#sorting system

[otherside-wanderer]

Hybrid sorter hub and its three branches - read more about its structure, how it works, and the development process below the cut!

General Structure

For this survival world, my friends and I decided to split up our resources in three different branches, all connected by one central hub. The fourth "branch" is an access hallway (not shown) that contains minecart rail stations. As of now, only one station is built, but the hallway also contains a room where any unsorted items flow out to - this room also contains its own sorter input!

You might notice redstone bulbs in the copper pillars along each hallway - activating these will reveal both a crafting table and stonecutter at the base of the pillar for easy crafting access. Also, the three branches have their own quirks since they were each organized and completed by a different builder - see if you can spot any differences (aside from the items being sorted)!

Redstone & Underbelly

During development, we decided that the sorter didn't need to be fully automatic like our last one - instead, we wanted a way to combine automatic and manual sorting, hence this hybrid design. Only the top rows (and about a dozen barrels in the middle and bottom rows) along each branch leverage automatic sorting - this was to simplify the sorter design and allow for better scalability. This is also why some of our most plentiful items are placed on the top row. We love Minecraft updates, but adding new blocks and items to a sorter can be tough!

Including manual sorting allows us to store unstackables as well as different kinds of items in the same barrel. Although there are some great designs out there for unstackable or multi-item sorters, we wanted this build to be our own and not have to worry about chunk alignment, minecarts, or having to construct it with build assist tools. If you're interested in the redstone for our automatic sorter modules, check out this post about our previous sorter! Our current one applies the concepts in similar ways.

Like our last sorter, @shewholistens has been doing an amazing job standardizing and decorating the Underbelly, which is still in progress. Having all of our sorter modules and hopper lines accessible (and good-looking) is such a boon, especially when doing work behind the scenes. Currently, the Underbelly is accessible via hidden doors at the end of each branch!

Development process

This was a big project. Since building our last sorter, we learned a lot about what works and what doesn't, and decided to carry that knowledge over to this one. In our new world, we put together a document detailing things we wanted in our sorter and how they would all fit together. These included item organization, a hybrid sorting system, input and output chests, crafting access points, a player-friendly underbelly, and - of course - decoration.

This prep work was by far the most important part of the sorter building process, and it allowed us to break the project into small, manageable pieces. It reminded me a lot of the work I do as a software engineer, and it was so exciting to see the sorter get built module by module, branch by branch.

Before I forget - huge thanks to @indigoforiver for convincing me that we needed a sorter! Our chest/shulker monster was... very bad...

[terapsina]

Sorting 11 year olds in houses based on their strongest traits is a mess and here’s how I’d fix it.

This is something I remember thinking about quite a while back (like a few years back), but I don’t think I ever actually wrote it down so I felt like doing it now.

Right. So why do the kids get sorted by their strongest traits? Let’s take Harry for example, he’s already brave, do you think putting him in a different house would have suddenly made him less so? NO! Harry is brave to a point where he barely cares about his own well being. Why exactly was it healthy to actually encourage that characteristic in him?

How about the Ravenclaw kids? They’re put there because they’re driven by promise of knowledge. Would Cho or Luna  have been any less curious and intelligent for being put in Hufflepuff?

Would Cedric be less loyal and hard working if he was a Slytherin?

Would Draco be less ambitious?

So back to my point, why sort by a personality trait that is already predominantly present in a kid? Wouldn’t it make more sense to sort by... not exactly their weakest trait, but by the trait that the young witch or wizard needs to nurture in themselves?

Lets go back to Harry. He was already brave as hell as an eleven year old kid, and he was loyal to Hagrid and Ron within like 10 minutes of meeting them. Neither did he need any lessons on hard work. What he did need was a bit more self worth and personal drive (basically the things the Dursleys had been trying to squash in him).

So wouldn’t it make more sense to place these kids in environments that would nourish the parts of them that hadn’t had a chance to develop yet? A school is supposed to teach kids and help them grow into well rounded, well adjusted adults. And that’s more likely to happen with as many different kinds of personalities around as possible.

Now I get how that could backfire, with mean kids naming the Gryffindor the house of cowards, and Ravenclaw the house of the stupid and so on and so forth. But honestly... mean kids are people and people can find anything to pick on someone about. 

Now you might be asking how putting all the kids that need more ambition together would actually help them develop said ambition.

And you might be wondering about how sorting by the weakest trait is any better than sorting by strongest WHEN YOU SORT THEM WHEN THEY’RE ELEVEN-FREAKING-YEARS OLD.

And I can knock down both questions with one stone. It’s simple. Two sortings. First one when the kids start their 1′st year, when they gets sorted by the personality trait they need to work on. And then again when they start their 5′th year by the rules we’re all familiar with, in essence, by their strongest personality trait.

Ergo if there’s a kid that’s smart and clever and interested in finding out as much as possible about absolutely everything, but hasn’t needed to do a chore in their life and doesn’t really see the point of hard work, they’d be sorted in Hufflepuff when they’re 11. And spend four years in that house. But then they’d be 15 and get sorted again, and this time they’d be sorted Ravenclaw... or maybe they wouldn’t be, because in those four years this kid would have gown up a bit and their personality might have shifted and maybe the qualities of Hufflepuff WOULD be their strongest traits now. Or maybe they’d have grown more ambitious than they were and be sorted in Slytherin.

Basically you can see what I’m trying to get at here (in a manner that is rambly and convoluted and I’m so sorry).

And this would definitely help with inter-house unity too, because it’s not like best friends who spent their first four Hogwarts years together in Ravenclaw would stop being friends because one of them is now a Gryffindor and the other is Slytherin.

And seeing older kids actually spending time together and getting along would mean the younger kids wouldn’t avoid people from other houses like the plague either.

AND this would avoid any possibility of there being a house for ‘purebloods’. Hard for an elitist little brat to turn their nose up about the ‘lowly muggleborns’ when they share a dorm with two of them and the halfblood son of ‘those blood traitors’ too,

Oh and of course every teacher would be sorted again when they’d get hired (again by their strongest quality). And actually it should be a traditional for every new headmaster to be sorted again after that too (huh... but maybe by their weakest quality once more, I mean I’m absolutely thinking about Dumbledore here, but it seems prudent that the head of the school would publicly acknowledge their flaws. It even helps the first years: ‘see? even our headmaster has things he needs to work on in himself, you have nothing to be ashamed about.’).

So this is basically how I think the sorting system would make more sense (and be better for students too). It still probably wouldn’t be a perfect system, but I think it would kinda work.

edit: ALSO PART OF GRADUATION CEREMONY WOULD BE GETTING RESORTED FOR THE LAST TIME unless they become a teacher (ONLY THIS TIME ONLY THE PERSON UNDER THE HAT WOULD KNOW WHAT THE HAT TOLD THEM).

[otherside-wanderer]

Sneak peak to our hybrid automatic/manual sorting system on our realm!

[otherside-wanderer]

The shulker monster and the shulker shulker as we slowly fill up our automatic sorting system - so many items...

[otherside-wanderer]

Part 2 of a set of posts looking at the castle's automatic sorting system on our realm.

Featured here are Hub 2 and the most "colorful" sections of the Sorter: flowers, dyes, and dyed blocks. The hubs alternate between ender chests and crafting tables for easy access to storage and crafting options when gathering resources. Also, each section is placed as close as possible to related sections for intuitive navigation.

All in all, it's an enormous build. The next Sorter post will focus on the underbelly and redstone mechanics.

[otherside-wanderer]

Part 3 of a set of posts looking at the castle's automatic sorting system on our realm.

This post features the underbelly of the sorter, which was standardized and decorated by @shewholistens. Each section contains scaffolding to access all three tiers of the sorter so the hoppers can be programmed and maintained over time.

The redstone was planned and implemented by myself and an old friend. It's an incredibly robust system that has survived several updates.

Keep reading to see how the Sorter works!

Above is a vertical slice of the redstone in the underbelly. These slices can be placed next to one another with negligible interaction for a compact system.

Note the three tiers (three yellow activators, three output barrels, etc). The top tier has room for bulk storage, the middle tier medium storage, and the bottom tier small storage.

Red concrete = block that represents the item to be stored in the barrel below

Magenta concrete = programmable hopper full of 21 named items and 1 item that will be sorted in the corresponding barrel

Lime concrete = hopper line that brings items over every input hopper until they reach a matching hopper

Yellow concrete = activators that allow items to flow through the programmable hoppers when an item to be sorted passes through

There are several Sorter input locations throughout the castle and village. When an item is brought to the sorter, it first passes through an automatic smelter to process any ores or uncooked food (wet sponges too). Post-processing, the item enters the Sorter's main hopper line (green). If a programmable hopper (magenta) below the line contains a matching item, then the item enters the programmable hopper. This activates the yellow section, allowing one copy of the item to flow into storage.

Of course, this is a simplified explanation of the entire Sorter. You may be wondering "Why are there droppers everywhere in the first picture but not the schematic?" or "Why does the top tier shown have more storage in some slices than others?" I'll answer any questions you have in the comments, but in the meantime, happy redstoning!

[otherside-wanderer]

Part 1 of a set of posts looking at the castle's automatic sorting system on our realm.

The Sorter is perhaps the most ambitious (and ongoing) survival project I've worked on while playing Minecraft. Although it doesn't sort all things stackable, the Sorter currently recognizes 618 different blocks and items from several input chests, which are then sorted into different sections (such as the End and Nether sections featured here). Due to the sheer number and diversity of items that need to be stored, the Sorter contains three hubs (like Hub 1 featured above) that branch out to these different sections.

Big shoutout to @shewholistens, @violinnorkling, and @indigoforiver for helping (even a little bit) with building, planning, and debugging the Sorter!

[sweet-cuddlebug]

the bookmarks in ao3 are PUBLIC????

what do you mean "not open at the moment"?????

guys i confess i dont know how bookmarks work :"(

i think i fucked up