Hah! Yea have never once messed with AE2. I have watched a couple tutorials but most a find are just either super boring /to slow and then others like way to fast. I always used refined storage. Have both in the pack I put together but this time i actually want to learn AE2 just so I myself can figure out on my own as to which i like the best. I have seen several debates on it and even started one myself but the only way I will ever truly know is to learn both fully and then make a informed decision for myself.
Right, OK, I can work with that!
you'll need some stuff before you can get started. In terms of vanilla resources, you'll want some nether quartz, redstone, iron, gold and diamonds, as well as a few basic things like glass.
In addition to this, you'll need some specific AE2 world gen things:
Ores:
Two ores, Certus Quartz ore and Charged Certus Quartz ore - the latter should have some blue sparkles to distinguish it, its much rarer. You'll want to take all the certus you find.
Meteorites:
If you explore the overworld, you'll find craters containing large balls of black stone, called sky stone. This sky stone can be smelted, and the smelted stone is used to make ME Controller blocks later on, so you'll want some of that, but the main thing you're looking for is the chest right near the centre of the meteorite. This is a sky stone chest, so will be difficult to tell from the surrounding sky stone. In it you'll find 1 or more "presses". Think of these as like a stamping die - you put it into a machine with some metal, and the machine presses that shape out of the metal you give it. In the case of AE2, the pressing machine is the Inscriber and here's the lowdown:
- There are 4 shapes you need to press (called Silicon, Logic, Engineering and Calculation) - the final products are "Printed _____" (for silicon) or "Printed ______ Circuit" for the other three.
- Each shape needs its own press, which means that you have to find at least one of each of the presses (so you will need to find multiple meteors)
- Each press has a material associated with it - Silicon, Gold, Diamond, and Pure Certus Quartz (more on that later)
After you've got the resources you need, you'll get onto crafting stuff:
Silicon is made by grinding certus quartz crystals into dust and smelting the dust; AE2 adds its own Quartz Grindstone to hand-grind the quartz if you need to; it can also be used to create fluix dust. Also note that finding meteorites can be made easier by crafting a Meteorite Compass, though this only points you to the nearest chunk a meteorite is in; also note that meteorites can occur underground.
The printed circuits you make are the first step towards making the final 3 types of processors that are used in almost all of AE2's various blocks. To make the final processors, you need to take one printed silicon, one redstone and one of the three printed circuits, and put that into an inscriber - that will press the three together into the corresponding processor. So you put in a Printed Logic Circuit with printed silicon and redstone, you get a Logic Processor. A logic processor is needed for the most basic of ME storage parts, so you'll be making a lot of those.
I mentioned fluix dust before; this is where we come on to the more complicated crafting mechanics in AE2. There are certain types of resources you need to craft. These are Fluix Crystals, Pure Fluix Crystals and Pure Certus Quartz Crystals. I'll deal with fluix crystals first:
To craft fluix crystals, you need to drop one
Charged Certus Quartz, one Nether Quartz and one redstone into a pool of water (this can be a single source block. Within a few seconds, you'll have Fluix Crystals. Yay! (as a side note, I would say on the automation side of things, anything that can pick up entities in a filtered manner, like Actually Additions' Ranged Collector, can help a lot).
Fluix crystals are very handy, and you need them to make the absolute first machine I'd recommend you make: the Charger. This can be attached to a power source or hand cranked with the same crank that you use for the Quartz Grindstone and can create Charged Certus Quartz from normal Certus Quartz. Once you've got that, you don't need to spend forever and a day trying to find the charged variant, as you can make it.
Now we have the Pure variants. These are crafted from 1 sand + the dust of what you want to make (which is generated in a 1:1 crystal to dust) - so 1 certus quartz crystal is ground into 1 certus quartz dust, one fluix crystal is ground into 1 fluix dust, and the same for nether quartz. Yes, that works for nether quartz too. This will make 2 seeds of the appropriate type. These crystal seeds need to be dropped into water and left to grow; at the standard rate, these take about
12 real-time hours to fully mature, and never despawn, so are worth getting started on
early. There are machines that can be used to speed this process up: Crystal Growth Accelerators; these need to be placed around the water source block you're using and connected to AE2 power. They use quite a lot of power, but are worth the investment.
You might have noticed that I said you get 2 seeds from one crystal. 2 for 1?! Great! In many recipes the pure variant can be used instead of the normal one, which is lovely, and economical, so it can be worth using.
BUT. You cannot grind the pure crystals into dust. So no getting infinite resources from nothing. As a side note, I believe the ME Controller MUST use pure fluix crystals.
I mentioned AE2 power earlier; while the charger I believe can take native RF power, your system is going to need AE2 power to work. You want an Energy Acceptor - this will take RF (also some others I think, don't quote me on this but I believe IC2, Mekanism and RotaryCraft) and convert it into AE2 power.
Once you've got some of these more advanced resources, you're basically ready to get started.
A key thing to remember is this: AE2 has channels. Think of these as data lines. Devices from AE2 take up channels; so an interface takes a channel, a terminal takes a channel, a drive takes a channel (note that a drive can hold a number of storage cells, and always takes 1 channel). Normal cables can carry up to 8 channels, so if you're setting up a small system, that's fine. A storage drive, some terminals, an interface/bus or two, you're ok. Anymore than that, and you need to have an ME Controller, which is a multiblock (rules about building one can be found
here). Each face of each block of the controller that can be accessed can support up to 32 channels (you need Dense Cable to carry that many though). So you could have a dense cable sticking out one side, going to all your autocrafting blocks (which I won't get onto at the mo), and another sticking out another side going to your terminals and storage, and so on.
You can't have more than one controller multiblock on a network. They don't explode like the RS ones do, they just won't work
Is that a helpful start?
