Item Pipe
alaindustrial:item_pipe
Summary
The Item Pipe carries things between chests and machines so you don't have to run them across yourself. Lay a line of pipes from one chest to another, tell it with the wrench where to take from and where to put — and it works on its own. It needs no power. A pipe moves 2 items per second. That's a touch slower than a hopper, so a full stack takes about 32 seconds. In exchange it runs any distance, branches, and lets you set each side — a hopper does none of that. Want speed: that comes with later pipes. If a pipe pulls from several chests (or feeds several), it takes them in turns — nobody is left out.
Sides and the wrench
Every side of a pipe has a role. Point at the side you want and right-click it with the wrench: the role switches to the next one. Only the side you clicked changes, and what it became is printed at the bottom of the screen.
| Mode | What it does | How it looks |
|---|---|---|
NEUTRAL | A plain connection: takes and gives. | plain sleeve |
EXTRACT | Takes things out of the chest or machine next to it. | wide mouth, orange tip |
INSERT | Puts things into the chest or machine next to it. | narrow nozzle, teal tip |
DISABLED | Turns this side off entirely. | no sleeve |
You read the role straight off the block, nothing to open: an orange mouth takes, a teal nozzle gives, and a disabled side simply has no sleeve. The usual chest-to-chest setup: EXTRACT on the side facing the first chest, INSERT on the side facing the second. That's it — the items are moving. A pipe never loses or duplicates anything: if the destination chest is full, the item stays where it is and the pipe just waits for room.
Shift-right-click with the wrench does not set sides — that dismantles the pipe, like any block of this mod.
Pipe to pipe
Where a pipe meets another pipe there is nothing to take or give — it's just a stretch of the route. So the wrench only toggles joined ↔ cut there, and no mouth or nozzle is drawn: a run of pipes stays smooth.
Recipe
8 silver ingots around an iron gear gives 8 pipes.
Implementation
Developer notes; nothing here affects play.
The shared network and face logic live in common; Fabric uses ItemStorage.SIDED, NeoForge . Modes are stored in the block entity's NBT as 2 bits per side. A transfer is atomic: source and destination change inside one transaction (Fabric Transfer API / NeoForge API), so items are never lost or duplicated. NeoForge exposes a transactional capability view for chests and machines, keeping WorldlyContainer side and slot rules intact.
Related
Wrench — sets each side, and takes the pipe back apart. Iron Gear — the crafting core. Silver — the body of the pipe.
Crafting
Shaped Crafting
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×8Item Pipe