Applied Energistics - best way to store the 3,000 different items that you have 3 of

Hi folks

This is something that I have been thinking about

I had the idea of using an rftools modular storage on an AE storage bus (wont work with a RFTools storage scanner) but I've been told this wouldnt be great for performance

The only alternatives I can think of are having a very large number of storage drawers on a controller, or simply having the items outside of AE (which may be a bit pesky - although it would be great to have a last modified/accessed attribute on each item type)

does anyone do anything else different?

 

It's a little bothersome, but I think of it from the other way around. The 10-20 things you have tens of thousands of. I'll usually use 8-16 DSU's as I progress, for things like cobble,dirt,stone,granite,sand,diorite,ash,netherrack,endstone,flesh. That takes up two sides of one dense cable branch. I'll set those to a higher priority than the next tier.
Then I'll configure 64k storage for the medium grade stuff, various fish, crystals, ores, ingots, glass. these will be a medium priority. I'll start with around 6 drives full, and use two channels for access terminals.
I have a channel for the ae assemblers (three trees of 8 interfaces with 4 assemblers each), and the 8 stacks of cpus and storage next to that.
Finally, and this is the answer to your question, I'll have 8-16 drives of really small 4k storage cells.
If they fill up, I'll put them in a me chest and see whats filling it up and consider breaking out a larger partitioned cell or not. Then the tedious step take all the 4k drives that filled up with honeycomb and run them through the io port. As they shuffle back into the ae the combs should pull out into the new larger cell designated for them, and the 4k's get rotated back into the bulk storage bank.

On a related note...I read some time back that ridiculously large ae systems in itself can be taxing, so for one thing I try to keep the structure in one chunk. The other is that in my example the bee combs (or agricraft output) don't generally need to be in my main ae at all.

So break off different ae's, and you can color them with fluix cables, so that the red terminal is bees, the green terminal is agricraft, and the blue terminal is the gigantic receiver for the quarries/ender pouch deposits.

As you accumulate lots of agricraft seeds just export those to the other system, and these secondary ae systems are almost always entirely 4k storage cells.

 

right okay, Thanks for the reply. I'm thinking that my problems are more the number of item types rather than the actual volume of those items but I like the ideas of having a lot of small drives alongside a few bigger ones

 

Yeah I talk way too much, that's the take away. Once you get a controller, each side has 32 channels. That's a lot of drives if you break it out right. The 4k drives hold the same different types as the more expensive (larger) cells, so just make sure those items are hitting the small drive banks.

That, combined with the me chest trick. You see that one red cell and wonder what's got it filled up, you can pop it in a ME chest (it can be on it's own energy acceptor since you just use it for analysis) and see what it is, then you can drop that cell into a io port to redistribute it's contents.

It may seem like I'm focusing on the quantity but really it's about cost an convenience (and of course performance). My AE never seems to show up on the server lag meter, yet I have everything broken out as described. The 'overflow' of small drives is relatively cheap (and pretty easy once you get even a small auto assembler going).

I also really appreciate how you can deconstruct the small drives and reuse the components to make them into bigger ones so sometimes the 4k will be 16k...I don't just ham handedly jam everything into 64k or 256k cells.

 

thanks

I was considering to have quite a few storage drawers (compacting drawers) with a storage bus connected to a drawer controller.

From what I've read is that this will have quite an impact on the server when its trying to autocraft so I think I will stay away from that idea

would you give me 4k drives a higher priority, so they will fill first and then examine the 4ks to see if you want to move any of the stuff onto a partition on the 64ks?

sorry for all the questions!