The Filament Tier Item Sorter

Winding is exact-tier: cobblestone only winds into a T1 spool, netherite only into a T6. Feeding eight winders from one chest normally means hand-building a vanilla sort line per tier.

The Filament Tier Item Sorter does it for you. Drop items into its 9-slot pool (by hopper, pipe, or hand) and each one is delivered to the winder holding a spool of that item’s tier.

Finding winders

The sorter checks all six of its faces. A winder touching it is found directly, with no cable at all.

To reach more than six winders, run MC3D Cable: the sorter reads every winder across the connected network. The cable only reports where the winders are. Items are never stored in or transported through a cable. They go straight from the pool into the winder’s own input slot.

Direct-touch and cable-reach are the same code path, so an unpowered, cable-less build behaves exactly like a networked one.

A newly wired winder is picked up within about five seconds (the cable’s topology refresh). Spool swaps and fill levels are read live, so those are seen instantly.

What it refuses

Two failure modes are permanent, so an item hitting either can never be wound:

• Items with no Filament Unit value
• Items on the winder blacklist (sticks and similar laundering-prone items)

This matters because a winder’s input slot accepts anything, so a stack of sticks would sit in it and jam that winder forever. The sorter never passes these along to a winder.

What it does with them instead depends on whether you have given it somewhere to put them.

Catching the rejects

Put a chest against any face of the sorter. Un-windable items are then accepted and pushed into that chest on the next tick, so you can point a completely unsorted item stream at the sorter and let it separate the windable from the rest.

Most containers work: a chest, a barrel, a hopper, or a pipe or conduit from another mod. It has to be something other mods and pipes can insert into as well; a block that does not expose an item inventory is skipped. The sorter checks all six faces and fills them in turn, splitting a stack across more than one container if the first runs out of room. There is nothing to configure and no direction to set.

Two details worth knowing:

• MC3DPrint machines are never used as the target. A winder sitting next to the sorter will not be handed junk, which is exactly what you want, since its input slot would accept it and jam. MC3D Cable is never in the running either, so it can share a face without competing.
• When the chest fills, the sorter goes back to refusing. Nothing is voided and nothing is dropped on the floor; your hoppers simply back up, the same signal you get when the pool fills.

With no such container attached, un-windable items are turned away at the door and never enter the pool at all, including when you try to shift-click them in by hand. That was the only behaviour before this existed, so an existing build keeps working exactly as it did.

Avoid wiring a pipe that both feeds the sorter and pulls from the reject chest. The junk will loop between them indefinitely. Nothing is lost, no power is used, and real items keep routing throughout, so it will not break anything, but it does not stop on its own either: as long as something keeps emptying the reject container, the loop keeps running and burning item-transfer throughput.

Reject routing is on by default. Turn it off with [sorter] rejectRouting in mc3dprint-common.toml.

What it holds

Everything else is accepted and retried:

• No winder of that tier on the network yet
• The matching winder’s input slot holds a different item
• The matching winder’s spool has no room for the yield

Items are never voided. When the pool fills, your hoppers back up. That visible backup is the signal. The GUI shows a computed per-tier readout (how many items are waiting and how many winders it can see for that tier), so you can tell at a glance which tier is stuck.

The pool is a one-way funnel: a hopper can feed it, but nothing can pull items back out. Open the GUI if you need to retrieve something by hand.

If an item in the pool stops being windable while it is sitting there (its value changes, or it is added to the blacklist), it is treated as a reject from then on and leaves through the attached container, provided reject routing is on and that container has room. Otherwise it stays in the pool as before.

Sharing the load

Two winders on the same tier both get fed. Winding is one item per second, so parallel same-tier winders are a real throughput strategy: the sorter alternates between them round-robin rather than filling the first one’s 64-slot queue while the second sits idle.

Any winder that would stall is skipped without wasting its turn: a full spool or an occupied input slot just means the item goes to the next candidate.

Speed and power

It routes up to 4 items per tick by default, configurable from 1 to 64 in mc3dprint-common.toml ([sorter] maxRoutedPerTick). One stack is the ceiling, since a winder’s single input slot takes at most a stack.

It costs no RF. The block runs completely unpowered: the item already pays its 200 RF at the winder, and taxing the same item twice for one logical operation isn’t worth it. MC3D Cable still visually attaches to it so your runs look right.