Well, the underfloor sandpile anvil feeder turned out more complicated than I first thought. I may have made it a little more complicated than necessary. The easy part is the anvils, as previously shown. The hard part is the under-the-floor. You need two stacked pistons to raise the anvil two blocks from under the floor, and a block on top of that if you want to hide the piston under the anvil (this arguably makes it more complicated than necessary). Master TMO and BluJay probably already know why this is tricky, for anyone who doesn't know here's why. First, a piston can't push an extended piston. Second, a sticky piston can't pull an extended piston. Third, a sticky piston won't pull a block attached to it when it's pulled by another sticky piston. So if I have a stack of two sticky pistons and a solid block I have to extend the lower one first, then the upper one to get the block up. Then, to get the block down I have follow this sequence: retract the top piston, retract the bottom piston, extend the top piston, retract the top piston. Tricky, but not too bad. Here's how I did it.
Redstone layer one of the double sticky piston stack, blocks shown are required, glass blocks need to be glass:
Redstone layer two, the button isn't needed but it's good for testing the circuit:
The circuit above will retract and extend the pistons and bring the top block down. To retract the stack simply power the block with the button. Of course as is, there's a required minimum pulse duration or it'll lock up and will need to be reset. Which explains the next part of the build, adding a rising edge detector with a long pulse output. Plus, there's the anvils, there needs to be twelve for this design to work. I'll explain at the last step.
Here's the final step with the addition of an observer and T-flip flop. The flip flop is needed to turn the observer's full cycle output into a single pulse. The last thing I do is put an item in the top dropper, this causes the system to cycle once, placing an anvil. Otherwise you need to use a button to set the flip flop.
Now that you can see the whole thing, you'll notice a lack of timing circuitry on the anvil piston. It's just hooked up directly to the flip flop output. This is why the current design needs 12 anvils. Since the piston can't push more than 12 blocks, it doesn't do anything until the sticky pistons have fully retracted. Once that space is clear, the piston pushes the anvils. When the new anvil shows up at the top, the second pulse of the observer turns off the flip flop output and the anvil piston retracts. If you wanted to use less than 12 anvils, repeaters would be needed to delay the piston signal. The timing would have to be right on or the rising edge detector output pulse would need to be extended by adding more repeaters to it.
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Due to a lag glitch, my entire inventory disappeared last night, including ALL of my Mending Diamond armor and tools, with the exception of my Silk Touch shovel. *sigh*
On the plus side...
Accomplished with enchanted iron armor and a really strong bow. My son was standing behind me, but I don't know that he shot the dragon or not.
PS - I just checked with him, and he did hit the dragon once, on the killing shot we both hit at the same time. I suspect his presence also made the dragon act more predictably. It kept charging in a straight line rather than circling around the healing crystals and spellbombing.
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Lava Workshop complete, unless I find problems later.
Here is the workshop itself, with a wide FOV:
This is a complete redesign of my original lava workshop. Instead of the water flowing downward, it flows from the back. An observer on the left watches the space. When you mine the obsidian block, it sends a signal through a pulse extender (to stop it from sending multiple pulses) to the dispenser. The dispenser is fed lava buckets from above, and just pours the lava into the water stream for the player to mine. Empty buckets are pulled out of the dispenser through a hopper/filter system underneath and returned to the player. The button visible in that last picture is for manually forcing a dispense.
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I've spent about 80xp enchanting 4 sets of iron armor and weapons in preparation for going through the End Portal. It's designed to be expendable - nobody's going to be upset if it's lost in the void. I'm not sure yet when we're going to go thru the Portal. The only two non-family members of Eranil not only have been playing other games, but they live in Houston, so they're just a weeeee bit preoccupied with other matters right now. Yes, they are safe.
Besides the enchanting and the farming necessary to do it, I've been cleaning out one of the lava pools from under Oshewani and converting it to obsidian. I've played around with rebuilding my lava workshop design, but rather than look up the design, I'm rebuilding the design from scratch. I might come up with something better this way.
And finally, I've cleaned out the witches from the iron farm. I need to boot some villagers back up there to replace them. I'm trying to come up with a water elevator design that fits in with the current aesthetic, and can be left there permanently. The issue will be in routing it around or through the farm without disrupting operations. It's also tempting to do a few other modifications to it, and I just haven't had the push to start any of these changes yet.
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What would change if lava were renewable is that you'd only need 1 bucket and a redstone machine to have infinite smelting fuel.
Set up your furnace in the Nether, with hopper inputs for materials, fuel, and hopper output to collect everything.
Add sorter to output hopper to collect the empty bucket and route it through hoppers to a dispenser pointed at the infinite lava block
Add comparator trigger to dispenser so that it fires once when something is in it.
Add hopper under dispenser, powered on so that it does not pull items out.
On a delayed timer from the comparator trigger above, depower the hopper so that the now-full lava bucket is routed back to the fuel input for the smelter.
Is this OP compared to the other perpetual machines out there? Infinite TNT from a glitch, Infinite wood harvesting, Infinite iron from a village iron farm, infinite slime from a slime chunk, etc.
(No, I haven't given any thought to wishing I had infinite lava, why do you ask? )
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Very nice! Good luck with your studying.
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Phase 1 of Landscaping, the workshop path and dock.
I'm enjoying architecting a bit more this time around. I attribute it to reading Sacheverell's articles on the topic. Who knows, maybe Rhageos will look a lot better in the end than Arkel?
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Another week has passed. I've been fairly busy, but have still made some decent progress with building things up. Since mobs liked spawning on top of my hill, I opened up the top of my mineshaft and built a monster spawner on top of the hill. I built it way overscale, and it used up all my cobblestone. I've never run out of cobblestone before. The building itself is currently a huge ugly monstrosity on the landscape, but I plan on prettying it up as I'm able. First though, I need to landscape and light up the surroundings, so that the only dark place is inside the building.
A funny thing happened the other day... my boat got hijacked.
And I've prettied up the inside of my workshop quite a bit.
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I don't plan on deleting it. I even put in a bit of work the other day extending the elevated track to the northern village. But I'm not really a great architect or builder. I don't come up with elaborate plans of things I want to build ahead of time, I just get occasional inspirations, usually from something I find in the map. The problem with Arkel was that I pretty much run out of different terrain. Almost everything around me was the same or very similar biome. Plains and hills. The only variation I found was a Spruce forest, and other than the wolves I found there, it didn't grab me, for some reason. With Rhageos, I have 3 different biomes within a short walk, 4 if you count the ocean/lakes, which I do. I like building underwater, for some reason.
I'm hoping Rhageos will turn out even bigger and better than Arkel, and it gives me the additional thrill of exploring something new again, which I had lost with Arkel. You can probably expect to see some of the same ideas from Arkel show up in some form in Rhageos. The roadsystem will probably return, at the very least. I already made up a mockup of the house I plan on building as soon as I collect the resources in a creative world.
If/when Realms opens up for MCPE, I can see me creating a world for my, my kids and my nephew, and then it would be possible to let folks in occasionally for visits if they wanted. A collaboratively-built world would be interesting, although since all of the collaborators mentioned above are under 10, don't expect high art from any of us. I'd probably be up for a different shared world with other players though.
Dear Diary,
Overall, I'm doing pretty well in this new world. I've built myself a fairly secure shelter, dug a mineshaft all the way down to bedrock, I have a small farm and some tree stock to keep me provided with food and wood (fwood?). I am having some issues with the local monsters, although nothing I haven't been able to handle so far. Because my shelter is dug into the side of the hill, it's possible for things to climb on the roof and then jump down on me when I come out the front door. Creepers have done that a couple of times. One of them even collapsed a sand cave that was just down slope from me. I'm going to try and turn that into a natural sheep and cow pen. I finally put up a fence around the edge of the hilltop that should stop most of the jumpers. If I can get some netherrack together, a flame barrier would be a nice finishing touch, I think.
To enjoy the sea breeze off the bay, I set up the front of my shelter with alternating fenceposts, one high, one low. That way I could slip in and out any time without having to use the door. I thought it would keep out the mobs, but a zombie managed to find a gap and come through (by accident, I think - all others tried to use the front door). And one time, this tiny little zombie riding a chicken just ran right in and started attacking me! That was the weirdest thing I've seen so far! I've blocked up the gaps with half-slabs. I think that will keep them from getting in, although I can't slip between the bars anymore either.
I built a boat and fishing pole the other day. I've only tried fishing once, and didn't catch anything. But I could see them out there. Maybe the squid scared them away?
I'll add some pictures to you soon, Diary. Right now everything's still pretty rough looking, but I don't have the resources to really polish things off yet.
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I reached bedrock alright. Then I moved to the top to start building upwards. That worked out okay until a spider knocked me off the top. At any rate, this world wasn't very exciting, and it became more about how much of this tower I could build. So I'll go ahead and close out the Hardcore blog at this point, with the expected arrival of 0.11 soon.
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Still digging downward, haven't hit bedrock yet, but I suspect I'm close. Wonder if I'll finish this before v0.11 is released? I've been lucky not to hit a lava bed in my digging, although I saw a flash of one due to a clipping error. It may have been off to one side of the shaft though.