Artist - Previous-generation Plethora Storage

[SquidDev]

A Rather Tremendous Item SysTem

Many a tale has been told about the battles fought between man and chest. Those ungodly wars, where man struggled to find an item in the dark forest of chests. In a fit of desperation, a select few tools were forged, blazing weapons formed from blood and sweat, to end this onslaught once and for all.

Many speak, is awestruck wonder of Turtlegistics, a trailblazer in the resistance against the rush of items. In hushed tones, some marvel at the Wyvern. On a cold winters day, the old may recount tales of the Item System with a pint of bitter in their hands. But those with a taste of style, cannot help but turn towards Artist when the struggle seems insurmountable. Though old and weary, it has a tireless efficiency, sure to send items back to where they belong.

Features

• Instant: Artist was built for a harsher, tougher climate, where searching for an item required the sacrifice of a first-born. Years of work _{(very on-off work)} have only improved it. Artist aggressively caches item information,
• Intuitive: Well, I understand it at least. Artist uses a GUI to interact with your items, though you rarely need to touch a mouse. Typing filters items (using a fuzzy search), and pressing will extract a set number. Pressing tab shows a dialogue with additional item information.
  We also support all readline keybindings, so you can jump around your input with ease.
• Ignite Artist will automatically keep furnaces stocked with fuel, and import the product into the system.
• Incredibly strained acronyms: What's not to love?
• Interchangable: I actually wanted "modular here", but by that point I'd committed to using "I"s. Outside the core storage system, each feature is implemented as a relatively simple module, allowing easy extension. Take a look at the builtin annotator for example.

Install

• Set up a turtle and equip an introspection module.
• pastebin get W5ZkVYSi gitget
• gitget SquidDev-CC artist vnext
• launch (also run this on startup)

The first run will probably be a little slower, as the entire system is scanned. Further launches will be near-instantaneous.

Screenshots


Fun facts: the second of those was taken back in 2016. Yeah, it's really not changed much.

[HydroNitrogen]

I'm a very old adventurer and I exercise staying alive while withstanding the thoughest circumstances. Artist has proven again and again to be reliable, fast and intuitive. I've thrown entire mountains worth of cobble, economies worth of gold and biospheres worth of potatoes in it, and it still functions like a charming hot young maid. And it does service with a smile.

Though I'm still wondering what makes that ogre sound in my turtle since I got artist...

[osmarks]

I really like the GUI.

[Distant]

I like the GUI.
I have installed Artist, on an advanced computer, and it shows the lists of stored items on my network. I have one crucial and one important question... these are:
1. I can't get it to output items. Do I need to edit a config file? The error says it cannot find "chest_xx", but I have searched the files looking for a reference to this with no luck.
and:
2. how do you set up chests etc to suck from?

EDIT I have re read the instructions... and done what it says...  and EQUIPPED an (unused) introspection module on an advanced turtle... and it now works. Anything i put in the turtle's slots is immediately taken and stored, and choosing items to withdraw from the GUI causes them to appear in slot 1 of the turtle's inventory! Brilliant.
... /EDIT

I have these less important questions:
Is there a recommended physical layout?
It refills coal on two furnaces, but I have to put in my chosen ore or raw food manually, however it then removes the output to a chest.
Can you have it move items on mass and sort them? (It doesn't seem that necessary).
I also tried on an advanced turtle with even less success. (It complained about no introspection module, which I had and it ignored!)
Is there any other control over Artist than the GUI and the tab key?

[SquidDev]

1. I can't get it to output items. Do I need to edit a config file? The error says it cannot find "chest_xx", but I have searched the files looking for a reference to this with no luck.
and:

There should be a .artist file in the root of the directory - you can edit that and look for a pickup_chest field. Set this to be the name of some chest on your network. I'll try to add some better validation here, so it either terminates on startup or refuses to extract.

2. how do you set up chests etc to suck from?

In the same config file, there should be a dropoffs field - add the names of chests you want to be able to drop off items into.

I would recommend sticking with the turtle GUI  - aside from the introspection module, it's much easier to use and setup.

Is there a recommended physical layout?

Not really. Whatever looks pretty - I normally just have an array of diamond chests in front of full block modems, but it should cope with whatever.

It refills coal on two furnaces, but I have to put in my chosen ore or raw food manually, however it then removes the output to a chest.

I'm not sure this is a question, but there isn't currently a way to automatically smelt items/request them be smelted. It's on my todo list, I just need to think about how it'll play with the rest of the system.

Can you have it move items on mass and sort them? (It doesn't seem that necessary).

It should be a pretty effective at keeping items sorted already. There isn't really a way to large numbers of items - you can extract 64*16 items in one go (so, fill the turtle), or more if you have a pickup chest instead.

Is there any other control over Artist than the GUI and the tab key?

Not really. It's pretty bare bones right now - no autocrafting or anything (well, yet - again, it's on my todo list but need to think about how it fits together). It's pretty modular at core, so it should be fairly trivial to add custom functionality if you should need it though.

As you may have gathered, Artist is still rather a work in progress (like most of my projects :/). It functions fine, but is far from user-friendly or feature-complete, and I can't commit as much time to it as I'd like to. If you've got any questions/comments/suggestions (or code), I'd love to hear it either here on the GH issue tracker.

Hope that helps a little :)