After driving myself insane with all of the fiddly iterative crafting required by FtB, I've decided that I want to build a no-hassle autocraft station that I can drop raw materials into and will dutifully create an array of gears, machine frames, and pistons for me. I want this built before I do any serious machine building (that's the whole point!), so the materials need to be things that I could reasonably find after one good caving expedition, and I want the station itself to require little to no machines.
I've got something that mostly works, using a double chest and a whole slew of Ewy's/Steve's Workshops. I dump logs, sand, cobble, and metals (either dust or ingots are fine), and the various Workshops pass their inputs and outputs back and forth with each other and the chest to create the things that I need. Each Workshop block can contain up to four crafting stations/furnaces, and they can input/output independently of each other, and can even take and receive items from the same face at the same time. The Workshops are also cheap (they only need stone and planks). My only complaint is that the autocraft upgrade costs SIX GOLD, but I'll probably just cheat that in, because come on.
Production control is crude. For example, I want to have an existing stock of wooden and stone gears, but those are also used as components for more advanced parts that I also want. There's no good way to set quantity controls with entry level stuff, so I crudely control it by making sure that each part has a unique limiting reagent.
The workflow looks something this:
1) Logs are pulled from the chest into a Workshop and made into planks. The planks are returned to the chest
2) Planks are pulled from the chest into a Workshop and made into sticks. The sticks are sent to another Workshop.
3) The sticks are made into wooden gears. The wooden gears are deposited in the chest.
4) Wooden gears and cobble are pulled by a Workshop and made into stone gears. The stone gears are deposited in the chest. One log makes 2 wooden gears, and 1 cobble makes only 1/4 of a stone gear, so I'll always have left over stock of wooden gears (which is good).
5a) Stone gears are pulled and made into copper gears (this can be controlled by the copper input)
5b) Stone gears are pulled and made into tin gears (controlled by tin)
5c) Stone gears are pulled and made into iron gears (controlled by iron)
6) Iron gears are pulled and made into gold gears (controlled by gold)
7) Glass, iron, and tin gears are pulled and made into machine frames (controlled by glass)
8) Cobble, planks, iron and redstone are pulled and made into pistons (controlled by redstone dust)
9) A single furnace pulls metal dusts and sand for smelting and returns the products to the chest
10) All Workshops pull coal, charcoal, or coke as needed to stay powered
It works, doesn't require any pipes, and you can see the entire state of the system just by opening the chest. It does have some problems though.
The Workshop doesn't have fuzzy detection for crafting recipes. So I can tell it to make planks out of oak logs, but I need separate crafting slot if I also want it to make planks out of spruce logs. I can easily fit 6 Workshops around my chest without obstructing the front or top, so I have enough leftover space to individually specify the most common logs, but what a pain. A Sawmill solves the problem by being a universal log acceptor (plus the sawdust can be turned into charcoal by the system pretty easily), so that will likely by one of the first upgrades I would make.
Sticks are also a problem, and for the same reason. However, I don't know of any universal stick making solution. I kind of hate to have 4-8 crafting slots dedicated to the various kinds of planks that might go through this system.
Scaling the system to encompass more recipes is hard, because all the Workshops are competing for each other from the same pool. I wanted to add pneumatic servos, but gold, glass, and redstone are already the limiting reagents for other things. Iron gears and machine frames both want a lot of iron, and it can be tricky getting them to not block each other.
Despite the warts, it's a fast and cheap set up that makes most of the fundamental Thermal Expansion parts with little hassle. I like to put a Tinker's Construct Crafting Station next to it so that I can do sane, easily managed machine crafting without any of the inventory juggling that I usually have to do.
I might tie in an Induction Furnace and Pulverizer as a later upgrade so I can just drop in raw ores, but at the beginning, I prefer to manage metal production manually.
I'm thinking about making a similar station for Industrial Craft components, although I'm not sure how well the Workshops will play with the various consumable tools that IC uses.
I've got something that mostly works, using a double chest and a whole slew of Ewy's/Steve's Workshops. I dump logs, sand, cobble, and metals (either dust or ingots are fine), and the various Workshops pass their inputs and outputs back and forth with each other and the chest to create the things that I need. Each Workshop block can contain up to four crafting stations/furnaces, and they can input/output independently of each other, and can even take and receive items from the same face at the same time. The Workshops are also cheap (they only need stone and planks). My only complaint is that the autocraft upgrade costs SIX GOLD, but I'll probably just cheat that in, because come on.
Production control is crude. For example, I want to have an existing stock of wooden and stone gears, but those are also used as components for more advanced parts that I also want. There's no good way to set quantity controls with entry level stuff, so I crudely control it by making sure that each part has a unique limiting reagent.
The workflow looks something this:
1) Logs are pulled from the chest into a Workshop and made into planks. The planks are returned to the chest
2) Planks are pulled from the chest into a Workshop and made into sticks. The sticks are sent to another Workshop.
3) The sticks are made into wooden gears. The wooden gears are deposited in the chest.
4) Wooden gears and cobble are pulled by a Workshop and made into stone gears. The stone gears are deposited in the chest. One log makes 2 wooden gears, and 1 cobble makes only 1/4 of a stone gear, so I'll always have left over stock of wooden gears (which is good).
5a) Stone gears are pulled and made into copper gears (this can be controlled by the copper input)
5b) Stone gears are pulled and made into tin gears (controlled by tin)
5c) Stone gears are pulled and made into iron gears (controlled by iron)
6) Iron gears are pulled and made into gold gears (controlled by gold)
7) Glass, iron, and tin gears are pulled and made into machine frames (controlled by glass)
8) Cobble, planks, iron and redstone are pulled and made into pistons (controlled by redstone dust)
9) A single furnace pulls metal dusts and sand for smelting and returns the products to the chest
10) All Workshops pull coal, charcoal, or coke as needed to stay powered
It works, doesn't require any pipes, and you can see the entire state of the system just by opening the chest. It does have some problems though.
The Workshop doesn't have fuzzy detection for crafting recipes. So I can tell it to make planks out of oak logs, but I need separate crafting slot if I also want it to make planks out of spruce logs. I can easily fit 6 Workshops around my chest without obstructing the front or top, so I have enough leftover space to individually specify the most common logs, but what a pain. A Sawmill solves the problem by being a universal log acceptor (plus the sawdust can be turned into charcoal by the system pretty easily), so that will likely by one of the first upgrades I would make.
Sticks are also a problem, and for the same reason. However, I don't know of any universal stick making solution. I kind of hate to have 4-8 crafting slots dedicated to the various kinds of planks that might go through this system.
Scaling the system to encompass more recipes is hard, because all the Workshops are competing for each other from the same pool. I wanted to add pneumatic servos, but gold, glass, and redstone are already the limiting reagents for other things. Iron gears and machine frames both want a lot of iron, and it can be tricky getting them to not block each other.
Despite the warts, it's a fast and cheap set up that makes most of the fundamental Thermal Expansion parts with little hassle. I like to put a Tinker's Construct Crafting Station next to it so that I can do sane, easily managed machine crafting without any of the inventory juggling that I usually have to do.
I might tie in an Induction Furnace and Pulverizer as a later upgrade so I can just drop in raw ores, but at the beginning, I prefer to manage metal production manually.
I'm thinking about making a similar station for Industrial Craft components, although I'm not sure how well the Workshops will play with the various consumable tools that IC uses.