System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Regolith Sintery

Regolith Dust was the last material in the game that nothing consumed

A press bed under a squat kiln, standing fixed on the lunar surface — and the Moon's only actual building, solid enough to step up onto rather than something a player just walks through like every other piece of surface scenery. It exists to fix the very last gap in the Moon's material economy: Regolith Dust dropped everywhere on the surface and in the hollow core, mining sites handed it out freely, and until this station existed nothing anywhere consumed a single unit of it.

Baking a plate

Interact with the press bed for 10 Regolith Dust and 1 Helium-3, and it bakes into a Sinter Plate. There's no cap on how many can be baked — only on how many can later be put to use.

Two places to spend a plate, both already built

Deliberately, the Sintery doesn't open a third isolated lunar loop of its own — every Sinter Plate pays into one of two systems a character has likely already sunk real effort into:

• An all-lunar Corelight Ingot recipe at the Hollow Forge — the original Earth-bars recipe is completely untouched and still fires first, but a player fully committed to the Moon no longer has to fly Iron and Gold Bars up from the surface just to keep casting.
• Ballast for a lit Lunar Relay, seated directly at a Comms Antenna — each plate seated raises the relay's holding capacity and rate. With zero plates ever seated, the relay's arithmetic is bit-for-bit identical to what it always was.

Version history

• The Regolith Sintery added, closing the last gap in the lunar material economy by giving Regolith Dust its first consumer.
• Given real collision, joining the Moon's peaks on the same solidity list — the last of a standing complaint about objects on the lunar surface having no hitbox at all; players had been walking straight through the one building the Moon actually has.

Trivia

• The Sintery's own interact reach and a nearby Comms Antenna's reach were found to overlap in a way that could make an antenna planted too close to the press unreachable entirely — fixed by having a single press always resolve to whichever of the two stations is actually nearer, rather than changing either reach.