✦ Astral Dragon Storage

A portable storage system built for enormous amounts of loot, deep progression, automation, and seamless integration with the Astral ecosystem.

Astral Dragon Storage is the second mod in the Astral Dragon series — a standalone portable mass-storage system designed to work both independently and alongside Astral Dragon Pickaxe.

Astral Storage is designed for the point where ordinary inventories, backpacks, and chests simply stop being enough.

Whether you are mining at extreme speed, clearing huge areas, building megastructures, or running a heavily automated world, Astral Storage gives you a portable storage matrix that grows together with your progression — from a specialized resource container into an endgame storage powerhouse.

Unlike a simple "bigger backpack", Astral Storage has its own progression system, upgrade rituals, storage rules, automation tools, and optional integrations with Astral Dragon Pickaxe and Applied Energistics 2.

🌌 The Astral Storage Cell

Everything revolves around the Astral Storage Cell — a portable storage matrix that can hold enormous quantities of items without turning into an unlimited bag from the moment you craft it.

The system uses a simple rule:

One item type = one type cell = one independent capacity limit.

If your current Compression level allows 16,000 items per type, one Cobblestone cell can hold up to 16,000 Cobblestone regardless of how much space other cells have.

This makes both capacity per type and number of available item types meaningful parts of progression.

At maximum progression, a single Astral Storage Cell can reach:

• 32,000,000 items per type
• 128 different item types
• Independent storage for every type cell
• Counts far beyond normal Minecraft stack limits

And ordinary overflow is never silently voided. If Astral Storage cannot accept something, the remainder stays in its original inventory, container, ME network, or normal item flow.

⭐ Two Independent Progression Paths

Astral Storage evolves along two interconnected branches.

◆ Compression — More of Each Item

Compression increases how much a single type cell can contain.

Compression turns the matrix into an increasingly dense reservoir of matter.

◆ Expansion — More Different Items

Expansion increases the number of item types the matrix can hold simultaneously.

Early Astral Storage is ideal for bulk mining resources.

Fully evolved Astral Storage becomes a powerful general-purpose portable storage system.

🔮 Astral Storage Altar

Upgrades are not performed through a simple crafting-grid recipe.

To evolve your matrix, you must build the Astral Storage Altar.

The Altar is the heart of the progression system, allowing you to restructure the internal matrix through increasingly powerful catalysts and rituals.

Higher stages require progressively more advanced materials from across Minecraft's progression, including Nether, Wither, End, and late-game resources.

Compression and Expansion must remain stable

The two branches cannot be pushed infinitely far apart.

At higher tiers, the matrix becomes increasingly unstable if matter density and spatial boundaries are developed unevenly.

• Early tiers allow considerable freedom.
• From Tier IV onward, the branches must stay closer together.
• From Tier VII onward, the matrix requires near-equilibrium.

The Altar GUI explains exactly why an upgrade is unavailable and what must be done next.

💎 Astral Value & Sacrificial Resonance

Expansion uses more than fixed recipes.

Items have an internal Astral Value, representing the amount of usable matter and resonance they contribute to the matrix.

Instead of requiring one exact resource for every upgrade, the Altar can absorb valuable materials toward the next Expansion.

But late-game rituals demand more than simply dumping millions of one resource into the Altar.

Resource Family Resonance

Related materials belong to the same resource family.

For example, different forms derived from the same material can contribute to the same family resonance.

Higher Expansion tiers require diversity between resource families, preventing a single infinitely farmed resource from trivializing the entire progression.

The ritual system:

• Tracks contributions from each resource family
• Reserves part of the required value for missing families
• Prevents saturated families from consuming useful items unnecessarily
• Shows the strongest family contributions directly in the Altar
• Never destroys an offering that cannot actually advance the current ritual

The result is an upgrade system that rewards resource diversity and progression across the game, rather than a single repetitive farm.

⚡ Automatic Loot Intake

Astral Storage can do much more than wait for you to manually open its GUI.

Each Storage Cell can control how automatically arriving items are handled.

Available modes include:

Pickaxe / Integrations

Accept items routed by compatible systems such as Astral Dragon Pickaxe.

Pickaxe + Ground Pickup

In addition to integration routing, items picked up from the ground can be sent directly into Astral Storage.

Automatic Intake Disabled

Use Astral Storage entirely manually.

Multiple Astral Storage Cells can also have different priorities, allowing incoming items to be offered to one storage before another.

🎯 Whitelist & Blacklist Filtering

Automatic intake can be configured independently for each Astral Storage Cell.

Choose between:

• Accept All
• Whitelist
• Blacklist

Want one Storage dedicated to stone and bulk blocks while another handles ores?

Want your automated mining output to ignore junk?

Configure each matrix exactly the way you want.

📌 Type Anchoring

A type cell normally becomes available again when its contents reach zero.

With Type Anchoring, you can reserve that cell for a specific item.

Even while empty, the slot remains bound to its designated type and cannot be claimed by something else.

This is extremely useful for organized mining setups and automated resource collection where certain important materials must always have guaranteed storage space.

🛡️ Unload Protection

Individual type cells can be protected from automatic unloading.

Protected resources remain inside Astral Storage when performing automated or quick export operations.

This protection can also be respected by the Applied Energistics 2 integration, allowing you to keep selected emergency supplies, rare materials, or reserved resources inside the matrix while unloading everything else.

Manual access remains available.

🚀 Instant Container Transfers

Astral Storage is designed to reduce inventory-management friction.

While holding the Storage Cell:

Shift + Right Click

Quickly transfers available contents:

Astral Storage → Container

Shift + Left Click

Pulls compatible contents:

Container → Astral Storage

These features use Forge's standard item-handler system, meaning they can work with far more than vanilla chests — including many compatible modded inventories and machines.

Filters, capacity limits, anchored types, and unload protection are respected.

🧹 Built-In Matrix Utilities

As your Astral Storage becomes attuned to the Altar, additional Matrix Facets can be awakened.

These quality-of-life abilities include:

• Matrix Ordering Sort stored types by name, quantity, or Astral Value.

• Selective Resonance Enables whitelist and blacklist filtering.

• Type Anchoring Reserve empty cells for specific item types.

• Protective Circuit Protect selected types from automatic unloading.

• Expulsion Pulse Quickly unload into compatible containers.

• Attraction Pulse Quickly collect items from compatible containers.

• Absorption Focus A dedicated slot for intentionally destroying unwanted item stacks.

• Annihilation Circuit A controlled mode for completely clearing a selected storage cell or inventory slot.

Each awakened ability can be enabled or disabled independently.

🔍 Storage Interface

Astral Storage includes its own GUI built around large item counts and type-based storage.

You can:

• Browse stored item types
• Search your storage
• Sort the matrix
• Insert and extract items manually
• Configure automatic intake
• Set Storage priority
• Configure filters
• Reserve type cells
• Protect cells from unloading
• View Compression and Expansion progression
• Inspect Astral Value and upgrade requirements

The item tooltip also provides useful information without opening the storage:

• Used type cells
• Full cells
• Partially filled cells
• Free cells

This is intentionally more useful than a generic storage percentage, because available item types are just as important as raw item count in Astral Storage.

⛏️ Astral Dragon Pickaxe Integration

Astral Dragon Pickaxe is completely optional.

When installed, Astral Storage becomes a natural destination for the enormous quantity of resources generated by high-speed Astral mining.

Compatible drops are routed through Astral Storage first.

If the Storage cannot accept the entire amount because of:

• Filters
• Type-cell limits
• Compression limits

…the remainder continues through the normal routing chain instead of being destroyed.

This lets the Pickaxe and Storage work together as one high-throughput mining system while keeping both mods fully usable on their own.

💠 Applied Energistics 2 Integration

Applied Energistics 2 is also completely optional.

When AE2 is installed, Astral Storage gains a dedicated ME Integration tab and can exchange resources with an ME network through the ME IO Port.

Both directions are supported:

ME → Astral Storage

Load resources from your ME network into the Storage Cell.

Astral Storage → ME

Unload Astral Storage back into your network.

Each Storage Cell has its own ME configuration.

You can control:

• ME → Storage transfers
• Storage → ME transfers
• Accept All / Whitelist / Blacklist import filtering
• Up to 60 dedicated ME filter entries
• Known Types Only mode
• Whether ME export should respect Unload Protection

Known Types Only

This mode allows the IO Port to refill item types that already exist — or have been anchored — without consuming empty cells for completely new types.

Perfect for controlled automation.

IO Port Status

Astral Storage also tracks the current or most recent IO Port operation.

Its tooltip can show:

• Loading
• Unloading
• Waiting / paused
• Completed
• Transfer blocked
• Amount transferred
• Remaining exportable items
• Why a local Astral Storage rule prevented a transfer

Protected items can remain inside the Storage while the IO Port still correctly finishes the rest of its unloading operation.

Note: Astral Storage is intentionally designed for exchange through the ME IO Port. It is not intended to replace normal AE2 storage cells inside an ME Drive or ME Chest, and Cell Workbench configuration is not required.

🧩 Standalone by Design

Astral Storage does not require either integration mod.

The core progression and stored data remain independent of optional integrations.

⚙️ Compatibility

• Minecraft: 1.19.2
• Mod Loader: Forge
• Forge: 43.4.12+
• Java: 17
• Applied Energistics 2: Optional, AE2 12.9.x
• Astral Dragon Pickaxe: Optional

✦ Built for the point where a stack is no longer a useful unit.

Start with a few carefully managed resource cells.

Evolve the matrix.

Compress millions of items into a portable container.

Expand its spatial boundaries.

Automate the flow of resources from your tools, containers and ME network.

And turn Astral Storage into the logistical core of your endgame.