About keeping track of IG time in SSP and SMP (and chickens)

[Battosay]

So, I've been running some issues lately, regarding the way you need to keep track of time to automatically feed chickens. And some of it has to do with SMP, so I'll post this here rather than in the feedback section since SMP ain't the main focus of the mod.
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For a very large portion of the mod (until you get access to the Soulforge tech), you only have a few ways to keep track of the time IG in your redstone contraptions :

¤ Turntables : that's the one who fits the best with the spirit of the mod, and it's pretty cool to build (you can have like a turntable who sends a signal every 12s, and you either do some maths with redstone (5x12 for a minute etc), or you use that signal to power several turntables in a row), but it ends up costing and lot to build and take a lot of space, which can lead to issues if you're not careful with chunk boundaries. And it has to compete with a beast :

¤ The decay timer. Extremely cheap. Perfectly compact. Only slightly limited because you can't have more than a hopper above the dispenser (or the redstone signal from the full hopper locks the dispenser), but you can always add more dispenser ! And it still lasts for 136h (almost 6 irl entire days of playtime) with a single dispenser. Sends a pulse every 5min. Increase that pulse length to whatever desired duration by placing the dispenser higher from the pressure plate. Send that very pulse to a turntable. Every IG day the turntable makes a full rotation and sends a signal. Bam, perfect 1 day timer.

¤ And a few more options, like using the time water takes to travel, or platforms and pulley, or minecarts, or there's even still some ways to make the good old piston-based BUDs, but neither of those are good options when I think you should build your first automated chicken coop : soon after you come back from the Nether.


So obviously, the best candidate is the decay timer. But it's not without drawbacks :

- For some obscure reason, the timer can sometimes fall out of sync with the actual IG time. After a lot of playtime it can build up a lot, and require a manual reset. But since you have a 5min window to feed the chicken and collect the eggs, it's not a really big problem.
- If you even happen to suddenly fall into one of FC's devious murderous traps meet your fate, time will skip to the next morning, so it'll be out of sync, and potentially waste a lot of chicken feed.
- Very occasionally, the item will despawn but no new item will be fired by the dispenser. In hundreds of hours it only happened to me once, so again, not a big problem.

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Now for the issue that only happens in SMP :

- You can't actually keep track of the IG time until you get access to the lens, post Soulforge. Before that, no matter where you put the timer (even in the spawn chunks), the area won't be actually loaded unless there's a player on the server. But the sun keeps technically going up and down, so when someone logs back in, the timer will be out of sync again.



And since this is the discussion section, question time :

What do you guys use as a timer to feed your chicken ?
And can you think of a way to do that properly on SMP ?

[Hiracho]

We only automated chickens after we had the soulforge, but It would have been very nice to have that way earlier. https://imgur.com/a/p3Age6W

Because nothing is loaded when no one is on the server, the only reliable way to make the timer is based on daylight :) With that said there are a few ways to make a light detector without soulforge tech ^_^ for instance grass can only grow during the day and can be removed with water on top of it, villagers only go out during the day and can activate pressure plates, eggs are only laid in the morning(some sort of feedback loop?)

Also: Block update detectors can be made pretty compact without the actual buddy block :)

I wouldn't want to spoil the fun of designing something for yourself! But I'm willing to design something if there's interest :)

[Battosay]

1) Damn, I absolutely love that piston ring of dirt slab to feed the chicken ! I guess you use that sticky piston behind the chocken to push the egg into the hopper while not hurting him ? That's pretty darn smart mate :)

2) I had completely forgotten about the villagers going out, I'm so used to keeping them locked up :D
That's a good idea too, but I'd have to make sure it's viable, from what I remember they didn't just go out once after dawn, they used to wander back in and out too, which would make the redstone logic much more complex.

3) The grass thing would actually require a fairly big number of different modules to be sure it works fast enough to get the eggs (it can take more than 5min to grow). Also, I ain't sure about how you'd go about using water to remove the grass while timing it properly. Well, you could count up to 10min after the first grass grows after dawn so that the water stays to prevent more grass block "growing", but then it becomes a bit more complex redstone wise.

4) Sadly you can't have a feedback loop, because if a chicken has been fed, it will only lay out an egg the proper next IG day. So if you feed a chicken and then there's no player the next morning, even if the chicken isn't loaded, it will miss the day it was supposed to lay out an egg, and won't do so the next time someone logs back in. You have "wasted" the chicken feed and the chicken won't lay an egg until you feed him again.


I think I will toy around with the grass idea, it seems like the best candidate so far, but I wish there was a proper way to do it without using some gamey old-times BUDs.

[jakerman999]

I'm wondering if there might be a way to detect the presence of mobs (undead in particular) to check for daylight. Zombies and Skeletons would burn up (helmets excepted) but there's the reset mechanism involved as well... don't want to rely on random spawns and tying everything to a mob spawner is kind of a large dependency.