Just idle curiosity but does it really handle crafting of unlimited complexity now? Compact solars for example. I've crafted medium voltage so far. (High voltage solar arrays require about 93K to craft, probably two 64k units).

The reason I ask is the old AE1 autocrafting was meant to handle complex crafting but seemed to have a bad habit of going into deadlock if two "tasks" needed the same resource (yeah the new system does NOT do this). It could require breaking and replacing the controller to get it moving again.

Update: I think I'm starting to get the new system: it looks as if a crafting CPU will automatically store all the materials needed to complete a job. That means they disappear from regular storage so can't be grabbed by another CPU. If the materials are incomplete it only offers to simulate.

It looks as if you can have more than one recipe for the same material. Which one gets used appears to be determined purely by the priority of the interface though and it will not use substitute recipes in response to one running out: I have tested this using food can recipes. I had two recipes, one using steak, the other using bread. I have to remove the steak recipe before it will use bread.

The reason why multiple recipes had seemed to work was that previously I was testing with the certus quartz dust recipe. If quartz is available it will grind it to make dust. If quartz is not available it will trigger the ore recipe, but as the ore recipe produces the dust as a byproduct it uses that dust instead of executing the dust recipe.

If you're wondering why you'd want multiple crafting CPUs, it is a good idea to have at least two: one high capacity and one low. While the high capacity one is busy on a big job you can still carry out minor autocrafts on the low capacity one. I think it looks for a free CPU starting from 1, so it may be worth trying to get your smallest CPU numbered #1.


One of the few uses I've found for the IC2 Pump is that on a ME system it is one of the simpler ways to get buckets of water on demand. Otherwise I'd need A TE fluid transposer AND aqueous accumulator, and some item routing as TE machines don't support single-face I/O.

The pump is behaving differently to how I remember though as I had to "wrench" it once to make it work so it seems as if the water intake isn't the bottom now, and it isn't taking water from directly below either.

Some IC2 crafts will fail if a material is available but charged, for example if you set the recipe for a discharged lapotron but have charged energy crystals in your storage. The charged crystal is taken in preference to crafting a new energy crystal, but then the lapotron crafting recipe fails because it would craft as partially charged which gives it a different ID. Other mods generally don't set damage according to charge so this is mostly an IC2 thing.

OK follow up about level emitters.
I've had a go at figuring out what level emitters do if you add a crafting card.
There's two modes, emit while crafting and emit to craft.

Unfortunately neither seems to properly trigger a redstone signal.

I've almost had emit-to-craft working, I set it up and the item (obsidian) appeared as a craft-able item. I set it to craft 10 blocks and the emitter lit up (enabling an igneous extruder) BUT it doesn't go out automatically (thinking about it that might be a block update problem...more testing), well not unless you cancel a crafting job. Setting a job and immediately cancelling it made the emitter go out as expected.


What I think is meant to happen is that in emit to craft mode the configured item actually appears as a recipe, and the emitter SHOULD emit redstone when that item is required. If this worked it could be used for items that are generated by machines not crafted from other items.

OK so emit to craft is slightly broken, but it does have a valuable use:

Say you have a machine that is configured to output a limited amount of something, either by using a level emitter or by using a chest and storage bus. Either way there is a finite amount of the item made available. Any crafting job that calls for more than that amount will fail.

If you add an emitter with a crafting card and set it to that item and "emit to craft" then it effectively tells AE that item has an infinite supply, so even if you've set it to only allow one stack of cobble it will still go ahead and craft that high voltage solar.

Another observation: the item router from MFR makes quite a good distributor for auto-crafting recipes. It has an annoying quirk that it won't output upwards. I can understand it being locked to not eject into space upwards but it doesn't eject upwards into an inventory either. It can be used as an item "catcher", since it accepts items falling or pushed into it. It is selective so it might be possible to use one under a crystal growth pool.

Its relevance to ME is it appears to be a valid destination for an interface and it will push items into itemducts, whereas the interface itself doesn't recognise ducts and tends to need a chest as a valid destination. This makes it a useful "bridge" for setting up autocrafting where the recipe involves multiple destinations, for example using the magma crucible and liquid transposer combination.

I had an idea that I could use them as part of an inscriber press setup, it is clumsy but works. UPDATE: IT BROKE!! I did end up using 5 filters to fix a few routing snags. I probably could have replaced some of the filters with even more item routers though.

The problem I'm hitting is the item router gets blocked if an item's destination is full and it stops routing other items. This is not a problem if it only routes from the interface but I was using the same router for outbound items as well which turned out to be a bad idea.

For anyone interested I modified my inscriber system to use a chest and lots of servos and retrievers.

Next instalment: Railcraft

Rolling machines are a pain to automate, at least they can still be automated though but with one machine per recipe.

I thought I'd need one interface per rolling machine but the interfaces should route to the correct machine provided the recipes don't overlap on materials. Unfortunately there's a limit because too many recipes use steel.

Rails Steel (or iron etc)
Advanced Rails Rails, Redstone, Gold
Electric rails Rails, Copper
Reinforced Rails Steel,Obsidian dust
High speed Steel, Blaze powder, Gold
Shunting wire: Copper Block, lead, paper!!
Rebar Steel (or iron etc)
Steel plate: Steel
Iron plate: Iron
Tin plate: Iron,tin
Copper plate: Copper

Based on the above I ought to be able to use five interfaces. I could probably lower it to four interfaces if I use iron as a substitute for steel in either the rail or rebar recipe but that would reduce yield.