[0.5.6beta] Ideas for building a mineral processing system that can be used from the early game to the end.

Foreword

Building a general ore processing system is not easy. There are many types of raw ore, machines can't handle them all, or the marking is annoying, or the processing routes are strange, all of which are unbearable.

But it doesn't matter. The ore processing system introduced in this article can be upgraded from the LV era all the way to the Megastructure era, meeting the processing requirements of almost all types of ores along the way. Moreover, this system allows setting default processing routes, saving the trouble of marking each ore.

Beginner Mineral Processing System

In the early stage, our logistics core was the wireless item transfer coverage plate unlocked in the lv era

This cover's transmission speed is almost unlimited, meeting the high throughput requirements for ore processing, and the cost is not very high.

In this era without AE, the simplest way to set the default processing method is to use the proximity principle of pipes.

The steel plate crates in the upper left and lower left of the image above are collection points for crushed/refined/purified ore and contaminated/clean ore powder, respectively. The processing products of these types from all machines should be sent to this crate. I will introduce how to divert to these two crates later, let's first look at this system.

The pipes on the upper side connect to 8 types of machines, and the pipes on the lower side connect to 2 types of machines. The machines corresponding to the rightmost crates of these two sections of pipes represent the default processing method. Therefore, the default processing method in the diagram is the route: Raw Ore (almost no by-products) -> Crusher (with by-products) -> Forging Hammer (no by-products) -> Ore Washer (Coarse Wash) (no by-products). The biggest advantage of this route is that it is very fast and can significantly alleviate the problem of insufficient steam machine efficiency.

Electromagnetic beneficiation equipment is used later on; it is not necessary to include it in the beneficiation system in the early stages.

The crates corresponding to these nine machines, at the connection points with the pipes, have filter cards attached to all except those with the default handling method.

By shift-right-clicking the configuration filter card icon on a machine, we can quickly specify the processing routes for certain ores. For example, marking crushed emeralds to the washing plant and purified emeralds to the sifter, the emerald processing route becomes: raw ore -> crusher -> washing plant (by-product) -> sifter (by-product) -> washing plant coarse wash (no by-product). Note that the sifter actually produces clean powder, so emeralds are strictly speaking by-products.

It is very simple to send items from steel crates to machines, just use a wireless item transfer to mark the input bus with four copper upgrades in front of the enabled auto-input of the target machine with a 2x2 drawer, then attach the transfer to the steel crate.

The crate at the original ore input on the left actually has a wireless item overlay for the crusher input.

Why not send it directly into the input bus? Because if the machine processing efficiency is too low, for example, if the sorter is too slow, and the sorter's input and the corresponding steel plate crates are full, then pure emerald ore will flow into the forging hammer as the default processing method, which will not achieve our intended purpose. Chests are our most reliable high-capacity storage devices in the early game.

The products from the Crusher, Washer, and Dryer contain three types of ores to be processed, as well as by-products and final products. We only need to use pipes to extract to the output bus and attach item label filters to two crates. Use whitelist/blacklist tags like c:purified_ores !c:purified_ores to separate processed products from by-products and final products. Specifically, these are the tags c:crushed_ores, c:purified_ores, and c:refined_ores. The processed products from these machines should all be sent to the steel crate in the upper left corner.

Similarly, the Grinder/Forging Hammer and Sieve have the same situation. The Grinder and Forging Hammer can simultaneously produce pure dusts and impure dusts, which can be filtered using c:pure_dusts | c:impure_dusts and !(c:pure_dusts | c:impure_dusts). The Sieve only produces pure dusts. The process products from these machines should all be sent to the steel plate crate in the bottom left corner.

The by-products and final products of all machines should be sent directly to the storage system.

After we have the MV circuit, we can make an advanced wireless item cover, which can directly use filter cards on the output bus, saving the trouble of pulling pipes and crates.

With such a logistics center, we can freely arrange ore processing equipment, with machines wirelessly connected to each other, greatly improving the tidiness of the ore processing system.

Advanced Mineral Processing System

After the AE system was implemented, our mine experienced its first upgrade.

Through the priority mechanism of the storage bus, setting the default processing method to -1 priority, and marking at least one placeholder item or process product on other storage buses, ae can also achieve the effect of default processing.

The biggest advantage of migrating to ae is that the marking limit is no longer the original 9 slots. The number of markable slots on storage buses is very high, which can fully meet the requirements in the mid to late game.

At the same time, we have obtained the ability to automatically output marked minerals to the raw ore input location.

After Stage IV, our ore processing can migrate to large machines. The throughput of large machines can no longer be met by small steel crates and small input/output buses (mainly the input/output buses are small), and the ore processing system needs to be upgraded again.

This brand new upgraded system has several huge improvement points.

• Replaced steel plate crates with Infernal Alloy Backpacks. IV-era backpacks can install three T4 upgrades, have massive storage, and allow for a greater variety of items to be stored simultaneously.

• Replaced Wireless Item Covers with Hypercubes. There is no intermediate cache, and the transfer speed is the AE IO speed, while the IO speed of the Extended Input Bus is extremely fast.

• Changed the target machine's input method, thereby increasing input volume and expanding parallelism. Specific methods are explained below.

• Added an ME Wireless Connection Machine on the right, configured as the ore input subnet. Ore crushers pull minerals from this network via Inventory Input Buses. The minerals in this network originate from items tagged in the Storage Buses attached to ME Interfaces on the main network.

• Added an ME Wireless Connection Machine on the left, configured as the ore output subnet. Products from all ore processing machines are sent directly to this network without classification. Three Tagged Storage Buses from this network (whitelist c:crushed_ores | c:purified_ores | c:refined_ores)(whitelist c:pure_dusts | c:impure_dusts)(blacklist c:crushed_ores | c:purified_ores | c:refined_ores | c:pure_dusts | c:impure_dusts) store them into two backpacks and the main network respectively.

• Due to the extremely high operating efficiency of IV large machines, the two byproduct-free processing methods, Forging Hammer and Coarse Washing, have been cancelled. New destinations have been added: Chemical Washing, Electro-gravity Separation, and Direct to Main Network. The Direct to Main Network is mainly used for platinum processing, enriched uranium, starlight crystal processing, and other purposes.

The ME output bus on the machine connects to the ore output subnet, and simultaneously powers the ME inventory input bus. The inventory input bus does not connect to any network. Enable pull mode to pull backpack contents via the storage bus. Raw materials are sent to the backpack via the hypercube.

To this end, we have immense intermediate cache capacity, machine input capacity, and infinite machine output capacity, and this intermediate system will hardly be a bottleneck anymore.

However, after the UHV voltage, we need to upgrade all backpacks to stack upgrades omega to prevent the backpacks from being filled due to excessive throughput (10m+). After the replacement, this system will no longer need to be upgraded.