AE2 ME Storage: Cells, Housings, and the Network

guide

The heart of Applied Energistics 2 is its ME network — a digital storage system that keeps items as data instead of in chests. This guide covers how storage is built.

Storage cells

Items live on ME Item Storage Cells, made by combining an ME Storage Component of a given size with a cell housing (or with quartz glass, redstone and metal directly). Components scale up — 1k, 4k, 16k and beyond — with each larger component crafted from smaller ones plus a Calculation Processor and quartz glass. Fluids use ME Fluid Storage Cells on the same pattern with ME Fluid Cell Housing.

Accessing storage

An ME Chest reads a single cell for direct access, and Portable Item Cell and Portable Fluid Cell combine a cell with an Energy Cell so you can carry network storage in hand.

Spatial storage

For storing whole regions of the world, Spatial Storage Cells (2³, 16³, 128³) hold Spatial Components built up with Engineering Processors and glowstone. Together these cells turn AE2 from simple chests into a compact, searchable digital warehouse — the foundation everything else in the mod plugs into.

Storage components come through the inscriber

Storage cells are built from processors, and processors come from the inscriber — 15 recipes, the smallest important category in a mod with 332 crafting recipes. Everything about scaling storage therefore runs into inscriber throughput first.

The other specialised categories are smaller still: Transform at 8, Charger at 3, Entropy at 2, and Quartz Cutting at 1 on 1.21.1 only.

Where the material starts

The mod's single structure is the Meteorite, placed as a top-layer modification at spacing 32, separation 8. It is common enough to be found rather than hunted, and it is the origin of the mod's starting resources.

Building blocks alongside the machinery

39 stonecutting recipes cover the quartz block family, which is how an ME room ends up looking coherent without importing blocks from another mod. It is worth cutting the decorative set at the same time as building the functional one.