CobbliMaker

Project CobbliMaker
Built by	Brickviking
Current Status	Finished
World	[[New Avalon]]
Province	Cyel
Location	(x=-9999,z=9999)

[[category:New Avalon]]

Introduction

The CobbliMaker is a small project made by myself (Brickviking), with help from others.

Put simply, this isn't two holes in the ground with lava at one end and water at the other, a la CaptainSparklez. 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, and 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.

Initial designs

Other cobble generators I had seen before and afterwards, such as the public cobble generator in Pixellia, worked on the theory of a lava block flowing against a pair of waterflows and creating two blocks of cobble that the user then chisels away with his pick, and waits for the waterflow to carry them to him. A user can quite happily sit here and generate a considerable number of stacks just by standing there and whacking blocks merrily. But it's not automated. Other automated versions simply pushed blocks out using a single piston. I thought of a small twist, how about using more than one piston?

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 84. I realised I could dispense with the separators and save myself obsidian in the process. That gained me a Mk 156. The pro? I got a lot of cobble, 12 rows of it. The cons? It was very slow, as it still only created one block at a time, then spent time shuffling blocks into place.

The next generation

If I could push along, why not up? Initial cuts with a horizontal 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, though I had to drive the columns down, not up. I set up such an array, and ended up with first the Mk 360, then eventually the Mk 720, each one having a series of slices pushed down from the generator (instead of pushing up like in later models), with walkways between each slice so I could access them individually.

Trying to teach people how to mine these slices effectively became a losing proposition with me eventually being the only one I actually fully trusted not to bollix the job and accidentally take out a piston in the process. Needless to say, this got pretty complicated.

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. Instead of driving columns of cobble down from the top, how about pushing them out in horizontal slices instead, using a vertical array of pistons, all driven from the same clock that was driving the initial block generation to begin with? Easy enough, so I put that into play, only to realise that the time to create a slab was now up to 50 minutes. Not exactly fast.

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. Enter that vertical array I talked about in the last paragraph.

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 obsidian generator, and I have to replace the lava all the time. 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 with one piston, we take out one block for the formation, you're left with 12 blocks you can push outwards. And as each piston in the wall can push out 13 blocks, you get 12 block high and 13 block wide slices, each containing 156 blocks.

The CobbliMaker Mk 1872

This was the final iteration of the design that I used, 12 slices wide. The wiring's a little more complicated once you expand past 12, but not overly so. I simply use redstone plus repeaters to each bank of 12 that I want to drive, borrowing this from my Behemoth design. In addition, I implemented a Full-Switch, meaning that the clock driving the whole system gets stopped once the slab is completely full. Clearing the whole slab, then removing the key, starts it all off again. In this regard, it's pretty much always ready to go. A nice additional touch, and I've added it to other models too. For those who know what a T-Bud is, that's what I used.

For debugging the circuit, I also added kick-buttons, to "kick" the clock into action if it happens to be stuck. I also added a "lock-off" switch to stop the clock from running, and a "lock-on" switch, to check that pistons aren't stuck closed when they're meant to be active.

The Behemoth

Described in its own page, the Behemoth uses the same CobbliMaker 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. There's no point in bothering with a full switch with this many segments all going at once.

The Hybrid Maker

This single-block maker produces both cobble and smoothstone, but not at the same time. The mechanics can be toggled—flick the switch one way, the generator makes cobble as normal. Flip it the other way, it'll start making smoothstone instead. I found this design on Youtube, so I implemented it with help from mredigeek. It was simple enough to make once I got the pistons in the right place, and the lava flowing down into the right area instead of being down on the bottom. I made quite a few blocks of obsidian before cottoning onto this fact. Server glitches meant that I didn't always get smoothstone.

The SmoothiMaker

This needed a modification of my standard cobble maker design. 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.

My first attempt at the SmoothiMaker consisted of me going back to the books and starting off with a single-block maker, pushing out a line of blocks. That was all very well, but how was I going to get this into a slab? By using a pair of makers, one at each end of a line of cobble. Double that, feeding the corners of a cube, and I potentially had the ability to produce a slab that was a massive 22x22x12. That's 5,808 blocks. Unfortunately, the time it would have taken to massage the blocks into a slab by creating them four at a time, meant that this model was not going to make it past the design phase. Even if I fed all eight corners of the cube, I still wasn't going to get the speed I wanted.

Thankfully, dnolan took my existing 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 through 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.