Item Barrel

The Item Barrel is a block added by Project Red which (as it's name suggests) is used to store items. Each barrel can hold a very large number of a single type of item, totalling 128 stacks of 64. Furthermore Barrels are excellent storage and sorting tools (see Usage).

If the mod MineChem is installed, then you can decompose the Item Barrel with the Chemical Decomposer into 32 Iron (Fe) and some Cellulose based of its wood content.

Simplest Functionality
With a single right-click on the Item Barrel, the player can store any held item, and that barrel will display the item's icon, name, and amount on the side.

After that, any double-right click on the barrel, no matter what the player is presently holding, will store all identical items from the player's inventory at once. This makes barrels useful for emptying the player's inventory of annoying clutter, such as cobblestone, seeds, spider eyes, and rotten flesh. A player can simply walk past a line of properly designated barrels, while double-right-clicking on them, to store the offending items.

Once items are stored in the barrel, they cannot be manually removed. Either the barrel must be broken, or the items must be extracted by other means. With regards to automation, the barrels sides are non-interactive. Its top is for inputting items, and its bottom is for extracting them.

Using Importers To Extract Items
To extract items from a barrel in a controlled way and using a minimal setup, attach either an Item Importer or Filtered Importer to the bottom of the barrel (shown in picture 1). Then attach a lever to the side of the importer and flick it, and you will cause the importer to extract items and eject them downward where the player can simply pick them up. Item Importers will extract a single item per flick, and Filtered Importers will extract a whole stack.

It should be noted that the importer must be oriented correctly for this to work, with its output (the smaller of two openings) facing downward. Use a Screwdriver to rotate the importer. Alternatively, if you cannot afford the screwdriver at present, change your position. The importer does not snap to faces like the common Hopper, but it will change in orientation depending on what direction you are looking as you place it.

Adding Pressure Tubes
A simplistic sorting setup provided by ProjectRed is the Pressure tube setup. It involves the usage of four components: pressure tubes (which are similar to buildcraft pipes), importers (such as the Item Importer or Filtered Importer), a chest to serve as a start inventory, and barrels for destination inventories (shown in picture 2).


 * 1) The starting inventory is the place where you, the player, can offload items for sorting. This can and probably should be a normal chest.
 * 2) Place an adjoining importer to extract items from the chest. Make sure the importer is oriented properly; Its input side is the larger of two openings, and should be attached to the chest. Place a pressure tube to its output side.
 * 3) Until the system is complete, no items will appear in the pressure tubes. Do not be alarmed. Set up some means of delivering a redstone pulse to your importer, whether it is by repeatedly flicking a lever, creating a Redstone Clock, or using Project Red's solution: the Timer. Even though the redstone pulse may be working, items will still not deploy at this stage.
 * 4) Set up an array of barrels. Ensure there is one barrel for every type of item you intend to sort.
 * 5) Lay pressure tubes from the output of the importer up to the tops of all of the barrels. The pressure tubes should attach to the tops of the barrels if you have done this correctly.
 * 6) Once your barrels are attached and your importer is receiving redstone pulses, items should flow through the system and into the barrel, which will keep them neatly sorted.

Barrels, and in fact all possible destination inventories, supply a sort of 'vacuum' that the pressure tubes require for operation. If there is space in some destination inventory, importers will deploy items into the tubes. If there is no available destination inventory, no items will be deployed.

So it should be noted that, should this system ever run out of barrels, the importer can become stuck with whatever item it sucked up last. The chest may then appear to be filled with sortable items for which barrels clearly exist, but the system will introduce nothing more into the pressure tubes because the importer is holding onto something for which there exists no vacuum pressure.

This can be immediately rectified by supplying a chest at the end of the setup for catching miscellaneous items. Alternatively, one can add more barrels. Or one can simply break the importer, get the item back out again, and refrain from introducing it back into the system.