Automated Charcoal?

[RaustBlackDragon]

I'm thinking of making an automated charcoal system that would load several furnaces via hoppers along a water flow. Does anybody have any advice for the charcoal collection and setup?

[bmanfoley]

Wouldn't the more optimal solution be to cook the logs in the kiln? You can make charcoal that way, and it's usually a bit more straightforward than furnaces

[RaustBlackDragon]

Wouldn't the more optimal solution be to cook the logs in the kiln? You can make charcoal that way, and it's usually a bit more straightforward than furnaces

Oh no, it's about USING the charcoal in the furnaces, it would be made in the kiln, yeah.

[Graphite]

I'm a bit confused as to what you're trying to accomplish. From what I can tell, hoppers will unload coal into the top-most slot, so putting charcoal in a hopper-filled furnace will pretty effectively clog the system the moment the first piece goes in.

Besides, other than baking bread I've not found a use for the vanilla furnace yet. Metals can be smelted in a kiln, glass and stone in a crucible. What were you planning on doing with the furnaces?

[RaustBlackDragon]

I'm a bit confused as to what you're trying to accomplish. From what I can tell, hoppers will unload coal into the top-most slot, so putting charcoal in a hopper-filled furnace will pretty effectively clog the system the moment the first piece goes in.

Besides, other than baking bread I've not found a use for the vanilla furnace yet. Metals can be smelted in a kiln, glass and stone in a crucible. What were you planning on doing with the furnaces?

Search this forum for "nyctophobia", I won't discuss it here :)

Also, I can just cram a brick in the smelting slot.

[Graphite]

That certainly explained a lot. Awful lot of work for a couple of automated lamps, though ;)

Anyhow, is it safe to assume that dividing the coal among the various furnaces is the main issue? While designing my dung/leatherfarm I considered a system where I had multiple waterflows leading off to different areas. Using a turntable, I had a piston always block all but one of the channels in such a way that the rest would redirect their flow to the open one (takes a bit of fiddling). I then used a dispenser on a block to shoot items into the water.

Ofcourse, the main danger in this one is that items will keep flowing back and forth between the open 'gates' but never quite get through. In my tests I had some stuff that was just happily flowing in circles in my contraption :P

[Starshifterxen]

There are a couple of other options too.

If you are not worried about exactly equal distribution then a single water flow with hoppers along it would work if you almost fill the hoppers with bricks. You will need to not fill the last hopper or have an overspill channel to avoid wastage though.

If you need the distribution to be much more exact and you have a lot of furnances, then the best way I have found is using a piston ring:

Spoiler

Show

About 2:40 onwards:

[TheAnarchitect]

Those piston rings can lag like a bitch though. Especially if you use a glowstone block and lens as the drop-trigger.

[whitechaos35]

Use a BD counter under each chute. When a new item enters the stream, pulse all of the BDs. Their contents should be such that only one is active at a given time. That active block dispenser should open a chute to the appropriate location. You can stagger all of the shoots right at the beginning of the stream so that there doesn't need to be much of a delay between new items entering the stream. There should always be a default chute for items to enter if they missed an opening.

[Starshifterxen]

Those piston rings can lag like a bitch though. Especially if you use a glowstone block and lens as the drop-trigger.

Very true, but I haven't found a better way yet if you need to split items a large number of times and not take up huge amounts of space.

Use a BD counter under each chute. When a new item enters the stream, pulse all of the BDs. Their contents should be such that only one is active at a given time. That active block dispenser should open a chute to the appropriate location. You can stagger all of the shoots right at the beginning of the stream so that there doesn't need to be much of a delay between new items entering the stream. There should always be a default chute for items to enter if they missed an opening.

That sounds interesting. Do you have an example or video to show how that works? - I find it hard to get my head round from just the text