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the condition that the atomic reconstructors power level is full,* the second to the auto-breaker, which has since been replaced by a world block importer that just breaks anything but stone, which simplifies the logic a bit, and makes it a tad more reliable.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