Screen Shots - 12/14/15
That ore generator was floating around in my head today, and what to do next with it. I thought up a couple of tweaks I wanted to make to increase output, but wasn’t able to come up with any real improvements to the design aside from making it more compact.
Shortening the length of the ore blocks row would result in some blocks being broken before conversion, so it needed to remain as long as I possibly could get it. If fact, this one’s a couple of blocks longer than the original. That should eliminate stone blocks making it all the way to the breakers and result in 100% conversion.
And, that was the result. Its max length is 14 blocks long, which means it’ll fit perfectly inside a Dimensional Pocket. I wanted to use as much floor space in the pocket as I could, and the pistons will actually stop pushing once they reach this length anyway, so it couldn’t be any more perfect.
Once in a while, even with the full glass enclosure, the lava would occasionally “leak” into the water forming a stone block that blocks the water off. A couple of block breakers were put into place to handle this issue. With this design, one timer can trigger the pistons, the main block breakers at the end, and one of these on each side. If a block forms in the water, it’ll be cleared on the next pulse. Since there’s water in there, it’s constantly “breaking” it when it’s got signal. I thought about adding a comparator to cause it to fire only if there was a block in the way, but it’s redstone powered. Infinite power, and breaking water has no effect. Anything more than the above would just increase complexity with very little gain. With this setup, once in a great while it might just fail to make a single block. I can live with that.
The glass outline was replaced because as I played around with it, the connected glass texture was making it difficult to see what was broken and what wasn’t. I’d break what I thought was an outer block, only to have lava flow out everywhere.
Replacing the glass with smooth stone means it gets converted to ore by the orechid from Botania, too, and I like the idea of using ore blocks as decoration for an ore generator. It says “I’ve got so much more ore than I’ll ever use”. In the final version, I’ll replace all the ore blocks in the structure with smooth stone again, so they’ll convert on the fly. Each structure will then generate independently, and thus end up with their own unique look. And, given how its built now, the back of it will be up against the wall in the pocket, but I can still access every block in the machine if I need to fix or tweak anything later.
I love the planned absurdity of the physics in Minecraft, and try to leverage them when I build. Nothing says Minecraft more than a block of lava held in place by a wire. I’ve settled on trying to do everything with Ender IO conduits because wow, they’re awesome! They’ll transport everything I need to, where I need to, how I need to, and with as much control as I’ll need for every scenario.
And, with all of that, the maximum height was trimmed down to only two blocks. Given the height of a dimensional pocket is 14 blocks, why then the concern about shortening it further? That:
Using WorldEdit, I made a copy of the machine, rotated the copy 90 degrees in memory, and placed it one up from the first. I then repeated that two more times.
And, it was a terrible mess. The “stock” piston towers were a little too tall, so when I’d rotated a full 360, I had conflicts with the next one on top. Plus, all that redstone conduit got a bit tangled in on itself, so I’ve got to remove that from the master before copying. But, this is why you build tests; to work out the issues before going into production.
I think I can get about ten of these things stacked in a single Dimensional Pocket. I should be able to even control that whole thing, every piston, every block breaker, with a single timer. Ten of these monstrosities chucking out ore in perfect sync. The timer I was using was set to five seconds, so the output would be about twenty ore blocks every five seconds or 4/second. Nice.
Finally, I’m using the OpenBlocks version of the block breaker because I THINK it’ll also collect XP. OpenMods registers a player, OpenModsFakePlayer, when you use them, and usually when something’s broken/killed by something that’s registered as a fake player it’ll cause that thing to drop XP. Have to confirm that, though.
In all other ways, that block breaker is exactly like all of the other variations, so that’s a nice perk if it can do that. I won’t pull in much, but coal sometimes drops XP so why let it go to waste? :) Remember, it’s about efficiency and getting every last drop (pun intended) I can out of every machine.
Now that I have a design I’m happy with, next step will be to stack and rotate and see how many I can fit in a 14x14x14 area.