MAIN MENU     FRONT PAGE MISSION STATEMENT SINCLAIR'S FOUNDRY MINECRAFT IN THE ARCTIC REJECTLAND THE FUNGUSLANDS & OTHER WORLDS RESOURCE PACKS & WORLD DOWNLOADS OTHER LINKS       ASSOCIATED WEB PAGES     THE HAMMER OF RETRIBUTION OGG-CAST HAMMER OF RETRIBUTION PRODUCTIONS PERSONAL PAGES FROM DAYS OF YORE ZX SPECTRUM SECTION: PROGRAMS & VIDEOS COMP.SYS.SINCLAIR CRAP GAMES COMPETITION 2021 RICK DANGEROUS RESURRECTED PROJECT 18: FIXING THE HOLES     Project coordinates: n/a Screenshots: 19 (+ 1 Sinclair) Date completed: 9 July 2015 Version: 1.8.7 Minecraft day completed: 3241 "You are walking past a garage, and a mechanic watches you menacingly, brandishing a very large spanner." And so I charge at the mechanic, grab the spanner off him and set about fixing all those annoying problems that have crept in over 3000-plus Minecraft days. I'll do it in chronological order, to keep things simple... ZX Spectrum screenshot: The Atlas Assignment (1983) Watch this game completed by ME! Yes, ME! via the RZX Archive. At the height of East-West tension in the 1980s, this text adventure with some foully difficult arcade sequences thrown in for not-so-good measure sees you take on the role of a secret agent who has to stop a Soviet spy from stealing the American nuclear defence plans. Of course, you have to start off in London, where a man with a huge scar down the side of his face looks like he needs a bullet putting through his head. So far, so good... but where do you move on to, and how? Well, grisket my briskets, we're in the East End of London, so I'll go up the apples and pears and ask me old china Mike Brewer for some advice, maybe he'll sell me an old Ford Cortina for a hat under twelve peaches. Minty. Not so minty is that Mike seems to be in the middle of one of his allegedly-playful rants at his chief mechanic... I think Edd might finally be about to snap and do something really awful with that spanner! Note that I might also, possibly, have embedded this sequence, plus a whole load of other "I wonder what might happen next?" hints into the RZX of the game. Watch it all to find out! FIXING PROJECT 3: SINCLAIR'S FOUNDRY One thing I may not have known when I built the gold-producing half of Sinclair's Foundry was the way zombie pigmen behave when they're angered. As they spawn in the portals, hit just one of them and they come running out with the usual insane lust for blood, but as they fall into the pit, all the pigmen that are angry drop experience and their rare drops when they're splattered into a mess of rotten bacon at the bottom of the chute. It makes for a rapid, if slightly impractical XP farm, given that I have to leave my zombie-hitting-spot and jump down to the basement to pick up the XP orbs, which are delivered through this half-block-high slit that nothing else can get through. The Kentucky Fried Chicken switch is in case any baby pigmen are riding chickens - they float down and don't die, and the chickens don't despawn with the pigkids, so I figure it's easier to fry them and never mind if I don't pick up the loot. Killing zombie pigmen for XP also required me to add a third filter for gold bars, dropped when an angry pigmen are killed manually. Anything else - gold swords and chicken waste - end up in the chest on the left, and I've added a 30-odd-block deep sword dump as I did in Rejectland - just in case, one day, there's some kind of recycling facility added and gold can be recovered from the swords. That's more out of hope than expectation, though. FIXING PROJECT 7: HEAVY ON THE MAGICK WITCH FARM There wasn't a lot wrong here - this farm has always produced more mangled witches than one of Matthew Hopkins' wet dreams. Even so, as each item is dispensed into a chest, there should be an interplay of dancing lights as a comparator in the guts behind this wall detects the items that have been filtered through. Only, it never worked before, because I'd put the comparators in front of one of the chests. That works if the item stays there, but it doesn't - I have to count the items in the hopper feeding into the chest. So a bit of slicing and dicing here and there, a few extra hoppers - hardly a problem when I have my foundry - and everything was made to work properly. It has meant the maintenance door, the walls, the lamps and the receiver chests have all been brought forwards by two blocks, but most people would never know the difference. FIXING PROJECT 11: COWPOKE SEYMOUR'S CATTLE GRID This one was rather trickier to sort out. I always wondered why the cow population on the north side of the farm was so much lower than the south side. There was an easy way to mark it; I already had a Nether subway train to a mushroom island, so I rounded up a few mooshrooms, brought them back to base, bred them until I had more than 64, slaughtered all the remaining cows, and filled the north side with the strange fungal creatures. All I had to do was leave the area (say, going back to the Nether), return to it and sure enough, some of the mooshrooms would glitch into the glass, suffocate in the walls, or wander right out of their confinement and into the pen with the regular cows. Those regular cows did not move at all. This is despite me building this farm inside the spawn chunks, so that the intention was they would always be loaded even if I travelled far away! Clearly, some remedial action was needed to rework the farm so that all the cows were held on the south side. And after a lot of testing in several copies of this world, one which tried to send the water through the herd (and didn't work because they all jump around), here's the simple system I came up with. As before, the cows will sit on this grid of iron bars - the adults can't drop through, but the calves can as they run around. The two pens are built on the south side of the farm, and there's a one-block gap under the grid with a water stream to sweep the calves away. They end up in the old water stream on the north side - the one on the south side, under the new grid, has been filled in. I decided the best way to fill the pens was to breed the cows outside, hack a hole in the roof and lead them in up a staircase. All the regular cows are in their pen, with the mooshrooms to follow. So once again, all I need to do is grab a load of wheat out the nearby silo, spam it into the cows, and forget about it - the original crushing mechanism still works, so when the calves in the splat pit grow up, they will be minced into steak and leather when the clock strikes midday. That is automatically delivered to the base via a long hopper line. Meanwhile, outside, I was never totally happy with the half-baked cow print entrance. I've filled the entire wall with it instead, and I'd say this looks much better. FIXING THE BASE With such a huge update and with lots of bits and pieces going on, the base was always likely to need some extra fettling after it was done. To start with, I've found nasties prowling around where they shouldn't be, and some dark spots (well, I say dark, what I actually mean is a light level of 7) needed eliminating. This one, right where the viewing window for the dragon egg is, was easily solved with another armour stand sitting on top of a lamp, as it is in the main corridor. In the south wing of the keyboard, I was suddenly disturbed by the sound of the door opening. What's that in my Golden Hall of Valhalla? It was a skeleton, and it had spawned on the table. That was soon fixed - with some torches doubling as candles to light up the big feast! It had been a hard day building things, and all I wanted to do was sleep with the newly-acquired cats, when WHAT IS THAT CREEPER DOING IN MY BEDROOM!? Sure enough, there was another dark spot at the head of the bed, and the creeper was quickly dispatched without any damage to the room, to me, or the the cats which the creeper is supposedly scared of. Not this one. Still, a couple of torches here will ensure that never happens again. Now to the warehouse and its working innards, where there a few more problems to be ironed out. Look at this... no wonder the indicator lights on the south wing never flashed - I left out the comparators! This was quite straightforward... ...and now it's fixed, so the light shows the netherrack chest filling as it should. But by far the most problematic piece of machinery in this base - the entire world, even - was this huge item lift (which I've repeated from the original base post) that carried everything from the sorter, from the furnaces, even from the food farms, up to the distribution line near the roof of the main body of the base. I used Draykke Devry's double-barrelled design, generally acknowledged to be one of the best, but I found that it would always stall with items backing up in the chest at the bottom of the lift every time I left the area and the chunk was unloaded. So, if there was a ton of items to be lifted, which there inevitably was if I'd unloaded my inventory or the furnaces were running at full pelt, there'd be a log jam that made the M25 at 5 pm on a Friday look like the empty roads of the Australian outback. It had to come out. The Ultimate Guide to Dropper Towers on the Minecraft forums looked like it might be useful - it is very, very thorough - but it tried to dissuade me from the only solution I thought would work, i.e. the design in which every dropper has a clock attached to it (the "fully comparator tested tower" in the guide). I tested quite a few such designs in a separate test world. The idea to do so came from who else but Dataless822 and his previous Build Big Or Go Home world - I remembered he'd built such a thing and even made a tutorial for it; as his worlds are downloadable I found the version from just after he'd built the lift - and found that it ran just as erratically in his world as it did when I built it in a test world. But there are loads of clock designs, and the one I decided on was from impulseSV's wood generator. The bug that made the generator produce infinite oak planks has long since been patched, but the clock is still good, and I've used it more times than I care to mention. What I found was, when I built a dropper tower using these clocks, it was more compact (5×4 as opposed to 7×3 if I used Data's clock), and mostly it ran smoothly. Unfortunately the top clock would only tick twice and then miss two cycles, so items tend to build up one dropper from the top - and if too many items build up there (about seven and a half stacks), the clock stops. I found it needed about a chest full of items, at least, before there would be any trouble - so I built it anyway. And then I found that all the clocks bar one ran that was when it was built in my world, so the tower ran at half speed and all the items backed up at the bottom - just like what used to happen with Draykke Devry's design! I was all ready to rip it all out and start again when, and I have no idea how, I came across a suggested fix - change all the clocking repeaters (i.e. the ones that face away from the solid block and feed into the side of the comparator, and the one nearest us in the picture) to two ticks, and what do you know, it's very slightly slower than it would be otherwise but it runs perfectly. Great success! And as I have more stone and redstone than I will ever need, plus a load of spare quartz, I'll keep on building this design wherever I need it. If there is a problem with this lift, and it's a relatively small one given what went before, it's that the input and output have to be on the same side due to the block tower next to the droppers that power them. Add in the extra-bulky redstone for this build and the need to leave a gap to avoid powering the hopper line, and it needed a lot of extra hoppers to re-route that line safely away from the redstone. However you build it, two hoppers that feed into the first dropper will be next to the redstone for the bottom two droppers, so those will back up. But as items don't back up in a dropper, eventually the whole load will be fed through. Meanwhile, I've taken the signal from the bottom dropper's clock, which pulses constantly as items are fed through it, and wired it to xisumavoid's pulse lengthener, which I'm sure I've highlighted before. With 14 items in the two opposing hoppers, this converts the pulsing signal into one that stays steadily on... ...which connects to one of the redstone lamps in the floor of the furnace area, which I've commandeered as an indicator light. When it's off, the lift is working - and when it turns on again, the last item has cleared the bottom dropper and everything returns to normal. Originally, I installed this when I was still using Draykke Devry's design - so I knew that if no indicator lights showed me that the chests in the warehouse were filling, and this light was still off, there was a log jam that I had to go and sort out. It's quite useful still having it in this improved setup. This final fix to the warehouse involves the cobblestone silo. Originally I'd built it to Data's canonical design; it uses a comparator to power a lamp that indicates "this system is full", but positions the comparator by the hopper filling the second double chest out of three in the stack. What I always wanted was much the same design but checking the hopper above - i.e. the one filling the third double chest, so when the light stays on, these chests really are full, and the next bank of chests start filling. I thought the change was going to involve some nastily complicated redstone - it doesn't, all it requires is a repeater to power the block above the indicator lamp, which in turn powers only that lamp below it and not its neighbours. It does require one extra hopper between the receiver chest and the bank behind, though... but I have plenty of iron!