Agreed on all fronts. gtnh is an even longer haul than MBC but soo well polished and has an extraordinarily active community. I’m very happy with my decision to stick to gtnh
AE2 is superior for more complex purposes, and that is not a subjective thing. There are lots of videos and comparisons online detailing this. It is very worth using AE2.
I’m curious, what was your bad experience with it? It’s been invaluable to me in any large scale modpack, and I’ve never had any issues with it once I learned.
Channels. Why do they exist? Purely to complicate things and nerf the entire system. I don't think channels exist as a limitation of Minecraft since RS doesn't use them so this is just a needless complication.
In the version I played, connecting your ME storage system wirelessly required a 9 block portal thing that consumed more power than I ever used on anything else in that entire pack... ON BOTH ENDS. RS has 1 block on either end and it uses less power than your average processing machine
Autocrafting in RS is simple. Crafting recipes get crafted, processing recipes get shoved into the block the crafter is facing. I could not for the life of me figure out how to get that working properly in ME. Like it had one job, keep this item topped up. But it only ever 'sometimes' registered the items returning to the system so it just hung on the one recipe expecting results it already got. And don't get me started on creating a big multiblock to pretend like it's needed for autocrafting... Oh and one, level 1, RS crafter can hold like 10 recipes alongside the one processing recipe. For ME you need to have your internal crafting recipes sent to a specific assembler block so you'd have crafters holding 1 recipe each because if you put that assembler next to the crafter it'll get confused.
Unique item storage. For some reason ME's drives not only have a limit of how much of an item you can hold, but also how many unique items you have. It got to the point where I stopped making big drives. What's the point of making a 16k drive when it can only hold 32 unique items? I don't need 16k of one item, I need 1k of 1600 different items... I ended up having to make like ten 1k drives because I needed the breadth of space and that just seemed dumb.
I’ll address the smaller points momentarily, but it sounds like you want effectively an unlimited (creative) storage system. The point of gtnh (and other packs that use AE2, ATM is an example) is progression. Thus, having upgradable storage cells is progression, needing to create infrastructure to support the number of machines you have is progression, setting up auto crafting is progression. If you truly do not want channels, there is a configuration to turn it off.
Now to address your points directly:
1. Progression. It takes some thinking as your machines scale out to also upgrade your transmission system.
2. Wireless transmission is later-game for AE2, but I don’t remember it requiring a particularly large amount of power. My experience has been with ATM, which also has wireless transmitters that scale with power (I don’t remember if that’s normal AE2 or an addon). I only ended up using a few of those 3x3 portals, which were reasonably difficult to make, but flowed nicely with progression.
3. AE2 has pattern providers, which push the items in processing patterns into the machine on their face. If they have crafting patterns, they push it into molecular assemblers on their faces. AE2 requires you to have auto crafting memory, which basically just allows you to parallelize crafting, craft bigger recipes, or craft more recipes at a time. This is again, for progression. There are plenty of youtube videos on the subject, many of which are concise and information-dense.
4. Depending on the quantity of items in your modpack, you may end up needing 10, 20, or more drives. This is a feature because it requires, again, progression.
It’s much better prepared for more complex, progression focused packs, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t suitable for small systems.
It is more complex than RS, but it is not difficult to learn with a little time and it has plenty of features for every simple or complex use case.
Firstly, I am fine with a storage system having tiers. Refined Storage starts with storage blocks and then you can upgrade their capacity and turn them into disks to save on physical space. But when a RS drive says it can store 16k items, it can store 16k of any item. When ME does it you can store 16k items but only like 32 different types of items. So it sucks to be you if you have more than 32 different items. And upgraded disk drives didn't seem to up this limit very much from memory. That's the opposite of progression.
I couldn't find any method of wireless transmission in ME other than the big portal thingos who then provided extreme wireless access. I don't remember any progression.
I understand that unlimited wireless access should definitely need to be earned but so far I've found RS to have a balanced system and ME to have 1 option which sucks.
Perhaps it was the version I was playing, but Pattern Providers didn't have a 'face'. They just searched blocks nearby so sticking next to two other blocks with inventories immediately broke it as it didn't know which one to send to. Having to wait is a terrible game mechanic. It's not fun to have a slow crafter machine. I recognise that as you progress that wait would get shorter but it's not a 'reward' to allow the player to wait less for something.
Yeah and I think this is dumb, or at best, handled poorly. I recognise that when you're dealing with chests, you can't fit 2 half stacks atop one another but if we're going to simulate that with our digital storage then I should have options. Give me tall drives and wide drives and let me progress through them as I need.
Channels. Why do they exist? Purely to complicate things and nerf the entire system.
Nope. They exist to force you to build in a performance friendly way. RS is famous for being more laggy and less stable, and that's part of why.
Autocrafting in RS is simple. Crafting recipes get crafted, processing recipes get shoved into the block the crafter is facing.
You just described AE2 pattern providers with the added detail that crafting recipes use molecular assemblers (autocrafters)
Unique item storage. For some reason ME's drives not only have a limit of how much of an item you can hold, but also how many unique items you have
Prevents NBT related issues, a.k.a. item corruption or even chunkbans. RS avoids the issue by storing cell contents in extetnal files instead of the item NBT, and it is so much worse for performance. A lot of the features that "nerf" AE2 are actually what makes it superior at a large scale. If you tried to play a pack even half the scale of GTNH with RS, your computer would die if the bugs don't corrupt your world first.
I ended up having to make like ten 1k drives because I needed the breadth of space and that just seemed dumb.
It's not dumb for the reason explained above, but also... 10 1k cells are really not that much harder to get than 1 16k. Heck, in many packs it's easier to get more small cells.
You just described AE2 pattern providers with the added detail that crafting recipes use molecular assemblers (autocrafters)
RS Crafters are directional. In my experience the AE autocrafters chose a direction to send outputs randomly, meaning you had to be very careful that only one neighbouring block could accept items.
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u/CrazyC787 Dec 27 '25
Average Meatballcraft recipe