The Tips and Tricks for AE..

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Hydra

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Jul 29, 2019
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Meh, I don't think these kinds of micro-optimizations are that useful. I have a pretty huge base and currently my power-consumption is 390 units/tick (78 mj/t).

The only reason for me to use dark cable is to be able to go to a low-power mode. So if I somehow manage to lose all my power I can disconnect a cable and only my storage and a single crafting interface will use power.
 

Nebuchadnezzar

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Jul 29, 2019
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This is just the beginning, and the main idea is to actively think about how you setup your system =)
If you have a lever attatched to your crafting terminal, and shut it of when you are not crafting (since the crafting
at the current time must be done manually) you can save a up to a hundred EU, if your crafting block is large.

Will add more useful tips later, but I love the idea of using coperators to get an exact amount of items into your system!
 

Hydra

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Jul 29, 2019
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This is just the beginning, and the main idea is to actively think about how you setup your system =)
If you have a lever attatched to your crafting terminal, and shut it of when you are not crafting (since the crafting
at the current time must be done manually) you can save a up to a hundred EU, if your crafting block is large.

What's a few hundred EU if you're at the advanced stage of creating large AE networks?
 

OmegaJasam

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Jul 29, 2019
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The advantage of barrels is, you know that you can store 64 stacks of each item. With a 4k disk, other items may fill up the space leaving you short of space for 64 stacks of whatever.

Preformat it with the one item type. Though I'm not sure whats cheaper between a storage bus and a 4K disk of the top of my head. Though personally I would never use a disk for such large scale storage. Building material level storage gets barrel/ex-dem or Deep Storage unit just so it's not ever going into the system.
 

Hydra

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Jul 29, 2019
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Preformat it with the one item type. Though I'm not sure whats cheaper between a storage bus and a 4K disk of the top of my head. Though personally I would never use a disk for such large scale storage. Building material level storage gets barrel/ex-dem or Deep Storage unit just so it's not ever going into the system.

No DSU unfortunately but this is what I do:
0bJ6uBV.png

Cobble, dirt and gravel go straight from the input tesseract into these barrels. Excess gets voided. This way it's available for crafting in the AE system but never clogs up the storage disks.
 

bigtwisty

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Jul 29, 2019
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I've noticed something interesting about using storage buses with barrels: they don't care what side of the barrel they are on. I have a wall of barrels for farmed items (for count restriction) with storage buses on the back. They still store and retrieve items with no issues.

Oh, and I have a storage bus on an incinerator with a lower priority than the barrels, but a higher one than my disk array. This voids out any excess renewable items.
 

Nebuchadnezzar

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Jul 29, 2019
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Thank you forum for not enable me to write long messages, write in BB formating =) I spent two hours writing that post, before you decided to crash upon me.
I hate that all the forums are moving in the direction of easiness, and remove the advanced features...

EDIT: Heh, I found it, then was enable to restore some of the formating using notepad.

Also what is the deal with no longer than 10k character posts?

* Storage system *

Here are some ideas and tips for your storage system. In the previous section we looked at
how to save EU, and turn of parts that are not in use. This section here will not focus much on that,
there is no problems combing the ideas from this section with the previous, but the result can be quite convoluted. Instead I want to focus on the broad ideas, and leave the details to the reader.
First I want to say "DEATH TO ALL LEVEL EMITTERS", in most cases one does not need level emitters
and the amount that one uses can be cu drastically down. I am looking forward to CC integration, so one can completely remove the need for these.
Now the AE system is evolved around storage buses, and the ability to store items.. This means that one should go with the flow of the system and not oppose it. By shift clicking on a storage bus, you can change the priority of that bus. The highest number will be prioritized first.
The key idea is to have your entire storage system preformated, yes this will take some time, but it will be so much better once it is done. Do not have more than one item per disk. As this makes it much harder to controll a minimum amount of items. For every raw item, ore use barrels or preformated disks.
When filled with a single item, the storage drives can keep

Code:
===============================
Cell | Stacks | Items
===============================
1k - 127 - 8182
4k - 508 - 32512
16k - 2032 - 130048
64k - 8128 - 520192
===============================


For items created from the system either use preformated buses, or chest with buses.
The least amount of items you can store using buses is using a normal chest, with this you can store 27 stacks of a certain item.
Lets look at a small example for smelting iron

p9pBgsY.jpg

This is the smallest example I could come up with. The idea is that the lower barrel will first fill up with iron, once this is full it will use the storage bus attatched to the furnace.
The lower import bus is used to fill the furnace with coal. Now one could easily have a gate at the back to only import coal when needed.
This system is far from optimal, and the biggest flaw is that is has no overflow. Imagine two stacks of iron coming into the system. But the furnace can only keep one stack! "A simple" solution is to add more furnaces
but alas this is expensive, time consuming and shortsighted. Below is one solution

GVOi0Pz.jpg

Now I do not really like this solution but it works. The configuration for the furnaces are shown below
The key here is that the system now has a overflow system, the sand and iron ingots have obtained their own storage cells.
There is an additional cell for the rich slag. The lowest router is set to export items, with the bandwidth upgrade.
The Router in the middle is set to import sand into the furnaces.
Whilst the top router insert ores into the furnaces. Now bear in mind this setup can easily be configured to export any type of ores.
YOU do not need any level emitters, or have a furnace for each type of ore.
The only thing you need to do is to set the priority of the bus below the chest. This bus can contain 54 items..
Well more than enough, for extra security I would recommend upgrading the chest.
The problems with the system below is that it is somewhat slow, and the bottleneck is the wooden transport pipe.
This can be fixed by replacing it with a gate system, a timer and a filter. But this I leave as an exercise for the reader ;)
The system above is good for a small setup, but that you can not turn it of is nagging me.. Below is my overengineered example... The system below contains of a tad less than 150 furnaces almost equally distributed.
The system also shuts all of its routers, buses and so forth and uses close to zero EU when iddle.
It uses two import buses when IDLE. In one minute it can cook a fuck-ton of ores. (each induction smelter uses 2 seconds on each ore).
iIOerSw.jpg


FJD9MDO.jpg
Yeah, I prefer enderchests over item tesseracts. But there are no real reason for using them in this system.
 

PhilHibbs

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Jan 15, 2013
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The key idea is to have your entire storage system preformated, yes this will take some time, but it will be so much better once it is done. Do not have more than one item per disk. As this makes it much harder to controll a minimum amount of items. For every raw item, ore use barrels or preformated disks.
I must have five hundred different items, so this means I need five hundred disks?
 

AlanEsh

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Jul 29, 2019
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I must have five hundred different items, so this means I need five hundred disks?
I'd take that with a grain of salt. I have several disks that contain odds and ends -- stuff I simply won't be storing more than a few stacks of; multiple collections of these items go on 1k disks in my setup.
 

DakkonB

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yeah I totally disagree. If you're putting all your disks in one or more ME Drives and don't plan on manually moving disks around, there's really little need to preformat disks. AE manages things pretty well on its own. It will attempt to store an item in an already existing disk that is already using that item type before it attempts to consume another item type on a different disk.

If you're accessing your items via an ME Access Terminal, it honestly doesn't matter if you have Iron Ingots spread across multiple disks, the AE system doesn't care it will show you the total count correctly.

In my opinion the only reason to preformat disks is if you for some reason still feel the need to put your disks into ME Chests and use them solely to access your items. Then you wouldn't want multiple items spread across multiple chests. But keep in mind that won't happen anyway unless one of two things happen. Either you screw up and put the same item type in different chests, or the chest that an item type is in runs out of space in which case it will automatically place it into a different disk/chest. As soon as a new item enters your system, place all of that item into a single ME Chest and it will forever continue to try to go into that same chest as long as the disk has space.
 

Nebuchadnezzar

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Jul 29, 2019
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I think I stated it somewhere in the posts, to clearify. Personally I use storage cells and barrels purely for single items.
For items I will never have more than a stack or two of I strictly use chests (vanilla, iron, gold, diamond) with gates, and storage
buses. Leftovers are sent to their respective places, furnaces, deep storage units, recyclers and lastly lava.

The reason why you would want to preformat the storage, is to be able to send items where they need to go without ever using level emitters. The idea of having a single chest with a storage bus that can store and process all your ores, gold, iron, silver, tin, copper etc is wonderful. Instead of having a bunch of level emitters, export buses.
With the additional bonus of being able to use more than one smelter/furnace per item.
 

Malkuth

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Jul 29, 2019
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This is just an opinion of mine... And it makes sense in my situation.. But since my whole base is run off Steam... Including EU to a point.. Shutting down the AE system is moot.. Since Even If I shut it down.. The steam boilers are still running 100% and still wasting the same amount of power anyway. :)
 

DakkonB

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Jul 29, 2019
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You don't need a chest at all to process all of your ores. The ores can simply be imported into your AE network, and then they get stored either onto a non-preformatted disk, or you could set up a preformatted disk with all of the ore types if you wanted. But that part doesn't matter too much since most likely the ore will be immediately exported and sent to be processed.

To do automatic ore processing I don't use level emitters, and already use multiple smelter/furnaces per item.

Maybe I'm not understanding how you're using level emitters... but I have a row of three pulverizers, which output into three powered furnaces, which output into three ME Interfaces. On the bottom of the three pulverizers are three ME Export Buses that contain all the ore types. As ore enters my AE network, if there is room in a pulverizer the ore is automatically sent there. Once the ingots exit the powered furnace they are automatically imported into my network via the ME Interface block.

The only place I use a level emitter is to turn off my recyclers once I reach a certain amount of scrap. I don't void or burn anything, I just have some Factorization barrels with extra dimensional storage upgrades and ME Storage Buses on them to store dirt, cobblestone, and gravel.
 
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Exasperation

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Jul 29, 2019
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Preformat it with the one item type. Though I'm not sure whats cheaper between a storage bus and a 4K disk of the top of my head. Though personally I would never use a disk for such large scale storage. Building material level storage gets barrel/ex-dem or Deep Storage unit just so it's not ever going into the system.
An ME Drive with 10 1k cells, each preformatted to hold a specific item, will cost 6 energy per tick and hold 127 stacks of each item.
This is the same energy cost as 6 storage buses, and holds about as much as 2 barrels of each item.
Replace the 1k cells with 4k cells, and the energy cost goes up to 11 energy per tick. The storage increases to 508 stacks per item, equivalent to ~1/2 an extra-dimensional barrel of each item, or about 8 barrels per item.
Replace them with 16k cells, and the energy cost goes up to 16 energy per tick. The storage increases to 2032 stacks per item, equivalent to ~2 ED barrels per item.
Replace them with 64k cells, and the energy cost goes up to 21 energy per tick. The storage increases to 8128 stacks per item, equivalent to ~8 ED barrels per item, or ~1/3845th of a DSU, or ~1/4128th of a GregTech Quantum Chest.

For energy efficiency per stack stored (assuming you actually need that much storage space), it goes:
QC > DSU > 64k > 16k > EDB > 4k > 1k > Barrel

Of course, if you really need that much storage space and are worried about keeping energy costs down, you can just stick a single storage bus on a black hole chest and call it a day.
 
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Someguy

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Jul 29, 2019
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They also are much less expensive for client rendering.

Can you explain this further, please? I'm curious as to (a) why a barrel would require more client-side rendering than a DSU, and (b) how you know this. Feel free to get as technical as you like, I'm not a Java guy (which you are, if I remember correctly), but I do have some coding experience.
 

Mash

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Jul 29, 2019
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Just a little bit of information for people that don't know and like to calculate approximately how much storage these disks have...

8 items = 1 byte of storage except when a new slot is filled with a new type of item.

Filling up free slots with an additional item on the disk will use up an increased amount of space, and filling up all 63 slots with 1 item will take up approximately 50 percent of the disk's storage space. Since that's a bit hard to calculate, I generally just divide the amount of bytes in half when calculating item space, to account for the possibility that I fill up every single slot.

For example, a 64k disk.

64/2 = 32. 32,000 * 8 = 256,000 items. That's the smallest amount of space that you can have on a 64k disk. Unless you really cram items into your disks, you're generally going to have more.
 

DoctorOr

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Jul 29, 2019
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Can you explain this further, please? I'm curious as to (a) why a barrel would require more client-side rendering than a DSU, and (b) how you know this. Feel free to get as technical as you like, I'm not a Java guy (which you are, if I remember correctly), but I do have some coding experience.

The DSU doesn't display the internal item.
 

Someguy

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Jul 29, 2019
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The DSU doesn't display the internal item.

Oh... well that's simple enough, isn't it? :)

I'm still curious though, does a simple "icon" of the internal item really make that much difference? I guess it requires updating while DSU's require none, so... hmm.