All-purpose Autocrafting factory setup problems

[incognito]

When playing tekkit, i had a very nice all-purpose autocrafting factory setup producing, well, everything.

It consisted of a storage facility and a processing/autocrafting part. this was connected by two pneumatic tube systems. One continuous system from storage to processing/autocrafting and one continuous system from processing/autocrafting to storage. All of this was made possible by retriever/retrievulators at each chest and each autocrafting/processingstation that 1) got shit to where shit was supposed to go, 2) avoided the retriever problem (only the closest retriever calling any particular item gets what it's calling) and 3) prevented overflow. This system was soo cool as it was truly modular (if you want a new item in the system you can add a new storage and set up a new processing/autocrafting unit and attaching it to the two tube systems. Also, it deals very well with multilevel crafting, as everything is in a loop.

Now i play FTB ultimate and I'm trying to create the same functionality, but I'm truly at a loss, as it appears the retrievulator has been removed or was not included in the first place. I've been researching Factorization, Applied energistics and even xycraft autocrafting and can't seem to create a system that does the same thing.

Am i overlooking something or is this very, very hard to do in FTB Ultimate?

 

[Xipheon]

Look into the manager (http://feed-the-beast.wikia.com/wiki/Manager). They need blutricity but they are very powerful.

 

[Rhodan]

Applied Energistics can craft any item and the intermediate items as long as you define the proper recipes, including any recipes that require machines from other mods. The downside is that it only crafts items upon request, you can't really tell it to keep churning out sticks forever or keep them at a certain level. I think.

 

[Poppycocks]

The retrievulator is from tubestuff. Add it yourself.

Applied energistics has fully automagic crafting as Rhoda said. It's kinda boring.

Applied Energistics can craft any item and the intermediate items as long as you define the proper recipes, including any recipes that require machines from other mods. The downside is that it only crafts items upon request, you can't really tell it to keep churning out sticks forever or keep them at a certain level. I think.

There's a workaround for that . I'm not telling how though.

 

[Djharts]

I wouldn't recommend managers. They seem to have lots of problems.

 

[Peppe]

Not familiar with the retrievulator, so not sure what functionality you would need to replace there.

AE is the simplest system to do all that. It can do it all on its own. It can be a little cheaper to hand off processing to other item moving/routing systems, but AE can do it as well.

Any inventory connected to the AE network is available anywhere on the network. It has a autocrafting system and methods to process materials on demand through impossible recipes.

Automating the crafting and maintain levels:

Spoiler

You input recipes into the system to allow it to craft directly or to process. So you can put in the recipe to make wood into planks, planks into sticks, and sticks into ladders. The possible recipes are autocrafting directly by the system. So with just wood in your storage you can request X ladders and it will craft through the materials as needed from wood to ladders.

For impossible recipes/processing you also give it crafting recipes. So you can tell it 1 of an ore = 2 dust, 1 dust = 1 ingot, or if you never want dust you can tell it 1 ore = 2 ingots and handle the dust in your processing system. You don't put the impossible recipes in the crafting unit, but instead put them in an interface. For crafting recipes the interface block outputs raw materials into adjacent pipes or inventories. So you could request 16 ingots with just ore in storage. The 8 ore would go to the interface that converts it to dust -- example the 8 ore exits the interface and goes to a macerator and the 16 dust returns. Now it has 16 dust and it sends that to an interface that has 1 dust = 1 ingot. Here the items go into a furnace and then return to the network as ingots.

Putting all that together. Say you put all the crafting and processing recipes needed to make a HV solar array. You could add the HV solar as a recipe. Request X amount of those and it will craft/process out of all your available materials.

If you don't want to request things you can also use export buses to craft items however you like. The export bus can be redstone controlled or just stop when the inventory fills up. AE also has a level emitter, so you can redstone control exporting HV solars to only be on when you have 8 or less in your storage network or whatever conditions you want.

 

[incognito]

Djharts: what are the problems with managers (aside from possible crashing issues)?

Poppycocks: I can't add mod component myself, unfortunately. I'm on a SMP server and the admin isn't to keen to things like that. Also, it'd somehow violate my gaming aestethics ;o)

 

[Rhodan]

There's a workaround for that . I'm not telling how though.

I just realized how! Silly me for not thinking of it earlier. So yeah, you can easily have it fill a chest with any number of any item you want to have available at any time ever. Just have a look at the various import and export bus thingies. Combined with xycraft crafting you can automate things very early on without having to make the big supercrafting thingy.
It's indeed a rather magic process, but it's quite expensive as well. I find it especially useful for making things on request, such as IC² circuits, cables and batteries. Automated systems that are always-on would be more fun using just pipes and tubes, so you can see things zip around.

 

[incognito]

I'm intersted in maintaing certain levels of certain blocks in defined chests. It looks like the manager'll do the job just fine, unless there's some serious issue with it, as hinted at above?[DOUBLEPOST=1367095881][/DOUBLEPOST]So for hooking managers up to machines, I reckon the way to do it would be to add managers to input and output faces independently? This works with IC2 and buildcraft machines?

 

[Djharts]

Well. Recently on a server I play on, a manager crashed the server for several days and that players region file had to be deleted. They lost their house.

 

[Lambert2191]

Applied energistics has fully automagic crafting as Rhoda said. It's kinda boring.

and dangerous..

Spoiler

 

[Djharts]

Just a little tip Lambert. Your link to your twitter doesn't seem to work.

 

[Lambert2191]

Just a little tip Lambert. Your link to your twitter doesn't seem to work.

fixed, cheers