Reasonably transforming my BC network into an AE network

[Flextt]

Hey guys,

with AE I've hit pretty much a brick wall. Honestly, I would really love to change to a smarter system, because I see BC as a necessary evil, that I will readible replace asap. My current base design is like this: modular, seperate short-length networks with BC pipes feeding into DSUs.

e.g.: A Harvester outputting into pipes with a diamond or distribution pipe as a loopback into a Planter and an output into a DSU. This works fine, although I do lose a few items every hour due to filled Planters and me being too lazy to incorperate inseration pipes and another loopback. However, since it works fully automated, it doesn't really matter.

Anyhow, I am not having a clue, how to properly use AE, when I store everything in DSUs. I definitely see myself improving the ore processing through AE, but other than that, I am pretty clueless. Can I make some sort of "Get me amount y of item x out of DSU for item x" terminal, so I can hide all those DSUs in some sort of cellar?

edit: and, how well does AE play with Tesseracts? Or do I have to use makeshift buffers with tesseract --> chest --> import buses?

[Viktor_Berg]

DSUs are connectable to the ME network using Storage Buses. You can also eliminate all loopback problems by using export and import buses to interact with items such as the Planter or the Harvester.

I STRONGLY recommend watching Direwolf's spotlights of AE (all of them), because that's basically a combination of a spotlight and a tutorial.

[badkruka]

I have a buffert chest between planter and harvester. I control the sappling pulls from the chest to planter with gates. If the buffert chest gets full I have a gate that pulls out sapplings untill I have one free spot in the chest and those sapplings goes to the storage chest. My sappling farm only runs when there is free space in the storage chest. With that I have zero loss with sapplings.

[weirleader]

To build on what Viktor said, if you use Storage Buses to attach your DSUs to the network, all future items of the given type that are stored in the network will go to that location (if you want multiple locations, you can configure the 'weight' of a given spot by using the GUI settings for each Storage Bus -- higher == more priority). As far as I can tell, it won't move existing items into a DSU, but I found that if I removed 10 stacks of an item and then placed them immediately back in inventory that it would pull from AE and place in the DSU. So it's easy... set it and forget it. Nothing more needs to be configured to get all DSU-stored items to always end up there, which means no more loss. Then, an ME Export Bus set to always export whatever items you are planting will keep a Planter full and never overflow (only exports when there's space); just seed a planter (no pun intended) with whatever items you are wanting it to plant and the stacks will always remain full, provided you have enough in inventory.

I had some odd troubles using the Import Bus with the Harvester, but resolved that by attaching an ME Interface instead, which automatically grabs any items that the Harvester picks up and drops them into the network.

Back to your questions,

Can I make some sort of "Get me amount y of item x out of DSU for item x" terminal, so I can hide all those DSUs in some sort of cellar?

edit: and, how well does AE play with Tesseracts? Or do I have to use makeshift buffers with tesseract --> chest --> import buses?

(1) Because the Storage Buses act as connected inventory, you never need to be given amount y of item x because it's *always* available within the network, and

(2) A Tesseract hooked directly to an ME Interface will dump items into the network easily (that's how I handle incoming from my Quarry); I haven't tried exporting into a Tesseract, but I'd imagine that'd be just as easy.

[Flextt]

Okay, I have understood the purpose of priorities and ME drives for DSUs, but I am seeing difficulties here. I have literally hundreds of thousands of items in my DSUs and wouldn't I fill my ME network with your approach? I actually like DSUs and I don't see a point building expensive storage drives when I already have them. However, there is no way for me to access a stack of items a single time out of a DSU?

[weirleader]

Sorry if I wasn't clear, by attaching a storage device to the DSUs they become AE storage locations and don't actually take up network space. But they DO show up as an available resource in the network.

[Flextt]

Okay amazing, I think thanks to you all guys, I now have the toolset to get cracking. My creative world where I tested tesseracts, DSUs and processing plays nice and I am super happy, but one last question:

How would I handle more than 8 possible inputs in a precision import bus? The obvious answer would be connecting another import bus on another face, but can I do it more elegantly?

[weirleader]

not that I know of... that's a limitation I've always just lived with.

[phazeonphoenix]

if you don't put anything into the import bus' configuration window it will import everything.

[Flextt]

Holy cows, ME Interfaces are the coolest thing ever....... craft stuff on demand... the things I am gonna do...

[jakalth]

crafting on demand can be done with import ,export, and I think storage buses as well, but they need something else to do the crafting, like a me interface hooked up to a furnace and/or an me autocrafter(the big multiblock crafting computer). Just click on the lower button that switches between single and stack mode. On the precise and fuzzy ones, they have a craft and move items mode, or a craft only mode. So they will request items to be crafted automaticly. Like a chest full of stone bricks. You pull a stack out and it will craft another stack to keep the chest full. I use this trick on my reactor but it is just as suited for anything you use on a regular basis. best to use small chests for this though unless you really need to keep a large number of them in storage at all times.

[Flextt]

Hey guys, is there anything like a distribution pipe-thing for AE? For example, I want my rubber from rubber trees to have 1/2 smelted into rubbers bars, 1/2 of rubbers bars smelted into raw plastic and the left over half as raw rubber. is that possible?

[TokiWartooth]

Yes check out level emitters, you can set a value to have in storage to emit a redstone signal you can use on a device that does the processing, thus for example if your raw rubber gets above 1000 turn it on and smelt the rest.

[phazeonphoenix]

There isn't a way to do it exactly like that as far as I'm aware. Without additional help AE's automation capacity is either always on or on a crafting request. Probably your best answer to this would be to smelt everything to rubber bars and use a ME Interface to automate smelting of plastic when you need it to craft. You could also use level emitters to kick on smelting of rubber bars into plastic once your supply falls below a certain number. Two level emitters connected to a Programable Rednet Controller configured to be an RS-Latch can be arranged to turn it back off again once production reaches an upper limit.

[Digdug83]

Step 1 - As stated above, just connect all your DSU's to storage buses and you have instant ME storage. I also have an ME drive for random items that I haven't made a DSU for.

Step 2 - To handle incoming items from things like quarries or MFR machines put down a chest (I use an ender chest so I can stuff things into an ender pouch when I'm out and about) with an item tesseract next to it. Then simply attach that chest to the ME network with an import bus set to pull in stack mode. All items will be sucked into the network and sorted automatically to either your DSU's or whatever other storage medium you have.

Step 3 - Item Processing can be achieved with one each of a level emitter, export and import bus plus the machine you need to use. Set the emitter to emit a signal whenever item x runs below (or above) value y. Then set the export bus to activate on signal and export item z to your machine. This is how I handle all stuff like plastic, stone, glass, etc. so my MAC isn't constantly trying to cook/smash/smelt stuff for me when I ask for something.

Step 4 - Construct an MAC and fill it with patterns for automated crafting goodness.

[Daemon_Eleuel]

Sidenote about the import from quarries:

You can just attach a ME interface (not a BUS) to a pipe/tesseract/whatever and it will act as a buffer for all incoming items.

I have 4 quarryplus attached to a single interface and I never lost anything (it has about 8 slots available and it drops items in the ME fast enough to keep up).

All sides act as inputs so it's pretty neat :)

[Flextt]

Sidenote about the import from quarries:

You can just attach a ME interface (not a BUS) to a pipe/tesseract/whatever and it will act as a buffer for all incoming items.

I have 4 quarryplus attached to a single interface and I never lost anything (it has about 8 slots available and it drops items in the ME fast enough to keep up).

All sides act as inputs so it's pretty neat

Yeah, I have now pretty much hooked up my central processing (distribution of important stuff into DSUs), my ore processing and every DSU to my AE network. I will refrain however from re-designing every single harvester, rancher and grinder however, because the existing BC network works fine and it seems like a lot of hassle. Still get to enjoy the advantage of opening up a single terminal and see everything I have

thanks for everyones help

[Daemon_Eleuel]

Another thing I found out.

To relocate your inventory to DSU's (attaching a storage bus will not move what you already have in the drives, just move items there EVENTUALLY) you can remove the disks from the ME drive and re-add them via a ME IO.

As a rule of thumb remember that the ME network will put the items where most of them are. I found this out as I had about 2 million of cobblestone in the drives and they were not going in the DSU.

Since most of the stuff was in drives the AE kept putting more cobble there. Moving that much using an export bus would've taken ages so I tried the IO and it worked (it just takes a few minutes to unload a 64k disk).

[Catts]

I ended up creating a massive connection of wires for a farming area that feeds into my ME system.

I've become extremely dependent on the ME... only use buildcraft for power. I also created a backup power generation system using combustion engines that I can activate if for any reason my other power sources fail which has happened several times.

[phazeonphoenix]

Another thing I found out.

To relocate your inventory to DSU's (attaching a storage bus will not move what you already have in the drives, just move items there EVENTUALLY) you can remove the disks from the ME drive and re-add them via a ME IO.

What I usually do when I wish to store a new type of item in a new DSU with a Storage Bus attached is "format" the Storage Bus with that item so only that item will fill that DSU. I then take out all my Storage Modules and run to the I/O Port. One by one I place Storage Modules into the IO Port configured to import into the system. This will empty the Storage Modules of what items can be placed into the DSUs and because I removed all other storage nothing else is moved.

I've become extremely dependent on the ME... only use buildcraft for power.

I think we all have. It's nothing to be ashamed of lol

[badkruka]

I build everything in buildcraft. Buildcraft are a very powerfull mod in tekkit but it takes more thinking to get things fully autmated then using ME.

If you just wanna get things to work then ME are a good mod to use but if you like problem solving then BC is the mod you should build around.

[Flextt]

I build everything in buildcraft. Buildcraft are a very powerfull mod in tekkit but it takes more thinking to get things fully autmated then using ME.

If you just wanna get things to work then ME are a good mod to use but if you like problem solving then BC is the mod you should build around.

Out-dated programming and bare-bone mechanics do not make for interesting problem-solving. It's more a "how do I work around this stupid quirk?"-thing. I am pretty sure, TE 3.0 will make BC 4.0 obsolete, especially if King Lemming adds some sort of floodgate

[badkruka]

It's more a "how do I work around this stupid quirk?"-thing.

Spot on.

ME oversimplifyes to much and totaly removes the problemsolving part. Everything you can do with ME you can solve with BC + other mods but it takes some thinking.

So yes, if you just whant things to work then go ME but if you like problemsolving then go BC. Tekkit isn't just about to get things to work for many ppl.

With the next big Tekkit upgrade I realy hope that Steve's Cart's cart anchor are fixed so I can start to mix in that mod in my builds.

[Daemon_Eleuel]

Honestly I was just tired of the crashes/lag caused by BC pipes :|