[Timing rodent b] Redstone wiring and circuitry noobery

[MisterFister]

I've never played vMC, and I'm early-nether in my first SSP playthrough. My only other experience was for YouTubing collaboration in a very-post-Dragon SMP on a very old seed that was originally created in vMC many vMC-versions ago, played through several BTW versions, and manually chunk-edited and corruption-recovered several times over.

Therefore, some of my experience is useful, but a lot of it is likely to be outdated (i.e., centered around mob grinder designs that compensated for earlier-version mob pawning behavior, etc.) Worse, I can look at almost any kind of build in action either by whitelisting and logging in to explore, or even on YouTube LP's, but I find no "for beginners" genre of tutorials. Note, I might sometime this year be in a position to create some, of course.

Therefore, I anticipate needing to self-teach a lot of this stuff. My high school shop classes only skimmed the basics of electronic circuitry design, and even that only culminated in soldering our own digital four-function calculators from kits purchased en masse by the school department. I understand in broad terms the ideas of polarity, positive / negative, diodes, capacitors / resistors transistors / etc., rising-edge and falling-edge signals, and I recognize some terminology used to describe logic gates in a general or vague conversational sense. I also have a gut-instinct-level rudimentary understanding of Boolean logic and I remember having fun with small high school projects coding in BASIC and vBASIC. All of this, however, was decades ago.

I understand the broad basics of redstone current, block-transparency to said current (though an incomplete knowledge of which blocks in BTW are transparent and which are not, or what transparencies might be conditional / variable / manipulable.) I can kind of guess at how to use redstone repeaters to extend signal strength, and I know that there are other uses for repeaters such as manipulating pulse frequency or duration, but signal boosting is the only thing I really understand about them. I know the basics of how to send redstone signals horizontally or vertically, and I can tinker with designs to achieve compactness. I also know that there are design benefits of keeping a construction confined entirely within a single MC chunk for load-distance performance issues, which is kind of related and kind of off-topic.

Emphasizing that I anticipate the need to self-teach myself, my early-nether tech stage in an SSP seed that was first generated under the most recent BTW version is pretty much the best excuse I can think of to start tinkering and exploring this stuff. To facilitate, can anyone provide links to resources or info that is specifically known to be entirely or mostly applicable for current version of BTW and vMC v1.5.2? I'm thinking version-reliable wiki entries, informative YouTube tutorials, example SMP's I could guest-whitelist into to spectate around in, stuff like that.

Thanks in advance!

[Gilberreke]

I think your best bet is to be build-oriented. Try to figure out what redstone can do in general, figure out something you want to do with it, then try to learn how to. In essence, what you can do with redstone hasn't changed since its introduction in Minecraft.

For BTW specifically, it's usually a question of automation. The most important part of automation tends to be to be collection at first. Collection centers around water more than redstone. Usual redstone questions on these forums are formed like this: "I want to automate resource X at point Y in the tech tree, what's possible?". The answer is then either specific builds or pieces of builds and smart little ideas to tackle the problem.

"Builds" in BTW in general consist of several parts:

- Trigger
- Harvest
- Collection

For example:

- Trigger: a dog poops
- Harvest: refeed dog
- Collection: a water system that drops the poop into a hopper

- Trigger: sugar cane grows
- Harvest: a piston pushes the sugar cane so it turns into item form
- Collection: a water system drops the sugar cane into a hopper

More complex builds string several processes into an assembly line with multiple triggers, harvests and collections.


Triggers can be periodical (turntable clock) or by detection. A common trigger is a bio-clock. The growth of one sugar cane is used as a trigger to harvest all sugar canes. Sugar cane is such an easy bio-clock people will also use it to harvest wheat for example (less common these days).

Here's a more complex redstone example: you need a clock that triggers something to happen every 60 seconds. You set up a waterwheel that powers a turntable on lowest setting (4 seconds). The turntable has a block on it with two redstone torches on opposite faces. If you now put redstone next to one of torches, the rotation of the block with the torches will cause that redstone to be on for 4 seconds, then off for 4 seconds. Now you can use a bit of redstone that will turn that into a pulse on rise and fall (aka, every 4 seconds a pulse is sent out). The pulse triggers a block dispenser with the following items inside: a piece of red wool, a piece of yellow wool, a piece of white wool and a block of redstone. Next to where those items are placed is another piece of redstone and a lightblock.

Here's what happens: every 4 seconds a pulse causes the block dispenser to put out an item, suck it back in and cycle to the next item. This means that the Block Dispenser will flicker the lamp every fourth item, basically acting as a multiplier. A pulse every 4 seconds and a multiplier of 4 means that the lamp will flicker every 16 seconds. We wanted to have a timer that pulses every 60 seconds, so we can now see we need a multiplier of 15 instead. We use 14 different kinds of colored wool and a redstone block for a multiplier of 15. 15*4=60 and we now have a clock that pulses every 60 seconds.


As you can tell, there's a lot that you can do, but it's very abstract without a specific need to fullfill.

[Daisjun]

I've built lots of different machines in BTW such as chicken farms, auto kilns and auto saws and all have only really relied on very rudimentary circuits. Like Gilb said, it's really more a matter of deciding what you need, then working out an efficient way to achieve it.

I've used the vMC wiki plenty of times for basic circuit components: http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Redstone_circuit It has probably way more info than you'll ever need.

Also, redstone mechanics really haven't changed much since 1.5, mainly because of the damage it would do to people's builds (that's why the godawful placement mechanics have never been fixed), so guides relating to any version of MC are relevant.

Keep in mind that because most redstone components need latches, you really want your builds to be as simple and passive as possible. For instance, the mob trap we built on our last world had no moving parts whatsoever. The way you utilise water in a build is probably more important than anything else.

[LannyRipple]

Here's the circuits I find most useful (probably covering 95% of all things I build).

* NOT, AND, OR gates (duh)
* Despawn clock
* Two-piston T flip-flop (design O; Switch out redstone for stone and put a redstone torch under one side of its path. When stone is over the torch it will conduct the signal.)
* Torch-repeater clocks (design D and E)
* Dispenser double-pulser
* RS latch

[abculatter_2]

Here's the circuits I find most useful (probably covering 95% of all things I build).

* NOT, AND, OR gates (duh)
* Despawn clock
* Two-piston T flip-flop (design O; Switch out redstone for stone and put a redstone torch under one side of its path. When stone is over the torch it will conduct the signal.)
* Torch-repeater clocks (design D and E)
* Dispenser double-pulser
* RS latch

I find pulse limiters to be extremely useful, as well. That might just be because of how I build my automation, though, which seems to tend to be somewhat redstone-heavy compared to a lot of other people...

[MisterFister]

Thank you folks! I'm not yet far enough along in my playthrough to be able to use this info fully, but briefly looking into it on my end now assures me that this'll end up being what I need. Thanks!!