Wyvern Girl HQ

Wyvern girls are best girls <3 Just a little spot for some VRChat stuff I'm Blake447 (She / Her) Math and Computer geek that loves doing and finding cool things. I practically live inside unity and blender by now. You can find me crunching on combinatorics or being addicted to Celeste and Ultrakill. No I don't run Arch. Good at making chess games, terrible at playing them. Has a hard time shutting up, expect long ranty and nerdy posts from me. I will take up half your timeline and I will not feel bad for it

[blake447]

Also i'm working on chess again from the ground up, expect some cool combinatorics write ups in the near future, as well as probably some transformation math

[blake447]

Somehow, it got worse

I didn't think it could. I though hypertoroidal chess was as bad as it got. I was wrong. I was so, so, so wrong.

This, is a 2D 4-player chess board. The way its constructed is by taking the furthest edges of each direction, and extruding an (n-1) dimensional slice in the extreme direction of choice.

Behold, a 4D multiplayer Chess board.

Now the number of players is dependent on the layout, and how you place the pieces. Now the number of players is dependent on the layout, and how you place the pieces.

This configuration, has 8 players: {+x, -x, +y, -y, +z, -z, +w, -w} playing red, green, white, black, orange, blue, yellow, purple, respectively. This means that each player has one "forward" direction which brings them to their immediate rival. okay well, there are definitely some sign errors in there but you get the point. Below, we have a different version that only has 4 players.

They are {+xz, -xz, +yw, -yw} playing red, green, white, black, respectively. Finally 4 players also allows for a fun multiverse time travel quirk. We can add a whole new multiversal dimension!

So in this timeline pictured, the turn order is white -> black -> red -> green. When white or black travel back in time, the new timeline splits off horizontally. When red or green travel back in time, the multiverse splits off vertically. This is officially the worst variant i think i've ever dreamed up. Well, hypertoroidal time travel chess might legitimately be worse. Technically neither is implemented, but this has unique ramifications for check and check mate detection that i'd... rather not think about so late at night. Enjoy my new monstrosity c:

[pythonian23]

Studying linear algebra rn and it's to freaky for me 😭

There's too much magickery, like you define a thing a certain way and suddenly it has 3 billion useful properties

I feel like calculus had carefully constructed definitions to specifically get the properties and uses you wanted but this is something completely different

[totalitariandemocracy]

tags by @generally-proven

[learningtogirl]

Real numbers aren't real?

[frxnkiistein]

good morning dimensions pipo

[blake447]

Alright everyone time for a 3 am crashout

Guess who's working on chess again? Partially due to revived interest, i'm gonna take a crack at getting this thing up to a reasonable speed. Starting with one of the neatest trick from 2D chess

Magic bit boards babyyyyyyyyy. Basically in 2D chess we take advantage of the fact that a 64 bit integer holds just enough individual bits to correspond one-to-one (and onto) occupancy of a chess board. You should read about them if you want i'm not explaining magic bitboards here lol It does require multiple bit boards to use, usually requiring one for rooks, for bishops, white, probably ghost pawns, stuff like that. The beauty of this though is we can represent essentially an entire board state with just a couple unsigned long ints. So here's where our journey start.... how uh... so fir... you may have noticed... uh....

yeah there's more than 64 squares there. This is where our trouble first starts. We need ways of dealing with larger boards. Now ya' girl went ahead and cracked this pretty quickly. Too bad its the wrong fucking thing.

Basically its as simple as reserving the outer lines of bits for data used to outright skip over that entire section, though it does come at the cost of only being able to represent 6x6 boards. So just apply that to.... I... actually only have like 2 boards that need this. This doesnt help at all, maybe i'll revisit it for the donuts.

(second ones a tiger btw, a 4D analog to a torus) Now lets revisit these magic bitboards again rq

Now astute readers may have noticed something horrifying about this. Notice how the left most grids are defined not only by the piece, but also the pieces positions. More generally, we can say that its defined by its n-agonals (monagonals, diagonals, triagonals, quadragonals, pentagonals)

It'd be good to know how many of these there are in total so we can get a rough idea of the number of magic bitboards we need. Luckily this is an easily solved problem. The number of monagonals in 5D space are 5 Choose 1. diagonals 5 choose 2. The total number of nagonals in 5D would then be the sum of these. We technically want to skip 5 choose 0 but for estimating memory usage the number being 32 instead of 31 wont make a difference, we kinda care about order of magnitude

Now you could add that up... ooooooooor you could use pascal's triangle. Well, there are some number theory theorems i dont remember but pascal's triangle is cute.

Now if you punch in all of the choose expressions above, you'll find they correspond to the bottom row of the pascals triangle here. And there's a neat trick about the sum of that row we can utilize.

The sums of the nth row of binomial coefficients is simply 2^n. So if we wanted to be exact we'd remove the 0-agonal, (5 choose 0) but for now, we'll settle into *about* 32 n-agonals. So for each square thats 32 n-agonals. on the 5x5x5x5x5 board we have 1024 squares. So thats like, 32k magic numbers right? Noooooot quite because that would assume we have access to 1024 bit integers. We do not have that kind of access. Each bit board can only represent a very small section of the board at once. For the 5D board we're lucky that it fits perfectly into a 3D slice. So a pretty solid approach would be to simply break it down into 4x4x4 3D slices

Upon inspection we see there are 16 3D slices which makes sense. Now there are a few ways to actually make those slices as well. This is a very similar problem to generating bishop moves. See, when we say a "3D slice" what we really mean is we're going to choose 3 dimensions to variables, and hold the other two fixed. 5 choose 3 is 10 so we get 10 different orientations of slices, meaning 160 3D slices in total with some transposition math.

A naive calculation would be to simply multiply this all together. 32 n-agonals * 1024 squares * 10 slice orientations * 16 slices * 8 btytes per 64 bit integer gives uuuuuuus....

Holy fuck, 40 MB of magic numbers, just for this board. *However* there was a naive thrown in there. This isn't entirely accurate, and i dont know in which direction. I think its better as far as memory goes, but time complexity is looking a bit worse. Basically the thing is, we're already taking 3D slices right? So hypothetically for any given board we only need the magic numbers for whatever subset of a board we can take. We can take an 8x8 section of a 2D slice, or a 4x4x4 section of a 3D slice. If you had a 64 squares long board you could take a single strip of that but like who would be crazy enough to do such a weird board like that, a 16x64 2D board? imagine. But anyway, the idea will be to take these bit boards that are solved for smaller slices, and use them to bulk process larger boards with fewer magic bit boards. This also somewhat solve the problem regarding user generated boards when that eventually does happen, but it does give us a new, at least... slightly easier one. Given some arbitrary board, how do you best subdivide it into bit boards and what can we do to speed things up. Oh yeah, and the fact Dragons wont move in 3D slices... But that's actually not as bad as it seems. Basically instead of taking a flat slice

We can sheer the slice across another direction. After that within the sheered slice the dragon would move like a unicorn. A devil (personal name for pentagonal rider) would move like a unicorn if we sheered across a second dimension as well. The combinatorics for this are actually much more forgiving in 5D than it would seem. Basically we need some extra bitboards for quadragonals and pentagonals, but we didnt have that many to begin with. There are 5 quadragonals, and with only one direction left to sheer we have to sheer that direction. Then we throw in an extra bitboard for the pentagonal sheer as well.

Well... it is important to note that the extra bitboards need to be multiplied by the (5 choose 3) or 10 ways to take slices in 3D space. We're actually going to drop the quadragonals and pentagonals from our original sum, and split them out here. 25 n-agonals (n<=3) * 64 squares per slice * 10 slice orientations * 16 slices * 8 bytes = 2MB for up to triagonals. 5 quadragonals * 64 squares per slice * 10 slice orientations * 2 sheer directions * 16 slices * 8 bytes = 2MB for quadragonals alone 1 pentagonal * 64 squares per slice * 10 slice orientations * 1 sheer direction * 16 slices * 8 bytes = 1 MB for pentagonals. So assuming i did all my math right we can use this building block for any board we need about 5MB dedicated just for these magic numbers. And actually, different slice forms are going to require other magic numbers and slicing rules. Good thing we're running on mostly modern hardware. That does feel like a lot of space but hopefully i can compress it. Accessing it quickly scares me as well, thats a lot of read-in, the whole thing would have to sit in RAM. Hopefully i can throw it into a compute shader and call it a day. Till next time~

[abalidoth]

My sincerest kudos to anyone who can figure out what I'm doing here

[abalidoth]

@gilettefusion5 lmao yeah pretty much

@priestessamy Pretty good guess! I actually really like the combinatorics of rhyme schemes but that's not what this is

@tiny-kitty-girl Good instinct -- each cell is determined by the two above, and coloring the cells would produce a Sierpinski-esque pattern.

@charyou-tree Half right! It's Pascal's Triangle, just not over the usual numbers.

@morbiditea-alt The pattern is the purpose, in this case. I just wanted to see what Pascal's Triangle in a nonabelian group would look like.

But nobody's named the group yet! Kudos still on the table!

[jesin00]

Looks to me like the quaternion group, with + denoting the identity element.

[abalidoth]

AND WE HAVE A WINNER!!!! 🎉

A, B, C are i,j,k ; upside down is negative, + is the identity element, and - is -1.

[395nm]

Out of mathematical interest (and not a deep-seated need to impress Tessa) I have implemented this quaternion sierpiński gasket in Excel!

Here's the setup: I assigned each quaternion an integer code (legend) and copied their multiplication table to my spreadsheet. In the automaton I used an indirect(address()) lookup to let each cell find the product of its parents in the multiplication table. I used MIN(1,H13) to assume empty cells are 1s instead of 0s.

1 is white, -1 is black. i, j, and k are primary colors; each unit's negative is its color inverted.

BEHOLD!

[abalidoth]

My sincerest kudos to anyone who can figure out what I'm doing here

[blake447]

I havent gone through and proved it, but after looking at some of the properties in the example, this looks like a quaterionic multiplicative pascal's triangle

A B and C seem to anti-commute, feels kinda like quaterions. A*B is C, B*C is uC (upside down c).

After anti commutativity is applied we see a general trend of different orientations apply a (possibly extra) 2nd flip upside-down. So like uCB is the same as u(BC), which ends up being uA.

+, - are somewhat interesting. Times themselves they are +, times the opposite gives -. + Preserves flippedness, - applies a flip. If these are based on quaternions, this seems initially analogous to the real component. + And - are positive and negative real scalars, ABC and uAuBuC are positive and negative complex components of i,j,k.

I havent sat down and proved it but based on this information, my first point of inspection would be if the following hypothesis holds:

+=1 A=i B=j C=k

-=-1 uA = -i uB = -j, uC = -k

And the element of the next row is the multiplicative product of the two entries above that it sits between.

But i dont feel like testing that right now so basic patterns and speculation are all you're getting from me for now lol.

[blake447]

Okay so like, i need to share this again because as of now no one has indicated to me that they understand just how absurd this is.

https://youtu.be/J7IKKzzApg8?si=04tTU-EeDF-A09mL

This is a zoom of a 41 iteration dragon curve. That's right 41 iterations. Why? Because i can :D Fun fact usually generating a dragon curve the memory requirement doubles each iteration, because you are copying and rotating the current curve. Double the segments, at best without any clever optimization its O(2^x)

So how hard is it to make say, 20 iterations? It was a long, long time ago, like 10 years, i followed an article that said you kind of have to write it in c so its more performant because 20 iterations on their machine took 20 minutes. 2^20 is going to be in the low one-millions range.

Now lets be more optimistic. Lets say computation time on a single cpu core has sped up 20 times, so you can generate a 20 iteration curve in 1 minute.

So 21 would take af least 2 minutes.

Now our scaling looks something more like 1m*2^(x-20). If we plug 21 more iterations to bring us up to 41, well we already know 2^20 is about one million, so this would be 2 million minutes or a bit under 2 years.

But guess what. This is rendering in real time. It would be incorrect to say that it generates the curve over 60 times per second, but it generates the visible part of the curve.

So what clever optimization trick gets me over a 120 million times speed boost at 41 iterations? Parallelization. See, this isnt just any dragon curve you see in c or java or python.

Nah girlie's running on the unity engines CG/HLSL shader language. The trick is to instead of generating the curve, and placing the segments with that info, we repeat the process that forms the dragon curve backwards. A dragon curve starts with a single segment, and it has 1 mid point. When folded, it turns into 2, and has 2 midpoints.

So what we do is we test every pixel, find its closest hypothetical midpoint, and then perform the transformation backwards. Since they originate from one segment, and this method ends up halvening the midpoints each time by merging them on top each other. These means after your desired number of iterations, we can simply check to see if the pixel we were on collapsed back into a specific midpoint.

Making midpoints integers an example would be the line segment from (0,0) to (0,2). Well then im that case the midpoint would be (0,1).

This scaling even allows us to keep track of everything via modulo operations. The vector math ends up working out so that most the time you're rotating and scaling, but the net displacement from the two is a fixed size vector along the cardinal direction, which when converted to integer math, is the same as either adding xor subtracting, just 1 from your current x xor y coordinate, based on the direction the rotation would take it

We can add a color gradient by keeping track of the turns in the curve. I dont remember exact details but its literally as simple as left? 0: right? 1. And then converting that binary number to decimal it gives you what number along the curve that pixels nearest midpoint belonged to.

Now there are some tricky edge cases like 0 iterations, or the first and last segment only being one line segment instead of a curve. Additionally if we try to smooth the color a bit by sampling all 4 directions, we'd get color bleeding between two very different parts of the curve that have been folded into proximity. You could probably weight this based on the proximity between segments but i dont recall if i ever bothered.

But yeah its some really fascinating stuff. Dont fully understand why the binary counting works but uh dont think i need to.

[blake447]

There we go now the embeds working

[blake447]

Okay so like, i need to share this again because as of now no one has indicated to me that they understand just how absurd this is.

https://youtu.be/J7IKKzzApg8?si=04tTU-EeDF-A09mL

This is a zoom of a 41 iteration dragon curve. That's right 41 iterations. Why? Because i can :D Fun fact usually generating a dragon curve the memory requirement doubles each iteration, because you are copying and rotating the current curve. Double the segments, at best without any clever optimization its O(2^x)

So how hard is it to make say, 20 iterations? It was a long, long time ago, like 10 years, i followed an article that said you kind of have to write it in c so its more performant because 20 iterations on their machine took 20 minutes. 2^20 is going to be in the low one-millions range.

Now lets be more optimistic. Lets say computation time on a single cpu core has sped up 20 times, so you can generate a 20 iteration curve in 1 minute.

So 21 would take af least 2 minutes.

Now our scaling looks something more like 1m*2^(x-20). If we plug 21 more iterations to bring us up to 41, well we already know 2^20 is about one million, so this would be 2 million minutes or a bit under 2 years.

But guess what. This is rendering in real time. It would be incorrect to say that it generates the curve over 60 times per second, but it generates the visible part of the curve.

So what clever optimization trick gets me over a 120 million times speed boost at 41 iterations? Parallelization. See, this isnt just any dragon curve you see in c or java or python.

Nah girlie's running on the unity engines CG/HLSL shader language. The trick is to instead of generating the curve, and placing the segments with that info, we repeat the process that forms the dragon curve backwards. A dragon curve starts with a single segment, and it has 1 mid point. When folded, it turns into 2, and has 2 midpoints.

So what we do is we test every pixel, find its closest hypothetical midpoint, and then perform the transformation backwards. Since they originate from one segment, and this method ends up halvening the midpoints each time by merging them on top each other. These means after your desired number of iterations, we can simply check to see if the pixel we were on collapsed back into a specific midpoint.

Making midpoints integers an example would be the line segment from (0,0) to (0,2). Well then im that case the midpoint would be (0,1).

This scaling even allows us to keep track of everything via modulo operations. The vector math ends up working out so that most the time you're rotating and scaling, but the net displacement from the two is a fixed size vector along the cardinal direction, which when converted to integer math, is the same as either adding xor subtracting, just 1 from your current x xor y coordinate, based on the direction the rotation would take it

We can add a color gradient by keeping track of the turns in the curve. I dont remember exact details but its literally as simple as left? 0: right? 1. And then converting that binary number to decimal it gives you what number along the curve that pixels nearest midpoint belonged to.

Now there are some tricky edge cases like 0 iterations, or the first and last segment only being one line segment instead of a curve. Additionally if we try to smooth the color a bit by sampling all 4 directions, we'd get color bleeding between two very different parts of the curve that have been folded into proximity. You could probably weight this based on the proximity between segments but i dont recall if i ever bothered.

But yeah its some really fascinating stuff. Dont fully understand why the binary counting works but uh dont think i need to.

[blake447]

8D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel

So 5D chess with multiverse time travel is played with a 2D board. This uses a 5D board, as its *base,* before we start slapping on any time travel shenanigans. Today someone was finally crazy enough to play me on this board. Some highlights from this game: This jurassic queen shooting back to the beginning of the game roughly 7 full turns into the past

This 3-way rook fork with a unicorn:

Me thinking this pawn was defended by just a singular rook (at least one knight is defending it with just a regular 2D knight move):

My opponent *correctly predicting* that I was going to exploit this opening

Except across timelines as we caught up to this point on the parallel timeline she split off. Here's where she noticed

where the idea was to place my queen in a spot where she was targeting the enemy king in the past AFTER i had split off this new timeline

HOWEVER i never made it that far, this is a dramatic recreation to show what the plan is. I actually ended up back tracking and we just played the main two timelines. Here's a unicorn snipe i had set up since literally my first move. The unicorn got captured by a knight, but i recaptured with a unicorn to re-set it up:

In the end, I moved a dragon multiversally across the timline

which threatens check

Now my opponent should have just blocked with a pawn honestly, since this isnt a time travel attack, but instead she captured with a unicorn

Which after i cash-in that triple rook fork for a trivial check

Lets me get a checkmate now that the unicorn is out of the way

Overall a very interesting game. Plans take a lot of steps to set into motion, and we both avoided playing out pawn exchanges. Part of our reluctance towards setting up longer strategies and doing pawn exchanges was because of technical issues. This lagged, so bad lmao. Any time we moved or submitted our turn we the check detection re-ran slowly ramping up our lagspikes to solid 5 or 6 seconds any time we did anything. As far as strategy goes, there is a lot of stuff to hypothetically set up, but my god is it hard to actually do any of it. The specific layout means there aren't easy f7 sac style pawns so the playstate actually has to be played out across the board. I would love to try this with a different layout, but for now i'm going to continue re-working the menus, editor, and then eventually optimize it so things dont lag nearly as bad.

[blake447]

Hey everyone, seeing a little bit of confusion going around about what this is. To be clear, it is not on Steam, and is completely unaffiliated with 5D chess with Multiverse Time Travel.

The steam game mine is based off of is much more polished and quite frankly much more comprehensible.

My client nD Time Travel Chess is on itch.io though! We have a small, though currently very quiet, discord where people are occasionally crazy enough to play a game or two.

I will say, development has been on hiatus for quite some time now, and it would benefit from a lot of polish, but with whats already up and running and possible i'm still so happy with how it turned out. The game is free, though it will ask for a small donation. Just hit no thanks to proceed if you want. No support is expected, and any given is greatly appreciated

As a side note, I used the title 8D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel in the post, but as i'm not affiliated with 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel the game itself has a different naming convention. Basically time travel variants just infix "Time Travel" to the name of the chess variant. 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel is 2D Chess plus timelines, for simply time travel chess. The variant shown above in the game outlined is a 5D board, plus multiverse and time dimensions for a 7D game total, 5D Time Travel Chess. But yeah personally i recommend trying 3D Space Chess, then 4D Sapphia Chess, then play the original 5D Chess with multiverse time travel (the understanding of higher dimensions is helpful in understanding that games mechanics) and then ease into higher dimensional time travel variants

[lordtableshark]

[prospitianescapee]

[image description: screenshots of a series of Tweets, transcribed below:]

Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) - 2018-08-21, 7:57 AM

Alright, so inspired by @NPurkeypile’s bee post yesterday, here is one of my favorite bits of Skyrim oral history - the myth of the treasure fox.

I’ve told this story before in talks/etc, but I don’t think I’ve shared it with twitter. Here goes.

Keep reading

[blake447]

With all the talk surrounding AI and machine learning i want to take a moment and appreciate a small positive opinion i have on the matter.

Clicking into the article it is part of a greater project to perform other tasks i dont personally thing AI should be getting used for, but in a vacuum as its own stage in the pipeline i believe it fits in with the original vision i had of machine learning.

Train massive expensive models to perform small dedicated tasks on low end consumer hardware to gain performance on stuff that otherwise might not have even been possible with a traditionally designed algorithm, let alone at that speed.

Pose estimation for extracting motion data from a video via computer vision, for example was very anticipated in the vr community for motion capture, would allow animation data for artists to be recorded with a $20 webcam instead of an expensive mocap rig, to start out at least.

Now what i will say is that they seem to be building it into a neural rendering engine for lighting and whatnot which i'm not fully on board because i think that crosses outside the bounds of technical and into artistic.

But i dont know how its implemented. I will say, if i were to use AI there are a few specific tasks i would like performed that otherwise wouldnt be viable on a low end machine using a rasterizer.

The first one Nvidia actually mentions, which is global illumination. Solutions for this are possible traditionally it just takes a lot of effort getting everything set up and is expensive for more complicated scenes. Taking in the static lightmap and object data in the form of a separately rendered layer, positional information, extra color parameters, etc.) generates a low resolution real time global illumination texture or light probes or a function that gets lightly blended in as a texture in the projects traditional rasterizer.

The other task i'd want to see is reflections and subsurface scattering. Basically, this would involve training a depth estimator. Feed the depth map, color scene rendering, and camera information to generate the screen space position to sample for the reflection.

Now the impressive part would be training those models to work robustly on the RTX 20 series. I suspect a performance gain is difficult here compared to just doing the raymarching but i'd be interested to see this approach and if you could get it to perform multiple bounces effectively.

[the-punforgiven]

I'm just saying, if you're going to worldbuild magic being a "raw, primal force, akin to and interweaving with nature itself" you gotta explain to me why animals don't use it

[the-punforgiven]

I know the normal answer is "they just aren't smart enough for it" but idk I've seen enough media where a character uses a spell in a moment of brain-off panic ilI feel like animals could probably stumble into a spell or two like, accidentally

[the-punforgiven]

Also how funny would it be to see a completely normal regular bear cast magic missile outta nowhere

[the-punforgiven]

Also there is no way ravens wouldn't figure out spells, tbh

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them

Either through observing or just figuring shit out ravens could 100% learn how to cast spells I'm sure of it

[the-punforgiven]

Dogs can also cast Magic Missile but every time they do the projectile is shaped like a bone or a stick and they chase after it

[blake447]

A related thought thats been bouncing around my head is to interweave magic down into the cellular level. Like, microscopically some cells construct structures that form magic runs, and you get like algae that gets its energy from areas of high energetic elemental concentration, for example fire and lightning. Imagine a yeast that receives its hydration through drawing from water runes. It opens or at least vastly expands a new branch of alchemy, akin to brewing beers, vinegars, wine, baking breads, or aging cheeses. Anyway I get carried away down below but uh, yeah, its a cool idea i think. A lot of room to explore

Some animals would start to take in runic algae and bacteria to perform magical tasks in symbiosis. Plants would likely first take similar adaptations into their own anatomy. The elemental composition of places could be determined by what kinds of wildlife are in the area, at a glance. Cultivating several ecosystems of elemental yeasts and measuring the rates at which they, not necessarily grow, but do their own thing could act as a more comprehensive, but long term method with limitations. Combined with detailed observation and cataloguing species, food webs, runic properties, and proportion of magic invoking life, scholars in a world like this would have a lot to study. Magical creatures would be such a wild realm to explore. Water runes should produce hydration, i'm unable to immediately justify it doing anything else. Fire and Lightning runes would be energy sources likely for primary consumers. One option is for fire and lightning to produce heat and voltage, respectively, but from a creative standpoint the mechanics of that get rather complicated. Rather, fire and lightning both i think would benefit from the abstraction of simply "energy sources," providing metabolic energy to otherwise unremarkable attuned species. This would serve the role sunlight does for algae, the host of vents and chemicals archaea use, or predation that autotrophs use for energy. This would result in species that require no food, that are depending on the concentration of the ambient energy, and are *disproportionately* energetically dense. These would have to be found in extremely dangerous environments, leading to primary producers in ecosystems, that subsist entirely off of intense and chronic lightning storms, with entire food webs built a top of them. A beetle could eat something resembling a plant that draws from lightning instead of sunlight, using the raw materials and metals from the cellular lighting runes for an otherwise unremarkable diet, maybe because of its bright and distinct coloration. Something like a fungus could then decompose that beetle, use the raw materials inherited from the beetles diet to reconstruct its own runes, and in the process reproduce explosively in response to even a single healthy adult beetle given all other resources provided. The implications this would have for the rate of decomposition of a given ecosystem, the rate of recycling of resources, and thus bio-diversity is interesting, and adds a different variable when considering the categorization of biomes and environments. And of course, because we love fantastic creature design, not just glowy yeast. Animals would use symbiotic relationships to mystical microbes like they already do, for example in our stomachs and digestive tract. This could lead to the development of organs that act as microbreweries for runic bacteria. Actually, lightning runes i think most interestingly would act for a catalyst for some chemical reactions, if we want the most interesting creatures. For example, a lighting aspected gut biome could separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, with the energy for the reaction provided by the bacterium's runic anatomy, creating a need for the host of the gut to consume the resources for the particular bacterium's otherwise, unremarkable anatomy, and dispose of the waste created. If solved however, the upside is an anatomy that can produce oxygen for respiration internally, as well as flammable, lightweight hydrogen gas, though I'm sure it could be used as an intermediate product for some other product if its properties prove too difficult for a species body to manage, (especially since they are frequenting heavy-lighting dense areas, flammable gas, might not be the way to go) but that in itself may prove an interesting evolutionary constraint to solve.

Light aspected species would go so hard. Cold aspection might only ever occur in species that need to negate an excess of production by energy by other processes potentially allowing nuclear metabolic processes. As it stands now the amount of energy released in such process is so enormous, and the forces preventing it are so powerful, that life can't realistically say, utilize fusion as an energy source. But imagine a cold rune, capable of sapping away obscene amounts of energy. Capable of, depending on the exact variation, sucking away the potential energy between two raw atomic nuclei, so that the magnetic force pushing them away gets spent feeding the rune, and the two halves fall closer and closer until they fused. Crucially each rune, depending on and because of its precise variation of the microscopic structure, consumes enough energy for the fusing of the two ingredients required, and all remaining burst from the release of the binding mass energy, save for the exact amount needed to perform the metabolic process that runs a specific microbe. Despite many elements and many variations of cold runes absorbing different amounts of energy, these things are still rare because they require both amounts to coincidentally line up correctly. This one would actually i think only has a small handful of valid nuclear equations that could even serve as a base, but basically each inserted run allows the author to make a nuclear equation ignore entropy and energy requirement and occur depending solely on raw materials provided, and could say, replace the light requirement in photosynthesis. Slap it inside a yeast and whatever byproduct the reaction produces can be cultivated by brewing now (would be great for a minecraft mod). Your worlds economy and technological development has been flipped on its head. I dont know how but rest assured i will write a script that scans through all known isotopes to get a comprehensive list of brewing recipes this would create. Look at me getting carried away. Anyways its something that i think would be cool to build on. I'm sure it'd lead to some very fantastical, yet grounded creature designs, as well as some very, very bizarre and alien ones.

[blake447]

Profiling a Minecraft Server

So for some entirely unknown reason, my minecraft server has started to run into performance issues. So i decided to start profiling it to see whats causing the most server lag! Note: I'm profiling these when they are off because, i can turn all of them off lol. Always include off switches people First things first, Create is remarkable performant. Like i can't speak to gpu strain but server side? I'm thoroughly impressed, i figured this would add up quicker.

(This is the interior of one of my create factories) Here's something interesting, integrated dynamics does in-fact just have ambient lag on cables.

I've started swapping out ID for Mekanism logistical transporters, but have still been using it for transmitting redstone, round-robin distribution, conditional exporting, and running wires through facade blocks (important for the mob farm).

Honestly its kind of remarkable how much strain these cables add just by existing. What's interesting here is that i could probably optimize this system by doing the logic in ID, exporting one block into a chest, and then using logistical transporters for the rest of the distance.

What's interesting though is that compact complicated machines still aren't all that performance heavy. My villager re-rolling machine and my universal dye machine are surprisingly light on server tick.

I genuinely thought this more complicated network would cause more strain then this, but apparently the cost comes with the cables themselves. Now i will say, I hadn't profiled it but when i had two exporters going in different directions to this large chest system, and my tps instantly dropped from the steady 20 to 15, and it fixed when i panic cleared it.

I'm considering using a dedicated ME system exclusively for the mob grinder to more precisely manage the items that come through it, but i'm unfamiliar with what its capable of and how to interface with it, for which i do plan on using more Integrated dynamics for, specifically to handle enchanted armor pieces.

[blake447]

My Factory

This behemoth of a machine is the first little bit of my factory. Our Journey starts with 6 CobbleGen blocks generating various resources. The Crimsite is manually added as a recipe by me since the config is easy and it allows for a simple source of iron and redstone, both of which have mystical agriculture equivalents but i like avoiding those options

Three of the materials generated get passed out into their own line on the conveyor belt. Crimsite, Cobblestone, and Diorite are fed through a basic bin with a lever on it to individually attached so that i can turn individual parts of the machine on and off.

Each one of those materials are piped off into their own staggered crushing wheels

The resulting resources are quite varied, and go through a short series of machines.

The cobblestone becomes gravel, which is split round robin between two chests. The first supply is directly put forward and one of the final outputs of the machine. The other gets pushed through this next crusher converting it to sand.

Flint and Clay are sorted out as byproducts from crushing the gravel into sand. The diorite outputs nether quartz which is sorted out next to this by a long, mostly hidden cable.

The Crimsite drops iron nuggets and and iron clumps, iron nuggets are split round robin between two chests, fed into one of two craters pictured above. One is piping in andesite to make andesite alloy, the other compresses the iron nuggets into iron ingots. The iron clumps get sent through a bulk washing sequence, producing iron nuggets and redstone dust. The iron nuggets are fed back into the split between crafters while redstone dust is pushed forward as a final output

Which leads to our final output, after everything is organized into individual reserves and moved down one floor.

From here I can wind back around into the previously built through chunks to require fewer chunks to be force loaded to make the machine idle, though i'm judging by some of the output that will be unnecessary

My bulk dying machine got a little more cramped to operate though :T I haven't even gotten to explain her. I probably should before i move her because she is insane to set up. Maybe i can make it a bit simpler...

[hibiscusbisque]

Can someone suggest Minecraft automation mods *other* than create? I'm kinda sick of create but I wanna build factories :3

[blake447]

I'm playing All the Mods 10 and it has some staples like Mekanism, Actually Additions, Industrial Foregoing, and Integrated Dynamics (my beloved), as well as some lesser known gems like Cobblegen and Botany Pots. Cobblegen in particular has the ability to be really powerful, as the blocks it adds can be configured in the .config to produce wide varieties of blocks.

By default you can generate stone, obsidian, nether rack, and diorite. That last one is big because crushing it with create crushing wheels gives nether quartz. I recommend adding crimsite into the .config for easy iron, since i think it makes for more interesting factory possibilities.

A real hidden gem imo is Alchemistry. It lets you break items down into their chemical components and reconstruct them into other things. To really shine it needs custom recipes by the modpack creator but you can get up to some pretty silly stuff. In a modpack called Dungeons Dragons and Space shuttles i was breaking down fish for their selenium to atomically fuse with some other element to make a component for that modpack's endgame special resource. A more practical use is that carrots have Beta-carotine which is stupid carbon dense, so you can produce coal or diamonds that way en masse.

It really shines when mods integrate recipes specifically for recombining elements into items. DDSS had some real care put into the recipes, and combine particularly with thermal expansions igneous extruder allowed for some interesting resource extraction.

[blake447]

My New Favorite Minecraft Machine: An Armadillo powered Diamond Farm

So, I've been playing some All The Mods 10 lately and have gotten a little bit of an itch in my brain to do some automation. Naturally one very coveted machine to create would be a diamond farm. Now ATM 10 has plenty of options for that, some better some worse. Some simple, and others... not so much. Lets go over the obvious Mystical Agriculture: Easily my least favorite mod, right being whatever that old equivalent exchange mod that used to be common was. Its boring. You make seeds, you plant a farm. I don't to watch grass grow. I want to make machines. Atomic Reconstructor:

Here's an interesting one. Basically slap a lens onto a laser, feed it with a cobblestone generator (it accepts any stone, and ATM 10 has a cobblegen mod that adds a block that can produce many stones, VERY quickly). This one is actually extremely easy to get early game, but takes a lot of power, is quite slow, and doesnt produce diamonds quickly at all. This was actually the first thing i made, even before my base was really setup. An atomic reconstructor, Mekanism coal generator as well as one or two basic machines, a squeezer and drying basin. It really doesn't take much. I've upgraded this one with a world block importer for silk touch but it worked just fine without it.

Here's the current setup. The cobblegen block creates stone, an Actually Addition auto-placer places it. A block detector sends two redstone pulses through integrated dynamics redstone writers, the first on detecting stone to the atomic reconstructor on the left *under the condition that the atomic reconstructors power level is full,* the second to the auto-breaker, which has since been replaced by a world block importer that just breaks anything but stone, which simplifies the logic a bit, and makes it a tad more reliable.

It gives a wide variety of what i would consider relatively useless ores, absurd amounts of copper, coal, and black quartz, and decent amounts of vanilla resources and osmium for mekanism. Obviously its not representative of the frequency they come in because i've drained most the redstone, emerald, and diamonds. It does need two advanced solar arrays from Mekanism and it still empties all my power cables after a while. It'll fire even if it doesn't have enough power too which is why I had to use a machine reader to limit its output. A decent and cute little farm, but it just doesnt give the diamond output i need. So lets look at other options. There's this steam compressor from modern industrialization which i did make, but needs some kind of power conversion or steam, and seems fairly slow

Boring. So it seems like there really aren't many good options, if you flip through certainly nothing that seems super automatable. Unless...

Well hold on. That's kind of silly, i can make leather horse armor with leather, upgrade it with 4 diamonds, and crush it down into 6. I can work with this, i think to myself. Armadillos, i can get those. Ars Nouveau allows capture of entities in jars so i can transport them along far distances. Apotheosis allows getting spawn eggs, and converting spawners in the worst case scenario. They're breedable with spider eyes to get a decent farm going. So here's what the ritual looks like.

I'm not going to go into detail for what it takes to actually get this put together, because it is *not* simple. You actually have to get nearly all the way through the mod Occultism to get here. The main ritual bowl also needs to be upgraded to run at a super reasonable speed. But yeah, here it is. In all its glory, my diamond farm. Hows it work? Glad you asked :3 Lets go over the simple part: the armadillos.

Above the chamber i have a group of armadillos, a player simulator with an offset upgrade to initiate the ritual, and two machines from industrial foregoing, and animal feeder and a baby separator. The machine rations out 2 spider eyes exactly upon a signal. Industrial foregoing's animal breeder will only feed the animals if there is a valid pair ready to breed, so if all of them are on cool down, or if only one isn't on cooldown, it'll wait. The baby armadillo gets separated out and dropped into the glass vial to promptly be used for the ritual (most ethical minecraft farm.) But Blake447 you might ask. You skipped over a pretty crucial part. How do you ration the 2 spider eyes? Where do you get the spider eyes, and the leather for the horse armor? I'm glad you asked. Here's the real beauty of the machine.

Ahhh integrated dynamics. My beloved. She's an extremely powerful logistics mod. The big black structure in the background is a mob grinder.

Rather than trying to implement the logic in place, i routed all major input/outputs and sensors into one central location for for logic and item flow. The mob grinder has two kinds of mob spawners, zombies and spiders (hence the ice. only kinda works btw. Fuck spiders and their wall climbing bs.) Rotten flesh is collected, filtered into a mechanical dryer from Integrated Dynamics to convert it into leather, then into an crafter from Enderio to turn it into leather horse armor.

Additionally hidden from here is an overflow system. An inventory reader detects when the intermediate rotten flesh chest is full and redirects the rotten flesh output from the mob grinder to be destroyed. The other input from the mob grinder, the spider eyes, get piped into a more complicated setup.

When the ritual completes, the diamond horse armor is dropped and picked up by a ranged collector, then piped into this beginning chest.

The spider eyes are initially stored within a bulk chest. Upon detecting the diamond horse armor in the above circled chest, spider eyes are transferred from the bulk spider eyes into the below circled chest, at a rate of 1 item per tick, under the condition that the number of spider eyes in the below circled chest is less than two.

There actually isn't any way of telling if the ritual is in progress, only what's in the ritual bowls. We're also utilizing a quirk of the ritual process here as well, that the main ritual bowl will not accept any items until all other sacrificial bowls are completed, meaning there's no need to check if they are full, since once we assume the ritual has been completed, no leather horse armor will be detected until they are refilled. So we wait until then to send out the spider eyes, to prevent the armadillo being sent out too early, and sacrificed before the ritual has been prepared. So once we've detected that the two spider eyes have been rationed accordingly, the diamond horse armor progresses to a second chest, where it is immediately moved into the crusher to be converted to raw diamonds. The crusher then imports those diamonds to 5 attached inventories, the 4 sacrificial bowls at priority 1, and an output inventory at priority 0. Since the sacrificial bowls only carry one diamond, the 2 remaining diamonds get skimmed from the top and are removed from the system.

The diamonds fill the sacrificial bowls, the leather horse armor is allowed into the ritual bowl, the spider eyes detect that it's been placed and sent to the animal feeder, the animal feeder feeds 2 random, off-cooldown armadillos, the baby is separated and dropped into the vial, where a player simulator initiates the sacrifice.

Its certainly no mystical agriculture farm (and it turns out there are simpler ways of doing loops like this within the same mod) but with a ramped up mob grinder the raw materials can be built up, then the system chunk-loaded to run in the background. The results are more than satisfactory in my opinion. Certainly on of my more interesting machines.

There are quite a few potential upgrades. The four i've implemented are more armadillos more more uptime on their breeding cooldown, a faster ritual bowl, ramped up spawners, and auto salvaging of armor dropped by mobs in the spawner. Auto crushing apotheosis gems and stripping enchantments are also possible. Integrated dynamics is already good for filtering nbt to auto crush cracked apotheosis gems, and even in the worst case scenario there are zombie villager spawners (with a range of 40 blocks, dear god turn that down asap) that spawn in with iron blocks. Obviously rotten flesh is backing my system up, so i could convert it to leather, use botany pots for paper, and automate both books and anvils. World block exporters and world item importers filtered to enchanted books and you could absolutely get stacks upon stacks of enchantment books. The mob grinder drops experience as well so pooled into a tap it could be used to combine excess books into higher tiers, though i'm not sure how automatable that is. Another potential thing you could do before ramping up spawners is backfeeding reliquary drops into auto crafters to increase rotten flesh and spider eye yield per mob, and combining leather scraps to become full leather. As of right now, my rotten flesh is entirely built up, yielding at least 4 stacks of diamonds worth before needing more, though spider eye yield could use it. The apothic spawners can also use some upgrades, ignoring lights, redstone sensitivity, redstone writers, and nether stars to make them ignore players (dear god, make sure there is a purge system on all storage bottle necks though.) Essentially make the entire system chunk loadable. God i love modded minecraft