Crafting with quarks

The most important concept to understand when crafting anything using quarks is color neutrality. In the section on quarks it is explained how quarks can have different colors, a property related to the strong force. When crafting anything with quarks, the resulting particle must not have a net green, red or blue color - they have to cancel out as illustrated in the image to the right.For example, the proton is a composite particle that consists out of two up quarks and a down quark held together by the strong nuclear force. However, only color neutral combinations are allowed, and therefore the quarks need to have red, green and blue colors in any respective order. This property has to be obeyed in all the recipes containing quarks. An antiquark has the "opposite" color, so the combination of a blue quark and a blue antiquark is also allowed: this combination leads to pions.

One other important property is that quarks have to be held together by the strong force, and most recipes will require you to add a number of gluons - the carriers of the strong force.

The two particles that can be made by combining three quarks are either the proton or neutron:

Proton: Two up quarks + one down quark + 6 gluons.

Neutron: Two down quarks + one up quark + 6 gluons.

If you want to make a combination of two quarks, the only way to achieve color neutrality is to use a quark in combination with an anti-quark. This will create various kinds of pion particles:

Pion0: Upquark + Anti-upquark + 7 gluons   OR   Downquark + Anti-downquark + 7 gluons

Pion+: Upquark + Anti-downquark + 7 gluons

Pion-: Downquark + Anti-upquark + 7 gluons.

The (+,- or 0) after the pion name refers to the charge of the pion particle.

Dive deeper into the physics: Crafting with antiquarks
With the exception of pions, all of the crafting recipes use only quarks and no anti-quarks. If you are a curious player, you might have tried to create a particle using three antiquarks, just like the proton and neutron are made from three quarks. This is a perfectly reasonable recipe, and in the real world this does actually lead to stable particles: the antiproton and the antineutron. However, neither of these particles are implemented in Elementary Craft, in order to keep the mod as simple as possible. Kudos for trying though!