Escalator in Minecraft using RedPower 2 Frames

Eloraam recently unveiled prerelease 5 of her RedPower 2 mod for Minecraft. One of the long-anticipated features in PR5 is Frames, which are movable scaffolding blocks that have had fans drooling since last fall.

On my list of possible things to build with Frames was an escalator. I'm pleased to show that RedPower 2 Frames indeed make it possible to construct an escalator in Minecraft.

Escalator using Frames from RedPower 2 (click to enlarge)

A still picture really doesn't do it justice, one needs to see it in action:

One fly in the ointment: Frames don't move the player horizontally, so you have to hold the Forward key during the horizontal movements.

This escalator somewhat misuses Frames and Frame Motors. In normal projects where Frames are used to construct mobile gantries or booms, the ratio of Frames to Frame Motors might be on the order of 30 to 1. Here it's roughly two Frame Motors for every Frame.

The design turns out to be quite simple. Because the Frame Motors for each direction of escalator travel are in the same plane and are adjacent both horizontally and vertically, no additional wiring is needed for power beyond the the single Blue Alloy Wire providing it at the base. Like all blulectric devices, Frame Motors conduct blutricity to their neighbors.

A Red Alloy Wire on the back of each set of Frame Motors supplies the timing signal to synchronize all the motors. The signal is from a Timer set to an interval of one second. I'm not sure how inefficient it is in terms of blulectric power consumption to activate all the Frame Motors for each move when only half are needed, but it's much simpler to wire.

This escalator just represents the tip of the iceberg. Frames are an incredibly flexible building block that can be used in a countless number of ways in building things that move.

And Frames are just one of the new things that arrived with prerelease 5. When you combine Frames with Control's emulated 6502 CPU, the liquid handling provided by pumps, and the parts added to Logic, the result is a set of components that will keep RedPower 2 players busy for a long time.

Edit: Thanks to Eloraam and others on the Minecraft Forums who answered questions, and to direwolf20 for his YouTube tutorial showing the basics of frames.

Minecraft: Sorting and smelting system using RedPower 2

Since building the Compact cobble generator I've been expanding my base. This article describes the sorting and automatic smelting system I built using RedPower 2.

The system uses seven sorting machines in series all sharing a common delivery tube. The use of a single delivery tube saves tubing and space in exchange for limiting your sort to fifteen categories (sixteen if you included unmatched items). While I used seven sorting machines, this system could be expanded to any number of sorters which would allow the sorting of hundreds of different items.

Photo 1: Seven sorting machines fed from the alchemical chest on the left (click to enlarge)

Of course you could use any number of sorters all using separate delivery tubes, but I wanted to see what could be done with an array of sorters using just a single delivery tube.

Overview diagram (click to enlarge)

• A chest serves as the main input to the row of sorting machines.
• The sorters assign color tags to the items which travel to the storage chests.
• Items which traverse all 7 sorters without getting matched end up in an exceptions chest.
• Ores which require smelting are sorted to the furnace feed chest.
• 8 blulectric furnaces arranged in parallel make short work of smelting tasks.
• Ingots from the furnaces are returned to the sorters, bypassing the input chest.
• Also bypassing the input chest are the harvests from the sugar cane farm, a cactus farm, and a low-output passive tree farm.

An alchemical chest from the Equivalent Exchange mod serves as the input chest (see photo 1).

A filter pulls the items from the chest. Because the filter's inventory is empty, it will pull all the stacks from the input chest. (If you want single items pulled, use a transposer.)

Output from the filter enters the first sorting machine. It's powered with a blue alloy wire, and passes the power along to the adjacent sorters.

Since the sorting machines are all in-line and receive items already traveling through the tubes, they don't require a redstone signal to activate.

Configuration for the second sorter in the chain (click to enlarge)

The sorting machines are set to mode 5 and so sort everything they receive, and assign a color to items that don't match. This system uses pink for unmatched items.

Sorted items emerge from the sorters with a color tag. They go up and take the common delivery tube to their destinations. Unsorted items enter the next sorter in the chain.

To understand how this arrangement of sorters works it's useful to review two basics about tubes in RedPower 2:

1. Routing in RedPower tubes selects the closest valid destination.
2. Color tags keep wrong-colored items out.

After the first sorter, the inputs to the subsequent sorters in the chain are colored pink. All items emerging from these sorting machines want take the shortest path and enter the next sorter in the chain, but the pink input tubes keep everything out except the unsorted items. Thus the sorted items are forced up into the common delivery tube on top of the sorters.

Photo 2: The transposer near the last sorter (click to enlarge)

The last sorting machine in the chain sends its unmatched output to a chest (see photo 2). Note that the chest is further away than the route back to the last sorter's input, so unmatched items will loop through the last sorter unless special measures are taken. An in-line transposer causes the route to the chest to be seen as the shortest path for pink-tagged items. (If you have extra colors, you can eliminate the transposer by replacing the pink tag with an unused color.)

Photo 3: A filter pulls a few unsorted items (click to enlarge)

A filter grabs a few specific unsorted items for storage in a separate chest (see photo 3).

Currently the sorting machines still have many unused columns available for sorting additional items. Besides the default color of pink, this system currently has 13 colors assigned, for a total of 14. That leaves two colors for expansion.

Note that sorting machines in mode 5 without any items in their configuration columns don't think they have anything to do, and won't assign the default color. In other words, an empty sorting machine won't do anything. When you are testing the handling of unsorted items, make sure you put at least 1 item into each sorting machine, even if you don't assign it a color. [Update: This has been fixed in RedPower 2 Prerelease 4c.]

Photo 4: The common delivery tube connects to the storage chests (click to enlarge)

The common delivery tube leads from the sorting machines to the storage chests (see photo 4).

The two alchemical chests are not connected to the sorting tubes. The first stores the RedPower 2 supplies for color tagging the tubes.

The second is for tools storage, and uses an Equivalent Exchange mod item called the Talisman of Repair to keep things in good condition.

Here's the current assignment of storage chests:

Yellow: metal ingots
Light blue: redstone, glowstone, and covalence dust
Brown: wood products

White: RedPower rocks (marble and basalt)
Gray: stone, stone brick, and clay

Green: plant harvests
Lime: creature drops

Light gray: glass and RedPower microblocks
Blue: RedPower wiring and logic items
Orange: pistons and RedPower machines and tubes.

Cyan: diamonds and other valuables
Black: coal and flint

Photo 5: The red tube ends at the furnace feed (click to enlarge)

The red tube leads to the furnace feed chest (see photo 5).

A filter pulls items from the chest in stacks of 4 to send to the furnaces.

Stacks of 4 take 20 seconds to smelt, so the timer for the filter is set to 2.5 seconds, which is 20 seconds divided by 8 furnaces. I haven't done timing tests to optimize the timer setting. An optimum configuration would locate the filter adajcent to the first split in the tubes to minimize travel latency.

Photo 6: The 8-way Blulectric Furnace system (click to enlarge)

The feed tubes lead to the center of each furnace cluster; equal path lengths yield even distribution (see photo 6).

Return tubes go under the floor and lead to a retriever. An empty inventory causes it to pull any item from the furnace outputs. Equal length tubes ensure that the retriever pulls evenly, and it's on a fast timer.

Prior to prerelease 4 a transposer would have been needed for each furnace to gather the output, but a single retriever can pull the smelting results from all the furnaces.

Blulectric furnaces take input on the left side and make output available on the right, so each cluster has the furnaces rotated so that left faces in towards the feed and right faces out for the return.

The two furnace clusters could have been located closer together but I wanted to be able to walk between them.

A bank of 18 battery boxes powers the furnaces. Three blue alloy wires in the floor provide power to different sections of the two furnace clusters. Since the wires are rated for 100 amps, and each furnace pulls about 10 amps, there is no danger of overloading the power feeds.

Photo 7: Not quite enough solar panels for the job (click to enlarge)

The battery boxes are charged by an array of 22 solar panels, which is only half of the 40 panels that I should have to run the furnaces (see photo 7).

[Edit: I thanked them on the forum, but I'd like to express my gratitude to Minecraft Forum users Kyyshrrk, TheEnlightened, and Eloraam for clearing up my confusion about the way that color tags influence tube routing.]

Minecraft: Compact cobble generator using RedPower 2

Now that Eloraam has released RedPower 2.0pr4 I've generated a new world in Minecraft 1.0.0 and have been starting to build things.

One of the basic devices that I build early on is a cobblestone generator, to ensure that there's plenty of cobblestone at hand.

Back in 1.8.1 with RedPower 2.0pr3 I'd come up with a vertically-oriented design for a cobble generator on a small footprint and minimal use of parts. The Redstone Tubes added in RedPower 2.0pr4 make the design cleaner and use even fewer parts, since Redstone Tubes carry the redstone signal to the block breakers.

Side view (click to enlarge)

Top view (click to enlarge)

 YouTube video of the cobble generator

Each vertical layer uses two lava and four block breakers, producing four cobble. As is typical for me, I went overboard and opted for four layers, so the cobble generator produces 16 cobble per two second tick.

Here's the layout of each vertical layer of the cobble generator:

Redstone Tube	Block Breaker	Cobble	Lava
Block Breaker	Stone	Water	Cobble
Cobble	Water	Stone	Block Breaker
Lava	Cobble	Block Breaker	Redstone Tube

The Bill of Materials for each layer:

• 2 Lava
• 2 Redstone Tube
• 4 Block Breaker
• 8 Glass Covers (for the sides of the lava and cobble)

Additional materials required to complete the cobble generator:

• Timer (set to default two second interval)
• Lever
• Various bits of wiring and tubing
• Chest(s) to store output

Just a single water source block is used for the entire generator. Note the water has a 1 block horizontal run before the vertical drops; this is critical to prevent the water from flowing horizontally inside the generator and turning the lava into obsidian. The water columns extend 1 block into the floor below the bottom level of the generator.

Each layer requires lava source blocks in order for it to flow horizontally and create the cobble. A more compact version could be built with lava source blocks above the cobble columns, but the vertical flow of lava is so slow that the generator couldn't operate on the two second cycle, so output speed would be reduced. This might be something to try in the Nether, since lava flows faster there, I think.

Each layer generates 4 cobble every 2 seconds, which works out to 120 cobble per minute per layer. This 4 layer generator produces 480 cobble per minute, which is 7.5 stacks.

An alternate layout is possible using half as much lava in a central column:

-	T	B	C	W	-	-
T	B	C	L	C	B	T
-	-	W	C	B	T	-

This can be used if lava is at a premium at the expense of a wider footprint and the use of more redstone tubes.

Update 11 Mar 2012: Ouroborus's comment about tilings is accurate. Here are some tilings I've worked out:

Cobble generator tilings (click to enlarge).

I've built the first two designs in the first column—the ones with 4 and 12 block breakers per layer. I don't think I'll go any larger; the 12-breaker design was built with six layers and it's a beast:

Six layer cobble generator puts 72 block breakers in a 7x7 footprint (click to enlarge).

It belches out cobble at an incredible rate. However, due to the changes in Equivalent Exchange 2 the amount of EMC is underwhelming.

This will change once Eloraam releases the Pulverizer for RedPower 2. Using Pulverizers to grind the cobble into gravel will quadruple its EMC value.