CobbliMaker

The CobbliMaker

A small project made by myself (Brickviking), with help from others.

Introduction

Put simply, this isn't two holes in the ground with lava at one end and water at the other. No baby, it's a bit bigger than that. To paraphrase from the Behemoth, it's water+lava+lots of pistons and redstone. Initial cuts at the Cobblimaker were of the "create a block, then shove it out horizontally" form. I then spent time fine tuning the resulting concept further.

Inception

Simply put, I watched a Skyblock Challenge youtube video done by CaptainSparklez. In that video, he created a dirt simple cobblestone generator, that was when I first got introduced to the concept. Of course, he had to stand there every time a block was created, and hack it out with a pick, sometimes losing the block in the process. I thought of a small twist, how about using a piston? Further research on other youtube videos showed just this idea in use.

First cuts

Pushing out the initial single block of cobble gained me a line of cobble blocks. I then had the idea of pushing this row out to further pistons, and pushing them out into further rows. First I separated them with obsidian channels, and created the six row Mk 78, only to realise I could dispense with the separators. That gained me a Mk 143. The pro? I got a lot of cobble. The cons? It was very slow, as it still only created one block at a time.

The next generation

If I could push along, why not up? Initial cuts with a piston array died before getting established, purely because I couldn't figure out a way to drive a flat piston array. Later on, I found it could be done, but gets complicated. So, I changed tack.

My chief problem was the fact that only one block was being created. How about a whole line of lava and water? That, my friends, was the magic I needed. All I had to do was to push the line of created cobble out of the way, to allow another line of cobble to be created, and so on. For that, I needed to lay down a line of pistons pushing upwards. Then I found that it would push up a wall of cobble that was 12 units high, so I had to figure out how to push that wall out into a slab.

mredigeek showed me that pairs of pistons could be driven with a single repeater, and with this, my design was almost finalised. All that remained was some uhm, fine tuning.

Current state of play

So, we have a line of water, then a gap, then a row of pistons one block down. The gap's necessary so that water flows down and not straight against the lava - otherwise we have our own obby generator. Not good. So, next we have a line of lava, with a bank of pistons directly above that pushing out horizontally.

As you can push up to 13 blocks in one channel, we take out one block for the formation, you're left with 12 blocks you can push outwards.

The Behemoth

Described in its own page, the Behemoth uses the same construction, except I decided to stack units. So far, I've stacked three separate units all running off the same clock, but there's no reason I can't go higher, except for what happens to the server. That's a lot of redstone operating there, so practical concerns may limit me to only three stacks high, and possibly only twenty wide. The Behemoth was more an experiment to prove that yes, I could indeed go out as wide as I liked - in fact I ran up the initial test at 100 wide without stacking and struck no problems aside from the obvious lag of 14,400 blocks being all shifted at once. Stacking them three high at 51 wide gave me more blocks. Way more blocks. The Behemoth took this up to a staggering 23,868 blocks. Bad on servers, but great on the number of blocks created. Working in between the stacks caused its own problems with mobs spawning in the dark areas between layers, which I could easily fix by lining the edge of the waterbay with glowstone or some other lighting.

The SmoothiMaker

This needed a modification of the standard cobble maker. Only working on 1.1 and later versions of Minecraft, the adjustments of lava flowing down onto water means we don't push the created blocks up one unit, but instead we need to push them up two units. This needs extra pistons, and further complicated circuitry. Thankfully, dnolan took my Cobblimaker and Behemoth design and figured out how to make smoothstone blocks get pushed up and out of the way sufficiently to create another line of smoothstone. In doing this, he provided me with the circuit, which I have since put into action as the SmoothiMaker Diamond. Taking one diamond pick to eat the created smoothstone slab, it's easy to see why I called it that. It's a bit smaller, as I only set this up at 10 units wide, though it still pushes twelve blocks for each "slice" up and out. The circuitry for the Smoothstone making's definitely more complicated though.

Where next?

No, I'm not making an automated Obsidianmaker. I can't push obby with pistons. Sigh. I actually can't think of other things that can be done that hasn't already been addressed by automation.