Advanced Assembly Line

Advanced Assembly Line
Mod	Gregtech 5
Type	Tile Entity
Relevant Quest	Advanced Assembly Line
Tier	IV
Size	5-16x4x3
Pollution	None
Properties:
Blast resistance	6
Hardness	1
Energy:
Energy usage	1.9k-536m EU/t
Voltage in	As per Energy Hatch
Max amperage	2A per Energy Hatch
Fluid capacity	As per Input Hatch
Item capacity	As per Input Bus

Introduction

The Advanced Assembly Line (AAL) is an upgraded version of the Assembly Line that allows for parallel processing 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. This is for a few reasons. First, parallelism is not free and will cost a tremendous amount of power which may be difficult to support until lasers are available. Second, the automation setup is significantly more expensive as it requires a lot of AE2 components. Third, the AAL is much more complicated than the Assembly Line and is prone to getting stuck if not setup correctly. A player should have a solid understanding of the basics before diving into the deep end.

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 energy hatches to handle the increased power requirements of parallel processing.

The input buses can be any tier, but typically 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.

Warning

AAL contain a significant amount of NBT data which can overload a chunk if too many are present. Therefore, when adding more machines try expanding horizontally instead of vertically to spread them out across multiple chunks.

Operation

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.

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 usual imperfect overclock. Every such laser overclock will add 0.3 to the power multiplier. For example, 1 laser overclock will have 50% recipe time and use 430% power but 2 laser overclocks will have 25% recipe time and use 1978% power (430 * 4.6). It is not possible to overclock faster than 1 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 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. Follow the slideshow below to walk through the steps of this approach.

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.

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