Behemoth

Project Behemoth
Built by	Brickviking
Current Status	Finished
World	Private
Province	Private
Location	(x=-9999,z=9999)

Introduction

The Behemoth, a huge monster of a cobblemaker. To date, the largest working redstone/piston construction made by Brickviking. Never actually built in New Avalon, although I might just think about a smaller model once the hosting is stable.

Description

In essence, it's an extra-wide multi-segment CobbliMaker but without the speedups of the 1872s. Each segment consists of:

• a line of water and a line of lava flowing together to become cobble,
• a row of pistons to push created cobble up,
• and an array of pistons to push the cobble up and out into huge slabs.

This creates multiple large slabs of cobble, or in later models, smoothstone.

Each piston wall is 12 units high, pushing blocks into a slab that's 13 deep, the limit of blocks that a piston can push. This particular model can be as slim or as wide as needed. Mk 1 was a single module of 100 wide, the Behemoth Mk 2 was created at the somewhat arbitrary figure of 51 units wide, using 3 stacked modules. I ended up with a total of 153 slices, creating 23,868 blocks in just over 11 minutes. In an updated version, I pushed it out to 60 units wide, and 4 stacked modules. This meant I ended up with 240 slices, now creating a mind-blowing 37,440 blocks. I don't actually know how long it took to create them, as my computer was starting to slow down to 3fps even when not looking at it. I suspect that if I did apply the speedups I used for the 1872s, it'd be a really good server stresstester.

Each module is separated from the next vertical module by enough room to fit in the water bays, lava and pistons, so I allowed 4 blocks worth of room. Thankfully, this meant I could drive the upper modules from the same torch tower that the lower modules used, without having to jump around finding more room. I would need more room to make smoothstone instead, as the creation circuitry is more complicated, and needs a deeper bay, about 7 blocks of room.

Pros

Speed of creation

Multiple huge slabs of cobble are very quickly created, taking about fourteen minutes to create 37,440 blocks of cobble. That's nearly as fast as I can get it to create cobble without losing any cycles due to server timing.

Creation of large amounts

For huge build projects, these makers are a boon, churning out cobble literally faster than users can chip the blocks off the slabs.

No distance to travel

Slabs are created in one place, meaning you don't have to go mining and risk mobs and lava to obtain lots of cobble, neither do you have to walk a long way with a small inventory to get it back home. Even with a minimal inventory (two diamond picks) you are still only going to get a maximum of 36 stacks of cobble back home. Instead, you can stick chestwalls up and just throw blocks into chests as you fill your inventory. Just watch out for the mobs that now spawn in between the slabs. I got around this somewhat by torching the edge of the water bay, glowstone would look more cool.

Cons

Resources

These cobble makers are extremely hungry for resources, especially the larger models. Each vertical slice uses 13 pistons, 1 water unit, 1 lava unit, 7 repeaters and 7 redstone, in addition to the redstone circuitry and repeaters for controlling the slices.

You will have to mine a long way to find all the redstone and iron that you need. I created the Behemoth in Creative mode, I hate to think how long it would have taken me to build a real Behemoth in Survival mode, even with help from other players.

System load

You need to consider the load that such a large amount of redstone and pistons will place on the server you run this on. I would strongly advise against installing any but the smallest models here on the Cubic Worlds server, even now we've got hosting that doesn't fall over at a sneeze.

Large number of picks and chests used

Creating such large slabs of cobble is good for one-off runs where you need a large amount, and have the picks—and users—to carve it all up. As a diamond pick (unenchanted) only breaks 1,561 blocks, even my CobbliMaker Mk 1872 took more than one diamond pick. The Behemoth needed more than fifteen diamond picks to recover the individual cobble in the Mk 3 model I chose to build. The Mk 4 needs 24 picks. Ouch.

In addition, you'll need either chests to store the cobble in for further processing (into projects or cooking smoothstone), or you need to use the cobble straight away in building projects.

Conclusion

It's a long way from the humble first-generation cobble maker, first portrayed in a Youtube CaptainSparklez video for the Skyblock challenge. This uses no fancy materials, just three holes in the ground, a bucket of lava, some water and any pick you have to hand.

Just to get the resources for the Behemoth, you'd have to mine a lot of iron, a heap of redstone, a tree farm for planks and have a small CobbliMaker on hand to produce enough cobble to create pistons. Having a SmoothiMaker on hand along with a silk-touch pick would help in the creation of repeaters, but it's still possibly faster mining the world instead. Possibly.

But hey. If you want to set this up, it's certainly possible.