RP Tubes - RedPower 2 Pneumatic Tubes, Revived
The best item transport system Minecraft ever had is back.
RP Tubes is a faithful revival of the pneumatic tube system and item machines from RedPower 2 (the Tekkit Classic era, pr5b2) for modern Forge rebuilt from the ground up with the original behaviors, textures, GUIs, and routing logic.
Pneumatic Tubes
- Pneumatic Tube: the classic brass-railed glass tube. Items visibly travel through the network with smooth animation, and always route to the nearest valid destination.
- Redstone Tube: carries items and a redstone signal. The red stripes glow brighter with signal strength, just like the original.
- Restriction Tube: massively increases path weight so items only take this route when there is no other option.
Items that can't be delivered anywhere bounce back to their source machine and wait in its internal buffer until a path opens up, no items ever spill on the floor from a full chest.
The Machines
All the RedPower 2 item machinery, with authentic textures, facings, and dedicated GUIs:
- Transposer: pulls one item per redstone pulse (or vacuums dropped items) into the tube network.
- Filter: like the Transposer, but with a 3×3 whitelist and a paint color for routed items.
- Sorting Machine: the legend itself. 8 color-coded filter columns × 5 rows, all five original sorting modes (anystack/allstacks sequential, random allstacks, anystack, any-item with default color), per-column channel buffers drained round-robin.
- Ejector: pushes buffered items out into the tube network.
- Relay: accepts painted/unpainted items and forwards them; doubles as a tube-accessible chest.
- Retriever: the reverse Filter: pulls matching items from across the tube network to itself, with sequential or any-match modes.
- Regulator: keeps a destination inventory stocked to an exact template, with dump and regulate modes.
- Item Detector: emits redstone pulses as items pass through: per item, per stack, or latched while plugged.
- Buffer: a 20-slot chest that tubes and machines can freely push into and pull from on every side.
- Block Breaker: breaks the block in front of it and sends it into the network.
- Deployer: places blocks and uses items, exactly like a robotic player hand.
- Igniter: lights fires (and TNT, and nether portals) on redstone signal, clears them when it turns off.
Materials & Crafting
- Alloy Furnace: the classic 3×3 alloying furnace with its original GUI. Smelts Brass (3 copper + 1 tin) and more.
- Automatic Crafting Table: the beloved BuildCraft AutoWorkbench, with its original textures and behavior: real items in the grid, one item always left behind to hold the recipe, pulls missing ingredients from adjacent chests, and one tube pull = one full craft (4 planks per log, just like the wooden-pipe days).
- Automatic Crafting Table Mk II: immibis's Tubestuff upgrade, faithfully recreated: a ghost recipe template, 45 slots of internal ingredient storage, and continuous hands-free crafting. Improved over the original with a translucent result preview so you can see the recipe resolved before feeding it materials.
- Tin Ore: generates in the overworld with the original RedPower distribution (10 veins per chunk below y48). Fully tag-based: if another mod already adds tin (ProjectRed, Thermal, Mekanism…), all of it just works together.
- Screwdriver: right-click any RP Tubes machine to rotate it through all six facings. 128 uses.
Compatibility & Soft Dependencies
RP Tubes has no required dependencies. Everything below is detected automatically when present:
- JEI: full recipe support, including a dedicated Alloy Smelting category with recipe transfer.
- ProjectRed: recipes prefer ProjectRed's red alloy and tin when installed, with vanilla fallbacks otherwise; the Alloy Furnace gains the classic Red Alloy recipe.
- ProjectE: EMC values for everything, tuned to Tekkit-era ratios.
- BuildCraft Community Edition: its Wooden Pipe is accepted alongside our Pneumatic Tube in the ACT Mk II recipe.
- Any tin mod (Thermal, Mekanism, ProjectRed…): all tin usage is tag-based (
forge:ingots/tin), so every mod's tin interoperates with ours.
- Works with any inventory from any mod: all item I/O uses Forge capabilities.
For Modders & Pack Makers
RP Tubes ships a small stable Java API (com.rptubes.api.RPTubesApi): inject items into the tube network like an Ejector, or implement ITubeConnectable to make your own blocks part of the network. Pack makers get data-driven hooks too: the rptubes:alloy_smelting recipe JSON type, the rptubes:act_pipes tag, and datapack-overridable tin worldgen. Full documentation is on the wiki.
Requirements
- Minecraft 1.7.10+
- Forge 43+
- No required dependencies. JEI strongly recommended.
Running a Large Modpack Server? Read This
Minecraft 1.19.2 itself has a vanilla bug (MC-258163): in packs with a very large number of total blockstates (~90+ mods), blocks whose IDs fall above 524,288 get visually corrupted on multiplayer — they render as entirely different blocks after batched updates, while singleplayer works fine. Any late-registered mod can be affected; it is not specific to RP Tubes.
The fix: install Block Limit Fix on the server only (no config, no client install). It backports Mojang's official 1.19.4 patch. If tubes or machines ever look like the wrong block on your server, this is why.
Credits
- Eloraam — creator of RedPower 2. The tube system, machines, textures, GUIs, and every design idea in this mod are her original work. RP Tubes is a tribute: a recreation of the pr5b2 transport system for players who never stopped missing it. All original art and design credit belongs to her.
- SpaceToad & the BuildCraft team — creators of BuildCraft and the original Automatic Crafting Table (AutoWorkbench). Its behavior and textures here are recreated from BuildCraft 2.2.14, the version every Tekkit Classic player remembers. BuildCraft is open source under the MMPL.
- immibis — creator of Tubestuff and the Automatic Crafting Table Mk II, recreated here from Tubestuff 49.1.2.
- MrTJP & the ProjectRed team — for faithfully carrying RedPower's wiring, logic gates, and world content forward on modern Minecraft for over a decade. RP Tubes is designed to sit alongside ProjectRed and complete the picture with the transport system it no longer includes — when ProjectRed is installed, recipes automatically use its red alloy and tin.
