Minecraft

Today at 11 am CST I will be releasing the 15th part of my “Bel Bungles Minecraft” series on YouTube, and hopefully if things go smoothly I will be recording the 16th part today which will take us to the end of the week. That said I am falling behind in the production of this thing and need to spend some time this weekend catching back up. I had this really great production cadence that allowed me to have several episodes queued and ready to go, and at one point I was three episodes ahead. I had been recording over my lunch break and then editing and queueing it up for the next week day timeslot at what I decided would be my release time of 11 am.

That sort of went off the rails this week because effectively I have been iced in since Sunday evening. This also means that my wife has been iced in and with more active human beings in the house it became a little harder to record over lunch. Similarly I have been dealing with the woes of winter in our house, which means my office is sweltering. There are some things I have done to mitigate this, but even so just from radiating heat through the wall it warms up significantly. My office is the first stop after exiting the heating unit and for some reason has two vents. This means the last place I have wanted to be after the work day is upstairs.

This is not to say that I won’t keep making Minecraft videos, because I am still enjoying myself. The pace of them might change a little bit. I am not sure if I am going to be able to keep up with five videos a week at least until I figure out a flow that works for my changing situation. I will probably be expanding what I am doing as well to more than just my single player world. I’ve been playing some on a friends server called Botchcraft, as well as a private Realm with my friend Grace. I will likely be recording some videos in both of these locations, but I will make certain to clearly state I am doing so in the video to stem some of the confusion.

Largely this is just a heads up that my flow of content may suffer a bit. Additionally I wasn’t sure what to talk about today so I figured this was as good of a topic as any. If you have not already watched any of the Minecraft series, then I will embed the playlist below. I mean it isn’t exactly compelling television, but I had fun making it and continue to enjoy my nonsense.

It is always something relatively simple that sets me down a path towards madness. In this case I was annoyed by just how much time it took to harvest a full field of produce in my Minecraft world. This lead me to research ways of making this work better, namely ways of harvesting an entire field at once. Essentially far as I could tell you have two different methods.

• The Water Method – this involves setting up a switch system that floods your field and pushes all of the produce towards a single collection point, and then allows you to reset the circuit and dam up the river once again. The positive is this collects all of the things that were just harvested but the negative is it requires you to build an incline since water blocks will only spread 7 blocks before needing to switch elevation. To do this most optimally this ends up creating a field that is awkward to plant.
• The Piston Method – one of the interesting characteristics of pushing a block with a piston is that it detaches anything that is on the surface. So say you had a torch on a block and you pushed that block, it would end up knocking the torch off of the surface. The same goes with tilled blocks and crops. The idea is that you push the blocks which causes all of the crops to be harvested allowing for you to collect them.

Redstone circuitry has always frightened me more than a little bit in Minecraft. I could get extremely simple automations to work, like opening a door from a switch but always seemed to struggle when it came to anything more complicated. So I now had before me the task of trying to figure out how to trigger six banks of four pistons all from the flip of a single switch. Pistons can move 12 blocks and if you attempt to move anything more than that they just fail completely. My field is laid out with a row of water every 5th block, though in truth I could have gotten by with significantly less water were I planning a bit better. Four blocks at once however is pretty much the upper bound of what I was willing to attempt to fire as a single mechanism.

I fired up a super flat demo world for the purpose of allowing me to sort out the mechanics in creative mode before attempting to apply the same logic in my single player world. I’ve not reached a point where I have unlimited supplies so I needed to be fairly judicious in the application of my resources. Even then I still built it wrong, but we will get into that later. Essentially my idea was to use sticky pistons and push the blocks to one side and in theory retract everything when I turned off the switch. The above image shows the final circuit design that I landed upon. Essentially a matrix of blocks connected by redstone with a single repeater to help boost the signal strength since redstone will only conduct for 15 spaces.

From there I decided to go ahead and create a larger scale mock up of the final machine, this time doing four iterations of the same modular design instead of the final six. It was around this point that I realized things were not going to work as I had originally envisioned them. This came from a simple misunderstanding of how sticky pistons actually work. In my mind they pushed a column of blocks and then retracted that same column of blocks as I had seen this behavior over and over in builds that relied on them in a vertical stack. When used horizontally they exhibit a completely different behavior of just pushing all 12 blocks and then retracting only the block directly making contact with the piston.

This lead me down the rabbit hole of not only needing six banks of four pistons all firing at once… but at the same time requiring a second series of six banks of four pistons firing in reaction to the first bank firing. Essentially I needed to shift all the blocks to one side and then trigger a counter event that pushed all of the blocks back to the other side. It is through the process of building something that you often learn how you SHOULD have built it. Where I thinking more clearly I would have simply set the circuit up so one side is always on and the other side is always off and the switch just toggles between those two states. However that is not the path I actually went down.

Meet the fearless observer block. The side with the cute little face sets towards a block of some sort that has the ability to change states. When this state changes the observer sends out a pulse of Redstone energy triggered out the backside of the block that can be connected up to some mechanism of your choice. The pulse is similar to that of a button push and I decided I was going to try and harness this mechanism to create my back process of triggering the opposite banks of pistons to fire resetting the playfield back to its normal position.

This ended up being significantly more challenging than I would have expected. In my mind how this should have worked was that I set the observer facing the empty block that I had on one side and as soon as a block was pushed into that spot it would trigger the back loop of the process and push everything back. This did not work in practice I believe because I was using a lever to trigger the entire process. This is the sort of revelation that happens long after you have built the damned thing and not necessarily in the heat of problem solving. So instead I switched to watching the state of the piston on the first bank. In practice what happens is each time I extend a piston or retract a piston it sends a pulse. You can slow this process down a bit by adding an additional observer which I ended up doing to fine tune the order of operations a bit.

The above image is the end result built in my single player world. Now is where I talk about how I did this wrong. Firstly I should have used a button to fire the event, and I think had I done so my original idea of monitoring the empty block state would have made things work perfectly. The second critical flaw that I did was use sticky pistons. This is all due to my earlier fallacy that using a sticky piston would pull the entire column back into place, but instead only pulls a single block. What ends up happening in practice is that on the back leg of the journey… a single block stays attached to the piston when it retracts creating a less than optimal situation.

However since I crafted 48 sticky pistons and lack the materials to craft another 48 regular pistons… I am pretty much stuck with this design decision for the moment. What I did in order to counteract this is dive even further down the rabbit hole and farm up copious amounts of clay and dye and create a rows worth of glazed terracotta. This block has the unique property of not being able to adhere to a sticky piston and as a result gets pushed neatly back into the original position by the second set of pistons. The unfortunate part however is that I have now lost a full row worth of plant-able space due to this design flaw.

At some point I want to replace the pistons at least on the backhaul side in so I can reclaim that row of planting space. I ended up building a way down into the mechanism of the machine that way I could debug any problems that might come up. Additionally there is the off chance that some of the produce will pop off and then get pushed down into the lower machine cavity and this gives me a way to drop down and double check that this did not happen. There are a lot of things that I would change if I ever did this again, namely I would just stick to normal pistons on both sides given that the “sticky” nature only serves to complicate the process. If I find another cache of Iron I will potentially swap them out and then switch the entire mechanism to work off a button.

The problem with redstone is the same problem with most of my development projects. You have to sort of force yourself to walk away from them otherwise you will continue fiddling and “optimizing” them for eternity. I set out to build a machine that would harvest my field of crops in with the single push of a button and I accomplished that. If it weren’t for the water… I would consider building a Minecart hopper system that cycled around the field collecting anything that dropped but that really is a path of madness. As it stands now… I just need to go find some more Iron before I do much of anything else.

Good Morning Friends. I apparently am just writing about Minecraft now, given that it represents most of what I played this weekend. I did some offline work on the “Bel Bungles” world but even there I am several episodes ahead that are queued up to release this week. Thing I have learned is I am apparently really bad at ignoring messages, or not so much willfully ignoring them but being oblivious to them existing. Somewhere buried in my DM inbox was a message from my friend Zelibeli complementing my Minecraft series and inviting me to go play on her server. This weekend I took her up on that invite and spent a good chunk of Sunday making a bit of a home.

She had an exceptionally pretty and functional main area to greet folks as they joined the server. I had not quite groked how to do screenshots at that point because all that seemed to happen was a Mojang loading screen image. After some googling I decided to instead rely on the built in screenshot functionality which is F2 and I hopped in really quickly this morning to take a few. I decided to head out from the spawn towards the nearest mountain…. and then claim it. I made my way up the sheer cliffside overlooking the swamp below and carved out my first hidey hole that ultimately has served as my base of operations in this world.

As picturesque as looking out over the balcony to the swamp below was… it wasn’t super functional. So my first order of operations was to dig a shaft down to ground level and then establish a “main” entrance off the forest floor below. This would also serve as an easier way to get any of the resources that I couldn’t find by hollowing out the mountain Dwarf style. Namely early on I would need a lot of wood and as such I proceeding to create a clearing that would serve a few purposes. Firstly of course wood but secondly it would allow me to see something coming and not be quite so surprised when a Skeleton or Zombie is waiting for me that didn’t quite get burned up from the sunlight.

I decided that I also wanted to have a way to grow some food. Zeli had provided me a super generous care package that included a Diamond Sword and Pick, along with a full suit of Chainmail and a stack of Pumpkin Pies. That said I don’t want to rely on the kindness of strangers forever so I needed a place to grow at least some modicum of food, along with providing a large amount of wheat for some later shenanigans. So from my hole in the wall I carved up to the summit of the mountain where I begin building a fort. It is very much in the “ugly but functional” stage of the build, but I will hopefully change that as time goes on. Unfortunately I am in a snow biome which means that I need to be careful with any free standing water. Currently I am using trapdoors to solve this problem but I am not sure happy with the torches placed on top of them.

From the Forest floor outpost I also decided to start digging another shaft downwards looping back upon itself heading towards bedrock so I could start the process of harvesting my own diamonds. Along the way however I encountered an abandoned Mineshaft which has ultimately distracted and dominated my play time. Firstly these are disturbingly dangerous to break, and I am starting to wonder if there is a cave spider spawner inside of this one. I hear them everywhere and that means I have to be super cautious given their EXTREMELY virulent poison. The other piece that I did not realize is just how rich in resources abandoned mines are. Sure there are the occasional carts with chests in them, but mine has an absolutely ridiculous amount of Iron in it. Not to mention the just casual resources like wooden structures and tracks. My goal is to eventually harvest everything I can get from this place before moving on.

The only negative about playing on a server, is in order to conserve resources it doesn’t load in chunks that you shouldn’t be interacting with… which means I can’t ACTUALLY see the main area from my home without someone hanging out over there and forcing those chunks to load in. You can however see the big communal farm, or at least part of it. I wanted to start somewhere at a distance from the main area but also close enough pending I wanted to go trade stuff to someone else. For now I am pretty happy with “Mount Belghast” that I am slowly working on. I noticed the swamp below spawns Slimes on occasion, which should make for easy sticky pistons when the time comes that I actually need some for a build.

My heart still belongs to my private world that I am using for recording the Minecraft series. However I do want to make a nice little presence in this shared world. Huge thanks to Zeli for inviting me to her world, I might at some point record a tour video once I get things working as intended.