Heater

Heater is a straightforward tech mod about centralizing fuel consumption and how to propagate the produced heat to nearby furnaces and furnaces-adjacent blocks.

(Credits to StarOcean for the fantastic textures they created!)

It only adds three blocks: the namesake Heater, the Heat Pipe, and the Thermostat.

Here's what they do.

Heater

As its namesake block, the Heater is this mod's core. Its role is to burn fuel and propagate the generated heat to nearby compatible blocks, such as Furnaces, Blast Furnaces, and Smokers from vanilla Minecraft, but also many other furnace variants from other mods if they are interoperable (see below).

Heat Pipe

The Heat Pipe is a pipe-like block which works as you may imagine. Heat produced by a Heater can travel through it, basically extending the Heater's reach. But be aware that heat can only propagate a certain distance before dissipating, and the oxidization state of the Heat Pipe can only reduce said distance.

The Heat Pipe is entity-free, so you can fully fulfil your pipe dreams without concerns about dropping performances.

Thermostat

By default, the Thermostat allows heat to propagate only in the direction it is facing and only if powered. When unpowered, it acts like any other heat-inert block.

However, you can use a fuel item on a Thermostat to make it memorise that fuel. Once you do so, the Thermostat will propagate heat generated by the memorised fuel (and only that generated by it) even when unpowered, whilst, when powered, it will propagate heat generated by any fuel but propagating it as if it were generated by the memorised one. For example, it could propagate the heat generated by wooden planks as if a lava bucket generated it, or vice versa.

You can then "use" an empty hand on the Thermostat to make it forget the memorised fuel and return to its default behaviour.

The Thermostat is also the only block that can "push" heat into a Heater, doubling as a heat repeater of sorts.

Interoperability

From Heater 4.0 onwards, I moved the interoperability logic to the Burning library mod, so look there. Spoiler: it's basically the same.

<datapack>.zip
├── data
│   └── <datapack>
│       └── heater
│           └── adapters
│               └── furnace
│                   └── <block_entity_type_1>.json (content example below)
│                   └── <block_entity_type_2>.json
│                   └── ...
├── pack.mcmeta
└── pack.png (optional)

// custom_furnace.json
{
    // The id of the 3rd party mod's furnace-like block's entity' type
    "type": "example_mod:custom_furnace_entity_type",
    // The name of the field corresponding in function to `litTime`
    "lit_time": "burnTime",
    // The name of the field corresponding in function to `litDuration`
    "lit_duration": "fuelTime"
}