Ultra Compact Modular Mechnical Crafter Module

Welcome to the Ultra Compact Modular Mechanical Crafter Module, an expandable Vanilla Create mechanical crafting system designed to grow with your factory!

The system is designed to be extremely compact and capable of handling a large number of crafting orders from a factory gauge system by utilising a multi-threading design.

How auto crafting works in Create

When you request auto crafting in Create via either JEI ordering or Factory Gauges, materials are sent to your crafter in packages, these packages must then be re-packaged for the mechanical crafters to handle them correctly.

When a repackager detects all of the necessary ingredients for a crafting order, it will automatically take all of those ingredient packages into its hidden inventory and output them in individual crafting packages. This process is the same for crafting orders containing only 1 item, or 1000 items.

When you submit a large order, re-packagers sharing an connected inventory will NOT share this load between them. Instead, a single re-packager will take in the entire order and be effectively unable process any other order until it is fully empty again. As such, it is important to have multiple re-packagers to provide additional capacity when orders back up.

Config Instructions

The crafter module expands out on either side of a central column, with crafter slices on one side, and vault slices on the other. Each crafter slice adds one additional mechanical crafter while each vault slice adds one additional re-packager.

The default download option provides the main variant of the module, containing 6 mechanical crafters and 6 re-packagers, a 6:6 configuration.

The core variant provides a smaller 3:3 configuration.

Each module can be expanded to contain up to 9 vault slices and technically infinite number of crafter slices, but it is generally recommended to have few or equal number of crafter slices to vault slices, as the re-packagers will be your primary bottleneck.

To expand your crafter module, simply download the crafter & vault slice schematics, print them in-line with your existing crafter and then expand the mechanical belts to the new slices.

Usage Instructions

Simply print the main or core schematic, rotation & mirroring is not recommended but it should still function correctly.

Rotational Power can be provided at any point on the module, just verify that the direction is correct (bottom belt towards crafters, top belt towards vaults).

Replace all frog ports to link them to your chain conveyors, ensuring to name the incoming frog ports (on the large vault) all to the same thing, and the outgoing frog port should be set to send-only. Optionally, you may also modify the system to integrate it into your mechanical belt system.

Finally, edit the sign on the outgoing packager to change the destination address of the crafted items, and tune the pulse timer to your preference. A shorter timer will make the system feel more responsive, while a longer timer will reduce the number of packages on your network.

A word of warning

While JEI crafting ordering works with stock keepers, it is generally better to utilise factory gauges as our testing has found that sometime JEI ordering may not work correctly and will leave partial order materials left in the crafter vault. Whereas factory gauges will always work correctly.

Debugging

If for any reason, you found yourself with stray items stuck in a crafter slice. Do not break the slices, as this will require reprinting the entire slice to put the mechanical crafter back in the correct configuration. Instead, you can use funnels to manually add in items to the crafter, filling every slot with any filler item. This will cause it to conduct a failed craft, ejecting all items from itself and clearing up the jam.