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 30: CHUCKIE EGG'S CRACKIN' BIRD SEED DOME     Project coordinates: X +198 : Y +67 : Z +35 Screenshots: 11 (+ 1 Sinclair) Date completed: 2 December 2015 Version: 1.8.8 Minecraft day completed: 4186 Here's a project that was never supposed to be one in the first place - but, given that it serves a very important purpose and I thought of a Sinclair-related name for it, I've given it its dues, a series of screenshots and an official project number. ZX Spectrum screenshot: Chuckie Egg (1984) Watch this game played to the point where it repeats by xmikex and Jamie Angus via the RZX Archive. It's another one of the all-time greats of the Spectrum's early days, but in many ways, Chuckie Egg owes its popularity to another machine of the day - the one developed by Sir Clive Sinclair's former business partner, Chris Curry. It was the BBC Micro, which stole a march on Sir Clive, being released at the end of 1981 when Sinclair's top model was still the ZX81 - but it had a severe disadvantage... price! The BBC Model B sold for £400, the 48K Spectrum was a mere £175 when it was launched a few months later, which torpedoed the BBC's idea that everyone should have their microcomputer at home; it was too expensive for most ordinary Joes. But the price wasn't a problem for schools, who invested heavily in the Beeb and its 5¼" floppy disk drive, taking on board the BBC's message that it was a computer designed primarily for education. Some schools would keep a copy or two of Chuckie Egg on board - I mean, how many other Beeb games can you name off the top of your head? - and soon everyone wanted a copy. Initially it was those of us who had a Spectrum or a Dragon 32 who had that chance, but the Amstrad and Bread Bin soon followed suit, and if any of the 1980s equivalents of otakus who had an MSX-compatible machine wanted to join in, so could they. It was a game for everyone! Initially, I hadn't intended this to be a major project - I thought that commandeering one of the abandoned huts in the ruined villager and filling it with hoppers would be adequate. When that proved problematic I then tried hollowing out a small area of the mother hens' pen in the top of the Battery Hen Battery, which you can see here. That still didn't work the way I wanted, and I realised that to be able to breed a large number of chickens at once, I'd have to give then a decently large area to spread out in. So an area was reserved, the same size as the sink bowl in the Red Scorpion sugar cane farm. The principle is, the chickens are allowed to breed, and when I've used up an entire inventory's worth of seeds, a hole opens in the centre of the sink bowl, and the floodgates open to wash all the chickens into that central killing pit. Or at least that was the intention. Once I'd built this version, with the floodgates operated by pistons holding back the water, I found the chickens were making a beeline for the space under the pistons, away from where I needed them to be... ...so this was the solution, get shot of the pistons, and instead use dispensers to operate the water flow. It can be switched on and off independently of the pit, which is still the central four blocks. I've also surrounded that pit with slabs so I can walk over the whole lot as if it was a flat floor and not have to jump out of the pit; when it's dropped, the pit is an insurmountable 1½ blocks, without a Leaping potion at least. This is the redstone as it was in the original build, hence why it's all turned on, keeping the pistons up. I was very fortunate in that the dispenser setup required almost no modification - I only had to swap out the lever for a button, so the redstone is not permanently powered, and it's a case of press it to unleash the water, press it again to put it away. All animals have a cool-off period before they can be bred again - five minutes, if there isn't any excessive lag in the world, and any juveniles should grow up in 20 minutes. What this meant was, I'd be out in the open waiting for the chickens to want to breed again, and I'd be attacked by all sorts of nasties - skeletons, creepers, we can't be having that. So I built this glass dome with the help of Plotz, using a sphere two blocks wider than the total area - essentially so it'd reach into the corners and there wouldn't be hiding places for the chickens to run away to. The sides were flattened a bit to match it up to the square sink bowl. At the front door you can see the controls - the lever on the left to raise and lower the central pit, and the button on the right to toggle the water streams. And at the back, there's a simple dispenser and clock setup with a chest that can be accessed from inside or outside; this is what chucks the eggs in the first place, so a new colony of chickens can be started - and I can collect a vast supply of eggs by turning off the recycler in the Battery Hen Battery. So the cycle goes: chuck the eggs, wait 20 minutes for the initial chickens to reach adulthood. Feed seeds to these chickens, wait 5 minutes, collect the eggs they lay in that time and chuck them. Feed more seeds, collect the eggs, chuck the eggs, wait 5 minutes, lather, rinse, repeat until I have no more seeds in my inventory, and the scene should now look something like this. No more seeds left? Excellent. At this point, wait another 20 minutes - maybe more - for as many of the chickens to grow into adults as possible. Then, open the pit and turn on the water streams so they're all washed into the central pit. Turn off the water... and prepare for mass slaughter. Adult chickens won't die with a single Harming II potion, so I've used a workaround - first, hit them with a Poison potion. Of course, seeing as this required a splash potion, I've been poisoned a bit myself, but it usually doesn't last long. Now for the grenade... ...throw that Harming potion, only a grade I will be needed, and all the chickens will die straight away. Switch quickly to a looting sword such as Hawkins' Cutlass to get more loot for all your efforts! Now, just wait for it to be collected in the chests beneath, and it can be taken off to Wurzel Dizzy's Fast Food Silo, with all the other chickens and feathers. Here's how much can be obtained from a standard cycle with 27 stacks of seeds; obviously it varies depending on how many eggs were chucked in the first place, and how many were collected and chucked during the mass breeding programme, but 602 chickens isn't bad at all - that's about 27 hours' worth of production in the Battery Hen Battery with the 20 mother hens I've got in there. As it was with the job collecting gold nuggets for the Battery Hen Battery, I didn't use any levels until I'd exhausted my entire supply of seeds, just to see how many I could build up. I've never seen 122 levels outside of a Creative world - and it netted me a lot of useful enchanted books!