Help With Applied Energistics
- Thread starter plzent3r
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Watch Direwolf's spotlight. It goes through everything you need to know. Just a warning, the spotlight is 1 hr long.
In simple terms, what he said.
First, get AE quartz. A lot of it. A stack at least to start with.
Make an ME interface, an ME chest (or drive bay), and a controller. Hook the controller up to a power source and ignore it unless you're having issues.
Melt some quartz dust into silicon and make some of the basic processors. Depending on your tech level, the assembly table is the better method. Just takes time.
Using those processors and some quartz, you'll want to make storage cells and turn those into drives. 1 storage cell for the low end drive (4 quartz), 3 for the med-low (12 quartz), 9 for the 16k (36 quartz), and 27 for the 64k drive (112 quartz, I think). Then just start putting things in the chest or terminal. instant storage
First, get AE quartz. A lot of it. A stack at least to start with.
Make an ME interface, an ME chest (or drive bay), and a controller. Hook the controller up to a power source and ignore it unless you're having issues.
Melt some quartz dust into silicon and make some of the basic processors. Depending on your tech level, the assembly table is the better method. Just takes time.
Using those processors and some quartz, you'll want to make storage cells and turn those into drives. 1 storage cell for the low end drive (4 quartz), 3 for the med-low (12 quartz), 9 for the 16k (36 quartz), and 27 for the 64k drive (112 quartz, I think). Then just start putting things in the chest or terminal. instant storage
I keep beating the drum on this: AE is easily the most expensive and awkward way to handle the output of your quarry. Use traditional ore processing pipelines and put the results into AE. AE does all sorts of amazing things and you can have it make arbitrarily complex crafting loops. It's just that for high volume inputs that have relatively low rates you pay a much higher energy cost rather than just putting everything in a chest then importing it (you pay the stack import cost even for single blocks in stack mode, but in single import mode you can fall behind).
Don't agree there. I use AE to feed ore into my pulverizers and the resulting dusts into my furnaces. I also use it to process raw materials from my bees and farms into the stuff I need, and it is used to feed charcoal to my boilers. It works very well in that regard and is much more compact than the same setup with RP sorters.
I do however void all cobble, dirt, gravel and Xycraft quartz right at the quarry.
AE isn't an early-game system though; it's more for when you already have more or less unlimited power since it has rather high drawbacks in setup costs and power consumption.
Any sort of sorting and providing? AE can do that well. What it's annoyed by is dribbling in hundreds of blocks you then subsequetly bamf out to be destroyed. This is why I say it's not a great funnel for your quarry. Void your cobble, dirt and gravel first. And while you're at it there's no reason not to just do your ore processing; buildcraft will do this cheaper and it's trivial to make it never overflow (remember BC will never voluntarily choose a route that causes a spill, and you can make an infinite ring buffer and so long as you don't have infinite input outpacing your output, you're good). AE can fill up and cells are expensive.
At the end of the day, you can do it either way. AE is just the most expensive way to do it, both in terms of material and power.
My new AE input system I'm building will use a whole different network for quarry inputs just to avoid having all my types eaten up, but we use Underground Biomes so our problem is exacerbated.
I want to hook my AE inventory up to my XZ fabricator does any one know how to pull off this small feat?
Curious about the power usage. I tested stack mode in two networks with full stacks vs 1 item in each stack. I used a single wooden chest full and the network that only had 1 item stacks used 1000 less EU.
Tried again - one side in stack mode and one side in single item mode. Both chest filled with 27 single items. Nearly identically usage ~40 EU difference (manually disconnecting the power from a bat box, so difference is probably my delay between removing power).
My conclusion then is the mode does not cost you anything extra.
Your advice on voiding the bulk materials before paying the import cost is good, but the import/export mode stack vs single item has no affect on the energy used.
Huh. Maybe this has been changed in since my last test? It was before the spotlight. Perhaps the stack cost in stack mode was a bug! If so, that's good.
As others have said, make sure you have plenty of Quartz and plenty of redstone before considering a large AE network.
I've burned through several stacks of redstone just getting one ME Drive rack configured. Almost every step of making a disk takes 2-4 redstone, and ME cable takes 2 redstone per cable.
I've burned through several stacks of redstone just getting one ME Drive rack configured. Almost every step of making a disk takes 2-4 redstone, and ME cable takes 2 redstone per cable.
No matter which mode you use you pay the "same" cost in power. That being moving 1 item uses 1 power. Moving a full 64 stack takes 64 power. The cost is paid at the time it moves. If you try to move a stack of 64 and only have 20 excess power, the system only moved 20 at a time.
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You'll want to make an ME Interface and plop the fabricator down right next to it. Depending on what you want to do with it, I highly recommend having a dark cable and level emitter handy so you can limit the input.
Anyway, put your design in the fabricator, then in the interface, you'll want to tell it to hold however many of each item your recipe needs.
Put an import bus on the side of the fabricator, hooked up to the system somewhere, and it will pull the inventory back in (or you can pipe it back into your sorting chest using other mods..whatever works for you). Unless you are doing this to condense things into storage blocks, you'll want to put a dark cable in between the interface and the rest of the system (make sure it's the only path in), and a level emitter pointing to the dark cable set to stop when # items is in the system. Item transport is so much faster than the redstone signal, though, that you'll probably end up with 8 or so extra
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Yeah, true. And if you go for the larger drives, you'll need glowstone dust and diamonds...4 glowstone and 1 diamond for a 16k drive (I think), and 12 and 3 for a 64 (again, I think)
Came across the AE dev notes for the 1.5 release:
http://ae-mod.info/dev/
And looks like buses will draw more constant power depending on the mode they are in (single vs stacked):
"Buses using Stack Mode now consume more power."
Seems like a pretty balanced way to do it -- depending on how big the difference is... like 2 Energy a tick in single mode and 3-4 in stack mode. And then you still pay per item...
http://ae-mod.info/dev/
And looks like buses will draw more constant power depending on the mode they are in (single vs stacked):
"Buses using Stack Mode now consume more power."
Seems like a pretty balanced way to do it -- depending on how big the difference is... like 2 Energy a tick in single mode and 3-4 in stack mode. And then you still pay per item...
You'll want to make an ME Interface and plop the fabricator down right next to it. Depending on what you want to do with it, I highly recommend having a dark cable and level emitter handy so you can limit the input.
Anyway, put your design in the fabricator, then in the interface, you'll want to tell it to hold however many of each item your recipe needs.
Put an import bus on the side of the fabricator, hooked up to the system somewhere, and it will pull the inventory back in (or you can pipe it back into your sorting chest using other mods..whatever works for you). Unless you are doing this to condense things into storage blocks, you'll want to put a dark cable in between the interface and the rest of the system (make sure it's the only path in), and a level emitter pointing to the dark cable set to stop when # items is in the system. Item transport is so much faster than the redstone signal, though, that you'll probably end up with 8 or so extra
Yeah, true. And if you go for the larger drives, you'll need glowstone dust and diamonds...4 glowstone and 1 diamond for a 16k drive (I think), and 12 and 3 for a 64 (again, I think)
Using a fabircator as an autocrafter is not complex. What I think is complex is trying to come up with a clever way to have a large sum of your AE store available to a crafter with flexible inputs. I'm not sure ME chests count as "inventory" for the Fabricator.
You can have up to a stack of 8 item types available to the fabricator using an ME interface (block). Stick an interface on each side of the fabricator and you could use 5 sides saving the last one for export. Items refill the interface instantly it appears -- not sure if there is an energy cost.
You'll want to make an ME Interface and plop the fabricator down right next to it. Depending on what you want to do with it, I highly recommend having a dark cable and level emitter handy so you can limit the input.
Anyway, put your design in the fabricator, then in the interface, you'll want to tell it to hold however many of each item your recipe needs.
Put an import bus on the side of the fabricator, hooked up to the system somewhere, and it will pull the inventory back in (or you can pipe it back into your sorting chest using other mods..whatever works for you). Unless you are doing this to condense things into storage blocks, you'll want to put a dark cable in between the interface and the rest of the system (make sure it's the only path in), and a level emitter pointing to the dark cable set to stop when # items is in the system. Item transport is so much faster than the redstone signal, though, that you'll probably end up with 8 or so extra
Yeah, true. And if you go for the larger drives, you'll need glowstone dust and diamonds...4 glowstone and 1 diamond for a 16k drive (I think), and 12 and 3 for a 64 (again, I think)
why not just point the level emitter at the fabricator? this way the fab might receive extra input, but it's disabled and won't use the input, although there might be a bit of an issue extracting that extra input. maybe use the level emitter to also turn on another import bus to import the extra items?
inexperienced gamer - 4 weeks into gregtech
My thoughts on all the above
1 - ME systems are amazing - I love them, the storage is awesome.
2 - They are cheap to run if you are just storing bits and bobs in them. as your network expands they can get very expensive so seriously consider what your power supply is like. eg mine is running at 50eu/t at the moment but thats fine as I have average 5000eu/t between my panels and boilers
3 - agree on the quarry completely - I void dirt/gravel xy etc at the quarry, saves power and sorting later on also if you have a quarry on high power (100mj tesseract in my case) then the ender chest cannot cope with all the input
4 - auto fab above is bang on - interface to fab to import bus
5 - if you use a level emitter on the bottom on the fab table you an auto fab on demand, I am using for compost and previously humus, works perfectly
6 - deep storage is cheap to make and also awesome - bottomless chest, use export bus to fill then replace with storage bus for maintenance (500K charcoal at the mo, disks are expensive)
todo list - there is an awesome looking full auto craft system available but I haven't gotten that far yet
My thoughts on all the above
1 - ME systems are amazing - I love them, the storage is awesome.
2 - They are cheap to run if you are just storing bits and bobs in them. as your network expands they can get very expensive so seriously consider what your power supply is like. eg mine is running at 50eu/t at the moment but thats fine as I have average 5000eu/t between my panels and boilers
3 - agree on the quarry completely - I void dirt/gravel xy etc at the quarry, saves power and sorting later on also if you have a quarry on high power (100mj tesseract in my case) then the ender chest cannot cope with all the input
4 - auto fab above is bang on - interface to fab to import bus
5 - if you use a level emitter on the bottom on the fab table you an auto fab on demand, I am using for compost and previously humus, works perfectly
6 - deep storage is cheap to make and also awesome - bottomless chest, use export bus to fill then replace with storage bus for maintenance (500K charcoal at the mo, disks are expensive)
todo list - there is an awesome looking full auto craft system available but I haven't gotten that far yet