Everything About It¶
This subchapter shows you an overview of bulk cells & it’s accompanying tools.
What Are Those?¶
Bulk Cells¶
MEGA Bulk Item Storage Cell, further referred as ‘Bulk Cells’, is a storage cell from MEGA Cells.
Bulk Cells is an incredibly powerful cell. A single cell can only hold 1 type of item but can practically store an infinite items.
Did you know that?
Assuming:
- You can theoretically produce a resource at a
maxIntvalue per tick (2,147,483,647 iron ingots/tick for example) - And do it 24/7
It still requires 6 years, 10 months, and 7 days to reach max capacity of maxLong (a 19 digit number). And BigInt can holds more than 268,000,000 digits (relative to your system memory of course)! This also means you do not need any kind of Overflow Prevention…or does it?
But hey, there’s more
On top of storing items, Bulk Cells also have the ability to compress & decompress items automatically!
Compression & Decompression¶
Having to make a pattern to craft nuggets from iron ingots, another pattern for crafting iron block, AND THEN another pattern to craft those back into iron ingots is labor-intensive, especially when you’re playing a pack that adds more than just iron, gold, copper, & diamonds. Up until now, you might’ve been using Storage Drawers to do this kind of thing. The Compacting Drawer, to be exact.
But using drawers comes with a small problem
Compacting Drawers (and any other variants of physical-storage-compactor from other mods) never play nice with AE2. This is because a Storage Bus (External Storage application) reports the drawer contents incorrectly.
Example of a misreport in AE2
Here we can see that the system reads we have 81 nuggets, 9 iron ingots, and 1 iron block. But clearly we don’t have those, since that would just mean we have 3 iron blocks. When the drawer itself definitely shows it only has 1. This also sometimes referred as “Over-Report“
Luckily the Bulk Cells already takes care of that for us :3
Compression Card¶
A Compression Card is a Card Upgrade that you can install in a bulk cell using a Cell Workbench. This thing allows the bulk cell to auto-compress its items.
No Compression Card = No Auto Compression!
Compression vs No Compression
Decompression Module¶
The decompression module is a device that works with compression cards to allow the network to automatically decompress items. To install it, just place it anywhere in the network (like the Wireless Access Point).
Decompression requires a functional CPU Multiblock!
Storage Drawers vs Bulk Cells¶
One might wonder,
Huh. Bulk cells seem just like Storage Drawers. Both can store a lot & compress items. Why would I use these cells instead of drawers?
Then let me present to you the ups & downs.
Disclaimer
This is not to say one is worse than another. Both have their own pros & cons. DO NOT weaponize this table to go ham on another users’ preferences.
Storage Drawers  | Bulk Cells |
|---|---|
| Holds up to 2.1 Billions of items | Practically holds infinite items |
| Very cheap | Relatively more expensive |
| Very easy to get into | Quite complex to start |
| Partitions done by using items + Config Tool | Partitions done by Cell Workbench + Cards |
| Compacting Drawers can misreport item amounts | Precise compression |
| Higher-form compression might be tricky | Handles every-form of compression innately + built-in decompression |
| Takes up more physical spaces | Quite space-efficient |
| Storage Bus readings (External Storage) can affect performance when scaled up | Innate AE2 support (storage cell) means more optimized when scaled up |
Additional Notes
Regarding Space Efficiency
This is what it looks like to store 20 items in bulk. The base ME Drives holds 10 cells and the ME Extended Drive from ExtendedAE holds 20 cells.
Regarding External Storage
External Storage is perfectly fine to do. A slight delay will happen because the storage bus tries to read every slot in a drawer network. This is mentioned in the in-game guide.
MEGA Cells | CurseForge Functional Storage | CurseForge