Refined Storage: Building Your First Storage Network
Refined Storage is a mass-storage mod built around a device network you access through a single Grid. This guide covers the components you need to get a network running.
Core materials
Two materials underpin everything: 
Quartz Enriched Iron, the mod's basic crafting metal, and processors made from 
Silicon (smelted from quartz). Processors come in three tiers — 
Basic Processor, 
Improved Processor and 
Advanced Processor — and each is smelted from its raw form. Higher processors unlock higher-capacity storage and devices.
The network core
A network centers on the Controller, which supplies power to everything connected. You interact with it through a 
Grid, the unified GUI that shows every item stored anywhere on the network.
First storage
Items live on storage: craft a 
1k Storage Part from Silicon, Quartz Enriched Iron, glass and redstone, then combine it with a 
Storage Housing to make a 
1k Storage Disk, which slots into a Disk Drive on the network. From this base you scale up disks and add devices, both covered in the storage and devices guides.
Check which build you are on first
Refined Storage's two versions are structured differently enough to confuse any guide:
- 1.21.1 (2.0.9) — 80 crafting recipes plus a 320-recipe recoloring system
- 1.20.1 (1.12.4) — 368 crafting recipes and no recoloring at all
The colour variants that fill the older crafting list were moved into recoloring on the newer one. Neither version has more content; they organise it differently.
What the mod actually contains
87 pages, 50 items, 37 blocks. That is a compact mod whose recipe count is dominated by variants rather than by distinct devices, so the number of things you need to learn is far smaller than 368 or 400 suggests.
The two stable categories
Smelting and Upgrade With Enchanted Book each carry 4 recipes on both builds. The enchanted-book upgrades are the mechanism for moving enchantments into storage devices and are worth learning early, since they behave identically regardless of version.
First steps
Build the core network and one storage device in whatever colour comes out. On 1.21.1 you can recolour the whole network afterwards without recrafting anything, which makes early aesthetic decisions reversible.