AE2 Autocrafting: Crafting Units and Storage
Autocrafting is what turns an Applied Energistics 2 network from storage into a factory that builds items on demand. This guide covers the crafting system's components.
Crafting storage
The crafting system remembers recipes and holds in-progress crafts in Crafting Storage blocks. Each is made by combining a 
Crafting Unit with an ME Storage Component — a 
1k Crafting Storage from a 1k component, a 
16k Crafting Storage from a 16k component, and larger sizes from bigger components. More and larger crafting storage means more parallel crafts and bigger jobs.
Building a crafting setup
A crafting network combines crafting storage with the processors and cells from the rest of AE2: you store patterns, request an item, and the network gathers ingredients and assembles it automatically. Because crafting storage reuses the same ME Storage Components as item storage, scaling your autocrafting is the same materials problem as scaling your warehouse.
Where it fits
Autocrafting sits on top of a working ME network — storage cells, processors and power. Once those are in place, crafting storage is the upgrade that lets you ask the network for any item and have it built from raw materials without opening a crafting table.
Where autocrafting sits in the recipe list
Applied Energistics 2 is 364 pages across 262 items and 102 blocks, and its crafting list is enormous — 332 recipes on 1.21.1 — but the machine categories that matter are small and specific:
Inscriber — 15 recipes- Transform — 8
Charger — 3- Entropy — 2
- Quartz Cutting — 1, and only on 1.21.1
Autocrafting is built from parts that come out of those, particularly the inscriber.
The inscriber is the bottleneck
Fifteen inscriber recipes cover the processors and printed circuits that every autocrafting component needs. Because the inscriber is slow and each processor takes multiple passes, the usual limit on scaling an autocrafting network is inscriber count rather than energy or storage.
Build a bank of them early rather than one and a plan to expand.
Meteorites are the starting point
The mod places one structure — the Meteorite, at spacing 32 with a separation of 8, as a top-layer modification. That is a dense placement, so meteorites are found rather than hunted, and they are where the mod's initial material comes from.
Version note
Only two differences exist between builds: one crafting recipe, and the single quartz-cutting recipe that exists on 1.21.1 alone.
Guide