ACTRs (pronounced actor) are the backbone of any automated setup.
(Thanks to TurkeySandvich for his short video on ACTRs.)
ACTRs can teleport any amount of resources or tools/items (repair guns, hacking chips, upgrade cards, automation chips, heat sinks, etc.) from anywhere in the ship to anywhere else in the ship. They do not have to be placed in proximity of the devices they're loading to function, though it's generally recommended you place them nearby for easy access.
ACTRs can only move one resource or tool type at a time. So, you will need additional ACTRs for every resource type you want, and every "stage" of a manufacturing process. For example, making hydrogen will require two ACTRs, one to move water from your extractors, and one to move hydrogen from your refineries to your fuel tanks or cargo space. On the other end of the spectrum, making U-238 Nuclear Fuel Rods requires five ACTRs, one for uranium, one for steel, one for iron, one for silicon, and one to move the completed rods to storage. If you can afford the brass and silicon, it's recommended to have lots of ACTRs for convenience, as they consume no energy or heat sinks if they're not actively moving cargo.


The temptation is to immediately hit that big red Start button. Don't! ACTRs will start moving stuff as soon as they are setup if they're turned on, and even if you're in the middle of adjusting them, ACTRs will carry on moving resources.




Click the button marked Select to bring up this very impressive list of resources and items. Everything you could possible want to move is on this list.






We're going to select Iron Ore and set up this ACTR to move it from an extractor to a refinery.







Now that you've selected a resource type, you'll see two new buttons have appeared on the ACTR interface. Click on Select Source. All of the sources are sorted by room, so select the room that has the device or storage that you want to pull from. Then you'll get a list of all devices in the room that it's possible to pull from. Click the checkbox of the device(s) you want to pull from, and you're done.

Now we're going to set up the destination, which is a tad more complicated. Selecting the destination(s) is the same as selecting the source(s), but now you can also adjust teleport amounts by clicking again on a selected destination. For base resource production like iron, you can leave everything to the defaults, but this will consume more heat sinks. In our scenario, the ACTR can move iron ore faster than our extractor can mine it. So, the ACTR will move iron ore as soon as it comes out of the extractor. However, ACTRs can move larger amounts of resources than a single crate at a time. By adjusting the minimum teleport amount to 1200, the ACTR will wait until there is at least 1200 iron ore available in the extractor before moving them to the refinery.
The max in buffer setting is not relevant to our scenario with iron ore, we want to keep the refinery full of iron ore (4800). However, if you're manufacturing resources like steel and brass, which require two base resources to make, or using ACTRs to automate an assembler, this setting is important. If you don't, the destination is likely to get crammed full of only one of the base resources, grinding production to a halt. You want to set this number in conjunction of the other base materials. Steel for example costs two iron and one carbon for every one steel. So, you want this max in buffer number on the iron ACTR to be double the max in buffer on the carbon ACTR. Make sure these numbers added up don't exceed the max the destination can hold. Once you've set all these numbers, it's time to add the heat sinks.

There are four tiers of heat sinks to choose from. Each costs different resources and have different hit points and heat capacity.

Tier I
Resource Cost: 50 Copper, 6 Deuterium
Heat Capacity: 20,000,000
Hit Points: 14,400
Approximate total teleports: 140
Tier II
Resource Cost: 35 Silicon, 5 Beryllium, 12 Deuterium
Heat Capacity: 60,000,000
Hit Points: 43,200
Approximate total teleports: 400
Tier III
Resource Cost: 50 Aluminum, 10 Beryllium, 24 Deuterium
Heat Capacity: 120,000,00
Hit Points: 86,400
Approximate total teleports: 800
Advanced Heat Sinks Not Pictured
Resource Cost: 50 Aluminum, 10 Beryllium, 20 Fluorite
Heat Capacity: 440,000,000
Hit Points: 316,800
Approximate total teleports: 3,000
[Note: Fluorite can only be obtained by strip mining special rich asteroids you get when completing the Hurles Co. system event chain.]

Every time an ACTR "fires" it adds ~260K heat to the heat sink (regardless of tier), then takes 257 hit points from the heat sink once the heat sink is at max heat. You can cool down a heat sink by placing it in a thermal extractor with coolant, allowing you to reuse it, but this is time consuming, and has to be done manually. Generally speaking heat sinks are meant to be treated as consumables, though there are exceptions with some automated setups.
ACTRs can hold two heat sinks, but only takes from one heat sink at a time, starting with the heat sink on the left side.
It's up to you what tier heat sinks you want to use, though it should be noted that ACTRs CANNOT move heat sinks into other ACTRs, so using lower tier heat sinks means you will be doing more running around to ensure all of your ACTRs have heat sinks. It is is crucial that your ACTRs have heat sinks at all times! ACTRs without heat sinks will continue to operate, but will damage themselves in the process. Damaged ACTRs will "lose" resources when teleporting, and an ACTR can fire several times damaged before it catches fire.

ACTRs do not have to be used in conjunction with automated machines. You can use them to load ammo, load missiles, maintain nuclear reactors, add oxygen to life support, remove carbon from life support, (currently bugged) etc., and their ability to move tools is often overlooked. I keep an ACTR next to a cargo teleporter on my larger mining and transport vessels to facilitate unloading.

When using an automated extractor to bring in a single resource, extractors will still bring in all the other resources in the asteroids. So if you set up an extractor at HSC Industrial Complex to bring in copper ore, make sure you have ACTRs set up to move all the iron ore and carbon that that will bring in as well.

ACTRs consume 40,000 power per teleport, and can fire once every 8 seconds. This averages out to a drain of 250/tick, though for most automated setups your ACTRs will not be at max capacity.
It's important to have extra generational capacity and preferably lots of power capacitors (not batteries) to supply this.

There are five types of automation chips. (Drone bay cards and cargo TP cards not pictured.) All of them cost the same resources to produce (10 gold, 10 silver, and 10 silicon) and all last the same duration (12 hours by default).

The difference is what they can be placed in. Extraction cartridges (blue) can be placed in Extractors and Salvagers. Printing cartridges (green) can only be placed in 3D Printers. Processing cartridges (red) can be placed in Refineries and Assemblers. Teleportation cartridges (purple) can only be placed in Cargo Teleporters. Drone Bay cartridges (yellow) can only be placed in Drone Bays.*

*Drone bays are not covered in this guide, as automating them is an entirely different and considerably more involved process. I may write a guide to Drone Bays in the future, but for now, you're on your own.

Automation cartridges go in slots on the machines listed above, which look like this:
Add an automation cartridge, and it looks like this:
(The green bar circled in red will go down with the chips remaining health, making for easy status checks.)









Once you've put the chip in, click the button marked Upgrade. This is the same on all machines.







Now you should have a menu that looks something like this. This is the menu on an extractor. They all have different resource options indicating what that particular machine is capable of producing/extracting, but the general layout is the same. You can select multiple resources for the machine to produce, and select a priority order. Make sure you have ACTRs set up to move all of the resources you have selected, as well as any other resources that may be brought in. For example, if you set up an extractor to mine copper, have ACTRs for the carbon and iron ore that are liable to come in with the copper. Once you've set up the resource priority, select Turn On. That's it, you're done!

A note on automating 3D Printers. In my opinion, it's a waste of gold and silver. Using ACTRs to load and remove the resulting products is worth it, but 3D printers are so slow and you so very rarely need to make large quantities of any one tool (an exception here for heat sinks), it's easier to manually start the print job for most tools.

need tips on designing and using automated setups, want to tell me how helpful this guide was, or tell me how much the guide and I ♥♥♥♥, the best way to get a hold of me is via Discord, on our Event Horizon server.
Invite link: https://discord.gg/XBHc2VW
Safe rifting!