Additional Pipes is a mod that adds a few extra pipes to Buildcraft. You might remember us from Tekkit, and yes, we're still around!
Pipes
Addition Transport Pipe
This pipe, like the Clay Pipe, will add items to an inventory before passing them down a pipe. However, it will only add the item if there is some of it in the inventory already. It's useful for making cheap and easy sorting systems.
Priority Insertion Pipe
The Clay Pipe is great for making automated systems so that they can't overflow. But, it falls short when you need to have more than one machine connected to a single pipe. This pipe allows you to specify the order in which you would like the connected inventories filled. Instead of having a row of clay pipes, you can use just one of these. For example, if you want to fill one connected chest before another, just increase its priority in the GUI.
Distribution Pipe
Buildcraft has long been missing a way to have a ratio of items between different outputs of a pipe, and this pipe provides it. For example, say you have a Forestry automated wheat farm, and you want it to generate seeds as well. However, it also needs to feed seeds back into itself to produce wheat. Normally, there wouldn't be an easy way to take the correct amount of excess seeds. However, with the Distribution Pipe, you can set it to feed two seeds back into the farm and one to the output, and things will work correctly!
Closed Pipe
The closed pipe is useful as a last-ditch override on a pipe system. It works like a normal transport pipe, except that if an item has nowhere to go, instead of being dropped on the ground, they go into the pipe's internal 9-stack inventory. When that gets full, they are deleted like a Void Pipe. You can use gates to tell when this pipe is storing items.
Advanced Wood Pipe
This is another pipe which kind of got absorbed into Buildcraft as the Emerald Pipe. It acts like a wooden pipe, however you can whitelist or blacklist certain items from being extracted. So, while it is cheaper that the Emerald Pipe, it lacks some of its functions. I feel like it differs enough from the Emerald Pipe that I'm not planning on removing it.
Teleport Pipes
These were the first pipes ever added to the mod, and certainly the most well-known. Instead of building huge pipelines, Teleport Pipes allow you to transport items, fluids, and power, and pipe signals across huge distances or even between dimensions. You assign a frequency to each one and can set it as public or private, so you can choose how your power and items are shared.
Also, in the 1.7.x and 1.8.x versions of the mod, pipes of the same type and frequency will share pipe wire signals with one another. You can use it to switch your power plant in another dimension on or off!
Fluid Teleport Pipe: 220MB/t
Power Teleport Pipe: 2560 RF/t (10% loss by default).
Teleport pipes are created in the assembly table, with the following recipes:
Before MC1.12:
MC1.12 and Up:
Water Pump Pipe
The water pump pipe is a easy, reliable, low-lag way to pump water. Instead of making a big 3x3 water source, a pump, and a bunch of redstone engines, just make one of these and place it over a single block of water. It will pump out 90MB of water per tick by default, likely more than you would get with the other setup and with much less lag.
Switch Pipe
The switch pipe is a simple way to close off sections of a pipe system. When it receives a redstone signal, it disconnects from pipes around it. There are variants for items, fluids, and power.
Switch Fluid Pipe: 40MB/t
Switch Kinesis Pipe: 1280 RF/t
Obsidian Fluid Pipe
This pipe originated as a request on the suggestion forums. Similar to an obsidian transport pipe, which sucks up items off the ground, this pipe sucks up fluids from containers. Just toss a canister or bucket at it, and it will pick it up, drain the fluid into the pipe system, and spit the item back out. If you power it with a redstone engine, it will also suck in items on the ground in front of it like an obsidian transport pipe (yeah, I kind of stole the code for this...). I would imagine it is pretty useful for quickly emptying large canisters of fluid without right-clicking on a tank a million times. It drains and transports 100MB of fluid per tick.
This pipe will be removed in the 1.12.x releases!
Gravity Feed Pipe
Gravity Feed Pipes pull items out of inventories without needing power. However, since they use the Power of Gravity™, they can only pull items from the bottoms of inventories. This pipe was added by request as a way to reduce lag in large factories caused by redstone engines.
Jeweled Pipe
This pipe functions as a greatly improved Diamond Pipe. First of all, it has 27 slots per side, allowing for much more complex sorting systems. Like a diamond pipe, putting an item in one of these slots will cause all of the same item in the pipe to be directed to that side. Each side has toggles which control whether the pipe will match metadata and/or NBT when filtering items. Finally, each side can be set to accept or deny unsorted items. If an item that enters the pipe is not in any of the sides, it will be sent to one of the sides with "Accept Unsorted" enabled. If no sides have that option enabled, the item will be routed randomly.
History
Additional Pipes has a long, storied history. It kind of feels like a poor orphan bounced between foster homes all its life. I'll record here what I've managed to find out.
The original developer of this mod is Zeldo, back in MC beta 1.8. He created a thread for it on Minecraft Forum here, and a Google Code source repo here. He developed it through BC2.2.5 and late 2011. He added teleport pipes, as well as most of the other pipes this mod has historically had.
Months later, the mod was picked up, with permission, by DaStormBringer and Kyprus. At first, it was apparently hosted here (dead link), but it was moved here, where the two developers worked on it. They updated it through Buildcraft 3, did a lot of work on the mod's chunkloader, and fixed a lot of bugs.
In October 2012, it was forked by tcooc on Github and updated first to 1.4.7, then to 1.5.1 and 1.6.4. Arasium and other developers also contributed. They added two new pipes as well as some gates. However, tcooc 's life apparently became too busy, and he stopped updating it over a year later in December 2014.
In August of the next year, I noticed that it was dead and thought it would be interesting to try and update it to MC1.7.10. A month or so later, the update was complete and I posted my version as a pull request on tcooc's repository. In January 2015, tcooc saw my work and decided to make me a maintainer of the project and give me Github access. I then started making official 1.7.10 builds, and later updated the mod to 1.8.x and 1.12.x.
Other Downloads
Older releases, dev builds, and changelogs are hosted on the Github releases page here.
The source can be found in the same repo.
Yes, yes, Logistics Pipes and teleport pipes don't play nice. See here for info.
FAQ
Q: What happened to the Redstone Pipe?
A: It has been removed because it duplicated features provided by Gates. If you haven't used them, give them a try! They're extremely powerful.
Q: Where do I report bugs?
A: I'd prefer that you used the GitHub issues page. That way, I get an email about it, and you have the opportunity to see if your problem has already been reported.
Q: Why is the Adv. Insertion Pipe deprecated?
A: Buildcraft added the Clay Pipe, which works identically to the Adv. Insertion Pipe, so there was no reason to keep it in the mod.
Mod Packs
I think life is too short to care about things like this.
It's MMPL licensed, so use it however you want.
MC1.12.x / BC8.0 Update
About a year ago, Buildcraft began a significant rewrite, throwing away much of its current codebase. This rewrite is still in progress, and hasn't yet produced a stable release for MC1.12. Also, beta versions of Buildcraft don't have all the functionality I need to make certain parts of Additional Pipes work.
So, while I am creating a series of alpha Additional Pipes releases for MC1.12.x, these should not be considered final releases. They may contain rendering glitches and bugs (some of which come from Buildcraft, some from Additional Pipes), and are currently missing the Power Teleport Pipe, Teleport Gates, and the Teleport Tether chunkloader.
If and when Buildcraft creates a new stable release, I will start creating stable releases of Additional Pipes that you can actually depend on!
Due to the magnitude of the BuildCraft 8.x changes, I had to rewrite more than half of Additional Pipes' code when porting to 1.12. Though it was a pain, this was actually an opportunity to give some of the cruft I inherited a rework! The following features are new in Additional Pipes 6.0:
- Distribution and priority insertion pipes now distribute at the item level, rather than the stack level. This means that they will break up stacks into smaller ones according to the distribution settings, and can now be used with stack-extracting engines
- BuildCraft guidebook support! Currently only the teleport pipe has an entry, but others will soon.
- Fully localizeable GUIs! Previously, AP's GUIs used mainly hardcoded strings, but now all strings are broken out to the language file
- Note that each localization will have to be updated to take advantage of this. Currently, the English, French, and Portuguese localizations are updated, but the Japanese, Russian, German, and Spanish ones have not been
So, while the MC1.7.10 and MC1.8.9 versions of Additional Pipes are stable and mature, the MC1.12.x version is not!