A Rather Tremendous Item SysTem

Artist is an inventory management system for CC: Tweaked (requires MC 1.16.x or later). One could think of it as a budget AE network. It offers an easy way to store and extract items, but powered entirely through ComputerCraft.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4346137/159051788-2664b57e-b184-4e1d-b759-99e5c010d539.mp4

Features

• Index an arbitrary number of inventories (chests, barrels, etc...), allowing for insertion and extraction from them.
• Simple interface to view and request items.
• Inventory operations run in parallel, allowing for near-instant scanning and transfer of items.
• Furnace management support, able to automatically refuel furnaces and insert smelted items into the main system.
• Automatically dispose of items when you've got too many.

Install

• Place down a turtle and some chests, and connect them all together with wired modems and networking cable.
• Run wget run https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SquidDev-CC/artist/HEAD/installer.lua on your computer to install artist.
• Run /artist.lua to start it. You may want to call this from your startup.lua file!

Basic usage

• Type to filter items. All text inputs use standard readline keybindings, so Ctrl+u can be used to clear the filter. Items are searchable using display name, item id and enchantments.
• You can scroll through the list with ↑/↓/PgUp/PgDown.
• Hold Tab to see additional information about an item, such as its durability or enchantments.
• You can close Artist (or any dialog within Artist) by typing Ctrl+d.
• To extract an item, press Enter. This brings up the "Extract" dialog. Hit Enter again to extract 64 items, or specify a different amount. The input box supports arbitrary expressions (like 64 * 2 + 16), which can be useful when working with larger numbers.
• To smelt an item, press Ctrl+Shift+f. Here you can specify the number of items to smelt (defaulting to 64 again) and the number of furnaces to use (defaults to all of them). This requires furnaces to be attached on the wired network.

Configuration

Artist writes a (documented) config option to .artist.d/config.lua, which can be used to change some of Artist's behaviour.

Some options you may want to adjust:

• turtle → auto_drop: Auto-drop items from the turtle's inventory when requested from the interface.
• furnace → fuels: A list of valid fuels for the furnace.
• dropoff → chests: A list of "dropoff" chests. Items inserted into them are automatically transferred into the main system.

• trashcan → items: Discard items when you've got too many of them. This requires another turtle on the network running the extra/trashcan.lua script. This is a mapping of items to the max number to stock.

  Example:

  items = {
    ["minecraft:cobblestone"] = 20000,
    ["minecraft:cobbled_deepslate"] = 20000,
  }

Extending

Artist is intended to be somewhat extensible, and you can register your own custom modules (be aware that the API is not stable though!) See the examples/display.lua file for an example.

History

Artist is a pretty old program at this point. It was first written in 2016 and, to my knowledge, was the first "inventory management" program for CC. While the code has changed a lot, the core ideas and interface haven't.

It should be noted that this is not the only item system out there, nor is it necessarily the best. There's a couple of other item systems I'm aware of out there:

• Turtlegistics: This was the first inventory system to become popular on SwitchCraft. I believe it's the first to use the turtle's inventory as a drop-off and pickup point (Artist used separate chests beforehand).
• Milo (see also this forum post): Milo is probably the most powerful inventory system out there, with support for crafting and remote item transfer (using Plethora's introspection module).