Low level autocrafting, suggestions wanted

  • Please make sure you are posting in the correct place. Server ads go here and modpack bugs go here

Remaker

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
52
0
0
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.
 

Odovbold

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
234
0
1
A simple way to solve your different type of wood logs/planks issue is to push logs into a Jabba barrels (or other unifier), then you will only have one kind of logs

The other way is to use Steve Factory Manager but I'm not sure if it's in your pack and the setup will be more complex than Steve's Workshop
 

Inaeo

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
2,158
-3
0
This depends greatly on the mods available to you, as well as the resources you have acquired. Your complaint regarding "SIX GOLD" leave the majority of options off the table, as autocrafting is a powerful thing which should require at least some investment (usually diamonds or gold gate even the simple options, many require both).

I'm currently working on a system using Storage Drawers and Enhanced Inventories. All the input can be housed in drawers, or simply piped into the Drawer Controller (or a slave). This allows for multiple stacks of materials to be queued.

Autocrafting is accomplished using Enhanced Inventories (forgot the block name, and I'm AFMC). The autocrafters work off a schematic made in a Worktable, but can only use a single recipe (without some tinkering), so a bank of crafters may be needed. The bonus is the fact that the autocrafters pull needed materials from adjacent Inventories, which includes for our purposes the Drawer Controller/Slave (which allows accss to the entire Drawer network). Perhaps the best bit is that these crafters require no fuel to do their job, making logistics a bit easier.

I have a dump chest on a hopper that feeds a Drawer Slave. I dump anything I don't need to carry in, and it puts it all away for me. The autocrafters pull needed materials from a different Slave (up to 5 crafters per Slave, but I'm only doing two per for stylistic reasons) and I have pipes pulling finished goods back into the Slave, which puts it adds it back to the Drawer network. The crafters are configurable for Redstone signal as well, should you want manual control.

Drawer Controller requires a diamond, and each Slave requires a gold ingot (if memory serves), but for some basic materials outside of that, you have easy, expandable, low tech autocrafting. Early on, you can keep a chest full of schematics and a single crafter - add recipe, flip switch, have it build as needed, shut off, and put away the schematic. It's slower than a full assembly line, but cheap and efficient.

Good luck, have fun.
 

Remaker

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
52
0
0
A simple way to solve your different type of wood logs/planks issue is to push logs into a Jabba barrels (or other unifier), then you will only have one kind of logs

I can't figure out how to make that work. Birch/Spruce/Oak logs are all different things and so JABBA doesn't unify them like it does with equivalent versions of copper. Is there a special thing I have to do?
 

Someone Else 37

Forum Addict
Feb 10, 2013
1,876
1,440
168
Does Ewy's Workshop allow for redstone control? If so, you could set up a lever that turns off the machine making stone gold gears, pistons, and machine frames while enabling the machine responsible for iron gears and pneumatic servos. Or, you could have two separate levers so you could turn both off at once, should you need glass, iron, or gold for other recipes.

Alternatively, Steve's Factory Manager can do every single thing you want your system can do, all at once. In particular, you can configure it to stop crafting when there are a specified number of items in the chest, negating the need to limit what you put in. However, it sounds like your system already works very well as it is, so in your shoes, I would probably not bother with tearing down the whole thing just to replace it with something else until I'd set up an AE system.
 

Odovbold

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
234
0
1
I can't figure out how to make that work. Birch/Spruce/Oak logs are all different things and so JABBA doesn't unify them like it does with equivalent versions of copper. Is there a special thing I have to do?
Birch/Spruce/Oak/Dark Oak/any vanilla tree logs are all oreDict as 'logWood', so put the Oak logs into a barrel, all other wood logs put in later will become Oak wood
 
Last edited:

Remaker

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
52
0
0
Does Ewy's Workshop allow for redstone control? If so, you could set up a lever that turns off the machine making stone gold gears, pistons, and machine frames while enabling the machine responsible for iron gears and pneumatic servos. Or, you could have two separate levers so you could turn both off at once, should you need glass, iron, or gold for other recipes.

No, but as I expand I might incorporate pipes and control those via redstone.

Alternatively, Steve's Factory Manager can do every single thing you want your system can do, all at once. In particular, you can configure it to stop crafting when there are a specified number of items in the chest, negating the need to limit what you put in. However, it sounds like your system already works very well as it is, so in your shoes, I would probably not bother with tearing down the whole thing just to replace it with something else until I'd set up an AE system.

That sounds pretty good, I'll check it out. I'm very interested in "low-tech" solutions right now. My playstyle is that I temporarily settle in some village building somewhere (with Witchery, villages get walls and guards, so they are very safe), and only move into a real home after I've established my basic needs. The big thing I try to get is renewable dirt, wood, and cobble. That makes building and terraforming much, much less tedious. Of course, you need a lot of machines to get all of that, and I've got it all crammed into a captured villager building, so floorspace is at a premium. Once I'm ready, I intend to use the JABBA dolly to cart most of my stuff onto an Archimedes ship and fly away, leaving some of the infrastructure behind to serve as an outpost.

EDIT: I just looked into Steve's Factory Manager. Holy moly, it's like having a baby version of Labview installed in Minecraft! Definitely going to try to incorporate one of these into the machine.

Birch/Spruce/Oak/Dark Oak/any vanilla tree logs are all oreDict as 'logWood', so put the Oak logs into a barrel, all other wood logs put in later will become Oak wood

But, how? Once I put a specific type of log into a barrel, it only takes that kind of log anymore. I've tried manually clicking, using itemducts, powered pipes, hoppers, the barrel never accepts off-flavor logs.
 
Last edited:

Odovbold

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
234
0
1
But, how? Once I put a specific type of log into a barrel, it only takes that kind of log anymore. I've tried manually clicking, using itemducts, powered pipes, hoppers, the barrel never accepts off-flavor logs.

Sorry about this one, just tested in my 1.7.10 world with Jabba 1.2.1a, it's not working any more.

The other alternative I can think of is MFR's Unifier http://ftbwiki.org/Unifier, but that could be more expansive than Steve's Factory Manager
 

Remaker

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
52
0
0
Steve's Factory Manager turns out to be everything I wanted. Powerful and compact methods to accomplish simple convenience tasks without having to grind for several hours. You can make a good system after having found your first redstone vein, and after finding your first gold vein, you can make an even better system (my compliant about the Workshop Table's autocrafting costing six gold was mostly that it cost six gold per table, which quickly escalates out of control).

I have a chest into which I put my logs, cobble, sand, redstone and metal dusts/ingots. The Manager pulls from it and maintains two of every gear, machine frame, servo, and numerous other subcomponents. It also maintains a stack of ladders, a stack of scaffolds, and one of each stone tool, all of which are shipped to an "adventuring chest" closer to the entrance of my home. I have a Workshop Table that sits behind it and automatically pulls any metal dust or sand and smelts them into ingots/glass. The whole thing is very sane and utterly non-fiddly. I love it. The Steve's Addons expansion is practically required unless you want to spend hours rewriting the same program every time you relocate.