Refined Storage Devices and Autocrafting
Refined Storage's real power is its devices — importers, exporters and autocrafting — that automate your network. This guide covers what each does.
Moving items in and out
Importer — pulls items from an adjacent inventory into the network.
Exporter — pushes items from the network into an adjacent inventory.
Constructor — places blocks from the network into the world; the 
Destructor breaks blocks into the network.
Detector — emits a redstone signal based on how much of an item the network holds.
Wireless and access
The 
Network Transmitter and 
Network Receiver link separate networks or extend one wirelessly, and the 
Crafting Grid lets you craft directly from network contents.
Autocrafting
Autocrafting turns the network into a factory. Store recipes in a 
Pattern Grid, add an 
Autocrafter, and request items through the Grid for the network to assemble; the 
Autocrafting Monitor and 
Autocrafter Manager track and manage jobs. You can also enhance devices with upgrades — including Silk Touch and Fortune applied from enchanted books — so importers and destructors respect those enchantments.
The two builds are radically different
This is the most important thing to check before following any Refined Storage guide. The recipe counts do not merely differ, they have been restructured:
- Crafting — 80 recipes on 1.21.1 against 368 on 1.20.1
- Recoloring — 320 recipes on 1.21.1 against none at all on 1.20.1
What happened is that colour variants moved out of the crafting list into a dedicated recoloring system on the newer build. So the 1.20.1 crafting list is inflated by every coloured version of every device, while 1.21.1 keeps the crafting list short and recolours afterwards.
A guide written for one line will look wrong on the other for that reason alone.
What stayed the same
Two categories are identical on both: 4 smelting recipes and 4 upgrade-with-enchanted-book recipes. The enchanted-book upgrades are the ones worth knowing, since they are how enchantments get transferred into devices.
Scale of the mod
87 pages across 50 items and 37 blocks — small compared with the recipe count, which is another sign of how much of that count was colour variants.
Practical advice
On 1.21.1, build devices in their default colour and recolour later; on 1.20.1, craft the colour you want directly.