Getting Started with Modular Routers Minecraft Mod - A Practical Guide

If you're a fan of automation and efficiency, the Modular Routers mod is a game-changer. This mod introduces a powerful system for automating item transfer, sorting, and even mining. Modular Routers offers a wide range of possibilities to enhance your gameplay. In this spotlight, we'll explore the core mechanics, practical applications, and advanced configurations of the Modular Routers mod, helping you unlock its full potential and take your Minecraft experience to the next level.

Modular Routers is a brilliant mod that has a relatively small number of craftable items for everything it is capable of. Here's the full set of items. We'll go through all of these in this post.

In addition to the router block itself, there are three basic item types, a module (looks like a tombstone), an upgrade (a square with a slice out of it), and the augment (square). There are also filters (the squares with blue rounded corners). Everything else is made from one of these items as the basis.

In this post, we'll do a number of different practical automations to learn how to use them.

Video Version

The Modular Router Block

The Modular Router block is essentially the container for the items that do all the work -- modules, upgrades, and augments. It sits in the world and interacts with it based on what you put inside it.

Here's the inside of the Router. It has three main sections:

Buffer - The router can can hold up to a stack of a single item. In that sense, it's a very simple one-stack hopper. But on steroids!

Modules - You put modules in the 9 modules slots. These are the instructions that are executed from left to right. Modules themselves have their own instructions inside of them. In it's simplest concept, all of the modules get executed once every cycle, which by default is 1 second, or 20 ticks. The modules do things like pull in an item, then operate on that item, then push it out to somewhere else.

Upgrades - These enhance the behavior of the Router. They make it go faster, run on more items at once, change it into a fluid or energy processor and more

Eco Mode - this allows the router to slow down to process only once every 5 seconds if it's idle. Then when something happens, it goes back to normal speed. This is a server friendly feature that can help cut down on lag.

Redstone Mode - This button can change how the router operates based on a redstone signal. The settings are Always on (ignore redstone and run), High Signal (operates when redstone is on), Low Signal (operates when there's no redstone signal), Always off, and Pulse (runs through the modules once on a redstone signal and stops).

Modules

Modules are the instructions on what to do. A router can have up to 9 of them and they get executed in sequence on each item in the buffer.

Move items from one inventory to another

The simplest Router function is to pull from an adjacent inventory and send items in a straight line to another chest.

That uses a Puller Module configured in the direction of the container, and then a Sender module configured in the direction of the destination. There are different levels of Puller and Sender modules that allow you to basically reach farther distances. The MK1 puller can pull only from an adjacent chest. The MK1 Sender can send an item in a straight line up to 16 blocks.

We'll touch on the higher level Pullers and senders in a later example.

It's important to note that moving items to and from inventories are basically the same as if you were doing it with a hopper. Some containers, like a furnace have specific sides that you must interact with to access their various slots. Modular routers work the same way.

Therefore when you configure a module, you specify what direction it operates in. To put fuel in a furnace with an MK1 sender, you'd need the router above the furnace with the sender pointing down. Our chests here don't have any restrictions, so we have the puller configured to pull from the left and the sender configured to push to the right.

There are lots of ways to configure a module with all kinds of filtering as well as augments that allow you to increase things like range, stack size, and more.

Modular Router to Pick Up Item Drops (like harvested Farm Crops, chicken eggs, and cactus)

The first thing I want to automate is the item drops from some chickens and a simple cactus farm and send them over to a central storage chest.

That chest sort of represents whatever storage system you have in place. that could be storage controller, or a chest connected to your Applied Energistics storage, an ender IO chest that sends the items elsewhere... or just a chest.

Dropped items is a very common problem to deal with, and there aren't many ways to do it, even with modded minecraft. In vanilla, we generally use water to push items into hoppers.

Here we have chickens and a cactus farm. We'll use a hopper to constantly pick up these drops.

This is very similar to the previous example, but instead of pulling from an inventory, we vacuum things up from the world. By default, this is a 6 block radius. Upgrades to the vacuum module can increase that range.

Modular Routers has a vacuum module! It picks up in a 6 block radius, so we also put 3 range upgrades in it to extend that range to 9, which is how far away the other side of the chicken coop is.

The MK1 Sender module in this case is very simple and just sends items straight into the storage chest.

Modular Router to Harvest Crops All Around It

Next let's harvest the crops in our farm. We can use a router to act like a player and essentially perform any mouse click action (right or left click, crouch, etc.) using the item in the buffer. Because there's a hoe in the buffer, we cannot use that buffer to pick up items. So we need a second buffer on top, which does the same vacuum operation that we used on the eggs and cactus.

We have four Activator modules in the bottom

The Activator module has an extra section for the action and how it's performed. We also specify the direction it acts in. We want four activation modules, one for each direction so the diamond hoe harvests as much crops as possible. It will only activate when the crop right next to the router matures, but then all the crops around that get broken.

Then the vacuum module picks them up. It's configured the same way as in the chicken and cactus farm but no range upgrades are needed.

Modular Router to Send Items to Smelter, Blast Furnace, and Smoker

Let's upgrade our egg and cactus router to send half of the eggs to a smelter and the other half to the chest. We'll also send all of the cactus to a mechanical squeezer, which will turn them into green dye.

We moved the Mk1 sender over two slots to the end of the line to catch any other items, like prickly pears and any other random block that happens to get picked up.

The distributor module is configured as follows:

We take the module and shift-right-click on the top of the furnace as well as the storage chest to set two destinations. The router is configured for round-robin distribution, which will send half to the furnace and half to the chest.

And when we're holding the Distributor Module, the destinations are highlighted.

We do the same with the Mk2 Sender, which can only send to one location, but also anywhere. In this case, it's going to the mechanical squeezer, filtered for cactus only.

Modular Router to Distribute Power

By putting an Energy Upgrade on a router, we can turn it into a battery. There are further upgrades that can allow it to hold more power and distribute it at faster rates.

The energy distributor doesn't have any internal configuration,,,

But like the item distributor, you must configure where the power is distributed to, up to eight different blocks.

Modular Router to Pull Liquid out of a Machine and Dump it

The mechanical squeezer turns cactus into dye but also fills up its tank with water.

So it doesn't over-fill, let's use a router to pull out the water and dump it into a hole below.

This requires two Fluid Modules, one to pull the water out of the squeezer into the back of the Router. Note that you must have a bucket in the buffer of the router to hold the water. See how it's configured to pull fluid into the back side.

The second Fluid module is configured to push out the fluid to the bottom slot. It's also configured to "Force" place the water, which will place it even if there's already a water block there. We need this on because we're just dumping water, and there will always be a water block there. You can imagine how this would be useful to just keep a fluid source in the world to get consumed and replaced as needed!

Modular Router to Pull Items from Machines like Smelter

Finally, we need to pull items out of the super-smelter blocks and send them back to the storage chest.

We have hoppers pushing all four machines' outputs into a single modular router.

That has an Mk2 Sender module that sends all items back into the central storage chest.

Be sure to check out the video with each of these examples demonstrated!

There's so much more to Modular Routers, but I just wanted to get you started. If you want to share what you've automated, or have any questions, please jump into the discord server!