Right, but suppose there is a recipe that requires 3 of item A to be put into a specific machine. The system only has one of item A on hand but can craft more of them, it would put the first item A into the machine and put the others in once they finish crafting. The question is how to make it wait until all three of item A are available before it puts them in the machine.
This thread is getting very messy as people are criss cross talking about AE1 and AE2 functionalities. What you are quoting was about AE2 I believe. And think you are talking about AE1.
Set the recipe to only put the 3 items in as in it takes three of these to make 3 of this instead of a 1 to 1 ratio that most people use. Such as 4 wood makes 16 planks. But you only have 3 wood. Then it shouldnt make any planks until there is more wood instead of the normal 1 wood makes 4 planks. That should work i think.
This doesnt really make much sense. We are talking about the problem with putting a pattern with 3xA=B into a ME interface. This will in AE1 results in the interface always outputting the item A as they become individually available, not waiting until 3 are available.
Example: Making Empty Cells with 1.6 Gregtech takes 2x Tin Plates in a Plate Bender. The ME interface on the Plate Bender will constantly export single plates as they get made, but if the exporting of plates get "out of sync" due to cancelling crafting jobs, closing/restarting world, breaking ME cables or whatever, then the machine is essentially blocked off from any other crafting job by the single tin plate left in the machine.
You cant make multiples of any crafting recipes to avoid this. Only a GT Advanced Regulator helps in this case(keeps the plates out of the machine until there is 2 of them). Only works on recipes with multiples of the same kind of items however.
The original problem lies in that AE1 ME Interfaces will always export crafting job recipe ingredients as they become available. And this wreaks havoc in many multislot machines/multiitems recipes. The very worst example I have seen is crafting the top tier EnderIO metal(1.6):
Automating a single Alloy Smelter to smelt the EIO metals and then ordering one of the Vibrant?(the green ones) Ingots results only in the following: An Enderpearl is exported into the Alloy Smelter, effectively blocking the smelter from being used to smelt the Energetic Alloy that goes together with the Ender Pearl /facepalm. If you want to automate this, then Vibrant Ingots have to have their very own Smelter...