Advanced Assembly Line
The Advanced Assembly Line (AAL) is an upgraded version of the Assembly Line that allows for simultaneous processing aka item pipelining and higher overclocking. It mimics a real assembly line by consuming ingredients one-by-one instead of all at once which allows the AAL to offer parallelism up to however many item inputs a recipe requires.
Although craftable at the same time as the Assembly Line, it is not recommended to upgrade right away for multiple reasons. 1) The AAL is much more complicated than the Assembly Line and is prone to getting stuck if not setup correctly. A solid understanding of the basics is strongly recommended before building this multiblock. 2) Parallelism is not free and will cost a tremendous amount of power which may be difficult to support without laser power transfer. 3) Automation is significantly more expensive as it requires a lot of AE2 components.
Construction
All construction requirements of the AAL are identical to the Assembly Line which means upgrading is as simple as replacing the controller block. Using a Multiblock Structure Hologram Projector will show the player the minimum length AAL, but holding multiple in a single stack can show/build different lengths up to the maximum of sixteen.
Buses and Hatches
Unlike the Assembly Line, the AAL accepts TecTech Multi-Amp Energy Hatches and Laser Target Hatches to handle the increased power requirements of parallel processing. However, there is no tier skipping. UV energy hatch(es) with any number of amps is not sufficient for a UHV recipe and the AAL will stop due to a crash. This is NOT like the regular Assembly Line which can run higher tier recipes with multiple energy hatches.
The input buses can be any tier, but typically Advanced Stocking Input Buses are used because they can easily auto-pull from buffer inventories. The output bus should replace a solid steel machine casing on layer 1 rather than replacing an input bus on the last slice.
Only four input hatches are required because no AAL recipe uses more than four fluids. There can be gaps between the input hatches if necessary.
Potential Chunk Corruption
Usage
The AAL will start processing once the input bus contents align with any stored Data Stick. The first slice will consume the ingredient in the input bus in just (recipe time / number of inputs) seconds. Once complete, the second slice will start processing in the same amount of time. This will continue until the last ingredient in the recipe. If the next slice cannot find the materials in its input bus, the just-finished slice will remain in a STUCK state which will hang the AAL. If this happens, the controller's front face will have its status light turned orange.
Power
The energy cost of this machine is the number of slices active multiplied by the original recipe EU/t. STUCK slices do not consume power. The AAL will use the worst energy supplying hatch's input voltage for calculating the tier of the recipe and overclocks. With higher amp energy hatches, it can overclock beyond the named voltage tiers, but will consume even more power than a usual imperfect overclock. Every such laser overclock will add 0.3 to the power multiplier. For example, one laser overclock will have 50% recipe time and use 430% power but two laser overclocks will have 25% recipe time and use 1978% power (4.3 * 4.6). It is not possible to overclock faster than one tick. The AAL first tries to parallelize, then normal imperfect overclock, then laser overclock.
Automation
There are not very many methods to automate the AAL. Only one is discussed in detail here as it is the most prominent and easiest to implement with an AE2 auto-craft system. A prerequisite is the ME Fluid Processing Pattern Terminal which is the only terminal big enough to pattern all the ingredients in AAL crafts.
Method 1: Applied Energistics
The core mechanic behind this approach is that ME Chests with set priorities can determine the order in which items are inserted and hold several recipes worth of a single item. Inputs are blocked using an Advanced Blocking Card (GTNH v2.3.7+) to avoid recipes from being mixed.
To actually run recipes in parallel on the same AAL, all patterns must be multiplied. Instead of a single motor, for example, have the pattern craft sixteen motors (hence the need for buffer chests). This is because the Advanced Blocking Card will prevent any additional ingredients from being inserted while there are still some in the buffer chests.
Duplicate items that are full stacks also need to be renamed in an Industrial Material Press. This is because the buffer chests can hold more than a single stack of items, unlike the ULV input buses used in regular Assembly Line automation.
| STEP 1
Place fluid storage buses on all the input hatches with DESCENDING PRIORITY from the first slice Use advanced stocking input buses on each slice and enable AUTO-PULL on all of them Alternate cable colors since each slice is its own AE2 subnetwork |
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| STEP 2
Place quartz fiber cables between each subnetwork for sharing power to all devices Notice there is a quartz fiber cable between the blue and green cable on the first slice Place an ME controller and dense fluix cables as shown (cable anchors are optional) |
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| STEP 3
Place a storage bus on the bottom of each green cable to read the contents of the ME chest directly underneath Each ME chest should be limited to a single item type (block container cell works well) and have DESCENDING PRIORITY from the first slice The ME chests serve as large buffers for each individual slice |
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| STEP 4
On the subnetwork (green), place an ME Dual Interface with an ADVANCED BLOCKING CARD inside On the main network (red), place an output P2P tunnel – ME Dual Interface with BLOCKING MODE enabled Power the subnetwork by connecting a quartz fiber cable to the main network or adding a neutronium energy cell (better for performance in the late game) |
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| STEP 5
Somewhere on the main network (red) should be an input P2P tunnel – ME dual interface with DEFAULT SETTINGS which should hold all the patterns Parallelizing this approach is as simple as linking more output P2P tunnels to this one input P2P tunnel More P2P tunnels can be added if more than 36 recipes are needed |
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| BONUS
There are a lot of AE2 cables, laser vacuum pipes, and optical fiber cables surrounding these machines A setup such as this can help compact everything, save on materials, and scale up very easily Downward facing data banks are daisy-chained underneath with the optical fiber cables coming up through the ground |
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