AE2 Automation - A small guide

Swedish_Medic · August 8, 2019

I thought I'd make a short post about features within the best mod Applied Energistics 2 (AE2). Having seen some people ask about how you automate the ME system I feel like giving a short post to help people new to the mod.

What you'll need for this at start is a basic ME system. The items you are going to need for this is ME interfaces, Molecular assembler, cables, ME Pattern Terminal, an ME Interface Terminal will make it easier but is not necessary, Crafting Storage and Crafting Co-processing units, a crafting monitor is optional.

Two basic structures are needed to be built for this, these are the CPU itself and the crafting chambers.

Part of the CPU are Crafting Storage of chosen size and Crafting Co-processing units as well as a crafting monitor. Putting these blocks together in a solid cube will cause the CPU to form, the same is true by only using a single Crafting Storage. The crafting storage determines how big of a project the CPU can handle. More crafting storage means bigger crafting recipes. So if you're only able to make 10 sticks per time, adding more crafting units can increase it to for example 200, this doesn't change the speed of the process. By adding Co-Processing Units to your CPU you will be able to perform tasks simultaneously within the recipe. Say you're making sticks. You need to craft the logs to planks and the planks to sticks. By adding 1 Co-Processing Unit you can now craft sticks from planks before all logs have been turned into planks. Each Co-Processor unit allows for 1 additional task to be crafted within the recipe. They are also responsible for how many molecular assemblers you can utilize for a recipe. If you have multiple Molecular Assemblers attached to an interface with the recipe each Co-Processing Unit will increase how many Molecular Assemblers can be used at once.

So then moving over to the Crafting Chambers. It's in your Crafting Chambers which all the crafting will take place. By attaching a Molecular Assembler to an Interface you will be able to start crafting stuff. Add the recipe you want into the interface and once requested to craft it will start crafting inside the Molecular Assembler. You can put up to 6 Molecular Assemblers on your interface, thereby enabling crafting to take place in more Molecular Assembler than 1. But as mentioned earlier, this will be dependant on how many Co-Processing Units you have available.

In order to make patterns to put in your crafting chambers you need the Me Pattern Terminal. It's in here which you make recipes into patterns that are placed in interfaces. The ME Interface Terminal helps you out by showing you the content of all the interfaces. This makes it much easier to keep track of where every recipe is and you can put patterns into interfaces in this Terminal rather than running around finding the best choice.

So how do you actually do it? First of all stick to the "no connections crosses chunks" rules. Do not connect AE2 stuff over chunk borders or you risk having items disappearing. You should probably also add an empty biometric card with build permission into your security station, as this can prevent the cross chunk bug.

Be realistic when you think about how big you need to build things. Here are some examples of CPUs

Here's how it looks like if you add the Crafting Monitor to the CPU multiblock.

You could go really big with your CPUs, but the question sorta becomes "Why" pretty quickly. Having the capacity to craft 2'000'000'000 cobble into something else in one order is pretty meaningless. For cobble that should never be a thing anyhow, but for other stuff you often get by crafting lower volumes. You want to think about the balance between Crafting Storage (Cyan/blue in this image) and Co-Processing Units. The more Co-Processing Units, the faster you can craft. This is where the Crafting Chamber and CPU can bottleneck each other. Being able to craft 100 things simultaneously is not going to make anyone happy. Connect the CPU to your ME system with cables.

These are some examples of Crafting Chambers:

The middle one is most basic allowing each pattern in the inscriber to be crafting in 1 molecular assembler. The one on the left has 3 molecular assemblers connected to each interface allowing for a recipe to be crafted simultaneously in 3 places. This design however will share all the growth chambers between the interfaces, so if 1 interface has a pattern for stick and the interface down to the left has a pattern for planks the molecular assembler they share will only be able to chose one to craft. Behinds that you see an interface covered on all sides with molecular assemblers, leaving it with 6 of them. For the pattern recipe in the interface to be able to use all 6 you need to have 5 co-processing units in the CPU. This is very effective and therefore also better at creating lag. The last one to the right uses a dense cable in the middle, two interfaces on opposite sides, then the layer above has it rotated 90 degrees, molecular assemblers are then put on each side of the interfaces (you can exclude the side facing outwards for it to be more compact). This design combines size taken up by the Crafting Chamber with access to growth chambers. 1 interface uses up 1 channel, it doesn't matter how many Growth Chambers are attached.

By adding Accelerator cards to the Molecular Chambers they will be able to craft much faster. Don't overdo it. Upgrading one Growth Chamber will only affect the speed inside that Growth Chamber.

This is how the ME Pattern Terminal looks like:

Put this where you want. Add Blank Patterns to the right slot, then when you've got the recipe you want to craft, simply press the arrow below the blank patterns and you'll have your pattern for that recipe. Next to the X by the crafting grid is what looks like an iron ingot, the way it looks now tells your ME system that for this recipe, matching ingredients can be used to replace what was initially in the recipe. Say I were to run out of oak wood here, the ME would then use similar wood.

This is the ME Interface Terminal

As stated, here you can keep your patterns organized.

Once you've built all the structures, they all have to connect to your ME. If it does not connect, then it's not part of the network. The spirit of AE2. Avoid overbuilding and auto-crafting huge amounts of items with this. It will cause lag, the faster it crafts the more lag you generate. Hopefully I've covered everything. Automation of specific machine setups will be another thing, as with Extra Cells. To end it off I thought I'd show you my ME auto-crafting.