Create a crystal growth chamber with six crystal growth accelerators

This tutorial will show you how to create a Applied Energistics 2 crystal growth chamber with a total number of six growth accelerators.

Automating the growth of pure AE2 crystals has always been a bit of a hassle. Not only is the setup a bit complicated, the crystals also need some time to form; see this chart for an approximation:

Now most setups only incorporate four or five crytal growth accelerators, but we can do better: With a little trick, we are able to completely enclose the water block on all six sides and reduce the crystal growth time to less than a minute. Aside from Applied Energistics 2, you need to have at least the following mods installed:

• Thermal Expansion
• Extra Utilities

This tutorial assumes that you have already created a base and a functioning Applied Energistics 2 network with storage and autocrafting capabilities. If you are not familiar with AE2 yet, please take a look at the AE2 tutorial series first.

1) Start by placing five blocks in a column and put a crystal growth accelerator (henceforth abbreviated as CGA) on top.

2) Put a block on top of the one CGA and surround the block with four more CGAs.

3) Break the block in the middle and fill the hole with water.

4) Put a temporary block on one of the CGAs at the side and place the final sixth CGA at its side to cover the water. Remove the temporary block afterwards.

5) Use an AE2 wrench or a Crescent Hammer from Thermal Expansion to rotate the middle four CGAs so that the face that looks like a cross is pointing up/downwards.

6) Connect all CGAs with a fluix cable.

7) Remove the blocks below the CGAs and put an Item Transfer Node from Extra Utilities below the CGA at the bottom.

8) Put an Extra Utilities Item Filter in your quickbar, select it and perform a rightclick to open its config screen. Place a Fluix Crystal, a Pure Fluix Crystal, a Pure Certus Quartz Crystal and a Pure Nether Quartz Crystal into the config slots.

9) Perform a rightclick on the Item Transfer Node and place the Item Filter from step 8 and two World Interaction Upgrades into the module slots at the bottom. Speed Upgrades (on the very right) are not necessary, but highly recommended.

10) Craft a ME Interface and put it into an anvil. Rename it to “Crystal Growth Chamber” or something similar so that you can identify it in the Interface Terminal later.

11) Place the ME Interface below the Item Transfer Node and use a wrench or crescent hammer to rotate it so that it points downwards.

12) Place a ME Storage Bus below the ME Interface, and a Fluix Cable below the Storage Bus, then place a ME Formation Plane below the fluix cable.

13) Place a Translocation Plate from Thermal Expansion below the ME Formation Plane.

14) Put a Multimeter from Thermal Expansion into your quickbar, select it, and sneak-rightclick while targeting the Translocation Plate to configure it. In the interface that opens, click on symbol (1) until you see a plus “+” symbol. This will teleport items thrown onto the plate to a position above it. Then use the +/- buttons (2) to set the teleport distance to 5. This will teleport any items directly into the water block above.

15) Place blocks around the Translocation Plate and the ME Formation Plane to seal it. In the screenshot below, I used a Glass Block from the Chisel mod, which I cut with a saw from Forge Microblocks.

16) Access a pattern terminal and create the patterns for all four crystal types:

18) Not necessary, but prettier: Add some structural support to make it look better. I used Cable Anchors from AE2 and Steel Fence blocks from Immersive Engineering.

That’s it – you can now craft pure crystals at your convenience, fast!