with plutonium to produce a schrabidium nugget.
Ionized particles in a cyclotron being bombarded with plutonium to produce a schrabidium nugget.

Pros

  • Contained within a single machine.
  • Useful for other purposes besides from schrabidium transmutation.

Cons

  • Can melt down if not provided with sufficient coolant.
  • Requires expensive materials to craft.
  • Requires a large and expensive machine to be crafted in.
  • Requires a fusion reactor.
  • Consumes so much power that use of produced schrabidium as a fuel becomes net power negative in addition to processed plutonium being able to provide far more power by itself.

Higgs Boson Exposure

Exposing 8 uranium-238 ingots in an exposure chamber to the higgs boson creates 8 pure schrabidium ingots and consumes the higgs boson as a result. Despite the immense power consumption of most particle accelerators, this recipe can actually be one of the most power efficient and fast methods of schrabidium production possible with a bare minimum power particle accelerator consuming approximately 100MHE per operation. A schrabidium transmutatation device producing enough schraranium to equal the amount of schrabidium produced by this operation will consume nearly exactly the same amount of power in addition to requiring multiple processing steps and producing extra products besides from schrabidium like plutonium. A higgs boson can also be used to turn uranium into schraranium in the exposure chamber, though there is little reason to do this due to the lower schrabidium yield.

A higgs boson inserted into an exposure chamber, transmutating uranium-238 into schrabidium
A higgs boson inserted into an exposure chamber, transmutating uranium-238 into schrabidium

Pros

  • 1:1 conversion ratio between uranium and schrabidium.
  • Once the accelerator is set up, each higgs boson only requires power, hydrogen, lead powder, reusable capsules, and a single ionized particles item to produce.
  • Easily automated.

Cons

  • Even a small particle accelerator is incredibly expensive.
  • 100MHE per operation with operations occurring every few seconds can stress even late game power generation setups.