Behemoth

The Behemoth

To date, the largest working redstone/piston construction made by User:Brickviking.

Description

In essence, it's a big segmented cobblestone maker, which consists of:

* a line each of water and lava, colliding to become cobble,
* a row of pistons to push cobble up,
* and a bank of pistons (set up in a wall)

This creates a large lump containing multiple blocks of cobble, or in later models, smoothstone.

The piston walls are 12 units high pushing blocks into rows 13 deep. This particular model can be as slim or as wide as needed, the Behemoth was created at the somewhat arbitrary figure of 51 units wide, with three stacked modules. I ended up with a total of 153 slices, creating 23,868 blocks in just over 11 minutes.

Pros

A slab of cobble is very quickly created, taking about eleven minutes to create 23,868 blocks of cobble. That's nearly as fast as I can get it to create cobble without losing any cycles due to server timing.

Cons

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

Creating such a large block of cobble is good for one-off runs where you need a large amount, and have the picks 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.

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 pipi, first portrayed in a Youtube CaptainSparklez video for the Skyblock challenge. This uses no fancy materials, just three holes in the ground, a block of lava and some water.