So i've been playing a lot of Agrarian Skies. Its a nice change from the regular tech mod hum drum, and I enjoy it. However, one problem i've always had with Thermal Expansion is the itemducts. I know you install a pneumatic servo in the pipe collar, and right click it with an empty hand to configure the sorting options. However, it seems so much more cryptic than the time-honored diamond pipe, which doesn't exist in this pack, and I am almost to the stage where i'm ready to begin automation. I know that if I don't soon learn how to use these pipes, i'm never going to get anywhere. Can someone please clarify the interface a bit for me? Images would be useful but not entirely necessary.
Thermal Expansion Itemducts
- Thread starter LunaticMiner
- Start date
one thing to remember is that you don't always need a servo to be able to pull from an inventory. a simple redstone signal and the duct set to export can already be used to extract with a duct.
installing a servo does allow you to configure the duct better. the configuration for extract and import state of the duct is pretty much the same
you start with the whitelist and blacklist function which is the exclamation button. there's a 3x3 inventory in the GUI where you can place in items.
setting the duct to whitelist will only allow the items you placed in the inventory to be allowed through that duct.
setting the duct to blacklist will allow any items to be allowed through that duct, except the item you placed in the inventory.
the button with the book is the dictionairy button. let's say you've several mods installed who all have their own copper.
if you want only copper, but from all the mods to go through that duct, you'd have to place every copper ingot from every mod into the inventory.
unless you use the dictionairy button. if you activate this button, it'll read the dictionairy tag from items.
with that you only need to place 1 type of copper ingot into the inventory for the duct to allow any copper ingot to go through.
you can find out if an item is in the dictionairy by hovering over that item, and look if it has a dictionairy name.
for copper it'd be something like "ingot.copper"
the other 2 buttons are meant for damaged items and enchanted items. I'm not entirely sure about these so I won't try to explain it as there's a good chance I'm wrong.
but basically with these 2 buttons, if you place a bow in the inventory, you can allow any damaged bow to go through the duct and any enchanted bow to go through
or only allow a bow with the exact same damage and enchant as the bow you placed in the inventory
I probably explained this pretty confusing so I'd suggest to look around for a tutorial/spotlight video on Thermal Expansion
there's plenty of them so I'd try to go with a tutorial/spotlight video of some well known youtubers
"ingotCopper", but yes. Let's also mention what the Ore dictionary is: its primary purpose is to help modders make recipes that work with any mod's metals, but in this case it serves as a good way to refer to a collection of (mostly) equivalent items. Mods register their items and blocks under any name they wish, and if other mods are around that have also registered items/blocks with the same name, ore dictionary-aware crafting recipes can use either one.
Note that, in this case, "crafting" can also refer to smelting, pulverizing, or just about any other operation turning one or more things into one or more other things. They're not always ore dictionary aware, but most of the time they tend to be.
That's actually mostly it. It's worth noting that NBT data is also used by just about everything that keeps other things inside (so, for instance, IC2 batteries use it, as do TE energy cells and flux capacitors, but also JABBA dollies, portable tanks, strongboxes, etc.). A good hint is that if something has behaviour that changes at different times, it's probably NBT-based. In a sorting system, it's rarely useful, but there are probably some corner cases.
NBT data is basically a free-form structured data store -- you can put just about anything into NBT, if you wish to do so. This means everyone uses it slightly differently, and a filter set to be NBT-aware will only let through (or stop) items that match the data exactly. This is most often used in some charging systems where you want to only pull out a battery-equivalent when it's completely charged: show the filter a completely charged version of the item, then set it to NBT matching. For most items that flow around a base, NBT is pretty much ignorable, as it should be empty.
Damage values are also known as meta ID values, and they're just the part after the : if you have NEI set to show you the item ID (e.g. vanilla orange wool has ID 35:1 -- the 35 is the actual block ID, and the :1 states that its damage value is 1. Most of the time you'll see this on tools that have durability (and so, you'd want to ignore damage on, say, a filter set to "put all bows, regardless of how damaged they are, into here"), but it is occasionally used for other purposes.
In particular, note that a lot of mods keep their number of block IDs (and, often, item IDs) down by giving their machines a single ID and using the damage value to distinguish them. TE itself does this, even. So theoretically, by ignoring damage values, you could have a filter that would accept any TE machine by just showing it one of them and setting the filter to ignore damage. It doesn't seem useful to do so, but you never know. So if you're filtering certus quartz dust, you'll want your filter to be damage-aware so that it doesn't allow nether quartz dust, fluix dust, or anything else that uses the same item ID with different damage values.
Good primer, @Yusunoha!
You could always install Buildcraft. IMO it wouldn't be cheaty, since itemducts do about the same things for about the same cost. Obviously you can't install mods if you're playing on someone else's server though (unless they do it too).
While true, that's an awfully big mod just to add some pipes. My other thought for the OP is that learning about item ducts now will serve you well as time goes by, as buildcraft becomes less relevant, and TE becomes more dominant as the 'core' mod for most mod packs.
Awfully big? BC is one of the smallest tech mods. Especially if you disable all the modules apart from transport and energy.