Applied Energestics General Help

[eric167]

Ive read the official thread and the wiki, and im still a bit lost on setting up.
I love the potential of all of this however.

you can sort of ignore these specific questions now, theyve been answered. i still welcome general advice/tips/tricks.

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how many items does a given storage module hold?
how many types of items can it hold?

my main mining setup is mining wells spaced out every 8 blocks on land, quarries in oceans.

how would i go about using the AE network for moving, refining, and crafting materials.

mainly, i would want for cobble/sand/dirt/gravel to have thier own storage, with a ready supply of 1 factorization barrel for each on hand.
and/or potentially a small physical supply of everything.
i want the grid connected to furnaces/whatever for refining, then go back to storage.
can i have the option of autocrafting some things for level maintenance (say two stacks on hand at all times?)
how would i set up level maintinance?
can i do in-network item deletion, or do i have to send to a trashcan or similar?
and how would i extract items from the network?

can i have remote connections, so i can chunkload my main base, but have a mining setup 1000+ blocks away that doesnt need a massively long cable?

how much energy is required?

 

[arentol]

Watch YouTube videos on the subject. That will get you 90% of the way there.

Then come back with what questions remain.

Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk 2

 

[RedBoss]

BevoLJ again to the rescue

He has a 3 part tutorial on AE. If you can't grasp it from him then you won't get it. This is a tutorial, not a spotlight so the info is very applicable. Search his channel, he has specific applications for the mod as well

 

[gusmahler]

Ive read the official thread and the wiki, and im still a bit lost on setting up.
I love the potential of all of this however.

how many items does a given storage module hold?
This page gives a detailed answer: http://ae-mod.info/ME-Storage-Math/

how many types of items can it hold?
Each can hold 63 different types of items.

my main mining setup is mining wells spaced out every 8 blocks on land, quarries in oceans.
Personally, the outputs of my quarries go to an ender chest. The same color enderchest is in my AE area, with several import buses attached to them.

how would i go about using the AE network for moving, refining, and crafting materials.

mainly, i would want for cobble/sand/dirt/gravel to have thier own storage, with a ready supply of 1 factorization barrel for each on hand.
and/or potentially a small physical supply of everything.
i want the grid connected to furnaces/whatever for refining, then go back to storage.
AE has a device called the "storage bus" that enables you to keep items in barrels (or Deep Storage Units, which are even better), but still be able to access them via the AE interface.

To do auto pulverizing and smelting, all you need to do is set up an area of pulverizers/macerators/furnaces/etc that you can run cable to. Then you put an export bus to the input of the pulverizer, exporting all iron ore. You connect an import bus to the same machine so that the output immediately goes into AE. Then you have an export bus at the input of the furnace, set to automatically export all iron dust to the system. You connect an import bus to the output of the furnace. Thereafter, any time an iron ore gets input into the system, it gets pulverized, then smelted into ingots. Obviously, you put all the ores you want to process into the export bus, not just iron.

can i have the option of autocrafting some things for level maintenance (say two stacks on hand at all times?)
Possible, but unwieldly. I'd recommend crafting as needed. It's different for things that need to be processed as opposed to crafted. E.g., glass or refined iron. If it's just stuff that you craft (e.g., advanced circuits), just put a pattern into the MAC and craft it as needed.


how would i set up level maintinance?
For something smelted, relatively easy. Set up an export bus on a furnace, set to only work if it receives a redstone signal. Then connect a Level Emitter facing the same export bus. Set it to only emit a redstone signal if you have less than 2 stacks of glass. Thereafter, when you run low on glass, it'll automatically export sand to the furnace.

For something that's crafted, you have to resort to an external crafting device, (e.g., Xycraft's Fabricators) and do a similar Level Emitter setup. So if you have less than a stack of pistons, for example, it automatically exports the ingredients to a chest next to the Fabricator.

can i do in-network item deletion, or do i have to send to a trashcan or similar?
Nothing automatic, as far as I know. You can set up a chest hooked up to a void pipe. Then put an export bus on the chest. So anytime you get rotten flesh, it exports to the chest, which then voids it.

and how would i extract items from the network?
Typically, you use the ME terminal or a wireless terminal. If you want to send items to a device, you use an export bus.

can i have remote connections, so i can chunkload my main base, but have a mining setup 1000+ blocks away that doesnt need a massively long cable?
You can lay down 1000 cables. Or you can do what direwolf did and connect the ME drives to an item tesseract. If he's at a remote base, he pushes a button and it sends the drives via item tesseract to the other base.

how much energy is required?
It depends on the size of your network. Mine is 165 EU/t or 66 MJ/t. But I have 13 crafting CPUs, 5 pattern providers, 3 disk drives, etc. So it's been operating for a while. It uses a lot less in the beginning.

 

[eric167]

ty guns & red. looked at dires spotlight, and that helped a fair bit.
so really energy shouldnt be an issue at all- couple of adv. solars handles it.
and for complex builds ill need a pattern for each step looks like.
but totally automatic!! no hunting for everything! no diggin through chests!
again, i am really excited about the potential of all this.
ill come back to this thread with any further questions. you can now sorta ignore the specific questions in my OP.
still welcome general advice/tips/tricks.

 

[PhilHibbs]

From the AE mod site: "Gunning straight for top tier storage cells, is not generally the best idea, since you use more resources, but don't get any extra type storage."

I went straight for 16k cells, but I already had a large reserve of quartz available because I was late getting into AE. My base was already up and running when the mod was added, and I never really fancied it, so I just let my quarry stack up the quartz until I decided to dip my toe into the water.

 

[gusmahler]

If you're already at the point where you're running multiple quarries, 16k cells are the best bet. 4k is simply too small and 64k cells are completely useless--way to expensive for something deep storage units do better.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I find that even in the mid game 4k cells are perfectly adequate. It's like.. four diamond chests worth of materials. So ten of them is like 40 diamond chests? If you use DSU/Barrel + Storage Bus for your bulk storage, 4k can easily hold you quite a long while.

 

[gusmahler]

I find that even in the mid game 4k cells are perfectly adequate. It's like.. four diamond chests worth of materials. So ten of them is like 40 diamond chests? If you use DSU/Barrel + Storage Bus for your bulk storage, 4k can easily hold you quite a long while.

To be a nit, a diamond chest has 108 slots. A 4k storage holds 508 stacks of one item, but only 260 stacks of 63 items (a little more than two diamond chests).

But you may be right. I started my AE setup before I even knew about DSUs, so a lot of my storage that would ideally be in DSUs aren't (for now, at least). But I have 20 storage cells. 2 are 64k, 2 are 1k, the rest are 16k.

I may actually try that, now that i know we'll be deleting this world soon. Just see if I can use 4k and DSUs instead.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

To be a nit, a diamond chest has 108 slots. A 4k storage holds 508 stacks of one item, but only 260 stacks of 63 items (a little more than two diamond chests)

Umm... a little basic math here:

A diamond chest can only store one stack of items per slot. Therefore, 108 slots = 108 stacks.

A 4k storage cell has 63 slots that can each carry 260 stacks of items.

63*260= 16,380 / 108 = just over 150 TIMES the amount of a diamond chest. We were off by a factor of a hundred.

 

[eric167]

running some creative mode tests, and it looks like the 1k will be plenty for the IC miners i plan on using on land. only problem is they dont specificially go for the infused stones, only when they run straight into them.
plan on using quarries only in oceans where i dont care about terrain preservation. if i ever get there that is.
and from a creative mode quarry, it looks like ill need at least one/two 64K cells, each 62x62 layer seems to take up around 1K bytes.
4 1/2 layers in, im 4.5 out of 16. give or take a hundred.
and i will have DSUs tied into my main grid for dirt/cobble and the like, the 64Ks will just be for transport to my main grid.

semi-off topic, the way the item digitization works almost reminds me of the tron universe.

 

[gusmahler]

Umm... a little basic math here:

A diamond chest can only store one stack of items per slot. Therefore, 108 slots = 108 stacks.

A 4k storage cell has 63 slots that can each carry 260 stacks of items.

63*260= 16,380 / 108 = just over 150 TIMES the amount of a diamond chest. We were off by a factor of a hundred.

No, you are mistaken.

A 4k storage cell can hold a total of 260 stacks of items. Thus, it can hold 260 / 108 = 2.4 times the number of stacks that a diamond chest can.

And even that is exaggerating, because a diamond chest could theoretically hold 108 full stacks, each with a different item. A 4k storage cell can only hold 63 different types of items.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

No, you are mistaken.

A 4k storage cell can hold a total of 260 stacks of items. Thus, it can hold 260 / 108 = 2.4 times the number of stacks that a diamond chest can.

And even that is exaggerating, because a diamond chest could theoretically hold 108 full stacks, each with a different item. A 4k storage cell can only hold 63 different types of items.

You can also use the Partition thing to make different drives for different resource types. Thus one might only have 32 items, all your ores, dusts, and gems. In which case, you'd have somewhere around 360ish stacks all told. Plus you can name it, and, more importantly, you only need to move that one data chip to move everything to a new facility

 

[Vaygrim]

Here is my Applied Energistics question:

There is a pair of vertical colored 'bars' on the back of my ME Drive unit, side by side. They sit at different levels and periodically seem to change based upon how full my drives are.. but that is sort of a guess to be honest.

What the heck do these things do? Are they an indicator for drive space available / used.. or am I just imagining all this and they are purely decoration? (Yes this is latest AE in MC 1.5.2)

 

[gusmahler]

Yes, it indicates how full the drives are. Green means it has space. Orange means there's no more room for new types of items (it already has 63), but there's room for more items. Red means it can't accept any items at all.

 

[eric167]

Yes, it indicates how full the drives are. Green means it has space. Orange means there's no more room for new types of items (it already has 63), but there's room for more items. Red means it can't accept any items at all.

those are the indicator lights on the cells on the front.
hes reffering to the BACK of the drive.
i think ive figured it out watching a quarry fill up a 16K.
green bar is type capactiy. higher the bar, the more types of items.
blue bar is item capacity.
both are for the entire drive, not individual cells. since i have only one cell in atm, it shows for that cell, but if i stick a 64K cell in, i will expect the green bar to drop by half, and the blue bar to vanish, as the items stored/capacity ratio isnt high enough to activate the first bar.

 

[PhilHibbs]

running some creative mode tests, and it looks like the 1k will be plenty for the IC miners i plan on using on land. only problem is they dont specificially go for the infused stones, only when they run straight into them.

You can add block IDs to the config for the miner.

 

[Vaygrim]

those are the indicator lights on the cells on the front.
hes reffering to the BACK of the drive.
i think ive figured it out watching a quarry fill up a 16K.
green bar is type capactiy. higher the bar, the more types of items.
blue bar is item capacity.
both are for the entire drive, not individual cells. since i have only one cell in atm, it shows for that cell, but if i stick a 64K cell in, i will expect the green bar to drop by half, and the blue bar to vanish, as the items stored/capacity ratio isnt high enough to activate the first bar.

THAT makes sense, now that you mention it!

Thanks!

 

[Baron_Falcon]

I would like to move my access terminal/crafting table. Is this possible without losing anything, and do I need a tool to do this? Thanks

 

[gusmahler]

I would like to move my access terminal/crafting table. Is this possible without losing anything, and do I need a tool to do this? Thanks

You can use a pickaxe to move the access terminal. You won't lose anything because everything is actually stored in the disks.