Item transport questions

[Bigpak]

Alright, I have a couple questions on item transportation with pipes conveyor belts etc.

When the items go on the conveyor belts if they are on a conveyor belt for 5 minutes will the items despawn or does it keep them locked in the conveyor belts and they won't despawn? With buildcraft pipes if I have like 30 stacks of iron ore in a pipe at the time a server is shut down will they still be in the pipe when the server reboots and nothing will get lost?

I've been playing around with applied energistics lately and I've fallen in love with it, what is the best item transportation and storage method all around? I need one method atleast to keep things from not overflowing, but having it stocked constantly and flowing at a good rate. I've tried extra utilities transport pipes and I just don't like them for some things, and I have absolutely no clue how to use logistics pipes even though I have watched spotlights and tutorials, there just so confusing.

Thanks

 

[TheAbstractHippo]

If I recall correctly, items don't despawn on conveyor belts or in pipes.

 

[Larmonade]

As far as the "best" system, I'd say it depends on the job you're doing. I use AE for the bulk of my item transportation, but I also use a series of ender chests and buildcraft pipes (with gates and such) to handle things within specific "factories" - my apples and saplings into biofuel setup gets initial input from the ME network, but within the network I just use pipes and chests, especially (and necessarily) for the various liquids.

I used to have a fancy pipe-sorting system for my ore processing, but have since moved to the less space intensive ME network along with interfaces and such for that as well. Generally, ME works well for 90% of what I want to do, and some clever workaround a with other things give me the level of micro-managing that's appropriate for what I'm doing.

In short:
ME network for most things
Ender chests for when I want a physical "drop-off point" or stash in the chain of production (that can be accessed from anywhere)
Pipes mostly when dealing intra-system or with buildcraft/forestry stuff that's easier with it.

 

[casilleroatr]

I think conveyor belts used to have a problem with items despawning but I think that was fixed. An item will usually either have left the chunk boundary or entered an inventory in the space of 5 minutes, I would imagine, I think they won't be a problem. They do stop when powered with redstone though. I am pretty sure that items will despawn if they are on a stationary conveyor. It looks like they act as normal item entities then. I have never noticed a problem with buildcraft pipes and server shutdowns either and I use them extensively. We should both probably test it, although I expect that there are no problems with expected shutdowns and chunk unloading.

Larmonade has summed up the big item transport mods out there pretty well. AE does work for a lot of things but I personally find it overkill in most situations, especially given the limited size of export configs.

Overflow protection is all about anticipating throughput and building sufficient overflow protection. This in my opinion is AE's most useful feature, it has enormous storage. That means if you sink your pipe networks into it overflow is not a major issue.

Logistics pipes is my new best friend in my worlds and it also has a few in built overflow protections with the default route quicksort module combo. It is complicated though. I got into it with a lot of single player testing and determination. If you feel so inclined, set up a buildcraft pipe network and some chests and start messing around with chassis pipes with extractor and item sink modules to move stuff from A to B.