"Ever-Full Pouch System"

[SeanWcom]

So I watched a video last night that inspired me. The video is linked below, but if you don't want to watch it, here's the general idea. You have a sorting system setup and working great. Now you also have an ender pouch tied to the sorting system, cool. But you have a second ender pouch that has a ton of frequently used materials (iron ingots, wood, whatever). As you take stuff out of that ender pouch, it is automatically refilled from your sorted inventory system. The general idea being that you can be anywhere and have access to just about anything you might need.

Here's the video showing how Nonsanity did it in Tekkit (classic I presume):

So I immediately sat down to do this on my own in a creative world (using the Direwolf20 pack) and found out that the person in the video is using Retrievulators from the TubeStuff mod (which we don't have in our pack). Since that's not available I tried to figure out a better way. The only thing I was able to come up with uses Managers, but that seems overly complex and expensive to implement. The regulator *looks* similar to the retrievulator, but I can't seem to figure out the regulator.

So - has anyone ever done an auto-restocking chest that can provide some tips?

 

[Korenn]

Sure. Here you go: http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/automated-crafting-in-mindcrack-pack-tutorial.9840/

 

[SeanWcom]

Golems are a good idea! I haven't gotten that far in my Thaumcraft research yet, but I'll keep it in mind. The first half of your video highlights why I'm hoping to stay away from Managers. They are cool, but like you said in your video, they are finicky. Set one thing the wrong way and you get items flying everywhere.

 

[Abdiel]

...so, like a manager connected to an enderchest?

This is one of the very few scenarios where managers are actually useful and likely the simplest solution: you want to keep an inventory stocked with X of item A, Y of item B, Z of item C, and so on; and the items may come from various supplier inventories.

 

[SeanWcom]

Yeah, that's what I was able to get working in creative mode, but was hoping for something a bit simpler. From what I could figure out a manager could only pull things out of chests managed by another manager. For a small sorting system, this wouldn't be a big deal... but when you start talking about 10+ chests, each with a manager on it, it gets tedious.

The magic of the "Retrievulator" in the TubeStuff mod is that it controls a retriever which means you don't have to have anything on each chest in your sorting system. Just the retriever and retrievulator next to your ender chest. The interface for the retrievulator is almost identical to the Regulator, so I was hoping there was some magic to be done with that.

No worries if not, but I'm still relatively new to the modpack, so I thought I'd ask.

 

[Abdiel]

Perhaps it is possible to set something like that up, but it wouldn't be anywhere as simple as hooking up a bunch of managers.

The main advantage of a retrievulator is that it can intelligently request any of the items being stocked that are needed at the moment. With a retriever, you always request the entire inventory, or nothing. Which leaves you with two choices: First, having a retriever for every item you want to stock, and somehow intelligently (most likely using computers) pulsing the ones you need. Moreover, for a fully working system, you have to somehow deal with running out of a resource, which means periodically pulsing the retrievers if an item doesn't arrive in time. Or second choice, having a retriever always retrieve *all* the items being stocked, throw them all into a regulator, and send whatever didn't fit back into storage - which will likely be all but one item stacks requested. This adds a huge and completely unnecessary strain on your tube network (and your server).