Routers: How the Heck?!

[B33TL3]

Hey guys!

I'm a new poster here, and I've been playing on a small private server with a few friends.
All of which think that Factorization is a pointless mod, excluding the barrels.

I'm trying to prove them wrong by making my ore processing system with Factorization, rather than the IC2 that most of them have done.

Except... In my quest to automate the entire process from dumping ores from a mining venture into a chest to Crystalizing and Slag Smelting... I'm not sure how the hell to use the fancy Routers that I've been seeing mentioned in all the "Automate your Factorization Setup here" threads. If anyone would be willing to help a guy out and explain just how Routers work, and possibly share some fully automated Factorization setups, I'd sure be grateful.

 

[SeniLiX]

 

[Whovian]

I'll agree with SeniLiX. Also let your friends get acquainted with the Pocket Crafting Table, Wrath Forge, Craftpacket system (a bit klunky, though,) and the rest of the mod. The goal of the mod seems amazing, though it's still in development.

EDIT: And Exo-suits. Since they are friggin' awesome.

 

[B33TL3]

Okay... after watching the spotlight, I can sort into barrels and chests and stuff...
Now I'm just curious as to how the heck would I get a Router to evenly distribute into a Crystalizer?

 

[Whovian]

One Crystallizer or a set of Crystallizers? If I remember correctly, Crystallizers automatically try to distribute inputs evenly between the different input inventory spots, so that won't be a problem. And it should evenly distribute them between sets of crystallizers anyway.

 

[B33TL3]

I just got out of a SSP Creative Test, and it the router would only put it into one slot, as if it had the Thoroughness upgrade... even though it didn't. :/

 

[Whovian]

This is unfortunate. I guess I'll have to learn a bit more about Crystallizer automation.

 

[Zjarek_S]

Since I started playing with factorization (due to the dire need of portable crafting in 1.3.2 ), I used it as main ore processing system. Overall this system has quite tiered character and is a lot more expensive than IC2/TE ones, but is a lot more fun to automate and gives 3 ingots from each ore and a lot of additional lead from silver.

Router by itself has a lot of possibilities, which can be further enhanced by upgrades. It basically interacts with every inventory placed next to it, or placed next to the inventory, that can interact with this router. There are 2 main modes, insertion and extraction. You can also specify if this action should affect anywhere in connected inventories, specified side of connected inventories or specified slot (for example in furnace 0 is input, 1 is fuel and 2 is output).

First step would be to process your ores in slag furnace, most important the silver ore to get lead, and you will need a lot of it. After you get 9 diamonds and 4 TNT it is time for grinder and power system, it won't hurt to add furnace heater to it. On this stage you can double all your ores except silver by just outputting gravel from grinder to slag furnace. Grinder also gets you quite good yield for silktouched ores, there is even tool with silktouch. Then there is tricky part, mixers. It got a lot easier now with emerald pipes, RP2 and TE, basically you can fill water buckets in dispensers, liquid transposers or RC water tanks and keep them constantly circulating to mixers. For easy automation of mixers you can use router to insert filled water buckets to for example slot 1 and gravel to slot 2.

Then I would go with semiautomatic crystallizers, i.e. with manual clean chunk input. As each operation of crystallizer takes 20 minutes, so you will need a lot of them, 20 would be good for a start. Theoretically each furnace heater can heat up 5 of them, but I usually put only 4 for easier automation and building. I'd advise to put a single router next to the crystallizers structure to extract items (from the top), because without it you would have to manually gather crystalline metals every 2 hours.

Of course modded minecraft (for me) is all about automation and I'm not playing it to run around feeding crystallizers, even if it is once per few hours. The best way to automate crystallizers for me is to use 5 routers, each set to a different input slot (one is reserved for acid), and distribute your incoming gravel using your automation system of choice. It is very pricey (30 routers to process all ores), in my latest world I went with frame machine which moved this 5 routers between different crystallization towers (pillar of furnace heaters surrounded by crystallizers, crystallizers connected by furnaces with filled fuel and output slot). I'm not sure it really was cheaper than additional 25 routers, but definitely fun.