Moron’s Guide to Managing Mechanical Monstrosities

At every point in which people build their favorite factories, there arises always the question of ‘how do I manage this?’ Applied Energistics 2 has the perfect answer for this question.

The Nomifactory questbook covers how to obtain most of these extremely useful devices. In the event that you are still clueless, JEI can help you. This guide is intended to acquaint you with the uses of these machines.

Simple Applied Energistics 2 storage is already explained well by the questbook. What I am going to introduce to those who are unfamiliar is the methodology of automated crafting using Applied Energistics. This mod adds much more than a big chest!

Step one to proper automation is the Interface. The Interface has multiple extremely important functions. Function one is the ability to serve as an inventory to passively stock up to 9 unique item stacks at once, and can be configured to supply different amounts of those items as well; function two is that the Interface can serve as a place to push outputs to port them into the AE network; and function three is automated active-order crafting; this will require a pattern terminal to be elaborated on in the next paragraph.

The ME Pattern Terminal is a terminal where you encode Patterns. The Patterns can be encoded to either serve as a Processing (machine) recipe, or a Crafting (Molecular Assembler) recipe. More on the Assembler later; the Processing recipes will be what you use to do things with machines. For Processing recipes, when the item specified by the recipe is ordered, the Interface will automatically push the ingredients into all adjacent inventories, but it will fill each inventory completely before moving onto the next one. This behavior also means that you can use a chest to receive the ingredients to be crafted with, and distribute it with non-AE2 methods. It registers the recipe as complete if the item enters the ME system via item routing to, say, an Interface.

Oh, and before I forget about what I said earlier, the Molecular Assembler is your active auto-crafter. Simply put, plop one down, stick an Interface next to it, put patterns in the Interface, stick some Acceleration Cards in the Assembler, and there you go, it crafts things for you. Simple enough.

Aaaaand I forgot about a really big component of this whole deal: CPUs. Crafting Storages and Co-Processing Units are what actually allow you to auto-craft in the first place. They form multiblocks that are valid for as long as they are a complete rectangular prism form; i.e. a 3x3x3 cube or a 2x2x1 little tower. Each Co-Processing Unit allows for one concurrent task of pushing items through an interface or crafting something with the Molecular Assembler. Additionally, byte costs are calculated per crafting job, necessitating the construction of Crafting Storages in order to pay this cost in bytes.

Now, Import and Export Busses are like Interfaces, but basically bad. They’re laggy, slow to transport items, and don’t have the patterning functions. Not worth using in the context of Nomifactory, but in other packs they’re fine… just use them sparingly. If you read this guide and complain that your base is lagging to Hell because you have 400 I/O Busses, I will personally roast your heart on a spit and eat it.

Now, the Interface is the bread and butter of Applied Energistics 2 automation. Using nothing but Interfaces will enable you to complete the pack, provided you manage them correctly. Big recipes that end up in the later game, or large-scale parallelization will occur via PackagedAuto, which is something that this guide does not take it upon itself to explain. However, there are a few specialized things you can do that will also make your experience pretty nice.

Let’s start with the Storage Bus. This thing basically takes any block with an inventory and treats it like another source for ME storage, allowing you to put items into it and extract them from it. This can be tuned for finer control with Partitions (filters) and Priority settings. It may not seem useful, until you realize that you can place a storage bus on a Drawer Controller and access all connected drawers, which allows extremely impressive deep storage capabilities. Beware of using too many Drawers on one Controller, however; they are not very performant when used like this. There are quite a few applications for these things, including setting a high priority on one connected to a Vacuum Freezer with an Ore Dictionary Filter set to ingotHot* to automatically port all Hot Ingots into it.

Now, we’re onto the P2P Tunnel. These things are super duper good, like super duper duper good if you really get into their function. They can transfer any amount of items, fluid, or energy without taking up space in the ME system, and they can transfer channels in a modpack with them enabled. They need Memory Cards to function; shift-right-click a tunnel connected to whatever you want to transfer from with one, and then right-click to paste the configuration. The first one placed becomes the input on that channel, and all subsequent ones become outputs for the channel. Multiple Memory Cards can remember multiple channels. The different types are Item, Fluid, Energy, Redstone, and ME tunnels - they transfer their respective things specified in their names. You can configure them by right-clicking a placed one with an Interface, Bucket, an EnderIO Energy Conduit, and Redstone Dust, respectively. Play with ‘em for a bit, but I should warn you: Energy Tunnels will consume 5% of the energy transferred from your network’s buffer, so your energy storage in your system should be able to far exceed anything that you want to transfer through it, especially since the ME energy storage does not replenish per tick, but for every couple of seconds or so. Still pretty useful; play with them a bit when you get confident with the other devices mentioned here.

I would be a fool if I were not to mention the ME Level Emitter. It is a simple device, yes, though a quite useful one: it allows you to emit redstone signal at a point based on the amount of an item that is currently stored in the ME network. So, for example, you can configure it for Energetic Alloy and point it at your Electric Blast Furnace’s Machine Controller Cover, and it will emit redstone either when the amount of Energetic Alloy in the system is above, or below the specified number. This has an extremely high amount of applications, and has almost single-handedly spawned a trend in Nomifactory that relies on having all machines passively crafting materials, limited by the constraints set by Level Emitters.

One last big thing… subnetworking. This is the design philosophy of using different network to store various things to allow very fine control of logistics for a certain room or machine setup. You can establish a subnetwork by connecting an ME Cable to Quartz Fiber attached to any AE2 machine. This has a few benefits for people who are confident they know what they’re doing, and are incredibly useful for saving channels in modpacks with them enabled. To view the contents of such a subnetwork, as Quartz Fiber only transfers AE power, use a Storage bus and place it onto an Interface. This allows you to set up a storage for exactly the amount of items or fluids you need without fearing it clogging up your own system. Pretty nifty feature; you could probably ask some experienced people for advice regarding how to use them well.

Oh, yeah, uh, there’s also this thing called the I/O Port. They’re nice for if you work on cells by partitioning them like Storage Busses in a Cell Workbench, as they allow you to transfer data between cells and your network. You can specify some more details like the direction of data transfer in the GUI.

Network Tools are a thing too. They let you view a lot of the details of your ME network. Just right-click a Cable with one!

Have a wonderful time using Applied Energistics 2. I know I do.