Request Item Conduits and Apiaries

[WindRider739]

Hey, folks. Got a small issue I haven't been able to figure out, and this board has been fantastic at helping me so far. I'm trying to rig up a series of Apiaries to automate my bee breeding. While I can totally use transport pipes and all that, I'd really rather use Ender IO if at all possible. I figured it would be as simple as Extract all from the top, input filtered princesses and drones on the back, feed everything else into a chest.

I was wrong, however. My issue is that while I can funnel specific drones back into my apiary, I cannot funnel specific princesses unless I remove the filter altogether (as far as I can tell). Does anyone know what to do about this? I really like how compact you can make things with ender io, which is why I'm going this route. It also cuts back on my frame lag a little as compared to pipes. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[epidemia78]

Dont know much about bees but seems to me making a dedicated ME system to deal with your bees would be a good way to go about it. Storage busses can be used in place of export busses in most applications aside from autocrafting and have the bonus of a lot more slots for filtering items.

 

[rhn]

The problem I think is that your princess will never be exactly the same again. If nothing else then its "life cycle" counter would have increased.

What I do is automate each alveary/apiary so it is isolated and will simply stuff whatever comes out of it back into it. I have so far done this with Itemducts, but EnderIO conduits will do as well. I just "program" them with a pair of Rocky bees and set them to not care whatever kind of bee it is.
Then whatever doesn't fit(drones because the stack is full) is deposited into a ME subnetwork along with the produce.

 

[WindRider739]

That's unfortunate. Do you think using an isolated ME system, I would be able to use Fuzzies to cycle the bees back in? I plan on having 40 or so apiaries / alvearies going. If I put a fuzzy export down and have it pull for instance my super Majestic bees with the filter, that it will also pull like my Noble bees?

 

[rhn]

That's unfortunate. Do you think using an isolated ME system, I would be able to use Fuzzies to cycle the bees back in? I plan on having 40 or so apiaries / alvearies going. If I put a fuzzy export down and have it pull for instance my super Majestic bees with the filter, that it will also pull like my Noble bees?

You do NOT want to use a Fuzzy bus to insert bees as it would push ANY bee into the apiary. You would want to use Precise if anything.

But I simply don't understand why you want your preciously bred bees into a big pool and jumble them around with all the others, thereby risking getting them lost somehow. You are making it MUCH more difficult on your self. How will you automate destroying excess drones without risking destroying the ones you need to breed with in the apiaries?

Isolate each Apiary! Make it so that the only bees that gets inserted back into the apiary is the ones that came out of it. And only then do the leftovers get put into the big system with no way of ever coming back.

This is how I do it using Itemducts(old 1.6.4 pics, but it is the method that counts):

Note that I am using the length of the path to make sure that inserting drones into the apiary is the priority over the Interface and the "Dense" mode to make sure that drones from one apiary does not back up into another apiary.

 

[epidemia78]

Stop making bees look fun, rhn.

 

[mathchamp]

Using Ender IO makes sorting a bit tougher since you can't sort based on distance. What I would do is:

• Attach two item conduits to each Apiary. One item conduit from each Apiary should all connect together as one network, while the other item conduit from each Apiary should be isolated and connect to nothing except that Apiary.
• Set the isolated conduit's connection to in/out, self feed enabled, set extraction filter to whitelist Princesses, ignore metadata, ignore NBT. This will replace the princess at the end of each generation. Make sure both insertion and extraction are on the same channel.
• Set the other conduit's connection to in/out, self feed enabled, set extraction filter to blacklist Princesses, ignore metadata, ignore NBT (i.e. it will pull anything that is not a princess). Set insertion filter to whitelist the desired drone, use metadata, use NBT, sticky mode disabled. Again, make sure everything is on the same colour channel.
• Connect the conduit network to some chest, ME Interface, etc., and set to insert only with negative priority, no filter, and the same colour channel as the rest of the network.
• The result is that princess will automatically reload each generation, drones will also be reloaded if possible, while any overflow drones will go into the overflow chest, along with all the bee products.

Some weaknesses to this setup:

• If you want to change an Apiary's type of bee, you need to remember to update the insertion filter. Although, technically, you can clear the filter if you know that there will always be drones in the Apiary. However, if you are wrong, random drones will be loaded in and screw up your princess.
• If you have multiple apiaries on your line with identical bees, it is possible that all the drones will be loaded into one apiary and the others will run dry. This can be mitigated by setting the conduits to round-robin extraction and applying the speed downgrade so that the drones get doled out one at a time. You can also try setting those Apiaries to separate colour channels (but then you must connect multiple conduits to your overflow chest with all the channels).

If you have Gendustry, its Automation upgrade makes things much easier if you wish to use the Industrial Apiaries. It will automatically load the princesses and drones into the princess/drone slots so you don't have to worry about looping them back in from the output slots. In this case, you just set up a trivial network which extracts the output from all the Apiaries (which will contain products and overflow drones) and dumps them into your overflow chest, ME network, etc. Note that Industrial Apiaries need energy to function - you can run energy conduits in parallel with your item conduits and connect to an RF source to supply them with RF.

 

[Michael280]

I just use logistics pipes to automate a bee subnetwork. There's no reason to dump anything but the finished products into the main network.

 

[GreenZombie]

Using Ender IO makes sorting a bit tougher since you can't sort based on distance.

Why would the EIO priority system not solve this? Where Thermal Dynamics relies on pipe distances, EIO has settable priorities - allthough I did think that distance was a factor when picking between destinations with an equal priority. A high priority insertion rule with no filter, will prefer to install drones and princesses as they are the only things that are valid to insert, and everything else will end up being sent to the low priority inventory. Don't, of course, share a single EIO segment amongst multiple alvearies as EIO might insert drones into the wrong alveary.

To prevent problems on my hives I have bred my production bees to have 1x fertility so I don't have to deal with a growing number of drones. This allows me to use an unfiltered conduit that simply is told to extract from, and re-insert into, the alveary. This handles princesses and queens. And then a conduit that has whitelisted extraction rules, that only extracts the product and speciality. This conduit can be shared between multiple alvearies safely.

 

[rhn]

I just use logistics pipes to automate a bee subnetwork. There's no reason to dump anything but the finished products into the main network.

Problem with BC pipes (and I guess this applies to Logistic pipes too) is that they since 1.6.4 looses their content during chunk/server reloads. So over time you will loose your princesses. Else it is SUPER easy to just automate it with normal vanilla BC pipes. There would be absolutely no need to use Logistic pipes.

 

[mathchamp]

Why would the EIO priority system not solve this? Where Thermal Dynamics relies on pipe distances, EIO has settable priorities - allthough I did think that distance was a factor when picking between destinations with an equal priority. A high priority insertion rule with no filter, will prefer to install drones and princesses as they are the only things that are valid to insert, and everything else will end up being sent to the low priority inventory. Don't, of course, share a single EIO segment amongst multiple alvearies as EIO might insert drones into the wrong alveary.

To prevent problems on my hives I have bred my production bees to have 1x fertility so I don't have to deal with a growing number of drones. This allows me to use an unfiltered conduit that simply is told to extract from, and re-insert into, the alveary. This handles princesses and queens. And then a conduit that has whitelisted extraction rules, that only extracts the product and speciality. This conduit can be shared between multiple alvearies safely.

The advantage of the distance-based sorting on ducts is that, by using dense pipes, you can have each apiary/alveary see itself as the highest-priority destination, the chest as medium priority (one dense pipe), and other apiaries/alvearies as lowest priority (two dense pipes). Ender IO only has global priority for the entire channel.

Basically, you'd have a "trunk" which connects to the overflow chest, and a local network for each apiary that both extracts from the apiary and inserts into the apiary. Each network would be connected to the trunk by a single dense duct, so to reach the "wrong" apiary would require going through two dense ducts.

And yes, another solution is to breed in 1x fertility, have one conduit whitelist drones and princesses and self insert, and have the other one blacklist drones and princesses and have your product chest as the only destination.