Copper Pipes

Item and fluid pipes that feel like they belong in vanilla. There are no menus: you control everything with right-clicks, item frames, redstone and comparators. Pipes are made of copper, so they oxidize and slow down unless you wax them.

Getting started

Put copper ingots in the top and bottom row of a crafting grid and leave the middle row empty. That gives you 8 copper pipes.

Pipes connect by themselves to neighbouring pipes and containers. Every connection to a container is a flange:

• A push flange (plain ring) puts items into the container. New connections start like this.
• A pull flange (grate) takes items out of the container.
• Right-click a flange with an empty hand to switch it: push, pull, nothing.

So to move items from one chest to another, place a line of pipes between them and right-click the flange at the first chest once. Items go to the nearest container with room, then on to the next one.

Sorting without menus

• Item frames are filters. Hang a frame on a container, and it only takes the items shown. Those items go there first, even past closer containers. Containers without frames take everything else.
• Glow item frames filter by group. A spruce log in a glow frame takes all logs and wood, an iron ingot all ingots. There are 56 groups, built from item tags, so items from other mods join in and datapacks can add more.
• Bundles in frames stand for everything inside them.

Works with vanilla machines

• Furnaces, smokers and blast furnaces: ingredients go on top, fuel in the side, and only results come back out.
• Brewing stands: ingredients, bottles and blaze powder go where they belong, and only finished potions come out.
• Crafters only get the ingredients they were set up with, each in its own slot. A crafter facing a pipe crafts straight into it.
• Composters, hoppers, droppers and everything else that holds items work too. Machines are supplied in turns, so a row of furnaces fills up evenly.
• Open pipe ends: items with nowhere to go fall out of an open end, like out of a dropper.

Pipes

Copper pipes oxidize: fresh copper is twice as fast as a hopper, fully oxidized copper half as fast. Wax them with honeycomb to keep them as they are, or scrape them with an axe to make them fast again. Upgraded pipes never oxidize.

Windowed pipes have a glass window that shows the items and fluids passing through. They work exactly like the pipe they were made from.

Redstone

• A signal on a pipe stops its inputs, like a hopper.
• Copper valve: a hand wheel that turns with the signal. The strongest signal shuts it, and a weaker one lets packets out at a slower pace.
• Flow meter: gives a short redstone pulse for every item or bucket passing through. An item frame on it picks what it counts.
• Comparators read pipes like containers, and sculk sensors hear what rattles through them.

Fluids and tanks

• Water and lava travel through pipes like items and follow the same rules.
• Copper can't stand lava. It carries it, but it heats up, glows and finally bursts. It also melts in the Nether. Iron, diamond and netherite pipes don't mind, and water cools copper down.
• Copper tanks hold 16 buckets of water, iron tanks water or lava. Tanks of a kind join into one big tank, up to 3 x 3 blocks and 5 high (720 buckets), and look like one.
• Empty buckets and bottles delivered to a tank get filled and travel on. Cauldrons work as sources and targets too.

Ender ports

Linked ports pass items and fluids between them without pipes in between, within one dimension, while both ends are loaded.

• Link them like drawing a cable: right-click one port with a compass, walk to the next port, and right-click that one.
• A dye colours all ports of a link.
• Knock on a port to see its partners glow through walls.
• A redstone signal holds a port shut, and a comparator tells whether a partner is there.

Sounds

Quiet and only audible close by. Old copper creaks now and then, water gurgles, lava bubbles, and a pipe with stuck items knocks, so you can find a jam by ear. Every sound has a subtitle.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• Fabric Loader 0.20.1 or newer
• Fabric API

The mod is needed on both the server and every client. Feel free to use it in modpacks.

Before removing the mod from a world, keep in mind that its pipes and tanks disappear together with what is inside them.

Tested with

The mod's automated tests also run in the Cobblemon Official Modpack 1.8.3, including Sodium, Lithium and Iris with Complementary Reimagined shaders.

Credits

The pipes' creaks and knocks are cut from these recordings on Freesound, released under CC0. Thanks to their authors:

• Creaking Metal Desk by EagleStealthTeam
• Heater Metal Sounds by qubodup