Guide to New Applied Energistics 2 from Simple to Advanced 

*Here, I will provide updates and fact checks for these videos.* (I will try my best to add corrections if needed) - Dense Cables can connect to devices. However, I wouldn't recommend using them for direct connections, as it consumes space on your 8-channel line, limiting connections for other devices. - The setup featuring the 2x4x2 Molecular Assembler + Pattern Provider is merely illustrative of how things can connect. You're free to build it according to your needs. Additionally, you can always add more Molecular Assemblers to the sides of the Pattern Providers if desired, as they only require power and not an additional channel. What I showcased in the video was just an example. - I was mistaken when I said Level Emitters use a channel. They don't use a channel (the more you know!)

I've always preferred the molecular assembler 'chandelier' setup personally but yours is very clear for demonstration purposes. Additional little tips that some might find useful: - If you're confused about the whole 'types' vs. 'bytes' on drives, just picture the drives the same as a chest. You have 36 slots in a chest, one slot might hold 64 cobble or one slot might hold one sword. For non-stackable items a chest can hold max 36 items. For stackable items it's 36 stacks of 64, or 2,304 items. Storage drives are just simulated chests; people talk about this 'confusing' mechanic when it's core Minecraft. - As you use an ME system over time, the items get fragmented with items spread across multiple storage disks. Again, imagining a series of chests, you might have 3 ender pearls in one chest and another 3 in a second chest, taking two slots. Same thing can happen on storage disks. So to defragment, use the IO Port shown at 15:43. AE fills up disks left to right, top to bottom in a given drive. So take the top left disk out and put it in the IO Port. This will empty everything off that disk into the network and onto the other disks leaving you with an empty disk. Then, pull the rest of the disks out of the drive and off of the network, and place the emptied disk back into top left. Then place all of your remaining disks into the IO Port to be exported. They will fill up the one singular drive as full as possible, including topping off anything that can stack. Take your next emptiest (or empty) disk and put it in top right slot of your drive, and again it will be filled up with as much stackable as possible. Repeat until everything is re-imported, and now you've consolidated your items on disks as much as can be and probably freed up quite a few 'type' slots. - The toggle bus and level emitters are pretty quickly gone over, but you can use those paired together to have entire auto-farm subnets only be active when you need items from that farm. Disabling the subnet running the farm can save you unnecessary sounds, energy, and resources depending on what goes into running that particular set of generation. i.e. if you're full of amethyst shards you can turn off the 'ping' 'pong' sounds by disabling the subnet running the formation/destruction planes until more are needed, rather than just using the overflow destruction card and having it running at full blast. - Finally, I don't know if AE has optimized around it, but a best practice I have always found for channel maintenance and AE performance is to avoid having loops in the cable. This might be moot now and just a holdover from ye olde days, but I use cable anchors to never have my network have multiple paths the channels might flow. Hub and spoke 100% is safest in my mind. Nice work Chosen!

Hey Guys, this one off episode covering AE2 is a tool to help players when they are doing the Gregtech Star in ATM9 as it is the main ideal storage option to go for when doing Gregtech. ATM9 Videos return tomorrow. Enjoy the video!

Man, you explained this in the way that really made me understand. There’s a few tutorials out there but none explained AE2 as you did. Great job and thank you.

This is, quite possibly, the most well articulated and explained AE2 tutorial on this entire website. Ive been looking for a high quality guide like this for months but it seems that most creators assume you are atleast fairly compitent with AE2 which i am not lmao, ive played it alot but i never really go past early game with it bc it always breaks my brain

A like just for dark mode. Thank you.

Imo the best and most useful way to understand subnets is to make an infinitely expandable drive setup. To do this on one of the cables from your main network place a storage bus, on the back of that place an ME interface, then a fluix cable coming off of that. This fluix cable wont be powered so you need to connect a quartz fiber to it and connect that to your main network, you can just connect it to the cable thats attached to the storage bus. Now you can add 6 ME drives and fill them with as many storage disks as you want and this will only take up 1 channel from your main network. To expand this infinitely, just do the same thing with the storage bus connected to an interface but on the cable connected to the ME drives and repeat. Remember though you can only use 8 channels in each of these subnets so 6 ME drives, interface, and 1 storage bus. Hope this helps.

Thank you for the effort you put into this video to make it easy to understand with examples. - Subnets have always confused me, your videos has helped with some concepts that I didn't fully understand while tinkering with AE2 off and on with mod packs. - Wireless, hasn't been something I've used but now want to. - Chunk loading with anchors, didn't know that was a thing - Toggle bus looks helpful - I had always used one net, including for the creation and destruction. Thank you for the recommendation to do this on a subnet - The farm was neat - The P2P I've used, it was a good refresher - OMG, making the components for AE2 is so much easier now, I had built so many contraptions in the past

Some interesting tidbit i want to share/add: 1. Molecular Assemblers can do recipe for stonecutter and smithing table. 2. Think of formation plane as insert-only storage bus, and annihilation plane as import bus. It's weird, but that's just how it works. 3. Partitioned disk >> drawers! Each item count as 1 bit (8 bits = 1 byte), meaning a 256k disk can store ~2M items. (Caveat: 1 byte can store 8 identical items.) 4. Storage bus into ME interface to make subnets. Think of the storage bus "reading" ME interface's storage. Just don't abuse it too much or it'll lag heavily. 5. Molecular assembler can act as a crafter. Just insert the pattern into it. Probably very underrated feature, especially now it can do more than crafting table. 6. There's other use for energy cells. If you do spatial IO, energy cells are a must. 7. Co-processor is optional, so long as there's at least 1 crafting storage, it'll work. Highly recommend AE2 tutorial by The MindCrafters.

This is amazing, thank you. Most modpacks tend to have a lack of real modern documentation or guides, and this helps with that a ton.

Really happy to see you making guides, as you tend to explain mods well in your modpack videos, although there does seem to be a typo in the title ( Also, you misspelled Certus quartz as certis quarts a few times in the video chapters)

Nice coverage of the basics of AE2! You should mention the Chandelier for autocrafting, it is the most efficient way to use a full dense cable worth of pattern providers (32) with maximum molecular assemblers attached for each. Another thing would be the limit of 8 channels in subnets can be circumvented by adding a controller to the subnet, this opens up the flexibility a lot and same rules apply for linking it to the main net with storage bus and interface.

Chosen, This is unbelievable helpful. Thank you so much! I have always stayed away from AE2 because of how complicated it looks

chosen doing direct guides now? amazing! honestly i many times refer to your LPs wen in doubts about some mods looking foward to new entries

Awesome guide, I am currently playing divine journey 2 making it my first real time diving deep into AE2

Oh wow! I wasnt expecting a tutorial from you but really appreciate it!

This is surely one of the Guilds On AE 2

This was immensely helpful. Would love to see more mods showcased with tutorials in the future

nice to see a fresh, very comprehensive, and deep guide to (in my opinion) one of the best technic and storage mods out there.

This is so helpful! I really hope we get more tutorials like this

Wow thank you so much for this, I was watching your previous videos on this for a while. This is a nice surprise

Amazing! Thank you very much!

Once again you have saved me hours of troubleshooting in my Stoneblock World

One of my favorite mods, theres very few developers that can pick an aesthetic and theme for a mod and full send it to its logical extreme quite like Applied Energistics. Its kinda funny how meta "Physical Items As Data" is in context of how minecraft works while still feeling like its not breaking immersion. Note, while it may be recommended to have your recipes vertical in the pattern interface terminal for speed, for organization this is pretty annoying to deal with for relatively little return. if youre at a point where AE2 autocrafting at max speed becomes a priority to the point where acceleration cards wont cut it, then you are most likely going to be crafting them in large batches anyways. If your modpack allows it, use passive crafting(or multiple machines running parallel in a subnet) if responsiveness is something you are after, but most modpacks arent factorio, the limiting factor wont be your processing speed but the rate of how fast you are going to get materials, and concurrency at the AE/ME level wont really be a limiting factor unless youre playing something insane like gregtech(and even then, youre better off with a subnet). Although i am a little confused, did the pattern provider replace the ME Interface in the new update?

I always go to your videos to learn modpacks so I really appreciate the video

finaly a wel to understand and uptodate guide to ae2 thank you soo mutch

I see this is the start of a playlist. Can't wait to see what's next.

fun little fact: several cable anchors arranged on the side of a vertical cable can be climbed from the side like a ladder

Fantastic guide! i was really stumped on automatic crafting and I/O - with mild confusion of channels. At least now i can automate the dumb inscriptors, cause THAT gets tedious fast

I….Really liked, enjoyed, and so appreciated this guide video. I’m with the other person that said we need this for ATM9 mod pack. As a semi noob to modded MC, it’s either simple or super complex and it takes time to figure it all out. Getting sidetracked doesn’t help the ones with ADHD and of courses when starting there’s A Lot of resources needed constantly to keep it flowing. Thanks for taking time to help out the “old timers of vanilla” and “newcomers of ATM9” ! I’ll probably watch this again after I get enough resources stockpiled.. going find a meteorite.

clear explaining for every lil feature nice video choosen

Thanks chosen i really needed this video

thanks for make it so simple to understand tutorial for dummies like myself ,the p2p connection i always tried to make it to be able to have a lot of channel in one network never knew i had to use the memory card. Love your content

Bruhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh the dark mode video format is new and UNDERRATEDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD THANKS YOU MY EYES THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART!

I don't know what specifically is about autocrafting in AE2 or Logistics Pipes or Pretty Pipes is making me so, well _excited_, but I freaking love this feeling of the system figuring out how to use the materials and doing the whole chain by itself. I love automation.

I would love to see this for all the mods!!

SO HELPFUL thank you Chosen

Protip: Use Sophisticated Storage Barrels hooked up to Storage Busses in order to get more efficient storage. Drives can only hold so much stuff, but Sophisticated Storage can accept upgrades that increase both the stack size and the number of stacks you can use. In one Soph barrel, you can hold over 32k cobblestone in one slot when that'd take up several drives in the ME system.

I love watching your videos for a while now but this video was amazing. The way u format your videos and go about explaining it is so simple to understand. Would u be able to cover other mods that can be confusing in ATM9 such as Mekanism/Advanced Mekanism?

I absolutely love the one off episodes of tutorials.

Hey chosen just wanted to let you know that you are my inspiration for playing modded minecraft . Thanks to you and your videos I have started playing modded Minecraft . I really admire your lets play videos . Love from Nepal 🇳🇵

This makes me want to re-learn how to make the Storage Drive tree I used to make and actually use AE2 again

The most clearly stated and easy to understand AE2 tutorial on RU-vid ^ Thanks Chosen! I have a feeling this will be the new "go-to" for AE2 questions 👌

I love these informational type vids.

This is AMAZING!!! Thank you!

nice decided to change to ae yesterady started today and was looking for a 1.20 guide couldnt be more pefect timing thanks

as someone that hasnt seen ae2 since there was a sky chest in the meteor, i feel like this is so much better and want to get back into it. i think the last ae2 system i built was on the official foolcraft 3 server

You actually don't need Co-Processing Units for the Pattern Provider to use more than one Molecular Assembler. You only need the Crafting Storage. The Co-Processors are only used to parallize multi stage crafting chains like "to make a fence i need sticks and planks, i can make sticks and planks in parallel". This can use 3 Co-Processors. You could have three Pattern Provider for the three recipes with their own Molecular Assemblers. You can see the Co-Processors working when looking in your crafting status.

You typod big dawg🔥

amazing video. thank you :)

Came looking for an explanation of subnets. Found amazing tutorials! Subnet explanation was superb! I describe P2P (is it not point-to-point?) as VPN! Thank you!

need more tutorials like this, I'm a noob at complex tech mods like this and i love to learn, also i love your videos

AE2 is my absolute favorite mod of all time. I know people love refined storage because of how simple it is. Tbh i have actually never used refined storage because whenever its been in a pack for me, so has ae2 so i go with that lol. I love the complexity of what you can do with ae2. I played divine journey 2 last year which was my first expert pack, and i really expanded my ae2 knowledge from that. I had a massive controller cube in the center of my base, and had space for over 100 p2ps to connect around my base. Everything was color coordinated and it was super fun to use. Also it was my first time even knowing level emitters were a thing, but they are such a godsend for a pack like dj2 where you need to passively automate sooo many things. I love ae2

Keep in mind that people also make mods for AE2 as well, for instance someone made a mod that adds a digital storage drive for Botania's Mana. While another person made a mod that adds a digital storage drive for Chemicals from the Mekanism mod. On top of that, there is a mod called AE2 things that adds deep storage drives that doesn't have the item type limit. Meaning you could very well have 1,024 swords of varying damage and enchantments levels. However I would still personally recommend against this, as storing large amounts of items with lots of NBT data in a single chunk can corrupt the chunk and cause damage to your world files.

OMFG! He actually told us to put them vertically! (31:15) I have been ranting in the comment sections of video's about this since the days of 1.7. Great video Chosen! Some minor mistakes, and it's a very basic tutorial, and covers practically nothing advanced, but it's very decent. It will do well to stand the test of time, like the video's of plenty of others on RU-vid. Such as The Mindcrafters and Nonsanity.

Great tutorial thank you

Thank you for the guide. I likely still won’t be using the mod due to how much it outclasses Create (my favorite) but if I end up playing without that I have a general gist of what to do.

Amazing work!!!!

To correct how storage cells work: They have certain amounts of bytes and always 63 types. Each type used up will consume 8 bytes, no matter what. Each 8 items will consume 1 byte. This means, with 32 logs inside, it will need 1 type, and it will require 12 bytes, because 8 bytes are needed for a type, and the other 4 are the 32 logs (32/8=4)... This means, if you technically only store logs in a 1k (1024) disk, you have enough storage for 1024-8 = 1016 bytes, which with 8 items per byte would mean 8124 logs.... Not 1024... This is extremely important... As for the example with when he put a bit more items inside afterwards: You have 3 types, so already 24 bytes, and then you have 37 total items, which divided by 8 would be 4.625 bytes... and because you can't have fractional bytes, it will always round up, to 5 bytes here... So in total: 29 bytes, like it said on the storage cell...

With assemblers: Going vertically with the patterns helps a bit, but it does not prevent dependent recipes from sharing assemblers. In the worst case the recipe needs 4 crafts and they are in the 4 providers sharing the crafters. With this tower-design that might be as bad as the 4 recipes having "only" 6 assemblers. So if you go for high-volume crafting where you want large assembler-builds then you want to manually spread out the patterns to different towers as much as possible. for these 4 recipes that could be as much as a 4x speedup for the exact same machine-layout (worst-case 6, best-case 24 assemblers).

Dark mode vids! Love it!

we have been blessed this is so good

oh... one completely forgot about teleportation, power transfer of RF/FE, cobble gen/ tree farms, void bases, tardis like rooms... yeah AE2 is the OG OP mod that more players should grok :D

I came here with the scope of deciding between rf and ae2 in atm8/9. Correct me if I`m wrong, but it seems like both of these storage mods do basically the same thing. It`s comparable to the linux vs windows debate, ae2 being a more in-depth mod, giving you more control over the whole network, while rf is like windows, much more simple to understand and set up, sacrificing a little bit here and there, ( i don`t know how the speed of auto crafting and processing compares, but i don`t think there would be that much of a difference). So for super advanced and technical players ea2 is the go to, while for the little bit casual rf is the go to. I`ve always used rf and haven`t tried ea2 just yet, so my opinion might not be the best, so correct me if I misunderstood something. Btw, great video!

Controller doesn't require to be powered by Energy Acceptor, he can accept power directly (in case of resource shortage) and you don't **have to** put controller at all, you can build perferctly fine system without it using subnets.

this feels like a well structured university lecture about networking

Ah yes the energy cell segment talking abt my greatest pain with this mod, the fuckin brownouts if you move too much stuff without having a cell or 2 set up. It took me weeks to figure out that little trick i always assumed the cells were nothing more than a novelty bc i hadnt really pushed my power grid hard enough to get brownouts in my AE system but yeah once i figured that one out the early game became MUCH less painful (im not joking yall get a power cell down super early and just let it fill up the first tier of them are basically dirt cheap and even just one will keep your power supply alive until you start getting into larger craft orders and shit like that

People that get confused about drives and types, think of them as chests with 1 extra row. Each slot holds one type. Some slots are stacks. So bigger drives are good for many items that stack. Several smaller drives are good for lots of unique items

I added this video to my watch later the moment I saw it and youtube insists on reccomending it whenever I only have 2 brain cells left after a long day. I will actually watch this eventually.

AE2 guild rise up

OMFG i love you so much better now

Just side note on the overflow destruction cards. I learned this the hard way in another pack. Make sure you ALWAYS partition the drive before adding one. If the drive is not partitioned and anything you add or craft hits that drive it will get deleted. Took me 2 hours of debugging an me system to figure out why every time I crafted an item it was not in the system.

Keep up the guilds

Your tutorial gave me a bunch of helpful tips and insight, but ngl, I think AE2 is always gonna make my brain hurt no matter what xD.

Ive tried using the energy accepters the way he does at 9:30 with the same combustion generator from cyclic and it doesnt seem to work the same for me, no power will get transmitted via the accepter unless i use a energy cable from cyclic and connect it straight to my ME controller, would anyone know why? am i missing some kind of mod maybe that allows them to work together?

Hey ChoseArchitect, great tutorial, if there are corrections in the future may I request putting “update/correction” or something that lets us the viewer know that there was a correction there in the time stamp list? It would everyone’s life easier to just go to that particular time stamp to see what was changed.

Wow didn't know you could configure drives to work like drawers with void overflow

For me, the best way to represent chanels are by imagining a cable from the machine to the controller inside the cables and that only 8 fit in normal cables and 32 in thick cables

Can you add what version of AE2 you are covering in the title or description? I've tried some of these things and the blocks/functionality isn't there. I assume this for 15.0.X versions.

I saw a comment elsewhere saying using nothing but smart cable on a very large network can cause fps lag, because they're always rendered. If true, this would also be a good reason to use covered cables and only use the smart ones in areas where you need to see how many channels are in use.

learning how to use P2P's a couple years ago was game changing on expert packs.

I'm working with some Project E integration into AE2 and whenever I put emc items in it always prioritizes putting them into the discs instead of the Project Expansion block. Is there any way to set this up in order to make it try and go into the Integration Block first I also had the same problem with RS.

Hi,just to know you can straight conect dense smart cable to anything,is conect as normal cable.

Question. In the auto crafting part where you hook up the 4 pattern provider / assembler pillars to the network, why can’t you just push them all together into one multi block structure and hook them up with a dense cable?

You should really make more guide videos like this rather than a let's play on every modpack out there. I promise you, you will get a lot more views this way

I love how any new thing he explains starts with the phrase "now this is when it gets complicated" every single thing in this mod gets a little more complicated 😂

nice Guild

what version is this because my inscriber doesn't have any options along the left side and pattern providers dont interact with inscribers when placed under them. I'm using AE2 12.9.9

How did you miss that you can upgrade the power and efficiency of vibration chambers with upgrade cards? I specifically took several days to code in the upgrade functionality lol.

Thanks for the dark mode ❤

So I have AE2 in my modpack with create. Obviously I don't want all my create farms in one location for sake of frames and lag. However I also don't want to run cables 1000 blocks from area to area. I'd also like to run less trains to move my items to one place.... is this possible to have network connections without running the cables or training everything to my main network..??

What an awesome video Chosen architect. Thankyou. I will use thuis 9n my own atm9 play. But i have a question: why should you prefer AE2 above Refined Storage? This mods feels a bit easier to handle and does a bit more relaxed with storage. Like a 16k disk can handle 16k single items. So what makes AE2 the way to go?

First comment, keep up the guides always helpful seeing experts guide beginners 🤙

Always was rough at figuring out subnets and how to make them talk to the main net while also sharing resoruces

quick question can i use the annihilation plane for a grape farm in lets do vinery cause its annoying to click everytime and we love automation

Very good video! I've a problem with autocrafting inscriber, when try crafting 64 Calculation Processor, de terminal say me, i need 64 Inscriber and 64 Inscriber Silicon, why happen that?

what level is your guild?

You should do Create next!

Finally I can get my friends to use AE2 without them complaining about it being “too complicated” and choosing to make huge chest monsters

I remember when inscriber automation was not as easy. Damn, times have changed a lot