Updates, updates

Weeklong delay comes from the absolutely insane update schedule Mojang went through this week. I upgraded, got locked out of both servers I play on, goofed off with 1.6, then downgraded back to 1.5, then got my server upgrade to 1.6 and had to BLARG

I know the game's in beta, but goodness. The up-and-down insanity cost me my cache of screenshots (a hasty deletion coupled with an accidental recycle bin emptying. I know, I know, and my dog ate my homework). In any case, I began doing some redstone work on Dankcraft and realized I had no clue what I was doing. Being ever sensible, I split the difference -- I created a clunky, expensive non-redstone cart-boosting system for ol' Danks, then experimented on a single-player map until I got a redstone system that works.


If you're unfamiliar, here's the deal with making your minecart zoom:
1. Powered rails, the legitimate (read: intended) system to power minecarts, got a significant boost in 1.6. This is because the efficient, but goofy, booster bug -- which was used to power carts previously -- was removed in that patch, and powered rails require a _lot_ of gold.

2. Gold is the second-rarest ore in the game. At the old exchange rate of gold: boost from powered rails, you'd have to turn a continent upside-down to get your minecart to go any significant distance. It wasn't favorable at all, and God forbid if you wanted to go uphill.

So, being the jump-right-in type, I skipped the obvious first step (that is, testing how far powered rails can shoot a minecart up an unpowered incline). In other words, I honestly have no clue how excited I should be about my system.

But, in other news: the system works!


Here's a snap of the heart of the system -- a toggle switch. (A warning to those sensitive to such things -- this redstone wiring is very, very inefficient and awkward. My next pass will tidy up / look to maximize space. I can probably halve the square feet this monster takes up.)

A toggle switch takes up about 36 square meters to do one thing -- whenever you feed a charge of redstone power into it (in this case, via a card going over a pressure plate) its output will switch to "on" or "off."


This is the launch pad. It does two things -- it provides an initial jolt to get the minecart going, and switches that curved rail momentarily to put the cart onto a loop. The powered rail on the loop is always turned on (hence the torches) so the loop would have no end if it weren't for nearly 1,000 square feet of wiring.


Here's a view of the loop. The two raised sections are pressure-plate rails; whenever the cart passes over one, it sends a pulse of redstone charge through redstone lines. The loop is necessary because of how Minecraft adds momentum to moving items -- the more powered rails a minecart passes over, the higher its momentum. A high-momentum minecart will lose speed at a slower rate, which means you can rocket to silly heights by building up momentum in a setup like this.


Here's the first cringe-inducing wiring. The far detector rail -- behind the camera and to the right in this photo -- powers the toggle switch, seen here, via underground wiring that leads to that turned-off torch on the left. This is terrible and inefficient and miserable and you shouldn't do it; this is what happens when you design things as you go. Version 2.0 will be much cleaner, and version 3.0 will be far more compact. (That's the version that'll go on Dankcraft once the server updates to 1.6.)


This is how I track the number of times I've gone in a circle. This 3x3 setup -- of two torches that feedback into themselves -- is a 1-bit memory cell. This cell can hold one piece of data -- "on" or "off." It's "off" now; when you feed a charge into the lit torch closest to the camera, it lights the darkened torch in the center. (That's "on," if you were in suspense still.) To reset the circuit, feed a redstone charge to the center torch while it's lit. When this circuit is "on," it then sends a charge to a logic gate ...


That looks like this. This might be a little confusing, but this logic gate is actually in the "off" state. When the two torches on the stone blocks are depowered, it turns on the darkened torch in the front -- that's "on." One torch is depowered when our memory circuit from above is on; the other is depowered when the toggle switch from above is turned "on." When properly calibrated, this logic gate gets turned "on" after 1 revolution on the loop. It's connected to another memory circuit, which connects to another logic gate, which connects to wiring to switch the track. This chain is only limited by your space and patience -- redstone circuits aren't instant, but this system has a built-in resilience to desynchronization. However, it's space-hungry. (I'm going to try tinkering with a binary system. The upside to that system is that, with similar space, you can record many, many more revolutions; the downside is that it's very complicated and offers a poor return on your space / redstone investment until you're looking at 3+ memory circuit / logic gate combinations.)



When both my memory circuits / logic gates are lit, a final memory circuit provides an uninterrupted flow of power through this redstone ...


To this curved rail, forcing it to change to allow the cart to escape onto the new track.


This track has a third detector rail; when the cart passes over this, it resets all my memory circuits to "off." This also closes the loop again; if I had an odd number of rotations, I'd also want to wire this detector rail into a logic gate shared with the first detector rail. That way, this would reset the toggle switch to the default "off" position to keep the system synced up. (A desynced system won't matter when you're doing an even number of revolutions, but it would add half a revolution to systems designed for an odd number of revolutions. The end result would actually be an additional full revolution, meaning that a desynced three-revolution system would send the rider on four revolutions -- which would generate power while saving space, and may be worth considering if I can get a more-compact track.)


Back to the stars!


This system feels incredibly powerful -- I shot up these 18 points of vertical ascent without breaking a sweat. However, I don't know how good simple powered rails are now, and I didn't bother testing because I'm a tweedle-dum; I'll go back and check that later. This ramp will also get extended up another 70ish meters to see if this system can hit the ceiling of the map. Also, if it's not apparent from my items, this was all legitimately harvested and created. From start to finish -- loading up the map to end of experiment -- was about a 4-hour process. In other words, once there's an established blueprint, any miner worth his or her salt could get this guy up and running from scratch in about 2 hours. There's another system I'm going to try, in which the initial push-button booster triggers a delayed redstone charge circuit on a tiny, 8-square track. It's nowhere near as cool, but it's guaranteed to use far fewer resources and take up a ton less space.


And John's discovered the joy of taking everything in the game underground. Unlike myself -- who was hard at work updating then downdating then upgrading then downgrading -- John was hard at work on his dwarven fortress on our server. Pics, and my Nether portals experiments (they only crash the game half the time!) next time.

Remember, if you want to play with us, just shoot me a message and I'll add you to the whitelist. The IP? It's 50.23.67.132:25617, thanks for asking. (That port at the end -- the :25617 -- is necessary, because we're on a virtual server.)

Added a whitelist

A whitelist is a list of who can and can't jump into my server. I'd left it off before, but I got at least one random today, and really don't want to have to do a restore because someone thinks it's cute to wreck the place up.

SO: If you wanna jump in, feel free, but you'll have to shoot me an email at joe.simmons.ii@gmail.com (the best way), shoot me a chat request over gmail (also good), comment on Facebook (not the best, but I check about 1/day), or leave a comment on the blog (probably the worst, I might not ever see it).

Come play, 50.23.67.132:25617

This is my multiplayer server. This is my tower ...


Here's one of my train tracks and a slaad. Nom, slaad, nom.


And that's the storm god. He's made of wool, which means that he's kind of in danger of bursting into flame if there's a storm. Mmm, oversight I guess.

Anyway, IP is 50.23.67.132:25617. (The port is necessary -- enter it exactly as you see there.)

My mines, meows

These are my basic mining supplies -- a diamond pickaxe, several torches (I typically carry about 100), a pail of water (to turn lava squares into harmless obsidian squares) and an iron shovel to quickly clear sand, dirt and gravel. I'm looking for iron, gold, diamond and cobblestone; if you mine correctly, you'll find more than 3 diamonds for every pickaxe you wear out while mining. I'm working on my second full stack, and I never use iron pickaxes. (So why iron shovels? I feel it's the best compromise on speed, durability and rarity of materials.)


This is my workstation and base of operations. The forges are typically in use, either making smooth stone from cobblestone, smelting iron and gold or making glass. These chests are all a little more than half full -- some with tools and building supplies, one with cobblestone, another with animal products, like wool.


This is my very technological elevator. The, eh, boat is the elevator car; that waterfall is the elevator shaft.


Boats are very awkward. Though you couldn't tell which way is forward -- at least I can't, I suppose there may be fine differences in the grain I haven't studied -- the boat not only has a front and a back, but it spins in the direction you're heading. That means every time you hit a current, you're spun to face the direction it's flowing. This becomes very problematic when you're using currents to hold a boat in one place (or when you suddenly hit the top of a waterfall).


Going down the shaft. This shaft is wide enough for the boat to sail into and drop; the water at the bottom keeps the boat (and yours truly) from shattering from the impact. Like I said in my first post, water works oddly in Minecraft.


This is the base of the falls. It's about a 100-meter drop; when I want to go back up, I hop in my boat, sail into the waterfall and let the boat's buoyancy do the rest. About 4 seconds later, I'm at the top of the map again.


I want to love minecarts, but they're horrible. Without glitched boosters -- which will be fixed next week with patch 1.6 -- the maximum speed is slightly less than double walking speed. It's hard to recoup the time spent laying the mine tracks. Granted, you're constantly walking about 10 mph, so you move at a good clip. Still, I'm covering a lot of ground. My next mine in this world will be using a zig-zag pattern that minimizes walking distances.


To get an idea of how large my mines are, this minetrack starts at x=185 ...


and ends at -945, or 1130 meters -- just over 1 kilometer. This branch extends another kilometer, along with three perpendicular branches that extend between 700 and 800 meters each.


The branches aren't terribly exciting, unfortunately. They sometimes break into larger caves, which are typically confusing deathtraps with plenty of ores. (Ores aren't more likely to spawn in caves, it's just that you see a lot of squares very quickly -- law of averages and all.) Once I got tired of walking half a mile to begin mining, I started with new main branches and perpendicular branches. I've got two more main branches and about 12 side ones; in total, it's about 15 kilometers of mine shafts.

First off,

Utterly ridiculous.

Now that we've got the self-upstaging out of the way, Here's what I've been working on:


The concept is sort of "Napolean on Elba" meets "Andean highlands" and they get jumped by a guy who builds towers. Originally, I just wanted to build towers, but ended up with far more cobblestone than I could ever use -- it's the most common byproduct of mining. (I've mined a lot, about 4ish scale miles; it's a complete mess, but I'll post pictures sometime.)


Here's another view of the complex. Napolean -- or whoever -- lives in the ivory tower; his guards live in the bulky gray mass. I liked the contrast; this idea that some nobleman gets to live in plush exile, but his scenic vistas were intentionally ruined with a hulking fortress to remind him that he's a prisoner. Quite a few of my screenies came during rain; it rains an awful lot in my biome, but it's awfully close to a large desert. It's a little odd.


This is my base of operations. The watchtower is on the opposite side of the (mountaintop) valley from the other screenshots; that bridge in the background was the first major structure I built on this map. The pond here is naturally occuring, but I added the waterfall (which I use to speedily reach my mine) and the sugar cane (which I use to make books). This is near the top of the map -- around Y=110, give or take -- so the drop to my mine is about 100 meters.


To the right is the bridge that leads to my base; the bridge in the foreground connects watchtowers two and three. The wooden structure in between the closest two towers is a rope bridge leading to an observation deck. You've probably noticed that I'm flying in these screenies; it's the only "cheat" I use. It slashes the time spent building by entirely negating the need for scaffolding; making proper scaffolding often takes more time than the actual building itself. (There's also the time cost of demolishing the old scaffolding, too.)


This is a manmade lake. It's about 20 meters deep at its lowest point; down below, you can see the underwater library (which I'm still working on). Water acts very strangely in Minecraft, so making something like this is a weird, nonintuituive process. Essentially, you've got to make a flood plain a meter deep then destroy it; otherwise, you just make raging, annoying waterfalls. That shadow on the lake is cast by the bridge to my base, seen in the last few screenshots.

Next time: My mines.