Logistics Pipes
Logistics Pipes is a transportation, crafting and automation mod that can not only manage your storage systems but also provide flexible on-demand auto crafting with its piping network.
Pipes
Unrouted Transport Pipes
Unrouted transport pipes are the pipes that you will use to connect different part of your logistics pipes system. It is the cheapest kind of pipe which also means it comes with multiple limitations listed below:
- Doesn't connect to any inventories
- Doesn't route items (don't use it for junctions)
Basic Logistics Pipes
This pipe is kind of an upgrade to the unrouted transport pipes. It has routing functionalities in it (although it is a quite basic one) so you can use it for junctions safely. This pipe is also used for connecting the whole LP network to power (usually it is a logistics power junction.)
Chassis
Chassis is a special kind of pipe: it functionality is defined by the modules it has. It has different tiers which affects how many modules the chassis can handle.
Blocks
Logistics Power Junction
You need power to run any system. a LP network is no exception. the logistics power junction is the heart of the whole system as it provides power to the whole network.
Storage
Now, before you go beef on everything LP has to offer, you need a well-organized storage system in place as LP itself only does the managing and automation part. you need to do the storage first. But since you are really going down the rabbit hole called logistics pipes, I think you have that covered. In this section, we will talk about how the LP network handle and manages items.
ItemSink Module
An ItemSink Module, when installed in a chassis and said chassis is connected to an inventory, "sinks" items into the inventory. Depending on the kind of ItemSink modules used, items are sorted with different criteria.
Basic ItemSink
The basic itemSink is... quite basic. It allows you to sort 9 different items in the inventory that a chassis with this item sink module connects to. It also introduces the "default route". What the default route does is that if an item needs to be sorted in the LP network but it has nowhere to go, it goes to the default route. The default route is a must-have because if an item has nowhere to go, it will get stuck in the pipe and eventually gets yeeted out of the network if no default route is in place: something that you definitely don't want to happen.
Polymorphic ItemSink
This kind of itemSink is simple: It sorts things that are already present in the inventory connected to it. It is useful sorting an inventory system with a lot of items inside (like a lot of storage drawers connected to a drawer controllers)
Other kinds of ItemSinks
There are quite a lot of itemSinks in LP, like the mod-based ItemSinks (that sort items based on the mods they are from), oreDict ItemSinks (which sorts items based on whatever ore-dictionary the item has) etc. Experiment and find whatever itemsink you suit it the most.
Item Requesting
Now that we have sorting storage, we need a way to request items from the network. Yes you can do the old way of searching through every single chests and drawers but it gets ridiculous as you uses more chests (which can be upgraded to get significantly bigger). Granted, the system knows what item is sorted in what chest, but when you request an item, it doesn't know where to get it without a Provider Module.
Provider Module
The Provider module allows the system to read the inventories and take items out when items are requested. There are multiple modes of it. If you are using a polymorphic ItemSink, remember to set it to the last mode such that there are at least one of said items is remained in the inventory, and be sorted using the polymorphic ItemSink.
OK... With the providers in place, you need something to do the requesting.
Request Logistics Pipes
This pipe allows the player to request items from the inventories in the system to a chest connected to this pipe. Then you can take it out.
Inserting Items
Now that we have the storage handled, it is not very useful for sorting if we can't insert items into the system... is it?
QuickSort Module
The QuickSort module takes a stack of item at a time and, if the item has a destination in the network that is not the default route, send that stack of items to the destination.