Featured Pictures: Defenseless Creeper (203/365)

A few days ago while I was working on my bread machine, I had a run in with a couple creepers. As you may recall, creepers were coming into my machine and this was before the laser. So, I had to kill the creepers myself which was more difficult than you may think. I hit it with my sword once but then I fell inside. I got a little too close to the creeper and I tried to fly out of there but I couldn’t. Mr. Creeper severely damaged part of my machine.

At this point, I was going slightly insane. Revenge was in order. I got myself a (what Tyler likes to call it) “God Sword.” An enchanted diamond sword with Sharpness 5 and Fire Aspect 2. I gave myself some creeper eggs and went crazy. I slaughtered them left and right. One of them though, managed to survive, for a while at least. Though he trapped himself.

Mr. Creeper found himself between a rock and a hard place. Or he found himself between bedrock and a creeper-hating man carrying a God Sword, which ever you prefer.

Well Mr. Creeper, you seem to be stuck there. Here, let me “help” you.

Mr. Creeper- Ah! It burnsssssss! Man- Hahahaha! Victory is mine!

Ha! Your father, or brother, or whatever, shouldn’t have crossed me.

You see friends, me and skeletons have a mutual hatred for each other. But everyone hates creepers, I’m just doing the world a favor. You’re welcome.

Thanks for reading and Happy Mining!

 

The (Almost) Infinite Bread Machine (202/365)

Hey everyone! As promised, I will show my machine today. I will show the evolution of this machine as well as how it works today. I promise this won’t be as long of a post as yesterday’s was.

This is what my machine looked like on Monday.

This is what it looks like today.

As the title suggests, this is a machine that can produce bread infinitely. Of course, who wants an infinite amount of bread? No one, but you can turn on this machine to make bread whenever you want. On Monday, my machine didn’t have much and it was far from infinite. It had some skeleton dispensers, some wheat harvesters and that was about it. Today, I have 4 skeleton spawner rooms, each with 25 spawners. I have lasers to kill them immediately, 3 harvesters, a tree farm to fuel the lasers, and an on/off switch.

To have deadly lasers, I need roasters. To fuel the roasters, i need coal. To make coal, I need logs. So here is the tree farm. Which is also fueled by bonemeal from the skeletons.

I have the standard harvester set up, but with another dispenser full of saplings harvested from the trees. I noticed that the harvester didn’t always successfully replant the tree, causing the system not to work.

The logs are smelted into charcoal using a roaster and then divided three ways; 50% to the log roaster, and 25% each to the lasers.

Back at the main machine, these are the three wheat harvesters. I had to surround them with fences since the slimes kept jumping on the farmland and destroying it.

The harvested wheat comes down the line, is made into bread, and stored in these chests. The chests are why the machine is technically not infinite; I can’t make an infinite amount of chests. Even if I could, I would have no way to set up a conveyor belt elaborate enough to sort the bread into the chests.

Here is where the bones are turned to bonemeal and then dispersed to the harvesters and the tree farm.

The bones go to the right, arrows to the left, and other mob drops to the lava. In a future update I will make it so that all mob drops are saved, including XP.

Here is the on/off switch.

I had difficulty at first because I needed to change the difficulty to turn off the spawners. I wanted everything to stop or start with one lever. So, I put some lights in the spawn rooms, set everything else up with some redstone and it worked perfectly.

This is an example of one of the mini-circuits controlling parts of the machine. The pulsar is constantly on, but it can’t send a current to the transmitter unless the on/off switch is on. That switch activates a piston which brings a dirt block up, allowing the redstone current to travel through it to the transmitter.

There are three of these rooms. There used to be 5, then I simplified things a bit.

 

This is the spawn location. I also refer to it as the torture chamber. Monsters come here via a teleporter and will encounter a laser causing them to die instantly.

One of the major and unavoidable flaws with my machine is that skeletons aren’t the only monsters that spawn. Creepers, zombies, spiders, endermen; they all feel the need to join in too. Doesn’t matter though. The lasers fear no one. Back in the day, my primary weapon was the sun. This, of course, meant nothing to spiders and creepers, so I had to kill them myself. It took a while to make it so that my machine could work at night. I tried arrows, that didn’t work very well. I wanted it so that i would reuse the arrows that skeletons dropped and shoot them back at them. But despite all that they dropped, I didn’t have enough. I am going to revisit that idea a bit in the future though and make an arrow machine.

Anyway, the mobs enter here…

And get fried to a crisp here.

This is where the drops flow out. I suppose I can get rid of that other laser. I made it to kill any escaping spiders that could make it out of the then 2 block wide hole. I made the hole smaller and now spiders can’t escape. So, I don’t need the 2nd laser now.

Those are the spawn rooms.

 

The spawners, which won’t currently work thanks to the lighting system.

25 spawners in each room. Do the math…Yes, 100 skeleton spawners.

Alright, let’s turn this thing on.

Another major and unavoidable flaw is that for the skeletons to spawn you must be near the spawners. Here they come.

Touching the laser means certain death. Good for me, bad for them. But most importantly, good for me.

 

With the bonemeal flowing, the tree farm is working. Unfortunately, another flaw, however small, is that you need a very small amount of coal to begin the machine. You see the first roaster, the one that turns logs to charcoal, needs fuel before it can start.

 

There’s the logs and saplings coming down the line now.

The logs smelted to charcoal.

 

Bonemeal sorting line in action.

 

Here comes the wheat.

Turned to bread.

 

Grrr…damn slimes. Here’s a tip. If any of you decide to try and make this machine, don’t make it in Superflat.

The laser will not activate unless this mob detector is activated.

That’s all for the demo. Time for my final speech. On Wednesday, I tested my machine and it yielded 611 pieces of bread, but used 5,370 arrows. That’s how I knew that I needed another method for killing the mobs. I discovered the laser and it was beautiful. Then I tested it yesterday and got only 410 pieces of bread but gained 569 arrows. By the way, in both of these tests, the duration was 20 minutes, one day-night cycle in Minecraft. You can see, the effort is great but the payoff can be greater if you give it enough time.

Yes, there are easier and more efficient food farms. The easiest being using pigs for an infinite supply of pork. I will give a demo of that and other simple machines in the future. But, this farm is just too awesome.

That’s all everyone. In the near future, I will show other food machines, and make other useful machines, and I will show them on here. Thanks for reading and Happy Mining!

Powercraft Mod Review (201/365)

Finally! Please excuse me for a minute while I take a sigh of relief that this mod review is done with. So, I wanted to have this done for Monday but I was unaware of the mod’s massive size. I introduced the mod on Monday and promised to have the complete review done by today. Well, it’s done. Now, I just want you guys to know a few things. One, this is the biggest mod review we have ever done on our blog, so I hope all of you enjoy it. Two, because it is the biggest mod review ever, I have been working on this since Monday, and I don’t mean working on it for an hour or so each day. I mean that whenever I had free time, I was working on this mod. Just saying.

Now, I am going to do two things with this post. First, I will show some of the new features that come with this mod. Some of them I left out because they didn’t add much to the game overall or because I don’t yet understand their purpose. Finally, I will present my machine that I spent the last four days perfecting. This is a huge post with tons of pictures so let’s get started.

Perhaps the most important addition to the game are conveyor belts. These are standard conveyor belts. You can move items around and use them to place items into chests, furnaces, and many other tools. With a furnace, it will only accept items that can be used for smelting (coal, food, sand, etc.).

These are speedy conveyor belts which move items twice as fast. The downside is that they can’t be used to place items in chests or furnaces.

Here is an item ejection belt. It can be used to remove items from chests. You can set it to remove items from a certain slot and how much to remove.

Here is an item detector belt which works the exact same way a detector rail does. When something travels over it, it sends out a redstone signal.

This is one of my favorites. The item seperator belt. With this you can seperate which items go which way. For example, you can set it up so that when gold and diamond come down the belt, gold will go to the left and diamonds to the right. Simple yet wonderful.

The item redirection belt can also be handy. When the item is not powered by redstone, all the items will go to the left. When it is powered, they will go to the right.

This is the brake conveyor. When not powered with redstone, items traveling down the belt will move slower over the brake. When it is powered, the items will completely stop.

Below the belt here, is a roaster. It can be fueled just like a furnace, and any items that travel over it (when it’s powered by redstone) will be cooked or smelted (if possible). So, if you send raw porkchops down, they’ll be cooked. If you send sand down, it will turn to glass. It will also do serious damage to mobs and the player, so be careful.

The automatic workbench. This tool is amazing. This is one of the most crucial tools to every machine. Just right-click it, insert the recipe you want to be used, put in the items and BAM! Instant crafting.

Elevators. The yellow ones make things go up, red goes down. Simple enough.

The redstone pulsar. It’s possible to make a pulsar without this mod, but Powercraft makes it a lot easier. It will send out a redstone pulse as often as you like and it can hold the pulse for as long as you like.

The block harvester. This tool is crucial to the running of my machine, without it, it could not work. This tool will harvest or mine any block that is in front of it (except for obsidian and bedrock) for 30 blocks.

It can also be used for harvesting wheat. Yay!

Next up is the block dispenser. This will dispense anything you put in it. Bonemeal, stone, trees, chests, etc. It will dispense 150 blocks out in a straight line. It won’t dispense more than one chest though. Sad day.

If you use these two blocks together, and if you have plenty of bonemeal on hand, you can craft an instant automatic wheat harvester.

This mod also brings in wireless redstone. Yes! You know how I love wireless redstone. It can be set to any frequency you like.

Teleporters. Aw yeah, now we’re talking. These things can be immensely helpful. They can teleport all mobs, players, and items. You can set each teleporter as a sender or a target, give it an ID, and control what it teleports.

Colored lights. Simple. These come in all dye colors just like wool.

Lasers. Now these are handy, and deadly. There are four different lasers. Tripwires, transmitters, receivers, and deadly lasers. The tripwire laser is obvious. it sends out a redstone signal when someone moves through it. When the transmitter laser is powered it sends out a beam. If the receiver picks up that beam then it sends out a redstone signal.

And here is the deadly laser. By placing a roaster down, and then placing a laser above it (and placing them in the right order does matter in this case; roaster then laser), you will have made your own deadly laser. As long as there is fuel in the roaster and it is powered by redstone, then any living thing that touches the laser (including the player) will die instantly.

You can also use mirrors to redirect the beam. There’s also a laser prism but I can’t get it to work.

This is an XP storage block. It works as a bank. You can deposit and withdraw XP.

This is cool for decoration. Iron ledges.

Iron stairs too. Equally cool.

You can build custom mob spawners using an activation crystal.

Any mob you want.

We also have sticky iron boots (don’t know what they do), the ore sniffer (a handheld version of a material detector), the activation crystal, power dust (more efficient fuel source than coal), and the radio remote (you can activate any transmitter frequencies whenever with this).

We also have day/night/rain sensors, empty/full chest sensors, proximity detectors for items, mobs, and players, a block that lets two different redstone wires intersect, and a corner repeater which can switch sides when right-clicked.

Finally, here are all the logic gates. I understand all but one of them, the D flip-flop gate. I did it the way I was told and it didn’t work. Strange.

FINAL RATING:

    

4.5/5 diamonds. This mod was a lot of fun. The very fact that I spent all my free time with this mod shows how great it is. I needed help to get started, mainly because the guide wasn’t as helpful as I would’ve liked, that is one of the reasons it isn’t a 5/5. Another reason is that there are still some limitations with it. You can’t sort mobs like you can items and I would really like it if they integrated that into the mod. Also, as with any mod, there are some noticeable and rather irritating bugs/glitches. But this is a truly great mod and I encourage all of you to try it out.

I have decided since this post is already extremely long and it isn’t really a part of the actual review, I am going to hold off on showing my machine until tomorrow.

So stay tuned for my machine post for tomorrow. I hope you all enjoy it. Very soon, Tyler and I are going to do a really awesome post to celebrate our progress on this blog. We have completed 200 posts, received almost 10,000 total views, and we are close to achieving another goal that we made a long time ago. *Hint: it may also coincide with the release of Minecraft 1.3.*

So please continue coming to our blog, help us reach our goal! Thanks for reading and Happy Mining!