Storage Cells

Discover a new guide Storage Cells for Applied Energistics 2 Wiki. Storage cells, which are one of the core storage mechanisms in Applied Energistics 2, come in three varieties: one for items, one for liquids, and one for spatial regions.

Contents

Item Storage Cells

Item storage boxes can hold up to 63 different types of items; the number of items they can store partly depends on how many types they are holding and their storage capacity.

Portable Item Storage

Fluid Storage Cells

Liquid storage cells can hold up to 5 different types of liquids; the amount of liquid they can store depends in part on how many types they are holding and their storage capacity.

Portable Fluid Storage

Capacity Limits

Storage cells have size and type limitations, plus you need to consider the resource usage of the cells to decide which is your best option. Each cell can store a fixed amount of data. Each type consumes a number of bytes (varies with cell size) and each consumes one bit of storage, so eight targets consumes one byte and a full stack of 64 consumes 8 bytes, regardless that item would stack outside of how an ME network would. For instance, 64 identical saddles don’t take up more space than 64 stones.
Shooting straight at the top-level storage cells is generally not the best idea, as you use more resources but don’t get any kind of additional storage.
Below is a table comparing the different storage cell tiers, their storage capacity, and a rough estimate of their costs.

Storage cell content vs cost

1k ME Item Storage Cell

Bytes: 1,024
Types: 63
Byte/Type: 8
C-Quartz: 5
N-Quartz: 5
Gold: 1
Diamonds: 0

4k ME Item Storage Cell

Bytes: 4,096
Types: 63
Byte/Type: 32
C-Quartz: 17
N-Quartz: 5
Gold: 3
Diamonds: 0

16k ME Item Storage Cell

Bytes: 16,384
Types: 63
Byte/Type: 128
C-Quartz: 51
N-Quartz: 10
Gold: 9
Diamonds: 1

64k ME Item Storage Cell

Bytes: 65,536
Types: 63
Byte/Type: 512
C-Quartz: 153
N-Quartz: 20
Gold: 27
Diamonds: 4

Storage capacity with different number of types

1k ME Item Storage Cell: 127 Stacks of items With 1 Item Type In Cell/ 65 Stacks of items With 63 Item Types in Cell.
4k ME Item Storage Cell: 508 Stacks of items With 1 Item Type In Cell/260 Stacks of items With 63 Item Types in Cell.
16k ME Item Storage Cell: 2,032 Stacks of items With 1 Item Type In Cell/ 1,040 Stacks of items With 63 Item Types in Cell.
64k ME Item Storage Cell: 8,128 Stacks of items With 1 Item Type In Cell/4,160 Stacks of items With 63 Item Types in Cell.