Elementary particles

In principle, everything in the Universe is made out of only a very small number of elementary particles. Some of their names might sound familiar, but others might be completely new:


 * Quarks
 * Electrons and Positrons
 * Neutrinos
 * Gluons
 * Photons
 * Weak bosons

You might have expected some other very small things to be on this list, such as atoms or protons. But even those can be made out of the particles above! The Elementary Craft mod shows how these particles can be combined to everything you know, including stars and helium balloons.

Not all elementary particles are the same. Quarks, electrons and neutrinos (the so-called matter particles) are distinct from the others because they have mass. The other particles carry the four fundamental forces of nature, and are therefore known as carrier particles. Generally, you always need a mix of those two kinds of particles to make a bigger object. Simply putting three quarks together will not make a proton: you need a force that holds the quarks together, in this case the strong force.

Elementary particles do not appear out of nowhere. They have to be obtained from different quantum field blocks, each different field corresponding to one of the particles above. For example, mining an electron field will give you electrons. Once you have enough of these particles, they can be combined on a crafting table to form larger particles. In rare cases, elementary particles can be created in other ways that do not require mining a quantum field block directly: these situations are very useful for creating particle farms.