FTB Infinity Evolved -- Limiting Automated Farm-Based Resource Storage With AE2?

[Brotuulaan]

What's a good method for maintaining a general amount of a resource in your system when the material is dependent on a farm you don't want running all the time?

I'm in the process of automating IC2 machines with my AE2 system, and rubber is one of those materials that fill that role. I'm thinking maybe set up a rubber tree farm that's shut off when local storage is full (whether IC2 or MFR trees are used), then set up an interface with my AE2 system to maintain a stack or two of each rubber, then use a processing pattern and an enderchest system to retrieve materials from that farm to make said rubber whenever either rubber store falls below the threshold in my system.

My thought is my processing pattern would send some item to the farm via an enderchest, unlocking local storage to send a preset number of items back home along with the original item. Once that cycle completed, the farm would run until it refilled its storage and then shut off again. In the meantime, my system could do whatever it needed with the resources it pulled in from the farm storage.

 

[triggerfinger12]

Are there storage drawers in IE? If so, does that version have the redstone upgrade? If yes to both then you should be able to have the drawer output a signal when the drawer is full. Another good way to do this is a level emitter set to however much rubber you want to have on hand. Both ways should work equally well but the level emitter one is a tad simpler. (I like the drawer idea better, though, as you can keep some pesky items from taking up disk space)

 

[Brotuulaan]

Yes, IE has storage drawers. The farm shutoff shouldn't be the hard part, but I'm trying to decide on the retrieval/capping method. I'm thinking this will be best as far as making sure my system keeps enough on hand but doesn't stuff itself with zillions of bits of rubber.

Do you have any thoughts as to the AE2 resource limiting idea above? Maybe have some alternatives that could be better? This is the first time I've used AE2, so I've been learning the ropes on this play-through and still have a lot I don't know about optimizing my systems for interacting with the outside world.

 

[Brotuulaan]

I might have settled on a simple setup, using MFR rubber trees and an EnderIO Farming Station for the farm.

Spoiler: Item Throttler

I had a couple of dimensional transceivers in a chest that I wasn't using, so I decided I'd use them for power. Then I remembered they transmit items as well, so I decided maybe they could bypass the ender chests. So that meant my limiting storage wouldn't be local to the farm but in my base.

The transceiver has a thermal dynamics duct pulling items out of it with a servo set to high redstone signal. It's dumping into a skystone chest (also sitting in my storage, so why not?), which has an import bus on it for my ME system. So that's the pipeline in.

The controls are being run by my ME system with a redstone emitter. Since my storage buffer is in my base instead of at the farm, I have to control it here, so I'm throttling it at my transceiver. The emitter is set to activate the itemduct whenever one of the types of rubber falls below 40 for now. I'll probably up that later. My system is set to automatically process the incoming MFR tree products (raw rubber, wood, and saplings), but since they take a little while to process, the system imports a fair number before the minimum rubber storage is hit. Once it is, the emitter is turned off again and the transceiver locks up. Since the transceivers each will store one stack of each item type and the farming station will store six stacks of anything, that means most of that (up to 12 stacks of items—3 per transceiver and 6 in the farming station) will probably make it through before the emitter turns off again.

I have an export bus on the transceiver to export stone axes, with a crafting card so they're only crafted as-needed. So the farming station stays supplied with axes, and it shuts off automatically when its output is full.

So it looks like this will keep me stocked on enough rubber to make anything (shy of some weirdly massive rubber demand down the road), and it'll turn on and off as storage levels fluctuate. It's also pretty small, taking up only the farming station and the transceiver buried beneath it at the farm, then the other transceiver, a chest, an itemduct, and some AE2 conduit/buses on the other end in my base.

I'll update this thread sometime soon to let you all know how it works out as I let it run, but I imagine it should work just fine as long as I don't need massive loads of rubber all at once.

 

[triggerfinger12]

That sounds like it should work! Keep me updated!

 

[Brotuulaan]

So having let it run for a long time now, it seems to work like a charm!

I did run into an issue of running out of rubber with a job today when I crafted a ton of IC2 circuits. I upped the minimum storage level to 150 to avoid that. I might end up doubling that if I find I'm doing huge orders down the line, but it's simple enough to raise the number in the emitter.

Seems like I have my permanent solution!