Applied Energistics 2

Getting started

Meteorites are common and leave big craters, so you have probably walked past one. A Meteorite Compass, a compass run through a Charger, points at the nearest one. Dig to its centre.

Inside you find Certus Quartz clusters, budding certus blocks and a Mysterious Cube. Break the cube for all four Inscriber presses. Mine the clusters and take the budding blocks with Silk Touch, which keeps them at their tier. Leave a flawless one where it is: even Silk Touch drops it to flawed.

• Find a meteorite and take the presses from the Mysterious Cube.
• Set up a certus farm with Growth Accelerators.
• Build an Inscriber and make the three processors.
• Put a ME Drive, a terminal and an Energy Acceptor together into your first network.

Certus quartz and fluix

Budding certus grows quartz buds like amethyst does. A fully grown cluster drops four Certus Quartz Crystals, more with Fortune; a bud broken early drops one Certus Quartz Dust. On their own the buds grow very slowly, so a Growth Accelerator next to the budding block is the first thing to build.

Flawless

Flawless Budding Certus never wears out, but can't be moved with a pickaxe.

Flawed

Flawed and the tiers below it can drop a tier every time a bud grows.

Chipped, Damaged

Chipped and Damaged end up as a plain Certus Quartz Block.

A worn block, or a plain certus block, thrown in water with a Charged Certus Quartz Crystal turns back into budding certus. In ATM10, ExtendedAE's Crystal Fixer goes further and turns flawed budding certus into flawless, which the base mod can't do.

A Charger turns a crystal into a Charged Certus Quartz Crystal. Throw one in water with redstone and nether quartz and you get Fluix Crystals, the other material most AE2 parts need.

The Inscriber and the processors

The Inscriber has a top slot, a middle slot and a bottom slot. A press in the top slot prints whatever goes in the middle:

Silicon Press

Silicon becomes Printed Silicon. Certus dust smelts into silicon.

Logic Press

A gold ingot becomes a Printed Logic Circuit.

Calculation Press

A certus quartz crystal becomes a Printed Calculation Circuit.

Engineering Press

A diamond becomes a Printed Engineering Circuit.

A processor is a printed circuit on top, redstone in the middle and Printed Silicon at the bottom: the Logic, Calculation and Engineering Processor. Almost every AE2 device needs one of them.

A press with an iron block in the middle slot makes a copy of itself, so you only ever need one of each. ATM10 adds a Universal Press, crafted from the four presses, four Sky Steel Ingots and a slime ball, which does the job of all four in one Inscriber, and copies itself from an iron block the same way.

Your first network

Everything is stored in Storage Cells that sit in a ME Drive. Put a drive down, an Energy Acceptor beside it fed with power from any mod, a cable on the drive and a ME Terminal or ME Crafting Terminal on the cable. Put cells in the drive and the terminal shows everything in them.

A cell is measured in bytes and in types. Each different item is a type, and each type takes some bytes up front; after that, eight items fit in one byte however they stack outside the network. A cell holding one type holds about twice as much as one holding all 63 it allows, so keep the odd items out of your bulk cells.

1k cell

1k: 8,128 items of one type.

4k cell

4k: 32,512.

16k cell

16k: 130,048.

64k cell

64k: 520,192.

256k cell

256k: 2,080,768.

A cell is a Storage Component in a housing. Crafting a cell with a bigger component upgrades it and keeps what's inside, and a Cell Workbench can limit a cell to the items you choose.

Channels

Most devices on a network need a channel. A normal cable carries eight, and a dense cable carries 32. Without a ME Controller the whole network gets eight, and the ninth device goes dark. A controller gives 32 channels from each face and makes the network as big as you can cable it.

Channels take the shortest path from a device to the nearest normal cable, then to the nearest dense cable, then to the controller. If that path is full, the devices at the end go without, even when another cable nearby is empty. Smart Cable shows the channels on it, which is the quickest way to see where they run out. Cable colour only stops cables connecting to each other; it has nothing to do with channels.

In ATM10 four Covered Cables craft into one Dense Covered Cable and one breaks back into four, and the same for smart cable.

Power

AE2 runs on its own unit, AE. An Energy Acceptor, or a controller, converts power from other mods into it, one way only. The network shares one pool of energy, so there is no limit on how fast a device draws from it, only on how much is stored.

Energy Cells and Dense Energy Cells add storage, which a big network wants. A Vibration Chamber burns fuel for AE, and a Crystal Resonance Generator makes a little on its own, but in ATM10 any other mod's power through an Energy Acceptor is the easy way.

Autocrafting

Autocrafting needs three things: something that asks, a crafting CPU that plans and holds the job, and a ME Pattern Provider holding the patterns. Ask in the terminal and the network works out every step, gathers the ingredients and hands them out.

Crafting patterns

A crafting table recipe. The provider pushes the ingredients into a Molecular Assembler beside it, which crafts and sends the result back.

Processing patterns

Anything else: a furnace, a Mekanism machine, a Create mixer. The provider pushes the ingredients into the machine, and the result has to come back into the network, through the provider or an import bus.

Patterns are written on Blank Patterns in a ME Pattern Encoding Terminal. A crafting CPU is a solid box of Crafting Units with at least one Crafting Storage block in it; storage sets how big a job it can plan, and Crafting Co-Processing Units make it faster. One CPU runs one job at a time, so build a few.

It can't handle a recipe whose result is also its own ingredient, like a smithing template that copies itself. Those need a pattern provider fed by hand or by a separate setup.

Moving items in and out

Import Bus

ME Import Bus pulls items from the inventory it faces into the network.

Export Bus

ME Export Bus pushes chosen items out into it.

Storage Bus

ME Storage Bus lets the network use a chest, drawer or other mod's storage as if it were a cell.

Interface

ME Interface keeps a set amount of chosen items in stock for pipes and machines to take.

Level Emitter

ME Level Emitter gives a redstone signal when the network holds more or less of an item than you set.

Buses and other devices take cards, made from a Basic Card or an Advanced Card: Acceleration makes them faster, Capacity gives them more filter slots, Crafting lets an export bus or interface order what it runs out of, and Fuzzy ignores damage and enchantments.

Across the base and beyond

A ME P2P Tunnel carries 32 channels down a single cable, and P2P tunnels can carry items, fluids, energy and redstone too. A Quantum Network Bridge, two rings of ME Quantum Rings around a ME Quantum Link Chamber, joins two networks anywhere, even across dimensions, using a pair of Quantum Entangled Singularities.

A ME Wireless Access Point lets a Wireless Terminal reach the network from a distance, further with each Wireless Booster. The Spatial IO Port and Spatial Pylons cut a whole room out of the world into a spatial cell and put it back somewhere else, the only way to move a flawless budding certus block.

ExtendedAE: Entro Crystals

ExtendedAE builds its machines from Entro Crystals. You won't find them in the world: they grow on a budding block you make yourself from a Fluix Block.

• Craft Entro Seeds: a sand, three Ender Dust, two redstone, two Glowstone Dust and a Sky Stone Dust make two.
• Right-click a placed Fluix Block with a seed. It becomes Budding Fully Entroized Fluix.
• Put Growth Accelerators next to it, as for certus, and harvest the full-grown Entro Clusters.

A full cluster drops one Entro Crystal, more with Fortune. A bud broken early drops an Entro Shard, and eight shards craft into a crystal. A Crystal Assembler can put the seed into the block for you, but the block it gives starts one tier lower.

Fully

Fully Entroized is where a seeded block starts. It wears down a tier at a time as buds grow.

Mostly, Half, Hardly

Mostly, Half and Hardly follow, and after Hardly it turns into a plain Certus Quartz Block.

Breaking it

Any of them breaks into one Entro Dust, Silk Touch or not, so a budding entro block can't be picked up.

ExtendedAE's guide counts about ten crystals from one seeded block without Fortune. To keep a block going, a Crystal Fixer fed with Ender Dust raises it one tier, with a 70% chance each try. Fed with charged certus, the same machine repairs budding certus: 80% for each step up to flawed, and 5% from flawed to flawless.

Entro Dust thrown into water with a Fluix Crystal turns back into an Entro Crystal. In ATM10, Mystical Agriculture has an Entro crop too: eight Entro Essence craft into three crystals.

ExtendedAE: machines and the Concurrent Processor

Most ExtendedAE machines are made in a Crystal Assembler, not at a crafting table. Getting one takes three steps:

• Throw Entro Dust, a Gold Ingot and a Lapis Lazuli into water together for an Entro Infused Ingot.
• Four of those, two copper ingots, two iron ingots and a Quartz Glass make an Extended Machine Frame.
• The frame, a ME Crafting Terminal, two Logic Processors, two glass cables and a Sky Stone Tank make the Crystal Assembler.

The assembler takes items and a fluid, with no grid. It also runs in-world recipes in bulk: four charged certus, four redstone and four nether quartz with water give eight Fluix Crystals, and Sky Steel works the same way with lava.

The extended machines need a Concurrent Processor, ExtendedAE's fourth processor. Make the Inscriber Concurrent Press in the Crystal Assembler from a Silicon Press, four Entro Crystals and three Eyes of Ender. It prints an Entro Crystal into a Printed Concurrent Circuit, which becomes the processor with redstone and Printed Silicon, like AE2's three. In ATM10 the Universal Press prints it too.

Pattern Provider

ME Extended Pattern Provider: a Pattern Provider with a much bigger pattern inventory.

Interface

ME Extended Interface: an Interface with more slots to configure.

Drive

ME Extended Drive: holds 20 cells, where a ME Drive holds 10.

Molecular Assembler

Extended Molecular Assembler: eight jobs at once at twice the speed, fed only by a Pattern Provider.

Inscriber

Extended Inscriber: four jobs at once.

Charger

Extended Charger: charges four items at once.

The Circuit Slicer cuts a storage block straight into printed circuits with no press, up to nine times faster than an Inscriber: nine from a block of gold, diamond, silicon or Sky Steel, four from a certus quartz block or an Entro Block. It is made in the Crystal Assembler from a frame, eight Engineering Processors, a stonecutter and the five presses. In ATM10 the Universal Press can stand in for the five, and the slicer turns an iron block into a new Universal Press.

MEGA Cells: Sky Steel and bigger cells

MEGA Cells adds storage cells from 1M to 256M, and all of it starts with Sky Steel. Throw a Charged Certus Quartz Crystal, an Iron Ingot and a Sky Stone into lava together and two Sky Steel Ingots come out. A Crystal Assembler makes eight at a time from four of each and some lava.

Copper in place of iron gives Sky Bronze, for fluid cells, and osmium gives Sky Osmium, for chemical cells. ATM10 adds Crystal Assembler recipes for both.

Next is the Accumulation Processor. Its press is made in an Inscriber: the Calculation Press on top, a Singularity in the middle and the Engineering Press at the bottom. Both presses are used up, so copy them with iron blocks first. A Matter Condenser with a 64k component in it makes the Singularity out of 256,000 items.

The Inscriber Accumulation Press prints a Sky Steel Ingot into a Printed Accumulation Circuit, and that circuit, Fluix Dust and Printed Silicon make the processor. The Circuit Slicer cuts a Sky Steel Block into nine circuits, and in ATM10 the Universal Press prints them too.

1M

1M component: an Accumulation Processor, three 256k components, Vibrant Quartz Glass and four Sky Stone Dust. It holds four times a 256k.

4M, 16M

4M and 16M: three of the size below, a processor, the glass and four Ender Dust.

64M, 256M

64M and 256M: the same with four Matter Balls in place of the dust.

Housing

MEGA Item Cell Housing: three Sky Steel Ingots, two Vibrant Quartz Glass and three Sky Stone Dust. A component in a housing is a cell, like the 1M Item Cell.

Two of its cells do what AE2's can't. The MEGA Bulk Item Storage Cell holds one item with no practical limit; set that item in a Cell Workbench before it takes anything. With a Compression Card it also takes that item's nuggets and blocks and packs them as they come in, and a MEGA Decompression Module lets autocrafting use them.

The MEGA Radioactive Chemical Storage Cell holds one radioactive Mekanism chemical, such as nuclear waste, polonium or plutonium, which ordinary chemical cells refuse. It holds 2,048 buckets and draws 250 AE/t. ATM10 changes its component's recipe, and our server lets it take Spent Nuclear Waste, which MEGA refuses by default.

For autocrafting, 1M MEGA Crafting Storage and up give a CPU far more room, and a MEGA Crafting Co-Processing Unit adds four threads where an ordinary one adds one. The MEGA Pattern Provider holds 18 processing patterns, the MEGA Interface has twice an Interface's slots, and a Superdense Energy Cell stores 12.8 million AE.

Questions