Hoppers and pipes

In one line

Without lithium, a hopper fills a slot up to the crate's capacity. With lithium, it stops at 64, because the alternative destroys items. The player's hand is unaffected either way.

What the mod changes about the hopper

A hopper of the game stops at whatever an ordinary stack accepts, so 64, regardless of the target container's capacity. DeepCrate patches that for its own crates, and it is the one part of the mod that depends on what else is installed.

An iron crate screen whose first slot carries 96 dirt blocks, the 512 module on the tab. — A hopper pushed dirt past the 64 already there. The slot carries 96.

Why lithium turns it off

Lithium replaces the hopper wholesale and keeps its own copy of the target inventory. Against a container answering more than 64, it takes the items out of the hopper and never writes them into the crate: they are gone.

The number was measured rather than assumed, eight blocks of dirt destroyed per run, with or without the patch. So the mod chooses to keep the items and lose the feature: while lithium is installed, a crate tells automation 64 a slot.

Taking the decision back

A server owner can set limitAutomationWithLithium to false in config/oas/deepcrate.json. Filling past 64 comes back, and the items are lost with the owner knowing why.

A hopper against a pair

A hopper placed against a double crate reaches only the half it touches, as it does with a barrel. Joining the two halves is what the game does for an ordinary chest, but lithium casts that result back and the server falls over on the first tick.