Pipez

Pipez is a Minecraft mod by henkelmax that adds simple, cheap pipes for moving items, fluids and energy around your base, plus gas if you’ve got Mekanism installed. There’s no power to set up and no multiblocks to build, you just place the pipes between your blocks, tell one end to pull, and the pipe does the rest.

What makes Pipez worth using over the bigger logistics mods is the upgrade system. Every pipe starts out slow and basic, and the Pipe Upgrades you slot into the extracting end are what speed it up and unlock redstone control, distribution modes and filters. This guide covers every pipe, how the Pipe Wrench works, what each upgrade does, and how to get filters working properly.

Pipez Pipes and Recipes

There are five pipes in Pipez, and each one only moves one kind of thing, except the Universal Pipe which moves everything at once. Pipes of different types won’t join onto each other either, so an Item Pipe laid next to a Fluid Pipe stays as two separate lines, which means you can run them side by side without them getting mixed up.

The pipes are cheap for what you get, as every recipe except the Universal Pipe gives you sixteen at once. Iron is the main cost, with Droppers going into the Item Pipe, Buckets into the Fluid Pipe and Blocks of Redstone into the Energy Pipe, so you’ll usually be able to make all three early on.

Item Pipe

→

16

Fluid Pipe

→

16

Energy Pipe

→

16

The Gas Pipe only has a recipe when Mekanism is installed, since it needs Mekanism’s Infused Alloy and there’s nothing for it to carry without it. The Universal Pipe is made from two of each of the other three pipes, and it’s covered in its own section further down, as it works a little differently to the rest.

How to Use Pipez

Setting up a pipe takes a few steps the first time, and most people get stuck on the extracting part, because a freshly placed pipe doesn’t do anything on its own. Pipes only ever pull from a side you’ve marked as extracting, and you do that with the Pipe Wrench, so that’s the first thing you’ll want to make.

The Pipe Wrench is made from two Flint and two Sticks, and it’s the tool you’ll use for every change you make to a pipe’s connections. Wrenches from other mods work too, as long as they’re tagged as wrenches, so if you already carry one from another tech mod you don’t need to make this one.

Pipe Wrench

→

Everything the wrench does happens while you’re sneaking. Right-clicking a pipe with the wrench without sneaking won’t change its connections, which is the reason a lot of players think their wrench is broken the first time they try to use it.

Place the pipes between the block you want to pull from and the blocks you want to fill. Pipes connect to each other and to any block that can hold what they carry, so an Item Pipe will join onto Chests, Barrels, Furnaces and machines from other mods without you having to do anything.

At this point nothing moves yet, as every connection is just a normal connection. A pipe can put items into anything it’s connected to, but it won’t take anything out of a block until you tell it to, which is what the next step is for.

Sneak and right-click the part of the pipe that touches the block you want to empty, and that end will get thicker to show it’s now extracting. That side will now pull from the block and push it into every other block connected to the pipe network, going to the nearest one first by default.

Sneak and right-click the same spot again and the connection gets cut off completely, and a third time connects it back as a normal connection. You can also cut the link between two pipes by sneaking and right-clicking the arm between them, which is handy when two lines are sitting next to each other and join up when you didn’t want them to.

Right-click the thicker extracting end with an empty hand to open its menu, which has one slot for an upgrade. Without an upgrade all of the buttons are grayed out and the pipe runs at its slowest speed, so the upgrade is what turns a basic pipe into something you can actually configure.

You can also sneak and right-click the extracting end while holding an upgrade to put it in straight away, and it’ll swap out whatever upgrade was in there before. Each extracting side has its own upgrade slot, so a pipe pulling from two different blocks needs two upgrades.

A Simple Auto Smelter

A good first build to get the hang of Pipez is an auto smelter, which takes whatever you put in a Chest, smelts it and puts it into a second Chest. It only takes a few Item Pipes and it shows off both extracting and normal connections, so it’s a nice way to learn how the pipes behave before you build anything bigger.

Run an Item Pipe from your input Chest to the top of a Furnace, then sneak and right-click the end touching the Chest with the Pipe Wrench so it extracts. Items going into the top of a Furnace always go into the smelting slot, so anything in the Chest will get pulled out and fed straight into the Furnace.

Put a second pipe on the bottom of the Furnace running to your output Chest, and set the end touching the Furnace to extract. Pulling from the bottom of a Furnace only takes out the finished items, so the smelted results end up in your output Chest, while fuel can be fed in from the side with a third pipe if you want it fully automatic.

Pipe Upgrades

Pipe Upgrades go into the extracting end of a pipe, and they do two jobs at once. They speed the pipe up, and each tier unlocks more settings in the pipe’s menu, starting with redstone control on the Basic Pipe Upgrade and ending with the full filter list from the Advanced Pipe Upgrade upwards.

Each upgrade is made from the one before it, so you can’t skip straight to the Advanced tier without making a Basic and an Improved first. That makes filters a Diamond tier feature, which is worth knowing early, as you’ll need four Diamonds and four Blocks of Redstone for every extracting side that you want to filter.

Basic Pipe Upgrade

→

Improved Pipe Upgrade

→

Advanced Pipe Upgrade

→

Ultimate Pipe Upgrade

→

The Ultimate Pipe Upgrade doesn’t unlock anything new over the Advanced one, it’s just a lot faster, and it costs four Netherite Ingots for each one. The Infinity Pipe Upgrade has no recipe at all and can only be taken from the Creative menu, so in survival the Ultimate Pipe Upgrade is as fast as it gets.

Pipez Transfer Rates

How fast a pipe moves things depends on the upgrade in its extracting end, and the jump between tiers is big. The rates below are the defaults, and they’re per extracting side, so a pipe pulling from two blocks moves twice as much, while a server owner can change any of them in the Pipez server config.

For items, a pipe with no upgrade moves 4 a second, which is fine for a Furnace but far too slow for emptying a mob farm. A Basic upgrade takes it to around 10 a second, Improved to 32 and Advanced to 128, while an Ultimate upgrade moves a full stack every tick, which is more than almost anything you’ll build can keep up with.

Energy Pipes are quick even without an upgrade at 256 FE a tick, which is enough for most early machines. If you’re running a big power setup, the Improved upgrade’s 8,192 FE a tick is usually where you’ll want to be, and it’s cheaper to reach than the Diamond tier.

How to Use Pipez Filters

Filters are the main reason people put Advanced upgrades in their pipes, as they let you choose exactly what a pipe pulls out and where it goes. Put an Advanced Pipe Upgrade or better in the extracting end, open the menu, and the filter buttons will be available along with a list that starts out empty.

Whitelist mode only moves the things on your list, and Blacklist mode moves everything except the things on your list. Whitelist is the default, and with an empty list a Whitelist lets everything through, so adding the upgrade doesn’t stop your pipe working until you actually add something to it.

Blacklist is the other way round, and it catches a lot of people out. A Blacklist with nothing on the list doesn’t move anything at all, so if you switch to Blacklist and your pipe suddenly stops, add at least one entry for the items you want to keep back and it’ll start working again.

Click Add to make a new entry, and either put an item into its slot or type an item ID into the Item/Tag box. You can drag items across from JEI as well, which is the quickest way to add something you don’t have on you, and it saves you getting the ID wrong when you type it out.

To filter a whole group of items at once, type a tag with a # in front of it instead, like #forge:ores for every ore or #minecraft:logs for every log. There’s no way to filter by mod name, so if you want everything from one mod you’ll need a tag that covers it, or an entry for each of the items you want to move.

The NBT Data box lets you match items by their data, like enchantments or damage, and you can set it to match the exact data or only the tags you’ve typed in. This is how you’d split enchanted books or damaged tools away from the rest, but for most sorting you’ll only need the item or tag.

Every entry also has a Regular and Inverted switch. An Inverted entry blocks whatever it matches, even in Whitelist mode, so a Whitelist of #forge:ores with an Inverted entry for Iron Ore moves every ore except Iron, which is often easier than building the same thing with a Blacklist.

Filter Destination Tool

The Filter Destination Tool lets a filter entry send its items to one specific block instead of anywhere on the network. It’s what you’d use to build a sorting system, where Cobblestone goes into one Chest, ores go into another and everything else goes into a third, all from the same extracting pipe.

It’s made from five Iron Ingots, two Redstone, a Glass Pane and any Button, so it’s cheap to make once you’ve got a few Iron Ingots spare. You only need one of them, as you can set it again as many times as you like.

Filter Destination Tool

→

Right-click the block you want items to go to while holding the tool, and you’ll get a message saying the destination is set. It saves the side of the block you clicked as well, so click the side that the pipe is actually touching, or the filter won’t find a match and nothing will be sent there.

Next, open your pipe’s filter, edit the entry and click the Destination slot while holding the tool, and the entry will show the position and how far away it is. Clicking the slot again clears it, which sets the entry back to going to any destination on the network.

The part that trips people up is that a destination entry only applies to that one block. Any other block on the network with no entries of its own will still take everything, so give every Chest its own entry, and put your overflow Chest at the far end of the line with the pipe left on Nearest First, so it only gets what the closer Chests won’t take.

Copying and Clearing Upgrade Settings

Everything you set in a pipe’s menu is saved on the upgrade, not on the pipe. If you take an upgrade out and put it in another pipe, all of its filters and modes go with it, and its tooltip shows which types it’s been set up for, like Items or Energy.

To copy settings, put a configured upgrade in a Crafting grid with one or more blank upgrades of the same tier, and they’ll all come out with the same settings. This saves a lot of time when you’ve got a dozen pipes that all need the same filter list, as you only have to type it in once.

You can also copy onto a blank upgrade of a different tier, and it’ll take whatever that tier can use, so a Basic upgrade only picks up the redstone setting. To wipe an upgrade back to blank, put it in the Crafting grid on its own, which is useful when an old filter is stopping a pipe from working and you want to start again.

Distribution and Redstone Modes

The Improved Pipe Upgrade unlocks the distribution button, which decides which connected block gets filled first. Item Pipes send to the nearest block by default, while Fluid, Energy and Gas Pipes split things evenly with Round Robin, and distance is counted by how many pipes it has to travel through.

Round Robin is the one to use when you’re feeding a row of Furnaces or machines, as it keeps them all working rather than filling the first one and leaving the others empty. Nearest First is the one to leave on for a sorting line, as the Chests with filters get the first look at every item and the overflow Chest at the end only gets what’s left over.

The Basic Pipe Upgrade unlocks redstone control, which has four modes, Ignored, Off When Powered, On When Powered and Always Off. The pipe checks for a signal on the pipe block itself rather than the block it’s pulling from, so put your Lever or Redstone Torch right next to the pipe you want to switch.

Universal Pipe and Gas Pipe

The Universal Pipe carries items, fluids, energy and gas all at once, so one line of pipe can run to a machine that needs all of them. You get six from a recipe that uses two of each of the other pipes, which makes it quite a bit more expensive, but it saves you running three or four separate lines.

Universal Pipe

→

6

Gas Pipe

→

16

Its menu has a tab for each type, and each tab has its own settings on the same upgrade. If a Universal Pipe is pulling something you don’t want from a machine, like energy out of a battery, set that type’s Redstone Mode to Always Off on that side and it’ll stop moving that type while the rest carry on.

The Gas Pipe is only there when Mekanism is installed, and it moves Mekanism’s gases like Hydrogen and Oxygen between tanks and machines. It works the same as the other pipes, with the same upgrades and filters, and its speeds are in the transfer rate table above, so it’s a simple swap if you’d rather not use Mekanism’s own pipes.

Tips

Put an upgrade in every extracting side, even a Basic one, as a pipe with no upgrade is slow and you can’t change any of its settings. A Basic upgrade only costs Iron and a bit of Redstone, and it more than doubles the speed of an Item Pipe while giving you redstone control, so there’s not really a reason to leave it empty.

Set up one upgrade with the filter list you want, then copy it in a Crafting grid rather than typing the same list into every pipe. The copy recipe works with as many blank upgrades as you can fit, and it’ll save you a lot of time on a big sorting system with lots of Chests.

If items go somewhere you didn’t expect, check which ends are extracting first. A pipe pulls from every extracting side and pushes into every other connected block on the network, so one extracting side left over from an old setup is usually the reason a Chest keeps getting emptied into the wrong place.

FAQ