An ME storage network inspired by Applied Energistics 2: cables, a controller, drives with storage cells that keep their contents, a terminal, interfaces, import, export and storage buses, autocrafting with encoded patterns and crafting CPUs, level maintainers, and fluids. Works on its own with vanilla recipes; Gregtorio Continued puts it on its GregTech tiers. Source and issues: https://github.com/Rykon00/me-network
Mods introducing new content into the game.
Augmented or new ways of transporting materials - belts, inserters, pipes!
Things related to oil and other fluids.
Entities which interact with the circuit network.
Furnaces, assembling machines, production chains.
More than just chests.
Hello,
I would like to report a UI issue that occurs when using this mod alongside Infinite Quality Tiers (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/infinite-quality-tiers).
As shown in the screenshot, the quality selection bar in the "Select an item" menu stretches infinitely to the right and goes completely off-screen. This makes it impossible to scroll through or select higher-tier quality items.
Screenshot of the issue: https://imgur.com/a/vZl24Ba
Would it be possible to add a scrollbar for the quality selection, or make the quality icons wrap to the next line when there are too many of them?
Thank you!
Hello again,
I would also like to report another issue related to quality in the ME Import Bus and ME Export Bus. There is currently no way to select the quality of an item in the filter slots.
As shown in the screenshots, when you open the "Select an item or fluid" menu for these buses, you can choose an item, but the filter always defaults to normal quality. There is no quality selector (like the one found in standard Factorio filter UIs).
This makes it impossible to filter for specific quality items (e.g., Uncommon or Rare items), which is crucial when playing with quality mods.
Could you please add a quality selection button to the Import/Export bus filter slots?
Thank you!
should be fixed with the new release, please keep me posted if it works
Ah, wonderful! Just when I thought I could finally relax and play the game, I found a few more things to bother you about. :)
First off - the quality‑selector overflow this thread is named after still reproduces for me: open the picker (e.g. to set a partition on a storage cell) with Infinite Quality Tiers installed, and the row of quality icons runs straight off the bottom of the window. Screenshot in the album below, in case it helps narrow it down.
Beyond that, a few more observations:
1. Buses & the ME Interface
Three things here - one cosmetic, two functional.
Cosmetic: on the ground the sprites are distinct enough, but in the hotbar/inventory the Storage Bus, Import Bus and Export Bus look essentially identical to the ME Interface - same generic box‑with‑screen, and crucially no directional arrow on the bus icons to separate them from the interface at a quick glance. Small in/out arrows on the bus icons would fix the constant mis‑picks.
Functional (top‑up): the Export Bus pushes at most one stack into an assembler input slot when the recipe needs more than a stack of that item - and it never tops the slot up past that first stack. Putting several export buses on the same assembler doesn't help either; the missing remainder simply never arrives, so multi‑stack recipes just sit incomplete. Is that cap intended, or can the bus be made to fill the full required amount?
Functional (copy/paste): copying a configured bus with Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V doesn't carry over its state/filters - the pasted bus comes back blank and you have to re‑bind everything by hand. Vanilla entities keep their config through copy/paste; the buses should too, otherwise standing up a whole wall of pre‑filtered buses is needlessly painful.
2. Wireless P2P (AE2 Stuff inspiration)
AE2 Stuff has a Wireless P2P connector, and sometimes dragging kilometres of cable for a single item/fluid link just isn't worth it. Anything wireless on the table for a later update? An electricity drain scaled to distance would feel like a fair price for the convenience.
3. Factorissimo 3, the Quantum Bridge & the Singularity balance
This is really one chain of thought. Factorissimo 3 (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/factorissimo-2-notnotmelon) isn't integrated, and that mod is normally the answer to "I ran out of room / I need to ship stuff across the whole map" by giving you another dimension to build in. Without it, the AE2 Quantum Bridge is the natural in‑mod substitute for long‑distance item teleportation - so: is a QB planned at all? The catch is obvious, a QB wrecks logistics balance, so it only fits if you're not holding strict vanilla balance the way Space Age had to. And that same "how do AE2's absurd costs survive Factorio's scale?"
All screenshots in one album: https://imgur.com/a/Knh2WiP
Thanks a ton for the mod - it's a joy to use.
P.S. - actually two more thoughts that popped up right after I wrote the above, didn't want to leave them out:
ME IO Port (the fast transfer I meant). What I had in mind is basically AE2's ME IO Port (https://appliedenergistics.org/ae2-site-archive/ME-IO-Port/index.html): a block that shuttles everything between the ME network and a storage cell in one action, with no per-item configuration of what gets sent, and the direction flipped in the UI (into the cell / into the network). Right now getting items into or out of a cell that isn't sitting in a drive is the slow, stack-by-stack part, and a port like that fixes it in one go. Is anything along these lines planned, even a simplified version?
Cell disassembly. In the original a cell can be broken back down into a storage component and a housing, but it's strict about contents: the cell has to be fully emptied first, and only then does it come apart into those two parts - the same parts that feed back into crafting cells. Would love to see this here too, for the cells you craft. Just checking whether it's on the table.
Anyway, that's everything from me. Thanks again for the mod, it's a blast.
Implemented all of your ideas, tell me if it works now with infinity quality tiers, I downloaded another mod and it worked with it.
Continuing this thread - I ran into a couple more problems with autocrafting, and I also have some suggestions and a few notes.
Autocrafting issues
Once the number of crafting CPUs (co‑processors) goes past roughly 2k, the network breaks and becomes completely inaccessible. The two screenshots show exactly this: at around 1k everything is fine (the “OK / 1K” shot - the ME Terminal lists the stored items and the controller reports power normally), but after crossing the ~2k threshold the same setup dies (the crossed‑out shot - the terminal just says “The ME Controller has no power” and the storage shows up empty, so there’s no access to the network at all).
The molecular assembler, when built from quality components and fitted with quality speed modules, actually finishes each craft faster than the pattern provider can pull the output off and dispatch the next crafting job. So the real bottleneck here is the pattern provider, not the assembler - the assembler ends up sitting idle between batches waiting for the next assignment instead of running continuously.
Suggestions
A singular cell for fluids - same idea as the item singular cell, but for liquids.
A block that can plug into the drone logistics network, so drones can build and service the base directly, without having to rig up manipulator + interface workarounds.
Pattern providers are currently limited to a 2D plane. In AE2 (Minecraft) the molecular assembler connects straight to the cable and carries channels, which lets you lay out compact multi‑layer bases. Here, because of the plane limit, you end up hanging 3 assemblers per provider and can’t make the layout any cleaner. It would be great if providers/assemblers weren’t tied to a flat plane and could carry channels the way AE2 does.
Bug
Underground cables: when you drag them out with the left mouse button held down, they get drawn and placed incorrectly.
Screenshots:
https://ibb.co/rGFMQ1N7
https://ibb.co/4Zjmxpg9
Wtf this is?!?!?!
https://ibb.co/5h6Qr9FX
A couple more things for this thread - one UI/design issue with frequencies, and one about pattern handling.
Frequency input field + wireless connector logic
When picking a frequency for the quantum bridge or the wireless connector, the input field misbehaves: it won't let you append digits to what you've typed - it wipes the whole field unless you manage to finish typing and hit Enter in time, and you only get about 1 second before it clears itself completely. This makes entering a long frequency number really painful.
Design‑wise: for the quantum bridge I get why one frequency is locked to one pair of bridges (2 blocks per channel). But the wireless connector has no channel cap at all, so why apply the same pairing rule to it? Couldn't all wireless connectors simply share one frequency and form a single wireless net? Or, alternatively, add a universal hub block that the wireless connectors link to, instead of forcing pairwise frequencies.
Pattern cloning & copy‑pasted providers
AE2 has a nice QoL feature where you can copy a pattern configuration with a memory card off one interface, and then click the memory card on a neighbouring interface to clone those patterns onto it (as long as blank patterns are in your inventory). It would be great to have the same here for replicating craft lines without re‑encoding everything by hand.
Related bug with the pattern provider: when you copy‑paste a provider that had patterns inside, the paste doesn't reproduce the patterns themselves - it looks like it stores some kind of reference / filter / request pointing at those same patterns. The result is a weird half‑empty state: the block "remembers" what it wants, but nothing actually puts the patterns into it. Neither the drones nor the network deliver the pattern into the copied provider, even when the pattern is present both in the player's inventory and as an item inside the network. So the copied block stays unusable until you re‑insert everything by hand - which makes the native copy/paste essentially pointless for providers.
P.S. - following up on the pattern provider note from above, since I looked into it further and my earlier wording ("it stores a reference / filter / request") turned out to be wrong, so let me correct the whole thing. The actual behaviour of the provider under copy/paste is the opposite of what we'd want. A normal copy/paste of a provider doesn't request the pattern that already exists in the network - it tries to re-create / re-encode the pattern from scratch using the saved parameters, which is exactly why a recipe that is already encoded and sitting in the network as an item never ends up inside the pasted provider: the paste path is "make a new pattern", not "pull the existing one". A shift copy/paste, on the other hand, doesn't trigger either action - it neither creates a pattern nor fetches one, so the pasted provider comes out with no link to the recipes at all. In practice there is therefore no copy/paste mode that puts an already-encoded pattern into the copied provider, even when that pattern is available both in the player's inventory and as an item in the network, and the block always has to be filled by hand, which is what made the native copy/paste useless for providers in the first place. And while we're on patterns, there should also be a simpler / bulk way to decode filled patterns back into blanks, because the real pain isn't decoding patterns in general but what happens after you rebuild or change a craft line: once the recipes shift, part of the old patterns simply becomes obsolete - they're still sitting there in the network or in the providers, but they're no longer used and no longer match anything because the crafting changed - and those dead patterns are exactly the ones you currently have to decode back into blanks by hand, one at a time. So a bulk decode/clear isn't just a convenience, it's the only sane way to sweep out the stale patterns left behind after a refactor instead of manually unwinding each leftover one every time you reorganise the line.
Thanks for following up, and you’re right about how 0.5.10 behaves. The first part is fixed for the next version (0.5.11): a provider built or pasted from a blueprint (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V) fills each slot with an already-encoded copy of that pattern from your inventory first, then from the ME network, and only encodes a blank when there’s none. Waiting slots show on the map. The ME Memory Card does the same and can paste a provider’s patterns onto every provider in an area. Shift settings paste still only copies priority, blocking, lock and cards. I’m considering letting it fill empty slots the same way.
The bulk clear doesn’t exist yet and I agree it’s needed after rebuilding a line. I’ll add a way to clear many patterns at once (the ones in your inventory, and the network’s patterns that no provider uses).
Quick separate note, on top of the blueprint/pattern fix you mentioned: When drones build a pattern provider, the encoded patterns in the slots are kept, but the extension cards in the upgrade slots are not - they have to be inserted by hand.
Thanks, confirmed in the code. A provider built from a blueprint asks only the ME network for its cards, never your inventory, unlike its patterns since the fix above. If a card can’t be placed at that moment, it may give up on it for good. One question that would help: were the cards in the ME network when the drones built it, or in your inventory or a chest? I’ll fix it for the next version: cards will come from your inventory first when you build by hand, then from the network, and a provider will keep waiting for missing cards and show it, like it does for patterns.
Apologies - my previous report on this was wrong, please disregard it. The extension cards do arrive correctly when they're sitting in the ME network. The mistake was on my side: I had them in my inventory and, by analogy with the molecular assembler, assumed the drones would request them from there too, when in fact they pull them from the network. So the behaviour is fine as-is and there's nothing to fix here - sorry for the noise.
A few unrelated smaller things I noticed while using it:
Craft output timing.
When you order a craft, the finished product doesn't get pushed into the network until the whole crafting cycle has completed. Is there a technical reason for waiting for the full cycle, rather than releasing the output into the network as soon as it's ready?
Search is case-sensitive.
The search box is hard-bound to letter case, which makes it awkward to use. Could it be made case-insensitive?
Wireless modular terminal in encoding mode. When you open it in pattern-encoding mode there are no slots for the patterns themselves, so anything you handle goes straight into your inventory - meaning you can't decode patterns on the fly there.
Auto-refill of the player inventory (feature idea).
Now that the portable terminal is an armor module and works inside the range of a wireless access point, it would be great to have it refill the player's inventory on its own, the same way logistic drones handle personal logistics requests in vanilla - pulling whatever the player needs straight from the ME network in the background, without having to open the terminal and click each stack by hand.
Sort mode doesn't persist across windows (correcting my earlier note).
The sort mode isn't a global/persistent preference - it only sticks in whichever terminal window you last touched. The moment you open a second terminal, every already-open window (including the first) snaps back to "amount"; re-sorting the new one knocks the previous one back too. So you can never keep two terminals open with a non-default sort - opening any fresh window resets all the others to amount. It would be good to have a single shared sort preference that applies to every terminal and survives opening new windows.
More sort criteria + direction. It would help to be able to sort by mod, by quality (the same way quality items are ranked), and by rarity/tier in a progression-tree style (e.g. items that need red flasks sit lower, and so on up the tree). On top of that, a toggle for sort direction - ascending vs descending - for whichever criterion is active.
Transient placeholder rows for zero-count items. While a terminal window is open, keep placeholder rows for items whose count has dropped to 0, so the list doesn't reshuffle and jump under the cursor. This matters most when the sort is not by amount, because then a vanishing row makes it impossible to click the right stack and pull the quantity you want. These placeholders should be temporary though - shown only while the window is open and only for items that actually hit 0 during that session; once the terminal is closed they disappear, and they reappear next time only if the same thing happens again. The GUI shouldn't be permanently cluttered with dead zero-count rows.
No worries about the cards, thanks for checking! On the rest:
Got it on the Clear flow in pattern mode - it does work via holding the pattern and clicking Clear, so I'm not asking to change the mechanic. Just flagging that it reads as unintuitive in practice, because the stationary terminal does expose pattern slots, so the expectation and muscle memory differ between the two modes of the same terminal.
On the search / case sensitivity, here's the exact repro you asked for, and it's specifically about localized names, not English ones. On a Cyrillic locale (RU), searching the translated name with a capital first letter - «Железная шестерня» - correctly matches iron gear, but the very same string with a lowercase first letter - «железная шестерня» - returns no match at all. So the asymmetry is between the capitalised and lowercased forms of the translated string, which suggests the lowercasing isn't being applied consistently to the localized/translated representation (or the translation is keyed/cached in a way that only the capitalised form resolves). That's the case I hit, not a plain Latin-case issue.
One more thing I noticed with the modular terminal: it appears to run off its own internal battery and does not draw power from the accumulator modules in the armor. I only caught it because there was no sun - the terminal drained to zero while the armor accumulators were still fully charged. Shouldn't a terminal that sits in the armor as a module pull from the armor's power network like any other module does? As it stands it wastes its internal charge and goes dark in shade/at night even when there's plenty of stored energy right next to it, which feels like either a bug or at least something that should be made explicit.
One more small thing, on the order-quantity input in the terminal: the green confirm button shows a tooltip hinting "press E" when you hover it, but with the cursor/focus sitting in the number field, pressing E doesn't activate that button - it closes the terminal instead (the default "close GUI" binding wins over the button's hotkey). So the hint is misleading and there's effectively no working keyboard path to confirm a typed quantity: you type the number, hit the very key the tooltip told you to hit, and the window just shuts. Either make E actually confirm the order while focus is in the field (and leave closing on Esc), or stop advertising E on that button if it can't be honoured - right now following the on-screen hint loses your terminal window.
P.S. - forgot one more, and it's related to localization but a different code path than the search issue above. Sorting by name uses the English name as the sort key, not the localized string that's actually rendered on screen. So in a Cyrillic locale the "sort by name" order follows the English alphabet while you're looking at Russian labels - the visible text and the resulting order don't match at all. The sort key should come from the active locale's translated name (same source the UI displays), otherwise name-sorting is effectively broken on every non-English language, just in a way that's easy to miss because the list still looks sorted, only against the wrong strings.
Confirmed, and it’s slightly worse than that: “by name” currently sorts by the item’s internal ID (like iron-plate), not by any displayed name. I’ll make it sort by your own locale’s translated names, the same ones the search already uses, in every window that sorts by name. Thanks for spotting it, that’s an easy one to miss as an English player.