Everything About It¶
This subchapter brings to you the overview of bulk cells & it’s accompanying trinkets.
What Are Those?¶
Bulk Cells¶
MEGA Bulk Item Storage Cell, further referred as ‘Bulk Cells’, is a storage cell from an addon mods called MEGA Cells by ninety.
Bulk Cells is an incredibly powerful cell. A single cell can only hold 1 type of item, but it stores item in BigInt value. Which is frickin’ big, the limitations is your system memory. Practically infinite.
Read more about BigInt Max Limit
Did you know that?
Assuming:
- You can theoretically produce a resource at a maxInt value per tick (2.147.483.647 of iron ingots per tick for example)
- And do it 24/7
It still requires 6 years, 10 months, and 7 days to only reach max capacity of maxLong (a 19 digits numbers). 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 is it?)
But hey, there’s more
On top of storing items, Bulk Cells also have the abilities to compress & decompress items automatically!
Compression & Decompression¶
Having to make a pattern to craft nuggets from an iron ingots, and another pattern for crafting iron block, AND THEN another pattern to craft those back into iron ingots is surely labor-intensive, especially when you’re playing a pack that adds more than just iron, gold, copper, & diamonds. Up until now, you might be familiar by using Storage Drawers to do this kind of thing. A Compacting Drawers to be exact.
But this comes with a small problem for drawers
Compacting Drawers (and any other variants of physical-storage-compactor from other mods) for the longest time existing never plays nice with AE2. This is because when a storage controller (ones you used to read all the drawers content) reads by a Storage Bus (External Storage application), it reports the content incorrectly.
Example of misreports to 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¶
Compression Card is a Card Upgrade which you can install to a bulk cell inside a Cell Workbench. This thing makes the bulk cell assigned with it considered as valid by the network to do compression of that cell contents.
Not assigning a Compression Card = No Compression!
Comparisons between Assigning Compression vs No Compression
Decompression Module¶
Decompression Module is a cable sub-part, meaning it can only be attached into a regular-sized ME cable (won’t connect into dense). Simultaneously with compression cards, this thing instead enables the network itself to be able to do any decompression. To install it, just place it anywhere in the network (like the Wireless Access Point).
Any decompression requires a functional CPU Multiblock !
Storage Drawers vs Bulk Cells¶
One might wonder,
Huh. Bulk cells seems just like Storage Drawers. Both can store a lot & compresses 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 has their own pros & cons. DO NOT weaponize this table to go ham on another user 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-Efficient…
This is the looks of storing 20 items in bulks. ME Drive from base AE2 holds 10 cell each, and ME Extended Drive from ExtendedAE mods can hold 20 cell each. Making it more compact with 1:20 ratio of space to item types compared to drawers.
Regarding External Storage…
External Storage is perfectly fine to do. Slight delay (performance affection) is bound to happen because it tries to read every slot in a drawers network that a storage bus able to read to. This is also mentioned by the in-game guide.
Applied Energistics 2 | CurseForge
Functional Storage | CurseForge
MEGA Cells | CurseForge
ExtendedAE | CurseForge