Pipes

Buildcraft adds 7 main different types of pipe: wooden, stone, cobblestone, iron, gold and diamond.

Wooden Pipes

These are used for extracting items from chests, furnaces and so on. To do this they must be powered by either a Redstone, Steam or Combustion engine.

Cobblestone and Stone Pipes

These pipes are the basic transport pipes. They will not connect to each other so can be used adjacent to each other whilst still transporting items to different places.

Iron Pipes

Iron Pipes are the "valve" pipes, as they are one way. They can have up to 5 inputs and 1 output. The output can be changed by using the Buildcraft wrench (the black one with the default texture pack).

Gold Pipes

Golden Pipes speed up any item that passes though them, provided that the pipe is powered by redstone

Diamond Pipes

Diamond Pipes are sorting pipes. They filter any item that enters them to one of the 6 outputs to decide what items go where. You can right click on the Diamond Pipe, and this will bring up a GUI with 6 different colours which are mirrored on the actual pipe. If you want cobblestone to go though the red output you put one cobblestone into the red row in the GUI. This obviously means you must already have one of the item you wish to filter.

Obsidian Pipes

Obsidian Pipes suck up items from the floor around them. The range and rate will increase if you power the pipe with an engine.

Redstone Pipes

Redstone Pipes are an energy source and a kind of transport pipe. When items are moving through them, the pipe sends off a redstone pulse which can be used to power anything such as, engines, pistons, etc.

You may also add Waterproof versions of all the aforementioned pipes, which can be crafted by cooking cactus green to create pipe waterproofing, which when crafted with any type of pipe will give the waterproof version. Waterproof Pipes are used to carry Oil, Fuel, Water and Lava.

Conductive pipes are another pipe which are added. This is crafted by placing a red stone dust ontop of the pipe. In a crafting grid only wood, stone and gold pipes can be used - they are used to take energy from engines to the devices that require the power. Wooden conductor pipes are needed to extract te power from the engines and stone or gold can be used to transport it. Stone will lose power the farther it travels whereas gold loses almost no power no matter how far it reaches.